Sean Carroll has kissed Bloggingheads good-bye.

It’s important to understand exactly what the objections are…Namely: if BH.tv has something unique and special going for it, it’s the idea that it’s not just a shouting match, or mindless entertainment. It’s a place we can go to hear people with very different perspectives talk about issues about which they may strongly disagree, but with a presumption that both people are worth listening to. If the issue at hand is one with which I’m sufficiently familiar, I can judge for myself whether I think the speakers are respectable; but if it’s not, I have to go by my experience with other dialogues on the site.

What I objected to about the creationists

Jerry Coyne took a look at a hypothesis that depression is an evolutionary adaptation.

in two new papers by Andrews and Thompson. In short, their “analytical rumination hypothesis” (ARH) proposes that the “malady” we call depression is actually an adaptive behavior built into our ancestors by natural selection. When facing difficult social problems, selection is said to have promoted behaviors that make individuals withdraw from life, ceasing to engage in formerly pleasurable activities like socializing, eating, and sex. This is all in the service of rumination: freed from other activities and commitments, the depressed individual is said to analyze the problems that led to depression in the first place, eventually solving them and re-entering society. This is “adaptive” because individuals

Russell wrote a terrific, exhilarating post about the solar system and Pluto and changing knowledge today. (It looks as if he wrote it tomorrow, but that’s because Metamagician is on Oz time even when Russell isn’t.)

Until very recently, astronomy needed no formal definition of a planet, but this has changed as our knowledge of the Solar System has increased. During the 1990s we discovered a toroidal region of space known as the Kuiper Belt, which contains not only Pluto but many other objects of similar composition and with similarly unusual orbits when compared to those of the eight larger planets. With a better understanding of the Solar System, astronomers came to understand Pluto as the largest of these Kuiper

This is an irritating piece of crap.

By Allah, we’re an arrogant lot. By “we”, I mean modern western feminists, a group among which I am generally proud to be included. Except when we’re full of ourselves. Western feminism is not the only ideology exquisitely sensible of gender injustice.

It’s not clear what that is supposed to mean – feminism is universalist, not ‘Western,’ and there are of course feminists all over the globe. But if Geraldine Brooks means that feminism itself is not the only (or best) way of talking and thinking about and demanding gender justice – well I just have no idea what she means, because talk of gender justice is feminism, and vice versa, so … Read the rest