Category Archives: Science

The primates of all England

So this week we took our twelve-year old granddaughter to Monkey World, east of our particular Eden here, in Dorset. It’s just down the road from the Bovington Tank Museum, so we had to be careful not to end up with the Shermans rather than the Simians (or the Chieftains instead of the Capuchins). I’ve seen the brown tourist signs for it for years, and assumed it was a small sad zoo in which fat children could gawp at small sad monkeys in cages.

Posted in Adam, Creation, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 4 Comments

Listen to the NGOs (and documentary makers), not the scientists!

For listening to the politicians, see here. I’ve had an interest in “documentary fiction” for some years, and the subject even found its way into my book God’s Good Earth, primarily from the angle of “Nature porn” portraying God’s world anthropomorphically as a tragic drama. Unfortunately David Attenborough features heavily in my critique, firstly because he does it a lot, secondly because he is hugely influential through the technical quality of his stuff, and thirdly because as a degreed zoologist he ought to do better.

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science | 2 Comments

Forgetful history

A correspondent with whom I’ve been discussing the Genesis Flood mentioned the interesting case of the Umm al Binni Lake in Iraq, which appears to be a recent meteoric impact crater, dated on the basis of the sedimentary history of the region to historic times. This would mean between 3000 and 2000 BCE, and it possibly corresponds to evidence in the region of widespread wildfires and floods from a likely airburst c2350BCE, called the Middle East Anomaly.

Posted in History, Science, Theology | 2 Comments

Whacko!

Well, that was a thrill! I’ve just come back from walking the dog through the wood, and witnessed a bit of nature drama. So you may as well share it.

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Tangy snacks hang in there

On 18th of this month I reported the destruction by hungry badger of the wasp nest I have been watching develop here at the Camel’s Eyrie. Here was the damage:

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Munchies with a tang

Last month I celebrated some of the wildife goings on here at the Camel’s Eyrie. Amongst them was this fine example of origami by a local band of common wasps:

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Listen to the politicians, not the scientists!

My green credentials aren’t too bad, I like to think, overall. My hectare of land is managed without chemicals largely as woodland and (rare) wild-flower meadow. My economical Suzuki does less than 6K miles a year, even though I live in the country with no public transport, and I haven’t even been on a plane since my daughter’s wedding in France in 2013. My book God’s Good Earth was endorsed by one of Britain’s leading scientific environmentalists as “a call to action.” Mr Chlorophyll, me.

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More on the human limitations of science (especially regarding politics)

My attention was drawn to an important, but rather predictably neglected, 2004 article How science makes environmental controversies worse, by Daniel Sarewitz (Environmental Science & Policy 7 (2004) 385–403). It’s essential reading.

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Scientists pay now, or must pay with interest later

Peter Ridd is an Australian geophysicist who has spent a lifetime studying the Great Barrier Reef, and recently won a court case against his dismissal from James Cook University, in which the judge was utterly scathing about the dirty tactics used to muzzle his academic freedom of speech and to discredit him as an individual.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | 9 Comments

“Just Nature” – clarify “Nature,” please.

Chasing up, for interest, references to the 1908 “Tunguska Event” (now most commonly thought to be a meteroric or cometary air-burst), I came across this recent piece in Physorg.

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