The God Delusion - English Language sales pass 2 million

In a thread related to the The God Delusion being back in the bestseller lists, Richard Dawkins mentioned English language sales figures for TGD (here):

    How many have been sold in the USA?

As it happens, I have just been sent some recent figures for sales of The God Delusion in English:-
North America 907,161
Rest of World 1,179,241
Total English language 2,086,402

(Another commenter mentions in excess of 260,000 sales for the German edition)

Not bad.

Polls

I just recently posted on polls.

This comic kind of says it all.

Darwin vs the crocoduck

A bit of fun. I do love schadenfreude.

Kirk Cameron on O'Reilly:

"Darwin said in order to prove evolution [...] you gotta be able to prove [...] one animal transitioning into another. And all through the fossil record and life, we don't find one of these - a crocoduck."

(original here)

So did Darwin say that? Well, no. In fact, he specifically debunks the notion.

Darwin, Origin of Species, Chapter IX:

"... it should always be borne in mind what sort of intermediate forms must, on my theory, have formerly existed. I have found it difficult, when looking at any two species, to avoid picturing to myself forms directly intermediate between them. But this is a wholly false view; we should always look for forms intermediate between each species and a common but unknown progenitor; and the progenitor will generally have differed in some respects from all its modified descendants."
(emphasis in the original)

Nothing more needs to be said. Darwin completely debunked Cameron and Comfort 150 years before they even thought of it. When you're pwnt by a guy that's been dead for about a century, you're too stupid to argue with. Just quote what Darwin actually said, and you're done.

[But just in case a creationist wanders by and is too dumb to just read Darwin, it's kind of like this. If I find you and your cousin and I'm looking for an intermediate form to see if you're related, I won't find a direct intermediate (a 50-50 mix of you and your cousin, or even worse, a Frankenstein's monster of components of both of you, like Cameron's crocoduck). The intermediate form is your nearest common ancestor -- your grandparents. Your grandparents will have characteristics different from both of you, and will not be directly intermediate. Not exactly like that, of course, the analogy is imperfect. But it's really not that complicated.]


The only possible conclusions are that they never read Darwin, or they did and they're deliberately lying. Either way, we end up with creationist lies. As usual.

To paraphrase Haldane, God must have an inordinate fondness for lying creationists, since he made so many of them.

A New Years "What shits me"...

What shits me is when people make a youtube video out of a piece of text.

If it's just a piece of text, make a fricking blogpost. I can read it ten times as fast as your video goes, and twenty times as fast as it will download.

I can jump back and forth instantly to the parts I want to reread. I can rescan a sentence I read that I didn't quite understand without reaching for the mouse.

Oh, and the comments will sound less like they were made by a 12 year old with Tourette's Syndrome.

If you have an animation, or a sequence of images that's more than a second or two (too long for an animated gif), then by all means, youtube it. But if it's just a way of fancying up some text, and putting it to bad music, forget it, it's a blogpost.

A youtube of a blogpost is a waste of time and bandwidth.

It's the present day version of what 5 years ago would have been a 14-point-purple-comic-sans-in-blinking-text blogpost.