In the interest of fostering rational arguments I'm going to present a common fallacy with each day's links. Today's fallacy is: Post Hoc

• Attenborough reveals creationist hate mail for not crediting God | World news | The Guardian

  Sir David Attenborough has revealed that he receives hate mail from viewers for failing to credit God in his documentaries. In an interview with this week's Radio Times about his latest documentary, on Charles Darwin and natural selection, the broadcaster said: "They tell me to burn in hell and good riddance."

  Telling the magazine that he was asked why he did not give "credit" to God, Attenborough added: "They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator."

  Attenborough went further in his opposition to creationism, saying it was "terrible" when it was taught alongside evolution as an alternative perspective. "It's like saying that two and two equals four, but if you wish to believe it, it could also be five ... Evolution is not a theory; it is a fact, every bit as much as the historical fact that William the Conqueror landed in 1066."



• Books for Schools: Michael Morpurgo says that reading for pleasure is a fundamental human right - Times Online

  WITHOUT THE SUNLIGHT of literature children cannot grow as they should. We know that from books come knowledge and understanding, that they are a source of infinite joy and fun, that they stimulate imagination and creativity, that they open eyes and minds and hearts. It is through the power and music and magic of stories and poems that children can expand their own intellectual curiosity, deve-lop the empathy and awareness that they will need to tackle the complexities of their own emotions, of the human condition in which they find themselves. And it's through books that we can learn the mastery of words, the essential skill that will enable us to express ourselves well enough to achieve our potential in the classroom and beyond.



• Al Roosten: Fiction: The New Yorker A George Saunders story.


• 5th Estate · 25th Estate: Jonathan Franzen on the Social Novel


• Handwriting Is on the Wall - WSJ.com

  Some years ago I spent a few weeks in the hills outside Rome with some priestly scholars who were engaged in producing the definitive Latin edition of the complete works of Thomas Aquinas. The job of checking hundreds of medieval manuscripts, looking for errors that had crept in over the centuries, was tough and exacting. At one point I asked whether any original manuscripts by Aquinas himself had survived -- and if they had, did that make the task any easier. One of the Dominican scholars looked at me with deep sadness and drew out some folio sheets covered densely with what looked like a monkish version of a Jackson Pollock. "Thomas Aquinas," he said, "had the worst handwriting in the Middle Ages."



• Letters - Toward a More Energy-Efficient Future - NYTimes.com(tip to Jason)


• Washington Times - Study backs thimerosal safety


• Series Preview | Important Things with Demetri Martin | Comedy Central


• The Ant « Mostly Anecdotal