Louis Agassiz rejected Darwinism

photo: U.S. Geological Survey

And you can see what happened to his statue.

wikipedia sez: After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Stanford President David Starr Jordan wrote, "Somebody—Dr. Angell, perhaps—remarked that 'Agassiz was great in the abstract but not in the concrete.'"

speaking of Wikipedia, perhaps you've heard of conservapedia, a wiki knockoff. They bill themselves as a "corrective" to the supposedly P.C. tone of Wikipedia. I don't quite know what to make of it, as some of the entries seem to have a satirical undercurrent, and I mean besides the unintentional sort you might expect. Presently they're recording the number of page views at the bottom of each entry. Here are some tallies, as of approximately 11pm central time:


Kelo desicion 15 times
Joseph McCarthy 273x
Rudy Giuliani 179x
Hillary Clinton 5781x
Charlton Heston 12x
(blogger)Jon Swift 1,130x

1,130 views? Either that's his mom, or somebody's pulling a swift fast one. I wonder how many people read Jon Swift and think he's a conservo, a la Ayn Clouter. Ayn, if you're reading this, please come visit and make fun of me if you feel the urge.

Of course, given its collaborative nature(like all wikis), it may be both a sincerely conservo venture and a put on. They've just started out, and lots of things and people still don't have entries, like John Wayne. Yeah, I know.