Hilarity in the recent ID creationism escapades

Here’s a hot prospect for the Discovery Institute: Fred Sigworth, a professor of Cellular and Molecular Physiology at Yale. Snap him up, quick! He’ll fit in perfectly! He gave a talk to the Yale Christian Fellowship which sounds like it was hilarious.

“Being a Christian is good preparation for work as a scientist, and science can help prepare you for being a Christian,” he said.

Oh? How does faith help you be a better scientist?

Sigworth said that both religion and science require working with incomplete data…

That’s a revelation right there. Science does require working with incomplete data, and religion requires working with no data at all. Therefore, religion must be more powerful than science! I am converted! Hallelujah!

OK, seriously, it sounds like a very silly talk by yet another gomer striving to invent rationalizations for his ridiculous religion. No news there.

Wait…how does that qualify someone to be a fellow of the Discovery Institute? Isn’t ID a secular theory?

Not if you listen to Bill Dembski’s Q & A last night…where he said, “I’ve got plenty of ulterior religious motive, I’d like to see ID succeed because of my Christian background and beliefs.” In addition, it sounds like not only did a professor get up and rip him apart on the flagellum, but the audience was laughing at poor Dembski. That’s what we need more of: the creationists getting laughed off the stages at their propaganda ops.

ERV was also at the Q & A, and recorded the audio. We’ll have to check later and see if she’s put anything up on it … although I’m a little concerned about the sound quality. It sounds like she might have been laughing hysterically the whole time, which could have drowned out some of the juicy bits.

The Hox code

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

The Hox genes are a set of transcription factors that exhibit an unusual property: they provide a glimpse of one way that gene expression is translated into metazoan morphology. For the most part, the genome seems to be a welter of various genes scattered about almost randomly, with no order present in their arrangement on a chromosome — the order only becomes apparent in their expression through the process of development. The Hox genes, on the other hand, seem like an island of comprehensible structure. These are all genes that specify segment identity — whether a segment of the embryo should form part of the head, thorax, or abdomen, for instance — and they’re all clustered together in one (usually) tidy spot.

Within that cluster, we see further evidence of order. Look at just the Drosophila part of the diagram below: there are 8 Hox genes in a row, and their order within that row reflects the order of expression in the fly body. On the left or 3′ end of the DNA strand, lab (labial) is expressed in the head, while Abd-B (Abdominal-B) is expressed at the end of the abdomen.

i-3d10d2b119aa766df39871ead4a8a19c-hoxcode_hox.gif
Schematic of relationship between Drosophila and mouse Hox genes. Hox genes are shown as colored boxes in their order on the chromosome. Orthologous genes between Drosophila and mouse, and paralogous mouse genes are shown color-coded.

Knocking out individual Hox genes in the fly causes homeotic transformations — one body part develops into another. These genes are early actors in the cascade of interactions that enable the development of morphologically distinct regions in a segmented animal — the activation of a Hox gene from the 3′ end is one of the earliest triggers that leads the segment to develop into part of the head.

Now look at the mouse part of the diagram above. We vertebrates have Hox genes that are homologous to the fly Hox genes, and they’re also clustered in discrete locations with 3’→5′ order reflecting anterior→posterior order of expression. There are differences — the two most obvious that we have more Hox genes on the 5′ side (these correspond to expression in the tail—flies do not have anything homologous to the chordate tail), and vertebrates also have four banks of Hox genes, HoxA, HoxB, HoxC, and HoxD. This complicates matters. Vertebrates have these parallel, overlapping sets of Hox genes, which suggests that morphology could be a product of a combinatorial expression of the genes in the four Hox clusters: there could be a Hox code, where identity can be defined with more gradations by mixing up the bounds of expression of each of the genes.

[Read more…]

Hovindian revisionism

We’ve all heard how the Creation Science Evangelism, Kent Hovind’s organization, has been strongarming YouTube to suppress criticisms of his bad science. Well, check this out: now CSE has been caught red-handed revising their licensing. Where before they declared everything free and good to disseminate, now they are retroactively claiming copyright.

I take that as an admission that they can’t stand the heat.

I might regret this but…it’s a combination Molly Award and Open Enrollment thread!

It’s that time of the month again, when we try to acknowledge the work of some commenter (or inanimate carbon rod) who has most delighted us by bestowing admission in the grand Order of the Molly. Just leave a comment here naming your favorite commenter or random object intended to mock the proceedings, and I’ll tally them up at the end of the week.

Also, I maintain this mega-blogroll, and I’m appallingly generous in putting blogs on it — of course, I’m also appallingly ruthless in expunging blogs that haven’t had an update in 30 days. All you have to do is:

  1. Check the current blogroll in case you’re already on it.
  2. Make sure you’ve got an RSS feed for your blog. I can’t put anyone on the blogroll without a syndication feed.
  3. Leave a comment with a link to your blog, perhaps with a little explanation about why you deserve to be read by anyone. If your RSS link is hard to find, tell me what that is, too. It’s also helpful if you tell me what category of my blogroll looks like a good home for you.
  4. This time around, since this is a Molly thread, you also have to vote for some great commenter. If you haven’t read the comments enough to know anyone, what the heck are you doing asking me to read your blog?

See? It’s easy! Do all that and I’ll put you on the blogroll. Let’s be realistic, though — it’s not the greatest honor in the world, and it’s also diluted by the fact that there are so darn many of you on the list right now. But hey, it’ll get you a link for at least a little while.

Oh, and note that leaving a comment in this thread will also put you in Seed’s 500,000th comment contest! You can’t lose!

Is religion rational?

Andrew Brown suggests that we shouldn’t suppose that religious belief is irrational, and I’m going to have to agree in part with him. I think theology is actually an exercise in reason — it is an activity that has engaged some of the greatest minds of the ages, and it is a sophisticated and elaborate logical edifice. It is a towering skyscraper constructed of finely honed girders of deductive logic, and I can appreciate how so many people respect it and admire it and want to protect it. I can also see how those who have dedicated much effort to working closely on the craftmanship of the structure are aghast at the idea that anyone should fail to see the work of the mind invested in it.

[Read more…]