By their fruits you shall know them

Jerry Coyne is being berated once again for daring to speak out against the folly of religion. This time, it’s a complaint by Michael Zimmerman, instigator of the clergy letter project, claiming that all those positive atheists are driving away the religious people who would support the teaching of evolution.

Like religious fundamentalists, Coyne is arguing that people must choose between religion and science, that they can’t accept both. There are, I believe, two problems with this position. First, pragmatically, studies have clearly suggested that in the United States, when people are given this choice, they will more often than not opt for religion. Now, I’m not suggesting that Coyne, or any of us who care deeply about science, should pervert our understanding of the discipline simply to make converts. No, I’m arguing that there is a way to promote the principles of scientific inquiry fully while not alienating many who are likely to be supporters by belittling their sincerely held beliefs

Coyne addresses it well, better than I would, because I’d hit that first phrase comparing us to religious fundamentalists and have to whip out the cyberpistol and switch on the agonizer. I’ll refrain from repeating the familiar arguments that you can find on Jerry’s post and cut to the chase.

The clergy letter project isn’t helping. This refusal to tell people they’re wrong when they are isn’t helping. This craven surrender to nonsense out of fear isn’t helping.

How do I know? I’ve read the goddamned sermons. They’re uniformly awful. The entire enterprise isn’t about encouraging people to think thoughtfully about the science, it’s about allowing priests to babble on about creationism and intelligent design and make their pious lies with the pretense of promoting science.

I haven’t read them all, because I can’t get through more than 2 or 3 at a sitting before I have to puke, so maybe there are a few gems in there where they actually promote, you know, reason, critical thinking, and science, but I haven’t found them yet and am disinclined to dig further.

So Susan Andrews preaches on evolution Sunday, and what does she promote? Intelligent Design.

I have come to believe, in my own journey of faith, that God lives in the questions. I believe that seeking understanding with my mind is the preparation I need to trust with my heart. I believe that faith is the frontier beyond the limits of knowledge. I have started looking for portents – in the sky, in the newspaper, in the textbook, in the science lab, in the hospital room, in the darkness as well as the light. Yes, I have started looking for those signs of a God who is trying to do a new thing. And I have discovered that it is in the process, and in the journey, and in the questions that new knowledge and new understanding is usually found. Specifically in this peculiar American controversy about intelligent design, I have come to believe that evolution is intelligent design. And that the Intelligent Designer is the One whom I call God.

Rabbi Friedland preaches on the Sabbath, and what does he promote? Biblical creationism.

After billions of years chemicals were combined to create the first stirrings of life. This developed into human life. What impetus brought those first living cells together? The Torah teaches us it was the Divine Force or Will of God. The sustaining force we call God is what brought it all about.

Life continues as a pattern. The Torah’s version is first earth and sky and water and planets and eventually life forms. Less to more, simple forms to more complex forms. plants to animals to humans. Humans most complex created b’tzelem Elokim.

Hub Nelson preaches on evolution Sunday, and what does he promote? Well, first he praises Rick Warren and The Purpose Driven Life, then he bashes Richard Dawkins and The God Delusion, and he wraps it all up by telling us his god provides meaning and beauty.

Unsurprisingly, everything in those sermons pushes a pro-religious agenda and wraps the science of evolution in a gushy, goofy package used to endorse religion, not science. I’d be more impressed with Michael Zimmerman’s claim that Coyne was undermining efforts to educate the faithful in good science if Zimmerman’s project was actually doing that. But it’s not. The Clergy Letter project is actually encouraging more fuzzy, sloppy thinking and reinforcing religious authority. And if Coyne is making his job harder, more power to Jerry.

Paul is dead

With mixed feelings, I announce the demise of Paul the ‘psychic’ octopus.

On the one hand, he was a living creature, and I feel sadness at any death. On the other hand, he was a psychic fraud, and I have no sympathy for those rascals. On the other hand, he was a cephalopod, and those especially deserve to thrive. On the other hand, the hype surrounding him was tiresome and overblown—good riddance. On the other hand, he was being exploited by his trainers slave masters, so he hardly deserves the blame. On the other hand, what a waste of everyone’s time to be playing fake psychic games with already boring football games. On the other hand, he spent his life confined to a really boring tank instead of savoring the splendor of life in the wild. On the other hand, he did have a life of safety and security and readily available food, so it could have been a better life than the typical short and brutal experience of nature.

I guess the bottom line is that I regret the death of the octopus, but am relieved that there’ll be no more of this psychic flim-flam.

Lungs with taste, or lungs with a fortuitous receptor?

Researchers in Maryland have discovered an interesting quirk: lung smooth muscle expresses on its surfaces a protein that is the same as the bitter taste receptor. This could be useful, since they also discovered that activating that receptor with bitter substances causes the muscle to relax, opening up airways, and could represent a new way to treat asthma. That’s a fine discovery.

But man, it really tells us something about human psychology. I’m getting all this mail right now, and just about all of it asks the same question: Why do lungs have taste receptors? What is the purpose of sensing taste with the lungs? Even the investigators speculate this way:

Most plant-based poisons are bitter, so the researchers thought the purpose of the lung’s taste receptors was similar to those in the tongue — to warn against poisons. “I initially thought the bitter-taste receptors in the lungs would prompt a ‘fight or flight’ response to a noxious inhalant, causing chest tightness and coughing so you would leave the toxic environment, but that’s not what we found,” says Dr. Liggett.

Weird. I guess the teleological impulse really is etched deep into most people’s minds. I’m going to suggest that everyone just relax, let go, and embrace a simpler assumption.

There is no purpose.

That should be our default assumption. Gene regulatory networks are complicated, with expression of all kinds of genes coupled to other genes, so my first thought was that this was a simple biological accident, and totally unsurprising. I’ve looked at enough developmental gene expression papers to know that genes get switched on and off in all kinds of complicated patterns that have nothing to do with proximal function and everything to do with the network of connections between them; sometimes if gene A is active, the only ‘purpose’ is because A is coregulated by factor X which also switches on gene B, and B is the next step in a physiological or developmental program that is adaptive for the organism.

Another way to think of it: the handle on your teapot is wobbling loose, so you bring the home toolbox into the kitchen to tighten it up with your screwdriver. Your toolbox also contains wrenches and a hammer, but we don’t speculate that the reason you brought the hammer is that you need it right then to fix the teapot. The purpose of bringing the hammer is that it’s in the same handy toolbox as your screwdriver, which is not really a purpose at all.

Now the way evolution works is that this purposeless variation may fortuitously find a purpose — a gene in the T2R family of G-protein coupled receptors is uselessly misexpressed in the lungs, but a clever doctor finds a way to take advantage of it to treat asthma, or you may spot a vagrant mouse skittering across your kitchen counter, and suddenly the hammer becomes a useful implement of pest control — but the root of that innovation isn’t purpose, but purposelessness and serendipity.

There’s another reason to be unimpressed with the purpose of the expression of this gene in the lungs. Many of you may already be familiar with another quirk of the bitter receptor — its expression is variable in people. A common observation to make in genetics labs is the existence of non-tasters, tasters, and super-tasters to a substance called phenylthiocarbamide, or PTC. The mechanism of that is variability in this same kind of receptor gene now found to be expressed in lung tissue. Shouldn’t we be used to the random element of the expression of this gene by now?

These Creation “Museums” are everywhere

The big overpriced embarrassment in Kentucky gets all the attention, but the creation ‘museums’ are sprinkled all over our country, like flyspecks on a sugar cookie. Mmm-mmmm.

Here’s an account of visiting the one in Glen Rose, Texas, run by the big-haired Carl Baugh. Every once in a while I’ll tune him in on the TV — he’s got a regular creationism show on the Trinity Broadcasting Network — but he’s kind of hard to take for very long.

There is an astonishing revelation in the article that I didn’t know, and really impels me to visit that place. Guess who looms over the interior of the ‘museum’ in the form of monumental statuary? It isn’t Jesus. Hint: the museum is in Texas.