Mark your calendars, Minnesotans!

Richard Dawkins’ spring tour of the United States is bringing him to Minneapolis — he’ll be speaking in Northrup Auditorium (the huge auditorium on the UMTC campus, so there should be lots of room for everyone) on 4 March 2009. Be there!

In other Dawkins news, he has posted an unused and unedited interview with Father George Coyne on his site. It’s long and it’s very aggravating, so not many of you will make it through the whole thing, but you’ll understand why it wasn’t used in any documentary. Coyne is personable, intelligent, and pleasant without fault. He’s the kind of avuncular and educated fellow anyone could find wonderful in conversation … except on religion.

Dawkins politely asks him how he reconciles the peculiar details of his religious belief to reason, and Coyne can’t quite address the problem. He’s willing to admit that if he’d been brought up in an Islamic household, he almost certainly wouldn’t be Catholic, but that that should inform him that the specifics of his belief are not founded in evidence and reason evades him totally. He falls back on “tradition” and “faith” as excuses. It’s tragic — I’m certain he’s a very smart man, but on religion he is simply blind and stupid.

Another tangent came to me while watching the video. I’ve been doing a lot of traveling lately, which means I spend all this time with strangers in airports. It’s interesting; most people are just people, and you can’t pigeonhole them into narrower roles without talking to them, except for people in uniforms. And who wears uniforms? Soldiers returning or going back to duty, police and security guards who are on duty, and priests. The police I can understand; they have an official job to do, and the uniform is useful in announcing their authority and making them obvious people to turn to when you need help.

But priests? Nope. That is an utterly useless profession. No one is worried about needing an emergency exorcism, or handling a drive-by spiritual crisis, or requiring rapid cracker delivery. Wearing the clerical collar is simply a demand for deference and respect, a token flaunted in expectation that the bearer will be regarded as especially virtuous and important. It’s annoying and unwarranted. I’m afraid that when I see priests wandering about in the airport, I’m not thinking, “there goes a good man,” I’m thinking, “there goes a sad gomer who wasted his life on the nonexistent.” I suppose it’s fair warning, but it’s still pretentious.

So in the Dawkins/Coyne interview, I’m noticing that Coyne has the magic collar on (I suppose if he’d been raised in an Islamic culture, he’d have a beard and black robes; if Buddhist, he’d be shaved bald and wearing orange; same difference), and Dawkins is dressed like any academic, nothing particularly distinctive. It bugged me. There is a status game being played here, and clerics demand it and get it, while scientists shrug off the superficialities and don’t try to push it. If you just ignore the words they’re saying (trust me, Coyne’s words aren’t at all enlightening) and look at the image, the message is that Coyne has special status, while Dawkins is simply one of the hoi polloi.

I don’t quite know what to do about it. We’re certainly not going to propose a uniform for scientists, which would be just as pompous as priests making sure to announce their delusions visually even while they’re standing around the luggage carousel. I guess I’m just going to have to put it on my to-do list of things to accomplish while we’re destroying religion: diminish the credibility of the clerical uniform. We’re just going to have to start regarding it in the same way we view clown costumes, I think.

Sometimes, I think public school administrators are the real enemy

A student, Brandon Creasy, submitted an opinion piece on evolution to the school news magazine. The principal, Kevin Bezy, rejected it and has held up publication of the magazine until it is revised. Bezy explains himself, and it’s the usual kind of weasely nonsense that makes me very snarly in the morning.

When asked his opinion of evolution and how that may have factored into the situation, Bezy declined to discuss his feelings on the theory. He said he considers that irrelevant to the matter, believing it important to remain unbiased when making decisions.

I don’t give a good greasy squirt of slimy spit for Mr Bezy’s “feelings” about evolution. He is supposed to be a professional educator, and the unbiased status of the theory is that it is the only legitimate explanation for life’s diversity; no other explanation, including the page and a half of poetic metaphor and myth included in the book of Genesis, is even close. When censoring well-supported scientific ideas, hiding behind a false objectivity is not an option.

“The law gives the principal the responsibility to edit publications of the school,” Bezy said. “It is an important responsibility because the principal has to look out for the rights and sensitivities of all students, especially in a diverse and multicultural area.”

Man, this guy sounds like a pompous gasbag. All this talk about sensitivities and multiculturalism isn’t being used to promote a diversity of ideas: he’s using it to squelch the expression of any opinions that differ from the flavorless, mealy pablum to which he wants the cultural environment of the school reduced. A “diverse and multicultural area” should be one where there is an outspoken clash of ideas, not one where disagreement is silenced.

Continuing, he said of the piece: “It didn’t present the theory with a sensitivity for those who hold other theories. The teacher of the student was asked to take out language that stated his theory is the only theory.”

Other theories? Like what? Name some, Mr Bezy. Show us the courage of your convictions that these other ideas are worth abusing science for. Does it include young earth creationism, the claim that the universe didn’t exist prior to the time a few Hebrew patriarchs started scribbling down notes about how to control their tribes? Or perhaps you are thinking of Intelligent Design creationism, a fatuous pretense to scientific thinking that has no evidence, no research program, and no rationale other than that they want to put a false front over some silly old myths?

So far, evolution is the only theory deserving of the name … unless Bezy is confusing the scientific meaning of the word “theory” with the colloquial, and thinks it is equivalent to “brain fart”. It is not the business of a public school to inundate students with a variety of brain farts — they get enough of those in church on Sunday — but to provide a disciplined introduction to the best scholarly ideas. Which of those two alternatives is the mission of the Gereau Center?

It just gets better and better

The skirmish over Christmas in Washington state just gets funnier every day.

Now someone wants to put up a Festivus pole in the capitol. That’s hilarious enough, but it gets better.

The Westboro Baptist Church has demanded to be allowed to put up a sign that says, “Santa Claus will take you to Hell”. I never thought I’d laugh at Fred Phelps and his gang of hateful loonies, but there you go.

We aren’t done yet! Bill Donohue of the Catholic League has to butt in and bray, too.

Gov. Gregoire is responsible for this mess. Having first acceded to the requests of atheists to attack Christmas, she is now confronted with the likes of the Westboro Baptist Church, a viciously anti-American, anti-Catholic and anti-gay group. There is a way to deal with this situation in a manner that is legally acceptable and morally defensible, but neither the Washington governor, nor her lawyers, have figured it out.

I know, I know! How about keeping the government entirely secular, throwing all the Christmas kitsch out of the capitol, and admitting that government has no business promoting any religious beliefs at all? That would be my solution. I think it’s clear by now that in a country with a crazy plurality of religious ideas, each one demanding equal recognition, the only fair decision is no recognition at all.

Unfortunately, Bully Donohue can’t figure that out. His solution is some pointless shuffling of signage around to keep the atheists separate from the nativity scene.

Amylase and human evolution

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I made a mistake that was quickly corrected by a correspondent. Yesterday, in writing about copy number variants in human genes, I used the example of the amylase gene on chromosome 1, which exists in variable numbers of copies in human populations, and my offhand remark was that the effect is “nothing that we can detect”, but that maybe people with extra copies would be “especially good at breaking down french fries”. Well, it turns out that we can detect this, that there was even a very cool study of this enzyme published last year, and that the ability to break down complex starches rapidly may have been a significant factor in human evolution.

So of course I have to tell you all about this now.

[Read more…]

Mary gets around

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Pareidolia is putting the Virgin Mary in all sorts of strange places. The latest: in the MRI of a woman’s brain. She’s trying to sell it off on eBay, of course.

It’s a silly illusion, but as I looked at it, I had an epiphany. It’s a body part. There’s a little nubbin for a head beneath a hood, with fleshy veils representing Mary’s robes below that.

You know, there’s another anatomical region on women that looks like that…

So, when is someone going to start selling gynecological photos on eBay? Can we defend explicit porn as religious iconography?

By the way, there is a poll associated with this story: “Do you see the Virgin Mary in this MRI?” No is ahead with 49% of the vote so far.

Hungarian phrasebook sketch comes to life

Whenever I see a magazine with Chinese calligraphy on the cover, which I cannot read at all, I have to wonder if it means something strange, like
“My nipples explode with delight“. The journal of the Max Planck Research Institute was hit by this little problem: they used some lovely Chinese calligraphy on their cover without looking up the meaning.

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Translation:

With high salaries, we have cordially invited for an extended series of matinées

KK and Jiamei as directors, who will personally lead jade-like girls in the spring of youth,

Beauties from the north who have a distinguished air of elegance and allure,

Young housewives having figures that will turn you on;

Their enchanting and coquettish performance will begin within the next few days.

Whoops. Max Planck Forschung apparently ran an ad for a Chinese brothel or strip club on their cover. At least they didn’t get it as a tattoo, and have reissued the magazine with a new cover.

Semantics is cold comfort when it comes to humanity

Mike Huckabee is a smug little hypocrite who tries to defend his opposition to gay marriage by arguing that a) it’s traditional (never mind that marriage has changed greatly since biblical times), b) it’s natural and necessary for procreation (ignoring the fact that a childless marriage is still regarded as a marriage), and c) that you can’t redefine the magic word “marriage” (yeah, like language never evolves). Jon Stewart makes him squirm over his position.

This wretched ignoramus will be running for president again in 2012, you know it. I know I’ll be struggling to suppress nausea when he does.