Francis Collins will be stepping down from his role at the BioLogos Foundation, as part of the process of becoming the head of the NIH.
This is only a minimal step, however, and it really doesn’t address any of my objections to the guy. The foundation and its web site will still be going on, and you know that once he finishes his tenure at NIH, he’ll just step back into it. I’m more concerned about whether he’ll be injecting religion into his politics on the job.
Several people have notified me that this ugly mug is appearing in the ads on this site:
Yep, Ben Stein is hawking “free” credit reports on my site. Only…they aren’t free. They aren’t useful. And Ben Stein is being an exploitive douchebag.
A few points are worth noting here. First, the score itself is not very useful to consumers. What’s useful is the report — if there’s an error on the report, then the consumer can try to rectify it. Secondly, and much more importantly, if you want a free credit report, there’s only one place to go: annualcreditreport.com. That’s the place where the big three credit-rating agencies will give you a genuinely free copy of your credit report once a year, as required by federal law.
You won’t be surprised to hear that freescore.com is not free: in order to get any information out of them at all, you have to authorize them to charge you a $29.95 monthly fee. They even extract a dollar out of you up front, just to make sure that money is there.
Stein, here, has become a predatory bait-and-switch merchant, dangling a “free” credit report in front of people so that he can sock them with a massive monthly fee for, essentially, doing nothing at all. Naturally, the people who take him up on this offer will be those who can least afford it.
The level to which Stein has now sunk is more than enough reason — as if the case for the prosecution weren’t damning enough already — for the NYT to cancel Stein’s contract forthwith. It’s simply unconscionable for a newspaper of record to employ as its “Everybody’s Business” columnist someone who is surely making a vast amount of money by luring the unsuspecting into overpaying for a financial product they should under no circumstances buy.
Who in their right mind would accept economic advice from Ben Stein, anyway?
Two things: the first is Sean Carroll’s discussion of what kinds of questions science can answer, and what the answers tell us about the universe.
And, without fail, the scientific judgment comes down in favor of a strictly non-miraculous, non-supernatural view of the universe.
That’s what’s really meant by my claim that science and religion are incompatible. I was referring to the Congregation-for-the-Causes-of-the-Saints interpretation of religion, which entails a variety of claims about things that actually happen in the world; not the it’s-all-in-our-hearts interpretation, where religion makes no such claims. (I have no interest in arguing at this point in time over which interpretation is “right.”) When religion, or anything else, makes claims about things that happen in the world, those claims can in principle be judged by the methods of science. That’s all.
Well, of course, there is one more thing: the judgment has been made, and views that step outside the boundaries of strictly natural explanation come up short. By “natural” I simply mean the view in which everything that happens can be explained in terms of a physical world obeying unambiguous rules, never disturbed by whimsical supernatural interventions from outside nature itself. The preference for a natural explanation is not an a priori assumption made by science; it’s a conclusion of the scientific method. We know enough about the workings of the world to compare two competing big-picture theoretical frameworks: a purely naturalistic one, versus one that incorporates some sort of supernatural component. To explain what we actually see, there’s no question that the naturalistic approach is simply a more compelling fit to the observations.
This is why religion is a failed explanation for the world. It just doesn’t line up with the evidence, at all.
Your second reading for the day is Dan Dennett explaining why we don’t even need religion as a social construct.
I am confident that those who believe in belief are wrong. That is, we no more need to preserve the myth of God in order to preserve a just and stable society than we needed to cling to the Gold Standard to keep our currency sound. It was a useful crutch, but we’ve outgrown it. Denmark, according to a recent study, is the sanest, healthiest, happiest, most crime-free nation in the world, and by and large the Danes simply ignore the God issue. We should certainly hope that those who believe in belief are wrong, because belief is waning fast, and the props are beginning to buckle.
If religion has no useful explanatory power, and if we don’t need it to make our lives better and richer, why not just toss the whole ball of fluff out?
Polls are bad enough, but the editorial that went with this one is something else. A group is lobbying to slap a bunch of religious phrases on the US Capitol Visitor’s Center, and their rationale is inane.
The engravings will cost less than $100,000 of the center’s total $621 million price tag. Fighting this silly lawsuit will probably cost more than the engravings themselves.
One hundred thousand dollars isn’t peanuts, and the argument that nobody should oppose them because it will cost even more money is ridiculous — if economy is a concern, then don’t vandalize the building in the first place! No engraving costs, no legal expenses, we’re all happy.
But this guy hasn’t quite hit his stride yet. Let’s bring on the tired old “freedom of religion, not freedom from religion” argument.
Let’s start by pointing out the First Amendment doesn’t grant freedom “from” religion, just freedom “of” religion. It doesn’t ban religion, it provides freedom for all so that one denomination doesn’t dominate or become the official state religion. Whether you practice a religion or not is up to people’s preferences.
No one is forced to worship because they saw the motto on a $20 bill. Or because they recited the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s pretty innocuous.
All right, I say this fellow needs to put his money where his mouth is. Let’s add “Praise be unto Allah”, “No gods, no masters”, and “Hail, Xenu!” to the center and to our money — think he’ll argue that it is all innocuous then?
Now that he has convinced you of the quality of his arguments, go vote.
Yes: Our motto reflects America’s religious heritage and should be displayed.
62.5%
No: The slogan is an unconstitutional endorsement of religion and should not be used for state purposes. 37.5%
I’ve got a franchise, I guess. The Thread That Will Not DIE is going to go on and on. I’ve once again closed the old thread, and here you go, more fresh virgin database entries to despoil. Go ahead and fill it up!
I must thank the reader known to me only as CAC for sending me DVDs of the Inside Nature’s Giants programs. I’ve been enjoying the dissections of an elephant and a whale in the evening — most of the organisms I cut into are millimeters long and require very sharp, thin instruments, so it’s interesting to see ones that require hip waders and backhoes.
You should all lobby your local PBS stations and tell them these would be wonderful additions to the lineup! You might also suggest that broadcasting them during the dinner hour might not be recommended.
Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute has published an opinion piece in the Boston Globe in which he makes a rather anachronistic argument for ID: Thomas Jefferson was a supporter. I knew the creationists were sloppy scholars and had a poor grasp of history and science, but this is getting ridiculous.
Here, I have to help them out.
|
Date |
Jefferson |
Darwin |
|
1743 |
born |
– |
|
1776 |
Writes the Declaration of Independence |
– |
|
1809 |
Ends his term as President of the US |
born |
|
1823 |
Writes the quote Stephen Meyer will find so appealing:
|
14 years old. |
| 1826 |
Dies. |
Darwin is a student at the University of Edinburgh. |
|
1831 |
Dead. |
Voyage of the Beagle |
|
1859 |
Still dead. |
Publishes the Origin. |
|
1882 |
Still very dead. |
Darwin dies, too. |
They do overlap a bit in time, but Jefferson was 33 years in the grave before Darwin got around to explaining how we don’t need a designer to explain the living universe. I rather suspect that no ship was dispatched from Virginia to Shropshire to get young Charlie Darwin’s rebuttal of the 1823 claim, either. It’s even less likely that Jefferson’s zombie rose up in 1859 to take a quick gander at these new ideas spreading through biology and decided, nah, he likes intelligent design better.
I could be wrong. Maybe the Biologic Institute has been holding seances and has received Jefferson’s imprimatur — I wouldn’t put it past them. Otherwise, though, Meyer is making a ludicrously stupid argument.
By the way, even if the DI had Jefferson’s revivified head in a jar, and it was making anti-evolutionary pronouncements, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to evolutionary biologists. Doctors might be excited, though.
No, not really — my title is a bit of a sensationalistic exploitation of the thesis of a paper by Peterson, Dietrich, and McPeek, but I can buy into their idea that microRNAs (miRNAs) may have contributed to the pattern of metazoan phylogenies we see now. It’s actually a thought-provoking concept, especially to someone who favors the evo-devo view of animal evolution. And actually, the question it answers is why we haven’t had thousands of Cambrian explosions.
In case you haven’t been keeping up, miRNAs are a hot topic in molecular genetics: they are short (21-23 nucleotides) pieces of single stranded RNA that are not translated into protein, but have their effect by binding to other strands of messenger RNA (mRNA) to which they complement, effectively down-regulating expression of that messenger. They play an important role in regulating the levels of expression of other genes.
One role for miRNAs seems to be to act as a kind of biological buffer, working to limit the range of effective message that can be operating in the cell at any one time. Some experiments that have knocked out specific miRNAs have had a very interesting effect: the range of expressed phenotypes for the targeted message gene increases. The presence or absence of miRNA doesn’t actually generate a novel phenotype, it simply fine-tunes what other genes do — and without miRNA, some genes become sloppy in their expression.
This talk of buffering expression immediately swivels a developmental biologist’s mind to another term: canalization. Canalization is a process that leads organisms to produce similar phenotypes despite variations in genotype or the environment (within limits, of course). Development is a fairly robust process that overcomes genetic variations and external events to yield a moderately consistent outcome — I can raise fish embryos at 20°C or at 30°C, and despite differences in the overall rate of growth, the resultant adult fish are indistinguishable. This is also true of populations in evolution: stasis is the norm, morphologies don’t swing too widely generation after generation, but still, we can get some rapid (geologically speaking) shifts, as if forms are switching between a couple of stable nodes of attraction.
Where the Cambrian comes into this is that it is the greatest example of a flowering of new forms, which then all began diverging down different evolutionary tracks. The curious thing isn’t their appearance — there is evidence of a diversity of forms before the Cambrian, bacteria had been flourishing for a few billion years, etc., and what happened 500 million years ago is that the forms became visible in the fossil record with the evolution of hard body parts — but that these phyla established body plans that they were then locked into, to varying degrees, right up to the modern day. What the authors are proposing is that miRNAs might be part of the explanation for why these lineages were subsequently channeled into discrete morphological pathways, each distinct from the other as chordates and arthropods and echinoderms and molluscs.
I’ve just seen Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s latest eruption of petulance, and I also see that people are commenting away in various threads here. I really can’t get to it until later, and I can’t say that I’m enthusiastic about addressing such a flaccid blubbery bit of self-pity anyway, so let this thread be the central place for teeth-gnashing, fulminations, denunciations, or defenses. Or if you’ve got anything else interesting to say, feel free to announce it.
You’re also supposed to read this, which should cover most of the scatological expressions of outrage.
(via io9)
