Pamphleteering

Rick was handed a nice tri-fold glossy pamphlet as he was walking to a fireworks display. It’s titled “What If”, and what it is is a collection of — you guessed it — bible quotes to extort your obedience to a goofy religion. Rick has handled the details, so I’ll just cut to the conclusion. It asks, “Based on the authority of these Scriptures, just think, WHAT IF you received Christ today? Just think, WHAT IF you don’t?”

The opening clause covers my response pretty well. “Based on the authority of these scriptures,” which is nonexistent, I don’t have to accept anything they say, and can throw it away. Or, at least, I’d reduce it to the one phrase in the whole mess that I do think is good advice.

“Just think.”

Now, where is our glossy pamphlet like this — only, like, not stupid — that we can give out to glad-handing god-dabblers?

Atlanta Pharyngufest!

All right, I think I have a decision: we will meet at 6:00pm or thereabouts on Saturday, 12 July, at Manuel’s Tavern, 602 N. Highland Ave., and have a grand old time for as long as you all can handle it. Remember, those Denverites could barely make it to 10pm — I think Georgians have to show that they can both party and offer entertaining rational conversation as good as the Coloradans gave. The honor of the South demands it!

Oh, and look: Atlanta skeptics are meeting at the same place and roughly the same time. It should be an excellent crowd.

Jefferson was a freethinker

If you’re listening to Atheists Talk radio right now, you’ve been hearing a lot about the secular intent of the founding of the US government. The LA Times has an article on the Jefferson Bible — that greatly abridged version of the Bible that Jefferson made by chopping out all the miracles and unbelievable stuff, reducing it to a work of New Testament philosophy. The article asks,

“Can you imagine the reaction if word got out that a president of the United States cut out Bible passages with scissors, glued them onto paper and said, ‘I only believe these parts?'”

My reaction would be “Hallelujah!” The Religious Right ought to be experiencing some sever cognitive dissonance, since they both revere the founding fathers to a ridiculous degree and insist that this is a Christian nation…but they avoid it by deluding themselves about the radical nature of some of the founding fathers’ religious belief.

We need a president who can do this:

In Jefferson’s version of the Gospels, for example, Jesus is still wrapped in swaddling clothes after his birth in Bethlehem. But there’s no angel telling shepherds watching their flocks by night that a savior has been born. Jefferson retains Jesus’ crucifixion but ends the text with his burial, not with the resurrection.

Stripping miracles from the story of Jesus was among the ambitious projects of a man with a famously restless mind. At 71, he read Plato’s “Republic” in the original Greek and found it lackluster.

We won’t be getting one in the next election.

Atlanta Pharyngufest?

Next week at this time I’ll be in lovely downtown Atlanta, staying at the Renaissance Atlanta Hotel. If we’re going to have a Pharyngufest, probably the best time would be Saturday, 12 July, and somewhere not too far away from the hotel. Anyone interested? Any locals want to make suggestions for good meeting places? We need something that isn’t too noisy, that serves good refreshments, and offers exemplary Southern hospitality, ’cause that’s what I expect when I go to Georgia. If nothing else, the hotel has two bars, and I suppose we could hit one of those.

If anyone wants to suggest better days, I could probably make it either Sunday the 13th or Tuesday the 15th.

Altenberg meeting next week: expect evolution to simply evolve slightly

Remember Suzan Mazur, the credulous reporter hyping a revolution in evolution? She’s at it again, publishing an e-book chapter by chapter on the “Altenberg 16”, this meeting that she thinks is all about radically revising evolutionary biology.

I can tell that Massimo Pigliucci — one of the 16 — is feeling a little exasperation at this nonsense, especially since some of the IDists have seized on it as vindication of their delusions about the “weakness” of evolutionary theory. He’s got an excellent post summarizing some of the motivation behind this meeting, which is actually part of a fairly routine process of occasional get-togethers by scientists with similar ideas to hash out the concepts. Here’s the actual subject of discussion at the Altenberg meeting.

The basic idea is that there have been some interesting empirical discoveries, as well as the articulation of some new concepts, subsequently to the Modern Synthesis, that one needs to explicitly integrate with the standard ideas about natural selection, common descent, population genetics and statistical genetics (nowadays known as evolutionary quantitative genetics). Some of these empirical discoveries include (but are not limited to) the existence of molecular buffering systems (like the so-called “heat shock response”) that may act as “capacitors” (i.e., facilitators) of bursts of phenotypic evolution, and the increasing evidence of the role of epigenetic (i.e., non-genetic) inheritance systems (this has nothing to do with Lamarckism, by the way). Some of the new concepts that have arisen since the MS include (but again are not limited to) the idea of “evolvability” (that different lineages have different propensities to evolve novel structures or functions), complexity theory (which opens the possibility of natural sources of organic complexity other than natural selection), and “accommodation” (a developmental process that may facilitate the coordinated appearance of complex traits in short evolutionary periods).

Now, did you see anything in the above that suggests that evolution is “a theory in crisis”? Did I say anything about intelligent designers, or the rejection of Darwinism, or any of the other nonsense that has filled the various uninformed and sometimes downright ridiculous commentaries that have appeared on the web about the Altenberg meeting? Didn’t think so. If next week’s workshop succeeds, what we will achieve is taking one more step in an ongoing discussion among scientists about how our theories account for biological phenomena, and how the discovery of new phenomena is to be matched by the elaboration of new theoretical constructs. This is how science works, folks, not a sign of “crisis.”

You cannot imagine how pleased I was to see this — not because I was at all concerned about this meeting, but because I’ve been scribbling down notes for the last few weeks on the subjects I want to discuss in my keynote at GECCO 2008, and that’s practically an outline of my plans. I was going to go over some of these concepts and define them and give examples; I didn’t have molecular buffers on my list (maybe I’ll have to add it), and I was going to say a bit about conservation/canalization vs. plasticity, but at least I’m reassured that I’m on the right track.