A reader sent me an example of religious kitsch, but just to be on the safe side, I’m going to have to put it below the fold. There’s nothing obscene about the work in question, but I dare you to look at it and not have wildly inappropriate thoughts skitter through your brain.
I think we need a caption contest for this one.
It bodes ill for a certain southern state that my mailbox overfloweth with tales of idiocy from Florida … it’s gotten to the point where I cringe a little bit when I see “Florida” in the subject line, because I know it’s going to be another delusional school board, another wacky letter to the editor, another Floridian complaining that his state isn’t as stupid as it sounds from all the news. Even the Florida Citizens for Science blog is a reservoir of terrible stories right now.
So I’m going to abstain for a little while from the Florida bashing and give the good guys a chance to catch up. How about telling us some good news? I’m sure there are intelligent, progressive people down there gearing up to fight for science and reason, so let’s hear the positive news from the Florida creation wars. If you want anonymity or don’t like commenting, go ahead and email Florida stories with a hopeful bent to me and we’ll try to present the other side of the state.
This is a good opinion piece in the Charlotte Observer by an Englishman residing in the city. He states right up front that he likes the city and sees a great deal of promise for the future in it, but he has one reservation: the region’s religiosity.
To a foreigner like myself, it’s disturbing that a majority of Americans don’t believe in something as fundamental as evolution (in a CBS/New York Times poll, 55 percent said God created humans in their current form). This erosion of belief in science and rationality is especially troubling for a prosperous region such as ours. American action is vital if we are to defuse the looming crisis of global warming, and Charlotte’s rise as an emerging global city gives us special responsibilities to play a leading role in solving this challenge. But solutions will be impossible without informed debate based on rigorous science.
It’s a polite piece that makes a solid point, that common American attitudes about science and religion are becoming an obstacle to economic progress.
It’s a lot cheaper than making a movie and trying to persuade all those scientists to shut up.
Let’s be fair — somebody used a little photoshop on me, too. But really, my head isn’t that small, I’m not quite that chunky, and I’d never use a gun.
It’s all about that goofy Abunga bookstore nonsense — I love how a couple of paragraphs and a few hundred comments can make the zealots swoon.
There are lots of comments there, too, most seem to either dislike Abunga’s model, or are defending it on false pretenses: “we MUST maintain the integrity of our free enterprise system”!!! It seems to me that having a swarm of people using their rating system exactly as they designed it is perfectly fair and a fine example of free enterprise in action.
Both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland are making a reduction in the legal blood alcohol driving limit from 0.08 to 0.05%. This is facing opposition from an unexpected quarter: Catholic priests are concerned about driving home after Mass. Well, now, how terrible for them.
“Perhaps it could be enough for you to fail a drink-driving test,” the Rev. Brian D’Arcy, a priest from Enniskillen, told the Irish Times. “I don’t like to use the word wine, as it is Christ’s blood in the Eucharist — but it still has all the characteristics of wine when in the blood stream.”
So it’s OK to drive if it’s Jesus who has lowered your response time, diminished your coordination, and addled your perceptions, but not if it’s alcohol? And do these guys seriously believe that that’s Jesus’s blood in your circulatory system afterwards? Weird.
I did learn something new…
Priests say the new limit would put them over the legal limit after fulfilling their duties during the Mass, which include drinking all consecrated wine not distributed during communion.
What a racket — here I thought godless evilutionists had it easy, what with their porn and moneybags, but the Catholics have made gurgling down any leftover wine an official duty. At the next EAC meeting, I’m going to have to move that we make it Official Policy that atheists are allowed to eat the last office donut, they are required to bogart that joint, and even if they are the last man or woman on earth, you must have sex with them.
… you should check out their recent appearance together on Bloggingheads.
We had Neil Shubin here last week, and now Jerry Coyne is guest-blogging at The Loom. I look forward to the day that I can just sit back and invite prominent scientists to do my work for me here.
Although, I have to say that while Coyne is largely correct, he’s being a bit unfair. He’s addressing Olivia Judson’s recent article on “hopeful monsters”, a concept Coyne and the majority of the biological community reject. I reject it, too, but I think there are some legitimate issues that are associated with the idea that are also all too often and unfortunately discarded.
One point that Coyne handles well: there is a disconnect between the magnitude of genotypic changes and phenotypic effects — a single point mutation can cause amazing morphological changes. As Coyne points out, though, although this can happen, it’s not likely to be a major force in evolutionary change. Dramatic, single-step phenotypic effects are the kinds of things that geneticists select for, but they are also exactly the kinds of things that nature selects against. Evolution is much more likely to sidle up towards a major change by successive smaller steps, since those small changes are less likely to be accompanied by major deleterious side effects. Also, phenotypic outcomes of development should be robust to be advantageous, which typically means that there are many regulatory events cooperating to produce them — and they are therefore buffered by multiple controls.
But please, let’s not always dismiss Richard Goldschmidt when discussing “hopeful monsters”. It really wasn’t that awful an idea. Goldschmidt worked on stable variations in organisms: he studied sex differences (ever noticed that males and females have pretty much the same genes, but different phenotypes?) and metamorphosis (similarly, an organism builds two or more very different morphologies with exactly the same genome). He postulated that there could be specific, well-structured, stable nodes of patterns of gene expression — genes weren’t generally fluid, but tended to lock in to particular states. If he were writing today, he’d probably be bringing up the notion of attractors in chaos theory; the ideas are very similar. In that context, he was proposing a worthy concept that should have been taken more seriously than it was — Mayr’s hatchet job was particularly awful.
The “hopeful monster” concept was not shot down by the synthesis — it was ignored. I think it’s been dismantled by developmental biology, though; what we’ve learned is that the stable morphological types we see in a single species are not simply fortunate stable nodes in a nucleus that can be tuned in different ways, but that each are the product of many generations of slow sculpting by the processes of evolution, and that they are riddled with clumsy kluges that aren’t the outcome of some elegant global pattern switching mechanism, but of a long history of small tweaks.
Now also, Coyne is no fan of evo-devo, and he briefly voices the suggestion that the evolutionary developmental biologists are among the sources of this idea that saltational changes lead to sudden, drastic changes in body plans … but I’m just not seeing that. I am seeing work, for instance, that suggests that Hox duplications have been part of the process of producing additions to body plans, but it’s not a case of “poof, arthropods gain a metathorax in one change” — it’s been quite conventional. It’s more like “poof, arthropods gain an extra Hox gene, which initially adds redundancy and is later shaped by evolutionary processes that confer additional specializations on a segment,” quite ordinary stuff that shouldn’t be at all objectionable to Coyne.
It’s especially peculiar to pin the “hopeful monster” concept on evo-devo, when the one evo-devo expert he quotes, the biologist Sean Carroll, explicitly points out that evo-devo doesn’t support it.
Coyne is also going to be speaking at an evo-devo symposium I’ll be attending in April — I’m going to be very interested to hear what he has to say.
Uh-oh. The word is out. Being an atheist evolutionist means all the porn you could want and being surrounded by big bags of money.
Good thing he left off the orgies. If people know about the orgies, we’d never get any peace.
So Heath Ledger, the young actor, is dead of unknown causes. I don’t know much about him, I did not have any kind of personal interaction with him so I don’t need to know much about him — I liked some of his movies, he was young, it’s tragic to see a life ended so early.
Those demented ghouls at Westboro Baptist Church have a different point of view, though.
It’s just a lunatic ranting his hate, but that last paragraph is fascinating.
Heath Ledger is now in Hell, and has begun serving his eternal sentence there — beside which, nothing else about Heath Ledger is relevant or consequential.
That epitomizes the problem, I think. There is a kind of sliding scale of belief: most of us value our lives to some degree, and consider how we spend our three score and ten to be important; then there are people who attach some degree of importance on an afterlife they’ve imagined, and consider this hypothetical eternity to be a matter of concern. Atheists have the scale pegged way over to the left and see this little slice of time we have as all we have, and therefore the only thing we have to make work. Most religious people have the dial turned up a little to the right — they are clearly operationally secular, spending most of their time on work and family, and socking away a little Sunday prayer time for an anticipated and wholly delusional Heaven. We can all live with that.
But then there are these wackos like Fred Phelps who have the dial turned so far to the right that they place a higher priority in their fantasies about what they’ll be doing after they’re dead over what they’re doing with their life right now. That’s where religion becomes a great evil, where it destroys lives and compels people to commit acts that are materially insane, but make great logical sense to people infected with the idea that there is an eternity of consequence for trivial transgressions against a shared belief.
This is why we have to strike right at the root of religious belief. It’s an unfounded expectation of a magic post-mortem resuscitation in a new universe with different rules that has the potential to completely change the equation about how we live our lives in this brief span — and not for the better, as proponents pretend — and to those of us who care about our lives, our world, and our legacy rather than our imagined ghost-existence, that matters.
P.S. Note the inconsistency in Phelps’ position, too. If what Heath Ledger did in his life is such a tiny, irrelevant fragment of god’s great plan for his existence, why is his role in a movie Fred Phelps didn’t like so important that it dictates an eternity of pain?
