In which I am compared to Einstein

I think it was intended to be an unfavorable comparison, but the ambiguity of the phrasing does leave open the possibility that Ben Stein is accusing Einstein of having a closed mind.

What we see below are two views of Intelligent Design’s place in science. One quote is from a brilliant, open minded and humble man…the other from a man typical of those who believe that they know better, but who don’t have much to offer, other than a closed-mind.

“My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.”

Albert Einstein (Nobel prize for Physics in 1921)

"Those crazy rascals behind Expelled have some new games they want to play: they’ve put out a casting call for victims of persecution. It’s a pitiful plea, but it will probably net a nice collection of complaints – because it’s true. We do reject Intelligent Design from the academy, from science, and from science education, and there’s a very good reason for that: it’s the same reason we reject astrology, alchemy, creationism, haruspication, necromancy, ornithomancy, and witchcraft from our science courses. Because they aren’t science."

PZ Myers, Neo-Darwinist, blog author and Wisconsin professor

A post from "EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed" spokesperson Ben Stein follows; it continues in the wondrously open – science view of Einstein, and provides an important perspective regarding academic freedom, and the right of every scientist, educator and researcher to pursue the evidence wherever it may lead, free from the persecution of The State, "Big Science" or lesser men wishing to impose an anti-theistic, materialistic worldview on our students, under the guise of “science.”

OK, not really. They’re trying to say mean things about me. I did have a couple of quick impressions about Stein’s remarks, though.

  • I hate to say it, but Einstein sure could talk like an airy-fairy ditz at times.

  • It was very nice of them to include enough of my quote to get the full meaning.

  • The quote is actually from a post where I commend a college student for speaking out against creationist B.S., which makes it a bit ironic.

  • I stand by my words. Good for me!

  • WISCONSIN!?!! Damn you, Ben Stein. Damn you to hell.

Pie in the sky between your thighs

Ladies, there are people who want your menstrual blood. It contains stromal cells, which are a multipotent adult-stem-cell-like population that might be a useful source of fairly plastic, proliferative cells. This distant possibility has prompted one company, C’Elle, to offer to collect, test, purify, and store these cells for you. As they say, these cells “may potentially provide phenomenal life saving treatments and customized therapies in the future“…so you should stash away a supply in cryogenic storage, just in case someone comes up with a use.

There is some serious science here, and Attila Csordas summarizes some of the interesting properties of these cells, but the approach is just weird. This can’t be called fraud — throughout their web site, they plainly admit that there is no practical, applied use for these cells right now, so they aren’t attempting to mislead at all — but they also can’t give a good pragmatic reason why anyone should pay to have their menstrual blood stored away.

That’s right, pay. Fees range from $499 for a single collection, to $1599 for a quarterly collection, with an additional yearly fee of $99-$199 for cryostorage. Yow. And you’ve just been throwing those tampons and pads away, not realizing that that is sludgy red treasure between your legs, and that you ought to be putting it on a high-tech pedestal and preserving it for a lifetime.

We guys are feeling left out, I assure you. I’m hoping we find a multipotent adult stem cell type in mucosal epithelia, so that we too can pay a premium price to honor the potential in our mucky secretions. If there isn’t a company doing this yet, I should start one.

I think I’ll call it “B’ooger™” (pronounced “boo-zhay”, of course).

Later, we may expand to serve a discriminating and exclusively male clientele with “Smeg’ma” (“smay-mwah”). There’s gold in them there slimes!

Can we please form a Rationalist Party now?

I was shocked to open Current Biology and find the leading news article was titled “Call to atheists,” and it was actually a pleasantly neutral article that simply reported on Dawkins’ efforts to organize atheists and promote a positive view of secularism — I guess I’m simply so used to so many media references that get immediately defensive of religion and treat atheism as something scary. It’s very nice.

Right after reading it, however, I got a note from Melissa. If you want to see something that should choke a cockroach, watch the parade of Democrats getting in line to stand up and defend the Bible. It’s nauseating. I want to see my party standing up to defend the constitution and personal liberties, not antique superstitions…but there they are, prioritizing vocal support for a wretched old book of lies while allowing the erosion of democratic principles to continue, and in fact by their praise of state-endorsed Christianity, promoting the demolition of the separation of church and state.

What does that have to do with Dawkins? He makes this comment in the interview:

He has been encouraged in the early days for the race for president by the apparent distancing of Republican candidates from the Christian right. But he found “very depressing” the profession of faith from the Democratic candidates. “I guess the Democrats have to pretend to be more pious than the Republicans because they are under suspicion of not being.”

I think Dawkins is wrong, unfortunately. Watch that video; I don’t think they’re pretending, I think they actually are pious twits.

I hate to admit it, but even I would vote for a Republican if he were openly atheist. I am thoroughly fed up with the sad-sack sanctimony from our representatives, and I don’t care whether it’s feigned or sincere — it’s corrosive garbage.

Williams, N (2007) Call to atheists. Current Biology 17(21):R899-R900.

Time-Blind?

While reading the book Time, Love, Memory I ran across the phrase, time-blind. It was used in the context of saying that without clock genes, genes that define our circadian rythm, we would be time-blind. Is this possible, are there people who have no concept of the passage of time?

Why was Andrew Grove speaking at the Society for Neuroscience?

It’s puzzling: he’s a rich and successful engineer, but I don’t see any particular virtue to his participation at SfN, and judging by these remarks, he just exposed himself for an ignoramus.

During the time Andrew S. Grove spent at Intel, the computer chip company he co-founded, the number of transistors on a chip went from about 1,000 to almost 10 billion. Over that same period, the standard treatment for Parkinson’s disease went from L-dopa to … L-dopa.

Grove (who beat prostate cancer 12 years ago and now suffers from Parkinson’s) thinks there is something deeply wrong with this picture, and he is letting the pharmaceutical industry, the National Institutes of Health and academic biomedicine have it. Like an increasing number of critics who are fed up with biomedical research that lets paralyzed rats (but not people) walk again, that cures mouse (but not human) cancer and that lifts the fog of the rodent version of Alzheimer’s but not people’s, he is taking aim at what more and more critics see as a broken system.

The institution of research in this country isn’t without its flaws, but Grove doesn’t have a clue. There are two big reasons we can’t just ramp up biomedical research and see new results flowing out of the pipeline and into the hospitals at an accelerated rate. The biological research program is not comparable to Intel’s computer chip production!

  • Biological research is not an exercise in applied engineering — we’re trying to discover fundamental unknown elements of biology, and it isn’t at all like scaling up or refining chip production. This is important: you can’t make science a process of applied engineering without destroying it. The job of the scientist is to uncover whole new principles and concepts, and that means there is a lot of scurrying about to reveal stuff that isn’t immediately obvious how it can be used in a practical sense.

    Grove is looking in the wrong places. We’re seeing rapid progress in many fields of science — evo-devo, to name one close to my heart — and he’s simply blind to them, and demanding immediate productivity in areas where he can’t even define the problem and which need more basic research to improve our understanding.

  • I would be more impressed with the superiority of engineering in the L-dopa example of Grove’s strategy for improving a chip didn’t involve throwing out the old model and plugging in a new one. Why didn’t Intel develop a treatment for my old 8088 that would transform it into a quad-core 64-bit Xeon. One could argue, I suppose, that our comparable strategy for Parkinson’s is to allow the old relics to die off while our Uterine Fab Units build brand new brains that work without crashing.

    It’s especially ironic since he is demanding new treatments because he has Parkinson’s, and now he thinks he can just demand a cure on a schedule, like he was ordering an iPhone.

It’s too bad Grove wasted all those years playing with simple toys like microprocessors instead of trying to understand something rather more complex.

Sad case out of India

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What do you do when a child is born with ischiopagus?

  1. Sell her to the circus?

  2. Turn her into an object of religious veneration?

  3. Try surgery to correct the condition as much as possible?

This little girl born with six legs and two arms had the option of all three; she’s currently being operated on to remove four of the limbs. I don’t think it is an easy decision, except for the fact that her condition is messed up enough that she’s not likely to survive to adulthood without the surgery. On the complicating side, the operation costs £100,000, has substantial risk of death or paralysis, and will not restore full, normal morphology. Here’s a paper describing the long term outcome of another case of a separation of conjoined twins.

Because we can’t rewind the clock, developmental abnormalities often are not correctable—they are treatable, which is a whole different thing, but the doctors can’t change the fact that this child is the result of a scrambled developmental process.

I stand corrected. The two medial posterior limbs are arms, so this is a conjoined twin with four arms and four legs, and with the second twin headless.

I’m very disappointed in Mike Myers

Iconoclasts- Enlightenment

Posted 47 Minutes Ago

Comedian/actor Mike Myers talks about how enlightenment actually means “lightening up” when he sits down for a one-on-one conversation with philosopher Deepak Chopra in this clip from the next episode of Iconoclasts. Airs Thursday, November 8th @10PM on The Sundance Channel! For More info, visit: http://www.sundancechannel.com/iconoclasts/

Sucking up to Deepak Chopra? Blechh. Pretending that his nonsense has anything to do with enlightenment? Double blechh.

The only part that’s valid is the claim that humor is part of enlightenment values—so let’s all laugh at these two goofballs.

Once more into the Haeckelian morass; or, Peter Moore is an illiterate fool

Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but we’ve got a serial spammer in the comments. This twit, calling himself Peter Moore (also known as Ken DeMyer, or Kdbuffalo, as he was known on Wikipedia before being banned there), is repeating himself over and over again, asking the same stupid question, never satisfied with any answer anyone gives him. Forty nine insipid comments in three days is enough.

I will answer him one last time. Any further attempt to spam multiple comment threads with his demands (and this alone makes him an ass: an incompetent, unqualified hack like Moore is in no position to make demands) will result in his immediate banning.

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