I am another one of PZ’s students just introducing myself. I am a biology major. When I am finished with my undergraduate work I hope to attend medical or physician assistant school. I am in neurobiology because I love learning about how the body works. It is part of what attracts me to the medical field.
Oh, no! Neal’s comments haven’t been getting through, so he sent me a friendly email message to let me know.
(By the way, the filters have been acting up in a horrible way lately — about 10% of the comments have been held up for moderation when they shouldn’t, and it’s irritating the heck out of me. I go in and approve broad swathes of arrested comments whenever I can, but it means sometimes your words get held up unnecessarily long.)
Warning: you might find these comments inoffensive if you are a longshoreman or attended Catholic school. Otherwise, watch out. Some of you know Neal by reputation, so you know what to expect.
A bunch of us were asked to recommend science blogs for The Scientist … now you can see the picks, too.
I’ve just come back from my introductory biology classroom in which I’ve been trying hard to convince students of an important historical fact: the scientists, especially the geologists, who came up with the idea that the earth was old were working in a Christian tradition, and they came up with their ideas because they needed to explain the evidence, not because they were driven by theological considerations or because they had been bribed by the Evil Atheist Conspiracy. Sometimes you just have to put them in the shoes of a geologist in 1850 to get them to see the true motives. Then I discover that ChrisR is also trying to make the point, that it’s the evidence not ideology that informs our conclusions.
It’s our studies of the rock record that have led geologists to propose that the Earth is so unimaginably old, not the edicts of the Evil Secular Conspiracy. When we observe huge angular unconformities, where rocks have been tilted almost vertically, eroded and then covered with flat-lying rocks, we see that they require a large period of time to have formed. When thermodynamics tells us that it would take tens of thousands of years for an ingneous intrusion hundreds of metres across to solidify from lava, we assume that that means it tooks tens of thousands of years to form. When present day estimates of sea floor spreading – measured in mm per year – match those estimated from the increased radiometric ages of the ocean floor away from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, we conclude the Atlantic Ocean has been formed after tens of millions of years of slow continental drift. The list goes on and on; and useful as the fossil record is, I could continue for quite a while without having to mention the E-word.
I was also trying to get across another piece of evidence that the biologists were trying (and before Darwin, failing) to interpret, one that is quite ironic now. One of the big questions before natural historians was to explain all the gradations of form in the natural world — why are there so many species of mouse, for instance, that vary in little ways, and why are there ‘mouse-like’ forms that are larger, like rats? Why is the world swimming in transitional forms, and why aren’t animals more distinct from one another, in other words?
It’s a sign of the degeneracy of the modern creationist that instead of grappling with these questions honestly, as the 19th century creationists/natural historians did, they instead simply deny the existence of the evidence. Like Chris says, rocks aren’t coy about their age, and I’d add that organisms aren’t hiding their relationships.
First it was me, now it’s God. God is being sued by State Senator Ernie Chambers of Nebraska.
Chambers lawsuit, which was filed on Friday in Douglas County Court, seeks a permanent injunction ordering God to cease certain harmful activities and the making of terroristic threats.
The lawsuit admits God goes by all sorts of alias, names, titles and designations and it also recognizes the fact that the defendant is “Omnipresent”.
In the lawsuit Chambers says he’s tried to contact God numerous times, “Plaintiff, despite reasonable efforts to effectuate personal service upon Defendant (“Come out, come out, wherever you are”) has been unable to do so.”
The suit also requests that the court given the “peculiar circumstances” of this case waive personal service. It says being Omniscient, the plaintiff assumes God will have actual knowledge of the action.
The lawsuit accuses God “of making and continuing to make terroristic threats of grave harm to innumerable persons, including constituents of Plaintiff who Plaintiff has the duty to represent.”
It says God has caused, “fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues, ferocious famines, devastating droughts, genocidal wars, birth defects, and the like.”
The suit also says God has caused, “calamitous catastrophes resulting in the wide-spread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth’s inhabitants including innocent babes, infants, children, the aged and infirm without mercy or distinction.”
Chambers also says God “has manifested neither compassion nor remorse, proclaiming that Defendant “will laugh” when calamity comes.
Chambers asks for the court to grant him a summary judgment. He says as an alternative, he wants the judge to set a date for a hearing as “expeditiously” as possible and enter a permanent injunction enjoining God from engaging in the types of deleterious actions and the making of terroristic threats described in the lawsuit.
This may surprise you, but God should call upon me to defend him. After all, I’ll show that God is neither omnipresent nor omniscient, and that those are just vague rumors spread by people who actually don’t know him. I’ll also demonstrate that God is utterly ineffectual, that not only doesn’t have the power to cause those horrible events that harm people, he doesn’t even have the capability to help anyone. And that he doesn’t show compassion or remorse, and contrary to Chambers, won’t laugh … because he is an entirely nonexistent, fictional character.
When the case is dismissed, we will then go on to sue all the priesthoods of Earth for misrepresentation of my innocent and entirely harmless client. We won’t countersue Ernie Chambers, though — I think I like that guy.
(Hat tip to the Lincoln Secular Humanists)
Here’s a hot prospect for the Discovery Institute: Fred Sigworth, a professor of Cellular and Molecular Physiology at Yale. Snap him up, quick! He’ll fit in perfectly! He gave a talk to the Yale Christian Fellowship which sounds like it was hilarious.
“Being a Christian is good preparation for work as a scientist, and science can help prepare you for being a Christian,” he said.
Oh? How does faith help you be a better scientist?
Sigworth said that both religion and science require working with incomplete data…
That’s a revelation right there. Science does require working with incomplete data, and religion requires working with no data at all. Therefore, religion must be more powerful than science! I am converted! Hallelujah!
OK, seriously, it sounds like a very silly talk by yet another gomer striving to invent rationalizations for his ridiculous religion. No news there.
Wait…how does that qualify someone to be a fellow of the Discovery Institute? Isn’t ID a secular theory?
Not if you listen to Bill Dembski’s Q & A last night…where he said, “I’ve got plenty of ulterior religious motive, I’d like to see ID succeed because of my Christian background and beliefs.” In addition, it sounds like not only did a professor get up and rip him apart on the flagellum, but the audience was laughing at poor Dembski. That’s what we need more of: the creationists getting laughed off the stages at their propaganda ops.
ERV was also at the Q & A, and recorded the audio. We’ll have to check later and see if she’s put anything up on it … although I’m a little concerned about the sound quality. It sounds like she might have been laughing hysterically the whole time, which could have drowned out some of the juicy bits.
Or I would, if I actually had a land squid.
Does anyone know where I could pick up one of those babies? Petco, Petsmart?
The Hox genes are a set of transcription factors that exhibit an unusual property: they provide a glimpse of one way that gene expression is translated into metazoan morphology. For the most part, the genome seems to be a welter of various genes scattered about almost randomly, with no order present in their arrangement on a chromosome — the order only becomes apparent in their expression through the process of development. The Hox genes, on the other hand, seem like an island of comprehensible structure. These are all genes that specify segment identity — whether a segment of the embryo should form part of the head, thorax, or abdomen, for instance — and they’re all clustered together in one (usually) tidy spot.
Within that cluster, we see further evidence of order. Look at just the Drosophila part of the diagram below: there are 8 Hox genes in a row, and their order within that row reflects the order of expression in the fly body. On the left or 3′ end of the DNA strand, lab (labial) is expressed in the head, while Abd-B (Abdominal-B) is expressed at the end of the abdomen.
Knocking out individual Hox genes in the fly causes homeotic transformations — one body part develops into another. These genes are early actors in the cascade of interactions that enable the development of morphologically distinct regions in a segmented animal — the activation of a Hox gene from the 3′ end is one of the earliest triggers that leads the segment to develop into part of the head.
Now look at the mouse part of the diagram above. We vertebrates have Hox genes that are homologous to the fly Hox genes, and they’re also clustered in discrete locations with 3’→5′ order reflecting anterior→posterior order of expression. There are differences — the two most obvious that we have more Hox genes on the 5′ side (these correspond to expression in the tail—flies do not have anything homologous to the chordate tail), and vertebrates also have four banks of Hox genes, HoxA, HoxB, HoxC, and HoxD. This complicates matters. Vertebrates have these parallel, overlapping sets of Hox genes, which suggests that morphology could be a product of a combinatorial expression of the genes in the four Hox clusters: there could be a Hox code, where identity can be defined with more gradations by mixing up the bounds of expression of each of the genes.
This would be something like Reason #5,422.
Another reason is that there’s no such thing as “Talk Like a Ninja Day”. (Psssst…19 September. Arrrr.)
We’ve all heard how the Creation Science Evangelism, Kent Hovind’s organization, has been strongarming YouTube to suppress criticisms of his bad science. Well, check this out: now CSE has been caught red-handed revising their licensing. Where before they declared everything free and good to disseminate, now they are retroactively claiming copyright.
I take that as an admission that they can’t stand the heat.
