Good ol’ Christian tolerance

This is amusing in so many ways to an atheist. Christian activists tried to disrupt a Hindu prayer in the Senate.

It’s absurd but so typical of Christian extremists that they would freak out at the imposition of a prayer that does not reflect their beliefs — welcome to my world, guys. We learn from an early age that the appropriate response is just to wait it out and not participate … and that any protests have to be made at an appropriate opportunity.

I’ll also point out that while everyone is pissed at the crazy Christians, the Hindu prayer is a rather vapid bit of meaningless nonsense, too…something about a transcendental glory living in the soul of the heavens, bla bla bla. The only part I liked was the request to lead us from the unreal to the real, which is exactly what I say all the time. Only I don’t address it to an unreal superman living in hearts.

Anyway, the only fair response to all this is simply to stop the magic incantations to any deity in our government. Let the senators who feel a need say a quiet prayer on their own, without dragging everyone into their personal superstition. And let’s chide any senators who complain about that for the weakness of their faith, that they can’t even pray without someone at the front of the room to help them out.

Silly and naive

Paul Nelson isn’t happy that I explained that W. Ford Doolittle is not denying common descent when he says there was a large and diverse pool of organisms swapping genes at the base of the tree of life, and he presents a very revealing counter-argument:

Before I respond to PZ’s baseless charge, let’s see what mental image the following proposition generates:

All organisms on Earth have descended from a single common ancestor.

I’ll bet “single common ancestor” caused you to picture a discrete cell. And if you opened a college biology textbook, to the diagram depicting Darwin’s Tree of Life, you’d find that same image.

Maybe among Nelson’s clique, they imagine a single cell; I don’t know of any biologists who would, though. Do they also imagine a single pair of humans giving rising to the modern population, too?

Lineages do not have descent through single individuals or pairs in any evolutionary explanation. It’s always populations. Humans arose as descendants of a group of our ancestors who also apparently maintained a loose and slowly weakening genetic contact with the root stock and closely related primates — there was a gradual separation of the lineage over time and embodied in many individuals. The rise of life in general was even less tidily bounded in the absence of strong isolating mechanisms — the little buggers were promiscuously sloshing genes back and forth among all kinds of cells.

I’m afraid that all Nelson has accomplished with his complaint was to reveal yet again how naive and simplistic the creationist view of biology is. And we already knew that … there’s nothing new there at all.

Oh, and do take a look at Nick Matzke’s mocking of his claim about textbooks. He seems to think the bars on a cladogram represents single, discrete individuals? I think Nelson has just flunked Evolutionary Biology 101.

Pseudoscience by press release

I just had to repost my review of Lifecode because the author, Stuart Pivar, is pushing the book again. Here’s the press release, shocking in its pretentious flapdoodle:

Prominent Scientists Reject Mainstream Genetics, Support New Theory of How the Human Body is Formed

New York, NY: In the foreword to the new book Lifecode, From Egg to Embryo by Self-organization, by Stuart Pivar, (Ryland Press), Darwin scholar Richard Milner* directs attention to the recent landmark ENCODE report (June 14) in which Human Genome Project Director Francis Collins calls the long-accepted model of genetics “badly flawed.” A week later, in a NY Times Science Times report, scores of scientists concluded that, after fifty years of genetic research, they don’t really understand what genes do, or how they work.

Lifecode presents an alternative theory of evolution which contends that the embryo is formed by self-organization, as are crystals, rather than by a genetic code subject to   natural selection. Accompanying illustrations depict hypothetical construction blueprints for the various body forms. Biological Self-organization has long been a contending alternate theory for the code of life; recent proponents include evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Brian Goodwin.

In a review of Lifecode, Robert Hazen calls the model plausible, worthy of publication and further study. Professor Hazen is a leading NASA origins of life scientist at the Carnegie Institute in Washington, DC. Other supporters include Dimitar Sasselov, Director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, evolutionary biologist Brian Goodwin, author of “How the Leopard Changed its Spots,” and Neil Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium.

This new theory detailed in Lifecode may also be said to counter Intelligent Design by providing a more cogent account of evolution than does Darwinian natural selection.

Nowadays, I don’t consider an encomium from Francis Collins to be worth much of anything, but he cites some other big names in there … I am highly dubious about any of them. He earlier made a big deal out of Stephen Jay Gould’s support, after Gould was safely dead and unable to question it, and what the book contains is page after page of rank nonsense that Gould would not have endorsed. I’d be disappointed if Hazen and Tyson had recommended the book, and particularly appalled if Goodwin actually liked it—the book is a series of pretty pictures of imaginary embryology taken entirely from the mind of Stuart Pivar and with no support from actual embryology, that is, the stuff we see in our labs in our microscopes. I have a suspicion that their praise is a distortion as gross as the claim that scientists don’t understand genes or how they work.

Pivar is a classic crackpot, and Lifecode isn’t a science book by any measure. There is no theory there, and no evidence or observation. I can’t believe any scientist would be taken in by it.

Lifecode

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I’ve been reading a strange book by Stuart Pivar, LifeCode: The Theory of Biological Self Organization (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), which purports to advance a new idea in structuralism and self-organization, in competition with Darwinian principles. I am thoroughly unconvinced, and am unimpressed with the unscientific and fabulously concocted imagery of the book.

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Reinventing the worm

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Sometimes, I confess, this whole common descent thing gets in the way and is really annoying. What we’ve learned over the years is that the evolution of life on earth is constrained by historical factors at every turn; every animal bears this wonderfully powerful toolbox of common developmental genes, inherited from pre-Cambrian ancestors, and it’s getting rather predictable that every time you open up some fundamental aspect of developmental pattern formation in a zebrafish, for instance, it is a modified echo of something we also see in a fruit fly. Sometimes you just want to see what evolution would do with a completely different starting point — if you could, as SJ Gould suggested, rewind the tape of life and let it play forward again, and see what novelties arose.

Take the worm. We take the generic worm for granted in biology: it’s a bilaterally symmetric muscular tube with a hydrostatic skeleton which propels itself through a medium with sinuous undulations, and with most of its sense organs concentrated in the forward end. The last common ancestor of all bilaterian animals was a worm, and we can see that ancestry in the organization of most animals today, even when it is obscured by odd little geegaws, like limbs and armor and regional specializations and various dangly spiky jointed bits. You’ll even see the argument made that that worm is the best of all possible simple forms, so it isn’t just an accident of history, it’s a morphological optimum.

But what if we could rewind the tape of life a little bit, to the first worms? Is it possible there are other ways such an animal could have been built? It seems nature may have carried out this little experiment for us, and we have an example of a reinvented worm, one not constructed by common descent from that initial triumphal exemplar in the pre-Cambrian — an alternative worm.

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Gay roundup

This is a nice, short summary of some of the explanations for the evolution of homosexuality. It could be shorter; there are really just two classes of explanation, the adaptationist strategy of trying to find a necessary enhancement to fitness, and the correct strategy of recognizing that not all attributes of an individual organism are going to be optimal for that individual’s reproduction, so don’t even try. Love isn’t hardwired by biology, and it can go in all kinds of different directions.

So I’m saying the best answer in the list is #5. I wouldn’t be biased by the fact that the author is quoting me, no, not at all.

Microsoft launches space program with captured alien technology

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UFO ‘studies’ have come a long way since the days of Billy Meier, when you could just throw a pie plate or a hubcap into the air and take a polaroid, and presto … proof of flying saucers! Now in these days of Photoshop and CGI, you can get much more elaborate and realistic images — none of those silver blurs anymore. DJ Chubakka introduced me to a weird world of modern UFO enthusiasts.

Nowadays you can read the markings right off the hulls of the spaceships.

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