Your weekly Fish

I’m sorry to say that Stanley Fish is treading the same futile path that every defender of religion follows: there’s the knee-jerk detestation of atheism, then there’s the argument that atheism is nothing but faith itself, and now he’s reduced to impotent handwaving about a sublime but unknowable god, and therefore religion is … what? He’s not clear. He seems to be saying we can’t criticize religion because we have imperfect knowledge of a perfect being.

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Those wacky, happy-go-lucky Christians and their amusing ways

A “visionary” is recommending a new way of seeing “visions” of the Virgin Mary: stare directly into the sun. It works! Sort of.

Zackey reportedly advised a Gauteng woman, Amal Nassif (37), earlier to look at the sun, and if she had faith, the Virgin Mary would appear.

Nassif stared at the sun for about a minute and lost her sight.

“I can’t seen anything. There is a large dark blind spot,” she was quoted as saying.

I have a “vision,” too — if you hit yourself in the head with a hammer really, really hard, you’ll see Jesus! That makes about as much sense as Zackey’s. Who, by the way, is reported as being “happy”, and is “inundated with people seeking prayer and healing.”

Sunday afternoon exercises

Here’s your course of action. First, tune up your brain with Encephalon #25. Feeling smart now?

Next, browse The Carnival of the Godless #69. Now you’re smart and aggressively, skeptically godless. Sharp as a knife.

Now you’re ready to read Revere’s Sunday Sermonette. You will be entertained. It’s an account of a Georgia pastor wrestling with theodicy, and he refreshingly concludes that a) yes, god is screwing with you and making you suffer, and b) his explanation is that god is making sure you don’t forget him. God is a petty tyrant who torments you to remind you that he exists.

You should be feeling pretty cocky at this point. These theological arguments are so silly and shallow and superficial, and you can just slice right through them.

Unfortunately, Greg Laden is going to slime you with a loogey gun next. Watching Michele Bachmann talk about god is agonizing—god was apparently “focused like a laser beam” on her congressional race; the omnipotent omniscient ruler of the entire universe thought a political contest in a small Minneapolis suburb was the most important event in the whole cosmos, and was personally wielding his vast power to get a babbling boob into office.

Hah. What good does all your brain power and reason and logic do against that, I ask you? If there were a god, Michele Bachmann would be evidence that he is evil and he is screwing with us.

Segmentation genes evolved undesigned

Jason Rosenhouse has dug into the details of the evo-devo chapter of Behe’s The Edge of Evolution and found some clear examples of dishonest quote-mining (so what else is new, you may be thinking—it’s what creationists do). I’ve warned you all before that when you see an ellipsis in a creationist quote, you ought to just assume that there’s been something cut out that completely contradicts the point the creationist is making; Rosenhouse finds that Behe gets around that little red-flag problem by simply leaving out the ellipses.

I just want to expand a little bit on one point Behe mangles and that Jason quotes. It turns out I actually give a lecture in my developmental biology courses on this very issue, the mathematical modeling antecedents to insect segmentation, so it’s simply weird to see Behe twisting a subject around that is so well understood in the evo-devo community, and that was actually well explained in Sean Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful.

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Pair-rule genes

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The general pattern of developing positional information in Drosophila starts out relatively simply and gets increasingly complicated as time goes by. Initially, there is a very broad distribution of a gradient of a maternal morphogen. That morphogen then triggers the expression of narrower (but still fairly broad) bands of aperiodic gap genes. The next step in this process is to turn on sets of genes in narrow, periodic bands that correspond to body segments. This next set of genes are called the pair-rule genes, because they do something surprising and rather neat: they are turned on in precisely alternating bands. In the picture above, for instance, one pair-rule gene, even-skipped, has been stained blue, and it is expressed in parasegment* 1, 3, 5, 7, etc. Another, fushi tarazu, has been stained brown, and this gene is turned on in parasegments 2, 4, 6, 8, etc.

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