It’s a rite of passage on Scienceblogs…

…that you have to take a sharp poke at the godless or godly to try and trigger a response, and now it’s Chris’s turn. He’s arguing with the usual faith/empiricism continuum, and adds a third axis to the debate, as illustrated here.

tern2.png

OK, it’s an interesting try. I don’t think it quite works, though. That “cranks” zone on the left needs to be expanded up towards the faith vertex, and actually ought to be indistinguishable from “theists”.

The other deep flaw is the position of “agnostics” (I have a suspicion that Chris would place himself in that group). I can think of several agnostics around here who ought to be classified as fanatically agnostic — they have greater zeal in arguing for their waffly and uninspiring position than any atheist, and with less cause.

tern3.png

While we’re tweaking, how about nudging my data point to somewhere south of the bottom line? I’m actively anti-faith, and I think my coordinates on that axis ought to be negative.

You can’t replace animals with petri dishes and computers

Once we’ve defeated the creationists (hah!), we’re going to have to manage the next problem: well-meaning but ill-informed animal rights activists. Nick describes a recent article that tries to claim we can reduce animal use in labs — and it even has a couple of respectable scientists signing on to that nonsense.

And it really is nonsense. We don’t understand everything that is going on inside animals, and to figure it out, we actually need to look inside them. There’s no other way. If you want to examine patterns of gene expression inside the developing mouse brain, you have to extract their brains (needless to say, a lethal process) and examine them with a host of tools. Isolated cells in a petri dish aren’t the same thing. To simulate something with a computer, you need to know the parameters of what you’re simulating.

Using our imaginations and inventing what we think might be going on rather easily leads to absurd results … and the way I recognized that they were absurd is that I’ve actually looked at the processes involved.

Not another creationist TV blitz…

Scott* has uncovered another slick media effort by creationists: the Seventh Day Adventists are putting on a four-part series called Out of Thin Air to trumpet their fundamentalist lunacy.

What I want to know is … where are the slick media people willing to put together lovely dramatic stories of the scientists — the brave minority fighting uncowed against a wealthy and ignorant majority? Come on, there’s a real story here. We do cool stuff! We’re passionate! We are probing reality! Our stage is the entire freaking universe! We don’t have money for PR, and our support organizations are underfunded! Oh … I guess that’s the answer. We aren’t going to be able to pony up as much cash as one of the many religious cults around here, and we aren’t going to be an uncritical, captive audience. That must be why so many of the science documentaries are either a series of talking heads, all science with no heart, or they’re nature vignettes, all pretty pictures and no science.

It’s a shame. The science story is so much more spectacular than the creationist foolishness, but we’re not building the media resources and the strong narratives that we need to compete with the liars for Jesus.

*Stop making excuses for the SDAs, Scott. They’re kooks, plain and simple. Maybe they’re nice people, but they’ve been brainwashed into believing idiocy.

Grow up, loons

This kind of silliness happens with tedious frequency. I get email notifications that I’ve been signed up to receive tripe from conservative or religious or creationist jerks.

You are now signed up to receive Ann Coulter’s weekly column, Newt Gingrich’s Winning the Future newsletter, and Robert Novak’s Evans-Novak Political Report. On Fridays you’ll also receive the Weekly Wrap-Up, containing the top stories of the week from HumanEvents.com.

You shouldn’t bother. Most of my email gets shunted through three layers of spam traps, and that kind of spam just gets blown away at first notice. It does mean that some legitimate communications get taken out behind the chemical sheds, too, but the spam dies swiftly and hard nowadays. You can stop wasting your time now.

Michael Behe demonstrates his incompetence again

Want to see some real science? An article in the NY Times summarizes research in the evolution of glucocorticoid receptors. This is really cool stuff, where the investigators do step-by-step changes in the protein structure to determine the likely sequence of evolutionary changes — it really does describe the path of evolutionary history for a set of proteins at the level of amino acids.

Now, if you want to see some junk science, Michael Behe flounders disgracefully to try and dismiss the work. This is a genuine embarrassment: Behe is a biochemist who has done legitimate work in protein structure, and this kind of research ought to be right up his alley, where he could make an informed analysis. Instead, it’s ugly and sad. A sensible creationist would simply admit that sure, here’s one case of the evolution of a receptor that is solidly made, but hey, look, over there — here are all these other proteins that haven’t been analyzed to the same level of detail. It would be pathetic and avoiding the issue, but Behe has a different and worse strategy: he denies the work shows anything at all. Because the researchers intentionally inserted mutations into the gene, they can’t argue that natural processes of mutation could have done the same thing. But of course we do know — point mutations happen all the time.

Behe continues his long slide into tendentious irrelevance and lunatic obsessions. Jason Rosenhouse digs into this step in Behe’s descent into unreason in much more detail.

A promising new organization: COPUS

Look into this one, everyone: the Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS), another attempt to coordinate efforts to improve public outreach and science education. They have some worthy goals:

  • Building the COPUS network – Underpinning the COPUS effort is a growing network of organizations and individuals who share a common goal: engaging sectors of the public in science and increasing their appreciation and understanding of the scientific enterprise. Find out more about participating in the COPUS Network.
  • Developing state-level benchmark science-indicator reports on the importance of science to the U.S. economy and standard-of-living
  • Supporting a national effort to promote the public understanding of science in a year-long celebration: Year of Science 2009 (also available: Year of Science 2009 fact sheet [PDF])

  • Integrating efforts with the Understanding Science website project currently under development at the University of California, Berkeley

If you’re involved with any kind of scientific outreach organization, register with them — they’ve got a long list of science groups. I particularly like the fact that they’re herding together a grassroots effort to celebrate a Year of Science in 2009, the Darwin bicentennial year, since there doesn’t seem to be any national leadership on the issue otherwise.

More dribblings from the producer of Expelled

Oh, gosh … this Expelled movie is going to be ghastly. Check out this interview with Walt Ruloff, the executive producer. Ruloff’s credentials on this issue are that — get ready for it — he was a software engineer. We get a good feel for the tack the movie is going to take: biologists don’t ask interesting and productive questions, they are defined by the Darwinist orthodoxy, and they actively suppress any questioning. It is, of course, a lie from word one.

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