I think I had a better day than any of you readers out there, and I have to gloat somewhere.
So…lunch with John Brockman. An afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art. A conversation with Niles Eldredge. Dinner with Benoit Mandelbrot. I should do this kind of thing every day.
By the way, I really recommend dinner with Mandelbrot. That guy has more stories…
Greg Laden makes a simple analysis of what triggers comments on Pharyngula: it turns out the least interesting subject is me (my self-esteem is being battered lately), with science close on my heels, but that you love to chatter about creationists and godlessness.
Now I wonder how strong the response will be if I say this post is about none of those things: it’s about you.
This doesn’t apply to me, of course, since I get to frolic on the streets of New York and visit Seed and MoMA.
(via Minnesota Stories)
Jim Lippard continues to present his reports on creationist finances, and this time he shows the Discovery Institute’s balance sheet. They brought in $3.5 million in 2004, almost all of it in the form of donations.
That sounds like a lot of money, but to put it in perspective, you could take a look at a representative university’s operating budget. The small liberal arts university I’m at, with about 2000 students, brings in about $11 million per year in tuition, and I believe that charitable donations were on the order of $1 million per year. In that absolute sense, the Discovery Institute is small potatoes. The difference is, though, that a university actually provides services by highly trained staff, and most of its income is plowed right back into doing real work. The DI uses its income almost entirely for PR.
Keep that in mind when you hear them talking about gearing up to do actual research: they don’t have the infrastructure or the people in place to do that much science, and they certainly don’t have the income to make much real progress. Maybe if they fired a bunch of flacks and philosophers, they’d have enough to fund one solid lab, if they could piggy-back on existing facilities somewhere.
Of course, they do have more than enough money to make a bigger public relations splash than a small university.
As we are so often reminded by proponents of Intelligent Design creationism, we contain molecular “machines” and “motors”. They don’t really explain how these motors came to be other than to foist the problem off on some invisible unspecified Designer, which is a poor way to do science—it’s more of a way to make excuses to not do science.
Evolution, on the other hand, provides a useful framework for trying to address the problem of the origin of molecular motors. We have a theory—common descent—that makes specific predictions—that there will be a nested hierarchy of differences between motors in different species. Phylogenetic analysis of variations between species allows us to reconstruct the history of a molecule with far more specificity than “Sometime between 6,000 and 4 billion years ago, a god or aliens (or aliens created by a god) conjured this molecule into existence by unknown and unknowable means”.
Richards and Cavalier-Smith (2005) have applied tested biological techniques to a specific motor molecule, myosin, and have used that information to assemble a picture of the phylogenetic history of eukaryotes.
Talk among yourselves, or savor the expression of ideas at these fine compendia of articles that I find copacetic:
Chris Clarke (whose blog sure is a lot prettier all of a sudden) has revealed that the Koufax award nominations are now open. Go nominate your favoritest blogs!
I do not want anyone to nominate Pharyngula, and if nominated in any category I’ll ask to be removed. You see, I’ve already got one. It’s a nice honor, but I don’t need any more, and I’d rather see the glory spread around. So this year I’m planning to campaign for someone else; I’m not sure who, yet, but we’ll see what kind of exciting science-oriented blogs show up in the list this time around.
To my great relief, I’ve made it to the big city without a hitch (last time I came out here, I spent more time sitting on a runway in Allentown). Now it’s just a busy, busy couple of days visiting with some very cool people—this time I’ll actually get to visit Seed Central—and then back home on Wednesday.
I’ve got to work on my image. Here’s another report about meeting me that says I “turned out to be a more low-key guy than I expected”. Maybe I’ve got to try and reverse expectations.
It’s true. I make Mr Rogers look like a bomb-throwing anarchist. I walk into a room and people fall asleep. If I start talking, catatonia and death ensue. I’ve got the personality and verve of a cheap mannequin.
Everyone will testify to the truth of what I say.
RJ Eskow has a set of 15 questions he wants us “militant atheists” to answer. Apparently, we’ve been blaming every problem in the universe on religion and religion alone, and we need to eradicate faith in order to inaugurate our new world order of peace, prosperity, and reason. That isn’t really hyperbole: his questions really are exercises in the obvious. Here’s one, for instance (no, I’m not going to waste my time with all 15):
Where the wars so often cited by militants (the Crusades, etc.) primarily religious in nature, or did their root causes stem from other factors such as economics, nationalism, and territorial expansion—as many experts in the field suggest? Or is the truth somewhere in between?
