Signs of the Cephalopod Underground

A reader discovered this fascinating graffiti in downtown Minneapolis, near the transit center on Hennepin Avenue.

i-cc9784a81d555cbd72a98956e46c5125-squidwhale.jpg

In Minneapolis! So far from the sea, but I’m not alone in pining for it.

I may have to look this up. This is a travel week for me, as I have to run around taking care of some essential pre-school year duties—I’m actually sitting in the St Cloud mall right now, watching the senior citizens do their laps, while waiting for our car to get some minor repairs and maintenance—and tomorrow I have to run in to the university to attend a meeting and to the airport to dispose of one of my kids for a few weeks. I might have some time to cruise the squid-haunted streets of the Big City for a while.

Actually, what I have is a physical bias

John Rennie deconstructs an IDist’s own definition of Intelligent Design. Here’s that definition:

ID is the claim that there exist patterns in nature that are best explained by intelligent agency. ID doesn’t claim to be a default explanation. It is claimed to be a legitimate hypothesis, supported by a large body of evidence, that deserves consideration without being rejected on principle because of a preconceived metaphysical bias.

Sentence by sentence, that definition is untenable. Read Rennie for the big picture, but I just want to focus on that last clause: the “preconceived metaphysical bias.” That’s a common creationist code phrase that you’ll hear a lot in this debate, and it can be translated as “scientists reject supernatural explanations.” That IDists claim to have a “best” explanation or that they actually have evidence in support of their beliefs becomes completely irrelevant when they cap their definition with the idea that you shouldn’t need rational, logical, tested explanations or any kind of empirical, natural evidence—the first part of the definition is a tacit admission of the need to meet the standards of our “metaphysical bias,” science, and that last bit is a rejection of science!

I think they need to cultivate a little more honesty and consistency, and lay out in detail what their metaphysical bias might be. Mine is that the processes of the natural world are sufficient to explain physical reality, and that what we require to understand the natural world are natural explanations. I’d like to see a summary of their biases and a list of the supernatural evidence that IDists want to use to support their contentions.

It’s how we can all get along

What an excellent demonstration of the importance of the principle of the separation of church and state: here’s a conservative Christian minister whose views on society and politics I find thoroughly odious; here’s a liberal Christian with whom I’d be 99% in agreement, but whose moderate religious views I can still find a bit batty; and then there’s me, the flaming atheist. We can all coexist and work together (or against each other, in a productive and civil way) as long as our government doesn’t arbitrarily privilege one religious view over another. As long as we can find common ground in our support for civil liberties and personal freedom to believe as we want, it really doesn’t matter what goofy ideas about gods we might have.

By the way, while you’re over at Making Light, don’t miss Jim Macdonald’s article on heat stress. We’re supposed to get up close to 100°F here in western Minnesota today, with high humidity and threats of thunderstorms—so it’s certainly timely information.

Ancient rules for Bilaterian development

i-7d38ad9babac8dddb14b35555112f8a5-volvox.jpg

Assuming that none of my readers are perfectly spherical, you all possess notable asymmetries—your top half is different from your bottom half, and your front or ventral half is different from you back or dorsal half. You left and right halves are probably superficially somewhat similar, but internally your organs are arranged in lopsided ways. Even so, the asymmetries are relatively specific: you aren’t quite like that Volvox to the right, a ball of cells with specializations scattered randomly within. People predictably have heads on top, eyes in front, arms and legs in useful locations. This is a key feature of development, one so familiar that we take it for granted.

I’d go so far as to suggest that one of the most important events in our evolutionary history was the basic one of taking a symmetrical ball of cells and imposing on it a coordinate system, creating positional information that allowed cells to have specific identities in particular places in the embryo. When the first multicellular colony of identical cells set aside a particular patch of cells to carry out a particular function, say putting one small subset in charge of reproduction, that asymmetry became an anchor point for establishing polarity. If cells could then determine how far away they were from that primitive gonad, evolution could start shaping function by position—maybe cells far away from the gonad could be dedicated to feeding, cells in between to transport, etc., and a specialized multicellular organism could emerge. Those patterns are determined by interactions between genes, and we can try to unravel the evolutionary history of asymmetry with comparative studies of regulatory molecules in early development.

[Read more…]