Poor picked-upon Pope

I’ve already done my fair share of pope-bashing, so I won’t kick him any more over this latest episode. Instead, I’ll just tell everyone to go read my homies in the science community, Revere and Sean (who is particularly telling on that jarringly bogus “Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul” claim), and my fellow Minnesotan, Norwegianity, and while you’re plumbing the Minnesota mentality, you might as well take in Tild’s deconversion tale and regular Spong blogging…if there’s some human heart beating under the religious vestments, it ain’t Ratzinger’s, and Spong is a better substitute.

Inverting the blogosphere into a kind of anti-beauty contest gives me hope

How about them boobies? I was traveling yesterday, and missed most of the astonishing uproar over being photographed while bearing breasts—so I won’t add much to the thrashing except to point out the bright side.

You see, the real resentment is over the fact that Jessica happens to be young and attractive, a couple of fortuitous and irrelevant features that don’t matter to the assessment of her writing. There are a lot of people like that in the blogosphere, like Amanda and Lindsay, and it’s not just the ladies—look at Ezra and Chris. They’re the competition. If we old and homely people can take them out by impeaching them on the basis of their looks and simultaneously elevating our raddled, decrepit appearance into a sign of gravitas and wisdom, we win! We need to constantly reinforce that pleasing “he/she-sure-didn’t-get-there-on-looks-and-sunny-disposition” source of false credibility, and divide the world into crotchety sourpusses you must obey and young kids with taut connective tissue you can ignore.

I suspect Ann Althouse must be cleverly thinking the very same thing.

It’s official, don’t question it

Rocket science isn’t my bag, but I have done brain surgery (on animals, not people), and I’ve done a lot of single cell neuro work, so I have to agree with this report that assesses the relative merits of the two disciplines:

“It does require a superior intellect to function as a rocket scientist,” the article concedes. “Having said that, though, rocket science is not brain surgery.”

The real clincher in the article, the one that demonstrates the perspicacity of this research, is this final assessment by a University of Minnesota expert:

“The fact of the matter is, the smartest people in the world have always been, and will always be, University of Minnesota experts,” he said.

Don’t argue with me, my authority is now unassailable.

(via James T. Downey)

What works, what doesn’t: the futility of appeasing creationists

An old pal of mine, the splendiferously morphogenetical Don Kane, has brought to my attention a curious juxtaposition. It’s two articles from the old, old days, both published in Nature in 1981, both relevant to my current interests, but each reflecting different outcomes. One is on zebrafish, the other on creationism.

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Luskin’s foolish credentialism

Chris Mooney gave a talk in Seattle, and you know who else is up there in my home town: the Discovery Institute. They tried to go on the offensive and sic their version of an attack dog on him…which was, amusingly enough, Casey Luskin. This is the kind of attack dog that goes “yap-yap-yap-yap-yap-yap-yap,” though, and annoys you by peeing on your shoes. His initial volley was this:

Why do so many people eagerly listen to a journalist with neither scientific nor legal training discuss a complex scientific and legal issue like intelligent design?

It is awkwardly ironic for an unqualified stooge of the Discovery Institute to question anyone’s credentials; if we start down that path, it’s going to lead to pointing out that very, very few of the people at that institute have any credentials in biology at all, and that maybe we should wonder why anyone should listen to a collection of ideologues with degrees in philosophy and law and theology when they pontificate on science (although, to give the other side of the argument, one of their favorite people, Ann Coulter, thinks “biologists are barely scientists,” so maybe they think the dearth of fellows with training in evolution is a plus).

But I’m not going to go down that path. I don’t think the formal credentials are as important as that gang of poseurs and con-men would like to believe.

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Luskin’s ludicrous genetics

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I mentioned before that IDEA clubs insist that expertise is optional; well, it’s clear that that is definitely true. Casey Luskin, the IDEA club coordinator and president, has written an utterly awful article “rebutting” part of Ken Miller’s testimony in the Dover trial. It is embarrassingly bad, a piece of dreck written by a lawyer that demonstrates that he knows nothing at all about genetics, evolution, biology, or basic logic. I’ll explain a few of his misconceptions about genetics, errors in the reproductive consequences of individuals with Robertsonian fusions, and how he has completely misrepresented the significance of the ape:human chromosome comparisons.

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