Now we know how to make the IDists dance in their petticoats: blaspheme.

The latest panty-twisting at Uncommon Descent is over the Blasphemy Challenge. The poor dears are so concerned about all the heretics damning themselves that DaveScot is moved to weep and pray over them, and William Dembski writes a letter to Richard Dawkins asking him why he doesn’t expand the challenge to torment the Moslems (note that Dawkins is not responsible for the Blasphemy Challenge, has nothing at all to do with it, and hasn’t promoted it, so it’s rather peculiar of Dembski to act as if he is the Grand Overlord of All Atheists).

This wouldn’t be worth following, except that I think Dawkins’ reply is absolutely perfect.

I had not given the Blasphemy Challenge any thought until you called it to my attention. Now that you have done so, I do not seem to feel strongly one way or the other. As that admirable bumper sticker has it, Blasphemy is a Victimless Crime. So, am I going to send in my own film clip denying the Holy Ghost? No, that is not what Oxford professors do, they write books instead. Do I find it offensive that so many young people are sending in their film clips? No. I hadn’t listened to any of them before you raised the matter. I have now done so, and I must say I find them more charming than offensive. They mostly seem rather nice young people, and they are doing their bit, in their own lively and entertaining way, to raise consciousness and set an example to their peers. I am especially pleased to note how young they are, for organized atheists have, until recently, been noticeably and discouragingly grey-headed. I think we may be witnessing the beginnings of a shift in the tectonic plates of our Zeitgeist. I am delighted to see so many young Americans taking part, in a way that suits their age group better than mine or yours.

It’s a weird and rather stupid request Dembski has made. The reason they are denying one of the Christian gods is because that’s what most of these people have been brought up to believe; Dembski himself would probably have no hesitation about denying Mohammed, so that wouldn’t be much of a challenge. What these people are doing in these clips is rejecting the dogma with which they were indoctrinated, and I agree with Dawkins that this is a most excellent and wise thing for them to do. I would similarly think it excellent if young Moslems were all to cheerfully deny Allah, and young Jews to deny their god, and a whole wave of outspoken unbelief were to sweep across the world.

There’s another great bonus that Dawkins didn’t notice: the spectacle of the creationists weeping and having the vapors at the thought of people rejecting their superstition is simply too delicious.

Oh, my. The email revelations continue, with little Billy Dembski showing off a reasonable, polite letter from Dawkins, followed by grandiose, delusional gloating in a letter from Dembski. This is beginning to hurt; I normally wouldn’t have any sympathy for the Baron Munchausen of Intelligent Design, but this battle is so one-sided it hardly seems fair.

So Billy was going to tattle on Dawkins to his neighbor, George W. Bush? Wow.

We need a thousand Sagans

I’m joining in on the Carl Sagan Memorial blog-a-thon, but I can’t offer unstinting praise. Sagan wrote about biology now and then, and every time he irritated me; I always felt like arguing with him about some detail that bugged me, and I think that was actually among his virtues—he was a scientist you cared enough about to want to criticize, and he also addressed questions wide and deep enough that we all felt like this curious astronomer was touching on our part of the universe.

Here’s one example, a short excerpt from my favorite Sagan book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll).

The blueprints, detailed instructions, and job orders for building you from scratch would fill about 1,000 encyclopedia volumes if written out in English. Yet every cell in your body has a set of these encyclopedias. A quasar is so far away that the light we see from it began its intergalactic voyage before the Earth was formed. Every person on Earth is descended from the same not-quite-human ancestors in East Africa a few million years ago, making us all cousins.

Whenever I think about any of these discoveries, I feel a tingle of exhilaration. My heart races. I can’t help it. Science is an astonishment and a delight. Every time a spacecraft flies by a new world, I find myself amazed. Planetary scientists ask themselves: “Oh, is that the way it is? Why didn’t we think of that?” But nature is always more subtle, more intricate, more elegant than what we are able to imagine. Given our manifest limitations, what is surprising is that we have been able to penetrate so far into the secrets of Nature.

At the same time that I want to tear apart his annoying analogy of the genome to a set of encyclopedias, while I deplore the incessant focus on human evolution rather than, say, the beauty of a sponge or a beetle, there’s one thing he did well: he represented the joy we can find in the natural world. That’s something we don’t communicate enough, I think, that science is this wonderful, powerful, far-reaching enterprise that reaches farther into the glories of the universe than any other idea that has ever occurred to humanity. That’s something he made explicit in the title of his book, too — the way we will beat back the darkness is to illuminate it with science.

Another new magazine arrived in my mailbox!

This one you’ve heard of, and maybe more of you subscribe to: the Dec/Jan issue of Seed. In addition to an article on Dark Energy, a review of the Year in Science, stories about Angela Merkel and Stephen Colbert and James Hansen, there’s the infamous feature on us sciencebloggers, and the very first entry in my new column. You’ve got to love a magazine that intersperses its articles with full-page photographs of venomous jellyfish. All they need now is a cephalopod centerfold, and the magazine will be perfect!

But what if I like dandelions?

Maybe we should sic Edward Tufte on ’em—Feministing found some amazing posters that purport to explain everything with the power of overwrought metaphor and cluttered, confusing cartoons. It just draws your eye in with the awesomeness of its arbitrariness.

i-ba8344d12ea4c53b6b2fdc0fb939f110-dandy_sex.jpg

So contraception is the source of single-parent families and infanticide? The stalk of divorce leads to the flower of abortion? The leaves of adultery and pre-marital sex use sunlight and carbon dioxide to make the sugar of sexual chaos that is stored in the root of coitus interruptus? Watch out, kids, if you blow on the puffball of euthansia, you’ll spread the seeds of a thousand new sex weeds! Now go in the house and wash the lust and hedonism off your hands.

It just doesn’t make sense.

I realized, though, that anybody can slap random labels on a random diagram to send meaningless messages out. Even me. So here you go, a fun and informative diagram that will help you understand all kinds of curious relationships in the world around you.

i-3094b3933ff97b0e198b0602529ea4f9-my_explanation.jpg

Please, use this information wisely and be sure to let it guide your life…to a brighter, healthier future, rich with the well-earned fruits of ying tong iddle I po.

Server update

We’ve been warned that there will be some server improvements made this evening, for the next few hours. You should still be able to see everything, but there may be commenting glitches while the upgrade is going on. Have no fear, we’re supposed to bounce back smoother and faster tomorrow.

Evolution of vascular systems

Once upon a time, in Paris in 1830, Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire debated Georges Léopole Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert,
Baron Cuvier on the subject of the unity of organismal form. Geoffroy favored the idea of a deep homology, that all animals shared a common archetype: invertebrates with their ventral nerve cord and dorsal hearts were inverted vertebrates, which have a dorsal nerve cord and ventral hearts, and that both were built around or within an idealized vertebra. While a thought-provoking idea, Geoffroy lacked the substantial evidence to make a persuasive case—he had to rely on fairly superficial similarities to argue for something that, to those familiar with the details, appeared contrary to reason and was therefore unconvincing. Evolutionary biology has changed that — the identification of relationships and the theory of common descent has made it unreasonable to argue against origins in a common ancestor — but that difficult problem of homology remains. How does one argue that particular structures in organisms divided by 600 million years of change are, in some way, based on the same ancient organ?

One way is sheer brute force. Characterize every single element of the structures, right down to the molecules of which they are made, and make a quantitative argument that the weight of the evidence makes the conclusion that they are not related highly improbable. I’ll summarize here a recent paper that strongly supports the idea of homology of the vertebrate and arthropod heart and vascular systems.

[Read more…]

Bad writers shouldn’t piss off good writers

That crazy pseudoscientific hack, Michael Crichton, has screwed up big time. In a teeny-tiny tantrum against a critic, he made up a character in his latest book with a similar name and background who also happens to be a depraved rapist of infants. Now the obliquely defamed critic makes a measured reply.

I confess to having mixed feelings about my sliver of literary immortality. It’s impossible not to be grossed out on some level–particularly by the creepy image of the smoldering Crichton, alone in his darkened study, imagining in pornographic detail the rape of a small child. It’s uplifting, however, to learn that Next’s sales have proved disappointing by Crichton’s standards, continuing what an industry newsletter dubs Crichton’s “recent pattern of erosion.” And I’m looking forward to the choice Crichton will have to make, when asked about the basis for Mick Crowley, between a comically dishonest denial and a confession of his shocking depravity.

Poor Crichton. The honest skewering is always more potent than the lying slander. I gave up on reading his books after Jurassic Park, and I can see I won’t be picking up any in the future, either.