I’m proud to be non-human

Here’s a dilemma: I think Ron Numbers, the philosopher and historian of science, is a smart fellow and a net asset to the opposition to creationism, and I agree with him that a diversity of approaches to the issue is a good thing. My opinion could change, though, because I am experiencing considerable exasperation with the apologists for religion on the evolution side, and this interview with Numbers isn’t helping things. Here’s an example of the kind of nonsense that drives me nuts.

QUESTION: Are scientists in general atheistic?

MR. NUMBERS: The public often gets the impression that most scientists are non-believers. But, that’s not true. Just within the past year the journal Nature published a study that revealed even today roughly the same proportion of scientists believe in God as did 75 years ago. [The figure is almost 40%]

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Bye bye, RA

I suspect that soon there will be at least one religious person who will claim he converted from atheism who I will believe. The Raving Atheist is getting ripe: he’s been ramping up the irrationality for some time now, precessing like a top slowing down, and I expect that soon enough he’ll flop over for Jesus. I’m not questioning his sincerity—he is an atheist, all right, and there is no doubt about it—but his sympathies are getting weirder and weirder.

This is not a new development. I’ve discussed his radical pro-life position before, and now Punkassblog and Amanda bring to my attention his latest post, in which he foreswears saying an unkind word about Christianity ever again, and in which I learn that he’s been actively working with one of those ghastly dishonest “crisis pregnancy centers” that offer no services other than propaganda (and, apparently, free teddy bears) and exist only to mislead women worried about pregnancy.

You know, I think I’d forgive an open conversion to Christianity far more easily than I can his irresponsible affiliation with those charlatans and fanatics.

His rationalizations for pro-life extremism simply don’t make sense: he seems to think something special happens at fertilization that unambiguously and unarbitrarily defines a human being. Diploidy is not the scientific term for ensoulment. Genetic specification is not sufficient to specify an individual. Potential is not a synonym for actuality. Fertilization is not a switch that triggers an ineluctable program towards individuality. The combinatorial uniqueness of an individual’s genome is inadequate to define the individual. Amanda notes that most opposition to abortion comes from either religious convictions, a commitment to a sexist social order, or I’d add, a rather primitive and unthinking desire to tightly control reproduction in potential mates and kin. I don’t know which of these apply to RA, but his weak excuses clearly rule out that it might have been an intellectual decision on his part.

He’s welcome to his convictions about abortion, but he needs to face it: they aren’t reasonable, and they’re as batty as Dawn Eden.

Old spiders

Two short articles in this week’s Science link the orb-weaving spiders back to a common ancestor in the Early Cretaceous, with both physical and molecular evidence. What we have is a 110-million-year-old piece of amber that preserves a piece of an orb web and some captured prey, and a new comparative study of spider silk proteins that ties together the two orb-weaving lineages, the Araneoidea and the Deinopoidea, and dates their last common ancestor to 136 million years ago.

Araneoids and Deinopoids build similar looking webs—a radial frame supporting a sticky spiral—but they differ in how they trap prey. Deinopoids spin dry fibers that they fluff into threads that adhere electrostatically to small insects; Araneoids secrete glue onto the the strand, which takes less work (no fluffing), and is much more strongly adhesive. The differences are enough to make one question whether there was a single origin of orb weavers, or whether the two groups independently stumbled on the same efficient form of architecture.

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Sing along with Cthulhu

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Feeling musical this morning? Stephanie Ching sent me links to some lyrics. An old User Friendly cartoon combines Cthulhu, zombies, and brains, and then there’s the unspeakable: this guy has written a song for John Tesh. If anything is going to rouse the sleeping Old Ones that lie in lost R’Lyeh, it’s got to be New Age caterwauling.

Quick! To scrub the thought of New Age Lite muzak out of your brain, Unfogged provides a cure: visualize your scrotum rupturing. Think about epididymitis and Fournier’s gangrene. There, can’t you feel the nightmare ebbing?

Carnivalia, and an open thread

I’ve been very, very bad at keeping up with all the carnivals, so here’s a quick roundup.

As usual, talk about whatever you want in the comments (at last, a place where the Coulter defenders can be evasive with permission!)