Truth in Science?

The Pagan Prattle has an article about the infection of the UK with a rather American sounding version of creationism/ID. It sounds as if the response has ranged from dismissal to dithering avoidance, so it doesn’t seem to be a big threat (yet—these nasty little strains can expand into chronic virulence fairly easily), so the most interesting thing, I thought, was some terminology.

There is an air of superficial plausibility about this, which is apparent in four lesson plans on Irreducible Complexity (Intelligent Design’s catchphrase), the Fossil Record, Homology and Natural Selection. As a geologist I will only comment on the Fossil Record Lesson Plan, where Pupils are introduced to the three theories currently used to interpret the fossil record: Phyletic Gradualism, Punctuated Equilibrium and Phyletic Discontinuity. These three are, of course, Darwinian gradualism, PE and essentially Six Day Creation. Both scientists and theologians contend, with massive evidence that it is disingenuous to present the last as a scientific theory.

Ooooh. “Phyletic Discontinuity Theory”. It sounds so…sciencey.

Hox cluster disintegration

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Hox genes are metazoan pattern forming genes—genes that are universally associated with defining the identities of regions of the body. There are multiple Hox genes present, and one of their unusual properties is that they are clustered and expressed colinearly. That is, they are found in ordered groups on the chromosome, and that the gene on one end is typically turned on first and expressed at the head end of the embryo, the next gene in order is turned on slightly later and expressed further back, and so on in sequence. That the tidy sequential order on the chromosome is associated with an equally tidy spatial and temporal pattern of expression in the body has always been one of the more fascinating aspects of these genes, and they are one of the few cases where we see an echo of phenotypic form comprehensibly laid out in the DNA.

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Miller gives another lecture

I’m going to be a bit distracted for a while, with some upcoming travel and various other bits of busy work, but I was listening to this lecture by Ken Miller (in which Carl Zimmer was in attendance, too) as I was puttering away on a lecture of my own . It’s pretty much the same talk he gave in Kansas, sans talk of shooting at new targets and other obnoxious language, but I still find myself disagreeing with his conclusions. I had to take just a minute to bring up my objections.

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PIGDID update

In case you haven’t been following the vivisections of Wells’ horrid book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, I thought I’d mention that there’s more online at the Panda’s Thumb. Wells’ book is a collection of anti-science propaganda, brought to us by those friendly frauds at the Discovery Institute and Regnery Publishing, and the crew at The Panda’s Thumb are slowly working their way through it, documenting the falsehoods, the distortions, the poor scholarship, and the generally atrocious crapitude of the book. It’s great fun!

The critiques of Chapter 3 (developmental biology), Chapter 9 (the genetic code and information), and Chapter 16 (American Lysenkoism, and this chapter was such a mess of lies that it spawned two additional posts: the distortions of the Ohio situation and Wells’ legal dishonesty are treated separately) went up early, but now various contributors have stuck the knife in Chapter 7 (who needs evolution?), Chapter 10 (irreducible complexity), and Chapter 15 (the war on Christianity). There are only about ten more stalls to muck out in this Augean stable. They’ll be done eventually, but one thing is certain: the fellows of the Discovery Institute will have spewed out more crap by the time it’s done.

This is not what secularism is about

Do not be shocked and dismayed. I’m going to criticize a
decision by NBC to strip “god” references from a kid’s show.

Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber always had a moral message in their long-running “VeggieTales” series, a collection of animated home videos for children that encourage moral behavior based on Christian principles. But now that the vegetable stars have hit network television, they cannot speak as freely as they once did, and that has got the Parents Television Council steamed.

The conservative media-watchdog group issued a statement Wednesday blasting NBC, which airs “VeggieTales,” for editing out some references to God from the children’s animated show.

Promoting a secular view of the way the world works does not mean we are obligated to censor references to mythical entities. I think “VeggieTales” is tedious dreck, and my kids were never into it, but some kids and parents are…and they should have the privilege of watching it. Reducing what children watch to inoffensive pablum, where every possible controversy and opinion is eradicated so that the boring message they all get is a toothless “be nice”, is not how we want to improve the boob tube. Let ’em praise Jesus all they want, but let’s also see more challenging fare make it to broadcast television, and let monitoring of what kids see be a parental decision, not the work of some bureaucrat at the source.

Puréeing television content is going to hurt the minority views most of all. That kids don’t get to see some talking broccoli thank God on NBC doesn’t mean they aren’t going to be saturated in religious messages in the home and church, but it does mean that spineless television executives will point to this decision as a rationalization for removing any atheist or non-Christian expression from their shows, too.

I think the fair thing to do would be to let the tomato and cucumber go ahead and babble their vegetable accolades for the nonexistent, and also let Sam Harris be a recurring guest on Sesame Street, or something equivalent. Can Dora the Explorer be a godless heathen?

Oh, yeah, the party…

Where were you guys? You missed it. I kept looking for you, but only the usual locals showed up. It was a great evening, but you disappointed me.

If you’re still on your way, OK…there’s still plenty of beer left, and a couple of bottles of wine, and even some food. And, of course, you can help with cleaning up the aftermath.

Rising godlessness

The British seem to have good taste. Look who is at the top of the UK bestseller list:

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I know what you are thinking: Where can I get my hands on a copy of Wintersmith? Aside from that, though, it’s impressive that The God Delusion has shot to the top so quickly. When I looked at the list of American best sellers, I saw that it wasn’t as depressing as I feared:

Chomsky and

Frank Rich on top,

Sam Harris is at #5, and

Dawkins is at #12 and climbing fast. Maybe there’s some hope for us after all—at least the literate segment of our population is pondering interesting views.

We still always get our Pratchett much, much later than the English and the Australians, though, which is so unfair.