What is their problem?

Man, the comments on my guest editorial at the Raw Story are nuts. I don’t know if the word “secular” brought out a flock of trolls, or if that place is always infested with these uncomprehending goons. There are a couple of people who seem baffled by the fact that I wrote a positive piece on the virtues of secularism, yet my prior comment on Melinda Barton was a negative work that concentrated on criticizing her sloppy logic and sneaky redefinitions. It’s bad enough that they are surprised that one person can use two different tactics, but they’re also suggesting that the fact that I didn’t beat up Barton some more means I’m backing away from my earlier statements.

I didn’t say more about Barton because I already wrote that argument. I thought I was thorough and didn’t need to rehash it—the fact that I included a link to it should have clued in people that I wasn’t repudiating it. I don’t know why this should be so difficult to grasp. I suspect it’s that people sympathetic to Barton’s view share her bigotry, and think that atheists are all planning to line the Christians up against the wall as soon as we’ve finished subverting society, right before the looting and orgies start. Atheists must be tied to extremism, or poor Ms. Barton’s argument falls apart.

Or maybe it’s the fact that the essay was a thousand words long, and overwhelmed their capacity (people who are bewildered at the idea of simultaneously supporting X while criticizing opponents of X don’t have much capacity to spare!)…so here, let me help by digesting the essay down.

Shorter intolerant rant by PZ Myers:

I’m willing to get along with and even support the religious, as long as they don’t threaten to suborn secular institutions to privilege religious belief.

Better?

Clocks and creationists

Lisa Jardine is a historian who clearly understands how science works:

The thought uppermost in my mind was how odd it is that non-scientists think of science as being about certainties and absolute truth. Whereas scientists are actually quite tentative—they simply try to arrive at the best fit between the experimental findings so far and a general principle.

Read the rest. She ties together the ideals of how science should be carried out with a story from Pepys and an unscrupulous sea captain and modern day creationists—excellent stuff!

We all have “Life Experience”—you get it by living

OK, this Dean Dad fella substituting for Dr. B got me a little sniffy with his first post (telling little kids easy lies about heaven is a pet peeve. Dead is gone, sugarcoating it is the first step to a life of delusions), but his latest is much more interesting and sparked some cranky comments—is it just me, or are the trolls on a hair-trigger everywhere lately?

Anyway, it’s a good snarl.

It’s not unusual for downsized or early-retired professionals to show up asking for faculty positions, thinking that we’ll be tripping all over ourselves for the opportunity to bask in their reflected glory. They present themselves as willing to take one for the greater good by settling for a job I spent years in poverty to prepare for, and felt damn lucky to get. In the few occasions in which folks like that have been hired, when I’ve been around to see it, they’ve ranged from acceptably average to constant-pain-in-the-neck. They’ve never excelled, or even risen above average. They don’t want to; as far as they’re concerned, they paid their dues in ‘the real world,’ and they’re coasting across the finish line by teaching. No, thanks.

I have never been on the administrative side of academia where those kinds of decisions are made, but I’ve met a few people that match that description. They think because they had successful careers and rose to bank president or regional manager of a department store or whatever, all commendable accomplishments and good on you, etc., that they now have exactly the right stuff to inspire and train college students. Nuh-uh. Stay away. If you ask me, they are exactly the wrong people to bring in to the university.

We already have a perception problem, with the increasing commodification of college degrees and the narrow b-school mentality that says the measure of the worth of an education is in how well it profits the students after graduation…where profit is measured only in how many more pennies the person will earn. People who have found happiness in the prosperity of the upper middle class tend to be superficial and uninteresting. Give me instead beach bums and street poets and activists who’ve found something of worth in the unconventional, and that’s where you’ll find deeper inspiration for students. Unfortunately, they’re also not the kind to collar college administrators and inspire them with tales of fat donations.

Oh, and do look at the comments. I’ve also noticed that those people who are most proud of their bourgeois accomplishments can be awfully thin-skinned when others are unimpressed with the size of their money-pile and the hard work they put into acquiring it.

Three years ago today

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I’m on the road again for a big chunk of today, so let’s just contemplate this icon for a failed, dishonest presidency—not only was the Iraq War a failed endeavor, but we have here an administration that relied entirely on propaganda and illusion…and they were incompetent at even that.

While you’re considering that, you’ve also got to wonder how Chris Matthews can look himself in the mirror every morning. Why do these men still have their jobs?

A brief overview of Hox genes

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In previous articles about fly development, I’d gone from the maternal gradient to genes that are expressed in alternating stripes (pair-rule genes), and mentioned some genes (the segment polarity genes) that are expressed in every segment. The end result is the development of a segmented animal: one made up of a repeated series of morphological modules, all the same.

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Building an animal with repeated elements like that is a wonderfully versatile strategy for making an organism larger without making it too much more complicated, but it’s not the whole story. Just repeating the same bits over and over again is a way to make a generic wormlike thing—a tapeworm, for instance—but even tapeworms may need to specialize certain individual segments for specific functions. At its simplest, it may be necessary to modify one end for feeding, and the opposite end for mating. So now, in addition to staking out the tissues of the embryo as belonging to discrete segments, we also need a mechanism that says “build mouthparts here (and not everywhere)”, and “put genitalia here (not over there)”.

[Read more…]

Secular horror?

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Remember Melinda Barton and that awful piece on the Raw Story? It was taken down, and now it’s back up with a few changes, I think. The editors asked me to submit a rebuttal. It’s online at the Raw Story now, along with that lovely icon to the right (“Secular Horror”?). You can read it there, or if you are so annoyed at the Raw Story that you never ever want to visit their site again, I’ve put a copy below the fold.

I’ll just add that the first comment over there makes me regret being nice. No, I do not retract or regret anything I originally said about Barton’s hacky work, and that is not why I did not expand on my point-by-point rebuttal. I thought I’d been sufficiently thorough to begin with, and wanted to get a positive view of secularism out there.

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This god must be one evil mofo

This is not funny.

Five children between 9 and 16 years old died and several others suffered burns when lightning struck a white-painted metal cross set on a hill in the town of Santa Maria del Rio early on Sunday, according to two newspaper reports.

If they’d paid as much attention to science as they did to piety, though, there would be a little less grief in the world today.

I am not here

Hurtling1 down the road in my black Chevy2, I laugh maniacally3. “Time to kick creationist butt4,” I say, “and test the mettle of the Cheeseheads.5“

I’m heading off to the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point to minister to the heathen today, so my online presence may be limited. I’ve got a lecture to give in their Evolution Sunday series. Here’s a copy of the PowerPoint file6, just so I have an online backup.

I’m racing right back early Monday morning, though. I’ve got a hellish week or two of grading and exams and classes and more travel, and I’ve got to get an early start on it all.

1Never exceeding the speed limit, though—the highway out of Morris is a notorious speed trap.

2With a few dents and dangling bits of scrap. Yeah, Connlann, thanks for dinging up the EvolutionMobile every time you come home.

3Or titter gratingly…it’s a matter of perspective.

4In front of a friendly crowd of godless freethinkers.

5They aren’t going to be mad about being called cheeseheads, are they?

6Don’t peek, Stevens Pointers! You’ll learn all the punchlines.7

7Actually, probably not. My PowerPoint files tend to be a little on the cryptic side, so you may not learn too much from it.