I’m in the wrong business

The money is all in the god racket.

Cambridge University cosmologist and mathematician John Barrow was awarded $1.6 million yesterday to do research into whether God is sitting at the control panel behind the Theory of Everything about the universe.

He won the 2006 Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities, the world’s richest individual scholarly research grant. Its initiator, mutual-fund investor Sir John Templeton, specified that it be worth more than the Nobel Prize (which is worth about $1.5 million) so the media would take it seriously.

…and it’s all for peddling a garbage interpretation of the anthropic principle. I’ve gotta wonder: would it be worth 1.6 million to get a lobotomy?

Timeline: PZ + MG

Call it fate, destiny, synchronicity, or astounding cosmic coincidence, but I have to report a series of highly unlikely events, a whole collection of chance occurrences that, multiplied together, defy reason and point ineluctably to some kind of universal force. These events are spread out over decades, and millions, even billions, of alternatives could have generated a completely different conclusion.

The data are overwhelming.

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I, for one, will welcome our Cyborg Insect overlords

Nah, I thought this has got to be a joke:

The Pentagon’s defence scientists want to create an army of cyber-insects that can be remotely controlled to check out explosives and send transmissions.

But no…there is actually a DARPA call for proposals.

DARPA seeks innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs, possibly enabled by intimately integrating microsystems within insects, during their early stages of metamorphoses. The healing processes from one metamorphic stage to the next stage are expected to yield more reliable bio-electromechanical interface to insects, as compared to adhesively bonded systems to adult insects. Once these platforms are integrated, various microsystem payloads can be mounted on the platforms with the goal of controlling insect locomotion, sense local environment, and scavenge power. Multidisciplinary teams of engineers, physicists, and biologists are expected to work together to develop new technologies utilizing insect biology, while developing foundations for the new field of insect cyborg engineering. The HI-MEMS may also serve as vehicles to conduct research to answer basic questions in biology.

The final demonstration goal of the HI-MEMS program is the delivery of an insect within five meters of a specific target located at hundred meters away, using electronic remote control, and/or global positioning system (GPS). Although flying insects are of great interest (e.g. moths and dragonflies), hopping and swimming insects could also meet final demonstration goals. In conjunction with delivery, the insect must remain stationary either indefinitely or until otherwise instructed. The insect-cyborg must also be able to transmit data from DOD relevant sensors, yielding information about the local environment. These sensors can include gas sensors, microphones, video, etc.

Although the idea of having a remote controlled dragonfly is very cool, I am very pessimistic, and have to dash a little cold water on the plan.

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Juravenator starki

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Juravenator starki is a new small theropod dinosaur from the late Jurassic—the specimen is exceptionally well-preserved, and retains fossilized imprints of its skin. The surprising thing about it is that its anatomy puts it smack in the middle of a large clade of coelurosaurs, members of which are known to have feathers…and its skin is bare and scaly. What it suggests is that feather evolution was complicated (no surprise there, actually), and that some lineages secondarily lost their feathery covering, or that there were seasonal or age-related or regional variations in feather expression.

More pictures are below the fold—this really is a very pretty specimen.

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Nelson responds

Paul Nelson responds to Amanda Marcotte, who mentioned that the poor quality of his debate explains why Nelson thinks ID should not be taught in schools.

Amanda, Sahotra and I spent three hours talking at an Austin bar the night before the debate. I reiterated to him what I’ve said for years: I’m not interested in getting ID into the public schools. He allowed as much in his spoken remarks (which should be available soon as streaming video from the UPA), but still stood up a straw-man ID bad guy. What’s funny is Sahotra and I have been debating/discussing design since we met in 1985, and in that whole time I’ve consistently told him that it doesn’t much matter to me if design is taught in public schools. We push that issue out of the way and move on to empirical and philosophical particulars.

Hmmm. Let’s take a look at the Wedge document, shall we?

Phase I of the wedge was supposed to be about research, writing, and publication. They were supposed to have a group of scientists doing pioneering work to “crack the materialist edifice”. This hasn’t worked out so well—nobody is actually doing any ID science—but let’s be charitable and assume that Nelson thinks his lecturing and debating and philosophizing is part of this phase.

What about Phase II? That’s titled “Publicity & Opinion-making”, and includes in its activities teacher training, as well as putting together apologetics seminars (revealing in its title, eh?) and television programs. Maybe Nelson isn’t thinking about getting this stuff in public schools, but his fellow travelers are—it’s in the plan. The DI must think they’re in Phase II, since they’re also publishing Teacher’s Guides for high school and undergraduate instructors. That awful textbook, “Of Pandas and People”, is intended for high schools and is clearly an ID-friendly book, even if it is nominally disavowed by the DI.

Phase III is “Cultural Confrontation and Renewal”. The DI plans to “pursue possible legal assistance in response to resistance to the integration of design theory into public school science curricula“. That’s blatant, I think. Since several prominent members (Behe and Minnich, for instance) of the DI provided legal assistance in response to the recent resistance in Dover, at least some part of the DI is ready to push ID into the schools.

Maybe Nelson doesn’t himself want ID taught in the public schools right now. But it is disingenuous to pretend that that isn’t the goal of the movement he is fronting.

I’d add that since he is completely lacking in “empirical” particulars, and his philosophy is painfully shallow and goofy, it’s awfully hard to figure out what exactly he is trying to accomplish. We’ll have to be forgiven if we speculate on the basis of the actions his backers are carrying out in the absence of plausible statements about their goals…it sure looks to me like they’re trying to peddle pseudoscience to the gullible, with Nelson’s assistance.