Why do you torture me so? For the past week, the number one request in my mailbox hasn’t been this nonsense about bacteria in meteorites, it’s been people asking me to address Rabbi Adam Jacobs’ stupid article on the Huffington Post.
I have a problem with that. I despise the Huffington Post and the fact that some liberals who ought to know better take it seriously as a leftist voice, instead of the lowbrow, pandering, honking noise of stupidity that it is. And in particular, I cannot support Arianna Huffington’s contempt for labor and her privileged pretentiousness. So I cannot link to her site any more at all.
Fortunately, I can link to Jerry Coyne instead, who takes the silly rabbi apart. I’ll only mention one item that jumped out at me.
His whole piece is a complaint that science has failed to explain the origin of life, and that we don’t have a complete step-by-step description of every process that generated the first replicator over four billion years ago.
One might suppose that in the six or so decades since the discovery of the DNA molecule by Watson and Crick during which researchers have been investigating the origin of life they might have come up with some pretty solid leads to explain it.
We’ve only had a few decades of steady progress, and already he’s demanding the moon? I notice that the rabbi has had a few millennia during which his ancestors have claimed an intimate and special relationship with an omniscient super-being, and all they have to show for it is “god did it.” You would think that with all that privileged access, there would have been some tiny fragment of scientific utility somewhere in their holy book, but no, nothing.
If we’re going to start comparing lacunae, let’s start with thermodynamics. We’ve got detailed, complete mathematical descriptions of a fundamental mechanism that drives all of biology; the Torah’s got nothin’. The believers have got a dissipated invisible vapor with not reasonable support; we’ve got Ludwig Boltzmann.
We win. Argument over.
Fuck off, rabbi.
