I’m not too impressed with the curriculum, but heck, they’ve got a great mascot, so I’m sure students will apply.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I’m not too impressed with the curriculum, but heck, they’ve got a great mascot, so I’m sure students will apply.
See, Larry Moran approves of my column in Seed — I’ll mention when it is available online, but you’d have it already if you subscribed…and this is also the perfect time to give a gift subscription.
(I know, I’m such a shameless pitchman.)
It’s proof of life after calamari!
All those kids who are expecting a white-bearded fat man to drop down the chimney are going to get a surprise on ‘podmas.
Carnivals! And conversation!
And don’t forget — the next Tangled Bank is at Ourobouros on Wednesday, 19 December. Send those links in to me or [email protected]!
It’s that time of the month again — it’s time to confer upon some worthy commenter the December 2007 Order of the Molly award. Just leave a comment here naming your favorite person on Pharyngula, and I’ll see that they get added to the distinguished ranks.
There goes Bill Dembski again, revealing both his religious delusions and his ignorance of the state of modern biology in an interview.
4. Does your research conclude that God is the Intelligent Designer?
I believe God created the world for a purpose. The Designer of intelligent design is, ultimately, the Christian God.
The focus of my writings is not to try to understand the Christian doctrine of creation; it’s to try to develop intelligent design as a scientific program.
There’s a big question within the intelligent design community: “How did the design get in there?” We’re very early in this game in terms of understanding the history of how the design got implemented. I think a lot of this is because evolutionary theory has so misled us that we have to rethink things from the ground up. That’s where we are. There are lots and lots of questions that are now open to re-examination in light of this new paradigm.
Keep that quote in mind for the future, next time they try to claim ID isn’t a sectarian religious belief. Also note that the the “design” he is wondering how it “got in there” hasn’t been demonstrated at all.
It isn’t a Dembski interview without an inflated ego on display:
5. How will your research affect the world of science?
It’s going to change the national conversation. I don’t see how you can read this book, if you’ve not been indoctrinated with Darwin’s theory, and go back to the evolutionary fold. The case against this materialistic, undirected evolution is overwhelming. This really goes to the worldview issues that are underlying this whole discussion: Are we the result of a blind, purposeless, material process, and is our intelligence then just this evolutionary byproduct of our need to survive and reproduce? Or are intelligence and purpose fundamental to our existence? Were we planned? Or are we an accidental happening? That’s really what is underlying this whole debate, and what this book, I think, addresses very effectively.
Intelligent design goes a long way in this culture, which is so infused with materialistic and atheistic ideology.
I’ve got the book he’s talking about, and I’m partway through it. It ain’t convincing. It’s the same old bluster that Wells and Dembski have been pounding their fists over for the last decade; there’s absolutely nothing new in it, just more rehashed chest-thumping from failed religious revolutionaries; I predict it will die a rapid death, simply because the IDers haven’t been able to come up with anything we haven’t already heard multiple times, and that has failed every time to convince anyone in the biology community with a scrap of sense.
On the one hand, this is a strange tale of mutant, bisexual, necrophiliac flies, and you’ve got to love it for the titillating nature of the experiments. But on the other, much more interesting hand, it’s a story about drilling down deeply into the causes of a complex behavior, and tracing it to a single gene product — and it also reveals much about the way the chemicals sloshing about in the brain can modulate responses to stimuli. Work by Grosjean and others on a simple Drosophila mutant, genderblind, which causes flies to be indiscriminate about gender in their courtship, opens up a window into how sexual responses are shaped and specified.
Think about human sexual responses. Some of us, when we see an attractive woman, are at least mildly aroused; others are have their sexual interest picqued when they see an attractive man; still others might feel sexual urges when they see a shoe, or a plush animal, or a pot of baked beans. No matter what the stimulus, these are all biological responses, with something in the environment matching some trigger in our brains and initiating a cascade of neural, neurochemical, and hormonal activity that leads to sexual behaviors. The question we want to address is what every step in the biology is doing; unfortunately, human behaviors are both too complex and not amenable to ethical experimentation, so we turn instead to simpler organisms that allow us to find simpler causes and carry out thorough experiments to probe the behavior.
I guess the science bloggers won’t be getting Time’s Blog of the Year Award then (which is nice, considering that other Minnesota blog that won, once upon a time.)
I’m fibbing, anyway. Michael Lemonick doesn’t really hate us, I think he was just trying to get a rise out of us. Success!
