Janet says it is National Delurking Week 2007— if you’ve been reading Pharyngula but haven’t been making comments, this is the thread where you’re supposed to make your existence known and say hello. The rest of you chatterboxes should sit back and let someone else have a turn saying something.
Let’s see…what did I do today? I met with a whole bunch of people at Seed. They were cool, but they won’t notice that I mentioned them because they never read my blog.
I also had dinner with Niles Eldredge, James Watson, Adam Bly, and Laura McNeil (big guns at Seed).
It was an engrossing evening, but now you’re all going to really hate me: I can drop names, but I’m not going to reveal private conversations…other than to mention that I was honored by a toast from that distinguished crowd, which means I can either die smug, or I’ve got a heck of a lot to do to live up to it now. I fear the latter, unfortunately.
If you’ve seen BladeRunner, you know the short soliloquy at the end by one of the android replicants, Roy, as he’s about to expire from a genetically programmed early death.
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams…glitter in the dark near Tanhauser Gate. All those…moments will be lost…in time, like tears…in rain. Time…to die.”
There’s an interesting idea here, that death can be an intrinsic property of our existence, a kind of internal mortality clock that is always ticking away, and eventually our time will run out and clunk, we’ll drop dead. There is a germ of truth to it; there are genetic factors that may predispose one to greater longevity, and in the nematode worm C. elegans there are known mutants that can greatly extend the lifetime of the animal under laboratory conditions.
However, in humans only about 25% of the variation in life span can be ascribed to genetic factors to any degree, and even in lab animals where variables can be greatly reduced, only 10-40% of the life span variation has a genetic component. There is a huge amount of chance involved; after all, there aren’t likely to be any genes that give you resistance to being run over by a bus. Life is like a long dice game, and while starting with a good endowment might let you keep playing for a longer time, eventually everyone craps out, and a run of bad luck can wipe out even the richest starting position rapidly.
In between these extremes of genetic predetermination and pure luck, though, a recent paper in Nature Genetics finds another possibility: factors in the organism that are not heritable, yet from an early age can be reasonably good predictors of mortality.
At least I freely admit it…so here, for your viewing pleasure, a brief musical interlude:
The Intelligent Design creationists keep trying the same old tactics of making their case with phony PR, but I don’t think it’s working so well anymore. For example, take a look at this op-ed from Richard Buggs of “‘Truth’ in Science”; he makes a futile attempt to throw out some of the usual creationist talking points, like these:
But, whatever the limitations of Darwinism, isn’t the intelligent design alternative an “intellectual dead end”? No. If true, ID is a profound insight into the natural world and a motivator to scientific inquiry. The pioneers of modern science, who were convinced that nature is designed, consequently held that it could be understood by human intellects. This confidence helped to drive the scientific revolution. More recently, proponents of ID predicted that some “junk” DNA must have a function well before this view became mainstream among Darwinists.
It’s rather pathetic. Buggs doesn’t even seem to understand how science works, and he makes vague claims that don’t make sense, and specific claims that are simply wrong.
We aren’t Darwinists any more. This isn’t 1859, OK?
The existence of Spiderman would also profoundly affect how we think about biology, evolution, physics, etc., if true. That final clause makes the whole idea non-scientific, if we recognized that Spiderman is a fictional character…what needs to be done is to support the initial premise. IDists want us to assume that major premise and act as if what follows from that invention is science.
The point about “confidence” in a designer driving the scientific revolution doesn’t make any sense. Does he think people who don’t believe in a designer just throw up their hands and give up because that means the world is unknowable?
The idea that large swathes of the genome have no adaptive utility is non-Darwinian. Functional roles were assumed by biologists first, certain stretches of non-coding DNA were known to be essential, and in general, IDists should avoid talking about junk DNA altogether, because all they do is reveal that they don’t understand the concept.
Now read the comments on Buggs article. It’s heartening: the readers slam the poor guy unmercifully. That’s what I like to see, every false claim made by an ID flak getting swarmed and ripped apart by an informed citizenry.
I think I had a better day than any of you readers out there, and I have to gloat somewhere.
So…lunch with John Brockman. An afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art. A conversation with Niles Eldredge. Dinner with Benoit Mandelbrot. I should do this kind of thing every day.
By the way, I really recommend dinner with Mandelbrot. That guy has more stories…
Greg Laden makes a simple analysis of what triggers comments on Pharyngula: it turns out the least interesting subject is me (my self-esteem is being battered lately), with science close on my heels, but that you love to chatter about creationists and godlessness.
Now I wonder how strong the response will be if I say this post is about none of those things: it’s about you.
This doesn’t apply to me, of course, since I get to frolic on the streets of New York and visit Seed and MoMA.
(via Minnesota Stories)
Jim Lippard continues to present his reports on creationist finances, and this time he shows the Discovery Institute’s balance sheet. They brought in $3.5 million in 2004, almost all of it in the form of donations.
That sounds like a lot of money, but to put it in perspective, you could take a look at a representative university’s operating budget. The small liberal arts university I’m at, with about 2000 students, brings in about $11 million per year in tuition, and I believe that charitable donations were on the order of $1 million per year. In that absolute sense, the Discovery Institute is small potatoes. The difference is, though, that a university actually provides services by highly trained staff, and most of its income is plowed right back into doing real work. The DI uses its income almost entirely for PR.
Keep that in mind when you hear them talking about gearing up to do actual research: they don’t have the infrastructure or the people in place to do that much science, and they certainly don’t have the income to make much real progress. Maybe if they fired a bunch of flacks and philosophers, they’d have enough to fund one solid lab, if they could piggy-back on existing facilities somewhere.
Of course, they do have more than enough money to make a bigger public relations splash than a small university.
As we are so often reminded by proponents of Intelligent Design creationism, we contain molecular “machines” and “motors”. They don’t really explain how these motors came to be other than to foist the problem off on some invisible unspecified Designer, which is a poor way to do science—it’s more of a way to make excuses to not do science.
Evolution, on the other hand, provides a useful framework for trying to address the problem of the origin of molecular motors. We have a theory—common descent—that makes specific predictions—that there will be a nested hierarchy of differences between motors in different species. Phylogenetic analysis of variations between species allows us to reconstruct the history of a molecule with far more specificity than “Sometime between 6,000 and 4 billion years ago, a god or aliens (or aliens created by a god) conjured this molecule into existence by unknown and unknowable means”.
Richards and Cavalier-Smith (2005) have applied tested biological techniques to a specific motor molecule, myosin, and have used that information to assemble a picture of the phylogenetic history of eukaryotes.
