Slides from my NDSU talk

By popular request, I’ve uploaded the slides I used in my talk at NDSU. I fear they won’t be very useful; you can see the structure of the talk, but what I was saying was the meat. For instance, there’s a slide that says “Francis Collins” and the title of his book, and what I did there was read an excerpt from his work, which isn’t anywhere in that document. Mac users, you can download the Keynote file, which has all the nice builds and transitions; everyone else will have to make do with a barebones
html version (there are a couple of slides where I dissolve in some photos that overlay the title…sorry, they won’t be readable here).

By the way, I’ve been using Keynote a lot lately—even when I’m going to do the presentation on a machine that only uses PowerPoint, I do all the creation and editing in Keynote and then export the whole thing to a ppt file. It’s beautiful. PowerPoint always gets in the way, doesn’t provide any help with what I actually want to do, and like everything Microsoft, is cumbersome, awkward, and ugly. Keynote is simple and clean and does the job, and then has those clever bits that make you appreciate how good Apple design is. Those alignment guides—brilliant! The dual-monitor setup so the presenter gets to see the next slide, with timers—I want it all the time! It’s also not that expensive for educators…heck, it’s not that expensive for non-educators.

Now if only it were available on every computer on which I have to do a presentation…

It’s all about the altruism, baby

While everyone seems to be hammering on the GOP for their love of child-molesters, we’re all forgetting that the Republicans are compensating for that with a bold foreign war to save Iraqis and their children. Why, look at the selfless summary by Mike DeWine:

“We’re not in Iraq for the Iraqis; we’re there for us.”

Uh, whoops. Never mind.

Maybe “We’re there for us!” could be the new GOP slogan.

Those who do not remember the National Lampoon are condemned to repeat it

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Deja vu, man, deja vu. I remember this magazine cover—I even bought the magazine, not because I was worried about the dog, but because I always read the National Lampoon. This is supposed to be a joke, though.

So now Goosing the Antithesis leads me to the
Answers in Genesis page, and what do I see?


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You have got to be kidding me. This is no joke: AiG has a a new campaign going that one-ups NatLamp and suggests that if you don’t buy in to Jesus, you will get shot.

If we evolved from lower life forms, then the Bible isn’t true and we are no more than animals. So why should we listen when it says to be fair, to be kind and to love our fellow human beings? The only thing that matters is pleasing ourselves at the cost of whomever gets in our way.

Creationists are a contemptible bunch, aren’t they? Lies and fear. That’s all they’ve got.

Look, the majority of people on this planet do not believe the Bible is true. Somehow, though, they don’t end up on shooting rampages. Isn’t it obvious Ken Ham and his fellow kooks are freaking wrong? How retarded do you have to be to swallow this nonsense?

Chiseling another line in my Articles of Damnation

If it’s quiet on Pharyngula today, it’s because I’m off at NDSU giving a talk to the Science, Religion and Lunch seminar, in the Meadow Lark Room in the NDSU Memorial Union (any Fargo residents out there?). The title of the talk is “Accommodation isn’t enough: why scientists need to speak out against religion”, and yes, I’m expecting to stimulate people to argue with me.

My central argument is that religion and science are incompatible ways of knowing: that important decisions should be made on the basis of reason and evidence, and religion fosters the abandonment of those principles. You might wonder what I propose to do about it, because religion seems to be a fixed element of our culture, one that will be impossible to eradicate, and in a progressive society that encourages independent thought, it would not even be desirable to stamp it out.

My answer is to compare it to another unstoppable universal that is tightly keyed in to human nature.

Top Ten Reasons Religion is Like Pornography

  1. It has been practiced for all of human history, in all cultures
  2. It exploits perfectly natural, even commendable, impulses
  3. Its virtues are debatable, its proponents fanatical
  4. People love it, but can’t give a rational reason for it
  5. Objectifies and degrades women even when it worships them
  6. You want to wash up after shaking hands with any of its leaders
  7. The costumes are outrageous, the performances silly, the plots unbelievable
  8. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying it, but it’s nothing to be proud of, either
  9. It is not a sound basis for public policy, government, or international relations
  10. Its stars are totally fake

Basically, I’m saying we ought to regard religion like we do other human foibles: regulate it, curb it’s excesses, shame those who overindulge, and for jebus’ sake, stop treating it like some exalted, privileged, glorious endeavor. Any idiot can be religious, after all, and many are.

Evolution of sensory signaling

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How we sense the world has, ultimately, a cellular and molecular basis. We have these big brains that do amazingly sophisticated processing to interpret the flood of sensory information pouring in through our eyes, our skin, our ears, our noses…but when it gets right down to it, the proximate cause is the arrival of some chemical or mechanical or energetic stimulus at a cell, which then transforms the impact of the external world into ionic and electrical and chemical changes. This is a process called sensory signaling, or sensory signal transduction.

While we have multiple sensory modalities, with thousands of different specificities, many of them have a common core. We detect both light and odor (and our cells also sense neurotransmitters) with similar proteins: they use a family of G-protein-linked receptors. What that means is that the sensory stimulus is received by a receptor molecule specific for that stimulus, which then actives a G-protein on the intracellular side of the cell membrane, which in turn activates an effector enzyme that modifies the concentration of second messenger molecules in the cell. Receptors vary—you have a different receptor for each molecule you can smell. The effector enzymes vary—it can be adenylate cyclase, which changes the levels of cyclic AMP, or it can be phospholipase C, which generates other signalling molecules, DAG and IP3. The G-protein that links receptor and effector is the common element that unites a whole battery of senses. The evolutionary roots of our ability to see light and taste sugar are all tied together.

[Read more…]

One partisan Republican down

The Commissar is voting Democratic this fall.

On the one hand, I’m not too impressed. It’s taken him long enough to realized that the Spoiled Child Presidency of GW Bush has been a catastrophe—the signs have all been there since before the 2000 election, and we moonbats have been called “Bush-haters” rather than perceptive.

On the other hand, I sympathize with something: the reluctance to support the Democratic party. While my contempt for Bush and the modern Republican agenda has grown, so has my disgust with the gutless, unprincipled Lords of the DNC. It’s hard to blame the Commissar for failing to see the flaws of our president when the opposition party has been so incompetent and so inarticulate that it has failed itself to express those problems and propose alternatives.