Now we have to import the godless

This is very good news, but don’t you wish we had a few more prominent American secularists to put on this advisory board? Welcome, Richard. Help us out!

Famed Scientist Richard Dawkins Joins the Advisory Board of the Secular
Coalition for America

Washington, DC — The Secular Coalition for America is
pleased to announce the addition of Richard Dawkins to its Advisory Board.
The Secular Coalition for America is the first lobbying organization
representing the interests of atheists, humanists, freethinkers, and other
nontheists in the nation’s capitol.

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Ann Coulter fills me with anticipation

This new book by Ann Coulter is going to be full of delectable idiocy, isn’t it?

Coulter devotes the last 80 pages to her full-scale attack on the theory of evolution and the utter dishonesty of what she calls the “Darwiniacs” and their refusal to face the fact that evolution is a patent absurdity, according to Coulter, credible only to those who will find any reason to deny the existence of God.

Great. Virtually every biologist in the world must be an atheist, then. Good for us! I’m sure this is going to be a bit of a shock to the readers of this weblog who understand and accept the evidence for evolution, but think they’re also Christians. You can all stop going to church now!

“The fundamental difference between our religion and theirs is that theirs always tells them what they want to hear,” Coulter declares.

“Darwinism never disappoints the liberals. They never say ‘Well, I’d like to have cheap meaningless sex tonight, but that would violate Darwinism.’ They can’t even say ‘I’d like to have cheap meaningless sex tonight with a goat, but that would violate Darwinism.’

This is true. Neither does Coulter, though. She also doesn’t get to refuse to screw goats because it would violate Boyle’s gas law. Is this a surprise? Evolution doesn’t pretend to be a set of moral rules. It’s a description of how populations of organisms behave over time, not how individuals should behave.

Why, without Ohm’s Law to restrain her, what’s to prevent Ann Coulter from indulging her wanton, bestial lusts?

If you have an instinct to do it, it must be evolved adaptation.

What if we don’t have an instinct to do it? I note that I seem to be lacking the instinct to have sex with goats. Unlike Ann.

Liberals subscribe to Darwinism not because it’s science, which they hate…

<spit take>

What?

…but out of some wishful thinking. Darwinism lets them off the hook morally.”

Actually, I use the Nernst equation to justify my immoral behavior. I reserve Darwinism for those nights I need an excuse to go dancing.

As fun as this book looks, though, I’m not going to buy it unless I can find it used. I hope the pages aren’t going to be stuck together.

Won for All

Last night, I had to read this book RPM mentioned. It’s not very long—about 100 pages, counting a preface, an epilogue, and an afterward, and it has lots of pictures—but be warned: it’s very inside baseball.

The book is Won for All: How the Drosophila Genome Was Sequenced(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Michael Ashburner, and its subject is the rush to sequence the Drosophila genome in 1998-1999. It’s a rather strange twist on what I expected, though. While the subtitle says “How the Drosophila Genome Was Sequenced,” there is almost no science at all in the body of the book; instead, it’s all about the people and the politics, with Ashburner flitting about from place to place, yelling at people and eating sushi. It’s phenomenally entertaining.

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