God (0.00 / 0)

Why is it so hard to believe God has structure in his master plan?  Sure, we are more similar to some animals than others, so what?  That proves nothing other then God has a plan, which is what we've been telling you all along.

Sheesh, you evolutionists are so close minded!

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by: Mark Matson @ Fri Jun 05, 2009 at 18:48:11 PM UTC

As someone who has a very abstract notion of these things, (0.00 / 0)

I tend to think that should be flipped around- the structure is the divine.

But, you know, I had it helpfully "explained" to me this week on Kos that my faith was about authority worship. Dude was less helpful about explaining just who the authority is that I worship.

    I've also had it repeatedly explained to me by friends that my geochemist father couldn't possibly be a Christian. Again, I tend to think that the opposite is true- that it's difficult to look at things at the scale that he does and not feel at least some basic sense of awe.

But it's hard to argue that there is not some very silly stuff floating around claiming to represent "belief."

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by: sb @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 14:50:59 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Awesome (4.00 / 1)

I've been in the same place. My chosen field is biochemistry, regulation of fuel metabolism in particular. Lately, I've been reading and pondering the development of eukaryocity. Such a fundamental advance and accomplished on a very long timescale. Truly defines the word "awesome". Gets right down to "structure", to say the very least. Not only changed the structure of a cell (inside and out), it made possible the development of multi-tissue/organ lifeforms. This evolutionary event, literally, introduced novel structures into life on this planet.

The most interesting part (for me anyway) is that one can describe all of this without invoking any god-like, organizing force. Design without a Designer.  

But, of course, that's all about change in entities that are already living. Creation and evolution are, to me, something like apples and oranges. Where "creation" is about making life from non-life; animating the inanimate, "evolution" is about changing existing life. Not really the same thing. I may be a poor messenger, but this notion doesn't go over well with Creationists, or Evolutionists.

It comes down to belief. Do you believe that a "god" caused the first Life to appear in the universe, or do you believe that Life was a natural result of physical forces acting on matter and energy? What scant evidence that exists doesn't really point one way or the other, by my estimation.


"It sounds wrong...
     ...but its right."

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by: SpitBall @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 15:36:22 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

no, it might not come down to belief (4.00 / 2)

The "god of the gaps" position assigns God the role of handling whatever we haven't figured out yet.  You capitalize the word Life, and ask if a god was needed to produce it.  I can't prove at this point that one didn't, but it used to be believed that God had to intervene to keep planets in their orbits or birds in the air, or that lightning bolts were thrown by a god.  As we learn more, there's less and less for God to do.  There are some experiments that point the way to how the basic components of life could be created from "non-life", but it's a very incomplete picture.

What's more interesting to me is whether there's more than one kind of life.  Every form of life we know of is based on the exact same DNA/RNA/protein scheme, with essentially the same genetic code (there are a couple of minor variations).  Maybe this is what leads you to think that this might have been a separate creation. Could there be a completely different scheme somewhere else, something utterly alien, based on a different chemical process.

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by: Joe Buck @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 16:43:31 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

I'm Not Sure About This (0.00 / 0)

I've only read a smidgen about this, but it's my understanding that one of the arguments against the theory of exogenesis (life migrating to Earth from other planets) is that our virosphere is too diverse.  I don't know much about this argument, but it seems possible that this means there multiple pre-biotic development pathways that brought us to the cusp of life, with different patterns that would all fall within your broadly-formulated "DNA/RNA/protein scheme", but still constitute what might arguably be a separate creation--albeit a convergent one.

As for the broader question of an entirely different chemical process, see the ever-helpful Wikipedia for the entry "Hypothetical types of biochemistry".

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 18:15:39 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Perhaps.... (4.00 / 1)

Where "creation" is about making life from non-life; animating the inanimate, "evolution" is about changing existing life. Not really the same thing.

When I was a kid, I got to go to a day-long extravaganza sponsored by Bell Labs for high-school science students chosen by their teachers as promising.

DNA had just been discovered five years or so before, and so it was all about double-helixes, and molecular self-replication. They even had Watson or Crick -- I don't remember which -- give a short presentation, and this, mind you, was before they got the Nobel Prize.

Anyway, a whole hour was devoted to showing the results, as controversial then as they were intriguing, of running lightning bolts through a gas mixture intended to match the chemical signature of earth's primordial atmosphere. The keynote speaker, Philip Wylie, author of Generation of Vipers, assured us kids that before we were his age, our intrepid scientists would have created the first artificial life.

Which is why I read with great interest a recent article claiming that a number of researchers are now genuinely closing in on this long-sought goal. You see, they're already a few years late, and if I'm going to see it at all, they'd better hurry.

I also wonder, from time to time, if there's anybody left who still treats high-school students with such respect, or spends so much money on them. Surely, that's part of our problem, don't you think?

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by: William Timberman @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 16:51:28 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

I forgot to mention (0.00 / 0)

that this was in fucking Oklahoma. No child left behind, indeed. Now literally all that's left in that wilderness of failed expectations is Bible thumpers and milennial snake-handlers.

It's a shame is what it is. A black shame on all of us.

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by: William Timberman @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 16:59:25 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Well, Will (4.00 / 1)

We've already created artificial life.  It's just that it lives inside computers.

They forgot to tell you that.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 18:18:43 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

;-) (0.00 / 0)

I'm afraid I don't believe you, Paul.

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by: William Timberman @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 18:21:57 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

But I'm NOT sorry.... (0.00 / 0)

That was an earlier model. It was easily confused, and far too polite.

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by: William Timberman @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 18:34:52 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Good point (0.00 / 0)

Not sure it really counts as "life" until it can acquire its own energy, but on the other hand maybe I'm being arrogant, it could be a kind of parasite.

"It sounds wrong...
     ...but its right."

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by: SpitBall @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 18:38:41 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

It Already DOES Acquire Its Own Energy (4.00 / 1)

It gets its energy from nerds.  More a symbiot than a parasite, I'd say.

btw, I wrote a term paper in college for my unfortunately Skinnerian psychology class, in which I described how rats reinforced Skinnerian psychologists to develop theories that made rats the measure of all things--clever rats.

I hadn't encountered cellular automata yet.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 19:36:18 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

eLife is a ponderable (0.00 / 0)

postulate, that much is true. The very carbon of my molecular soul aches at the thought of letting such a sandy thing pass as living. I can be an arrogant little monkey, sometimes.

Symbiosis is a form of parasitism. Some might argue that ultimate parasitism. In a rather real sense, eukaryotes are based on the parasitic nature of the prokaryotes that gave rise to the nucleus and other sub-cellular organelles. Its pertinent on a site like this because it is expressed in politics and ideology, I think. Collective cooperation on one hand and strict top-down dominance on the other. The reality, such as can be perceived by a creature such as myself, is some admixture, of course, but the pattern is fundamental.  

How much of our politics are genetic? Is there a chemical equation for compassion? Which neurons were fired or repressed while John Yoo puzzled over the precise wording of memos at 3 o'clock in the morning?


"It sounds wrong...
     ...but its right."

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by: SpitBall @ Sun Jun 07, 2009 at 02:12:22 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Mirror Neurons Were Repressed (0.00 / 0)

Not sure any neurons were firing at all.

Evidence to the contrary is sketchy at best.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Sun Jun 07, 2009 at 04:07:34 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Creating Life is a work in progress (0.00 / 0)

The experiments you describe are ongoing, but even so, no life created yet. You're talking Chemical Evolution. I don't like that term very much. But, putting semantics aside, this is a kind of prerequisite of creating life, or spontaneous generation as it used to be called. This is where religion intersects science and reason. Barring demonstrable evidence for how molecules became structured into a living entity remains a matter of belief.

Was it the hand of a Creator God, or the statistical probabilities of a the reasonable and mathematical Universe that scientists struggle to describe and command? I admit that after a few beers, I become uncertain as to whether there is a meaningful difference. Just because we know about static electricity and cloud formation does not invalidate the stories of Zeus' lighting bolts because these stories encode our humanity in ways that genes cannot quite manage. But, I digress.

Lack of respect is a problem across the spectrum. I think that "education" has become memorization of rote facts (or what pass as facts) and the practice of problem solving has been neglected. Its anti-thought and couples well with the attention span reducing nature of UTube and Twitter. Reasoning takes time and effort, two things that students are taught to think of as either undesirable or impossible.

"It sounds wrong...
     ...but its right."

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by: SpitBall @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 18:23:45 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

See, I really don't feel like I have much to say about (0.00 / 0)

the creation of the universe, strangely enough. Do I tend to feel like life was a natural result of forces acting on matter and energy?- yes. But, you know, when I was an insufficiently medicated Bipolar 1 and contemplated death on a daily basis from 5-8 pm, did I start to feel less than confident that we had all the answers? Sure. But more to an inarguable point is that ritual and mythos have proved themselves to be sustaining to human beings over 1000's of years. Someone here referred to it as a "psychological crutch." Precisely. It may not be your thing, fine, but anyone who assumes Martin Luther King, Bob Dylan, William Blake, and Willie Nelson all preoccupy (-ied) themselves with a man in the sky and what he did in 7 days has a more unshakable faith than I do.

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by: sb @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 23:02:06 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Any god that works (0.00 / 0)

One could say

"It sounds wrong...
     ...but its right."

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by: SpitBall @ Sun Jun 07, 2009 at 02:00:27 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

I remember a few years ago I was much more worried about this stuff (0.00 / 0)

As you may have noticed, the fundamentalists in this country have declared war against evolution and the scientific method it is founded on.

A great article in Salon, "The New Monkey Trial", details just how obsessed, organized and well funded these holy warriors are and they are well on their way to victory.

For example, we learn that Dr. Jonathan Wells, who appears to be a reasonable scientist who just happens to believe in "intelligent design" instead of evolution, actually decided at a very young age to dedicate his life to fighting the evils of evolution -- long before he ever earned a "Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology from Berkeley and another in religious studies from Yale.

A member of the Unification Church whose education was bankrolled by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, he's written that he sought his degrees specifically to fight the teaching of evolution. As he put it in an article on the Moonie Web site True Parents, "Father's words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father [Sun Myung Moon] chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle."

Be scared, people.  This world is at war between the forces of religious fundamentalism and enlightened reason. Enlightened reason must win.

Dr. Wells is a senior fellow at a group called the Center for Science and Culture which proposed a wedge strategy that "seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies."

"The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built ... Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science. Debunking the traditional conceptions of both God and man, thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment. This materialistic conception of reality eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and art."

We live in a country where 48% of the population believes dinosaurs walked the earth with humans, even with all their education and the press trying to tell them otherwise.  (Heck, one out of four adults still think the sun goes around the Earth.)  

Think how that number can climb once they visit the Dinosaur Adventure Land "the place where dinosaurs and the Bible meet" or the soon to be completed Genisis Park.

Chris Mooney doesn't think the threat is all that serious, despite all of this.

That said, I'm not as pessimistic as Goldberg. Although Democratic politicians tend to be cowards on this subject, the elite media still have no love for creationism, and that's a powerful force to be reckoned with. Science's defenders should bring out national television crews, and let them interview the Bible-thumpers who come out for these battles on the local level. One of these types appears in Goldberg's article--and I'm telling you, mainstream journalists are not ready to embrace people like this.

Kevin Drum agrees, the liberal (or at least well educated, elite) media will save us.

I think Chris is right. As I've said before, the mainstream media really is biased toward showing what they're familiar with, and what they're mostly familar with is their fellow college educated social liberals. Unfortunately, this is a two-edged sword: when it comes to the crackpot end of the spectrum, lefty crackpots get a lot of press and end up convincing a lot of people that liberals are nuts, but conservative crackpots are mostly considered weird loons confined to their weird little rural communities and are therefore ignored.

I, however, am far more pessimistic.  I think the threat is real and building.  I guess the November election really shook me; before that I had great faith in the corrective force of democracy.  Democracy didn't correct itself.

I now think of our society as much more delicate, much more unstable than I thought only a few months before.  I don't think the elite in the fourth estate are going to save us from this one, not on their own.

Remember, most of us 'elite' think of science as a very different endeavor than, say, the priesthood.  After all, scientific theories must be falsifiable and withstand years of observation, experimentation and criticism before any scientist will begin to think of a theory as fact.

But to the lay person, science is no different than any other elite endeavor; a bunch of people in power they don't know get together to determine their version of the truth, then preach it to everyone else.  

Have you looked for a gluon lately?  No, me neither.  There is a huge, real difference between science and religion, but the lay person takes either one on faith.  To them it doesn't seem so different.

It's not hard for creationists to convince the public that the evidence for evolution is weak. Scientists accept evolution as something very close to fact, but Americans never have. In a November 2004 CBS News/New York Times poll, about evolution, 55 percent of the respondents said that God created humans in their present form. Twenty-seven percent believed in the evolution of man guided by God, and 13 percent believed in evolution without God.

So it should come as no surprise that the majority of Americans -- 65 percent, according to the poll cited above -- favor teaching creationism alongside evolution in public schools. Creationism is the perfect culture-war issue because it inevitably pits majorities in local communities against interloping lawyers and scientists. In a country gripped by right-wing populism, it's not hard to stoke resentment against scientists who have the gall to think that they know more than everybody else.

But some are already fighting back.  For the punch-line to this comic go here (via Majikthise).

Be nice, be sensitive, but fight back.  I don't want my child growing up in the world these fundamentalists are trying to build.  And to all those 'conservative' libertarians out there, look with whom you are allied.  Do you really think these people have the same vision for America you do?  Do you think it is even close??

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by: Mark Matson @ Fri Jun 05, 2009 at 19:12:35 PM UTC

I Wrote Perhaps The First Diary About The "Wedge" Strategy At DKos (4.00 / 3)

four or five years ago, Mark.  So I'm pretty familiar with this deeply deceitful war they're waging.  

The problem is, it's just really hard for most liberals to comprehend what's going on--particularly since creationism doesn't actually have much in the way of Biblical support, so it's not just a secular/religious divide.  Genesis 1 & 2 are both obviously poetic, metaphorical descriptions--which happen to contradict each other, should you try to take them literally.  

Simple fact is, it's not religion vs. science, it's fundamentalism vs. everything else.

Simple formula:

Fundamentalism = ignorance * certainty.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 16:08:51 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Lilith (4.00 / 2)

Genesis 1 & 2 are both obviously poetic, metaphorical descriptions--which happen to contradict each other, should you try to take them literally.

There is an old Jewish tradition of making up stories to fill in the blanks and get the Torah to be more consistent.  This is the origin of much of Kabbalahism.  My daughter and I, however, call it Bible fan fiction.

The solution to the problem of Genesis 1 and 2 was the invention of Lilith.  Lilith appears in the old testament just once, as a demon.  What they did was create a back story for her where she was Adam's first wife.  She is the first woman mentioned in Genesis 1.

But Lilith refused to obey Adam.  In defiance of Adam and G-d,  she spoke G-d's true name out loud which (you'll see why we call this Bible fan fiction) instantly gave her superpowers and she flew away, out of Eden.

Eve, formed from Adam's rib, was his second wife, this time more obedient, though that didn't work out so well, either.

Obviously, the story of Lilith has serious resonance for some in the feminist community.  Some even presenting her as the female aspect of God Herself.

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by: Mark Matson @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 18:46:23 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Yeah, I Know (0.00 / 0)

Unitarian Sunday School alum you know.  Plus, there's Lilith Fair, named after her, promised to return in 2010!

Yes, it's true.  The Jews invented fan fiction, too.  Which, of course, is by definition non-canonical.  i.e., anathema to fundamentalists!

The cure that's worse than the disease, so far as they're concerned.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 19:30:22 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Well, you know, personally (0.00 / 0)

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by: sb @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 23:07:01 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Well, you know, personally I feel like real heresy is commited (0.00 / 0)

when you confine Cibo Mitto to the second stage, a la
Lillith Fair. But, you know, once again, to each their own.  

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by: sb @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 23:09:48 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Yikes! (0.00 / 0)

Not only that, Aimee Mann, too.

IIRC, Cibbo Matto was the only band to perform on Buffy, The Vampire Slayer that was mentioned by name by one of the characters (Willow), and Aimee Mann was the only performer to have a speaking line ("Man, I hate playing vampire towns.")

Definitely something sinister going on here.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 23:49:51 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Foot soldiers (0.00 / 0)

As long as these individuals serve primarily as foot soldiers for the corporate establishment and for the ultra wealthy, they will be allowed their dominance over a little thing like education.  After all, corporations outsource the work anyway.  What a racket.

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by: David Kowalski @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 20:46:39 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Ah, Chick Publications! (4.00 / 1)

I remember them well from my childhood. People passed them around like candy.

I think my favorite was the one that looked like a hundred dollar bill, folded in half. You'd see it lying on the sidewalk and pick it up, and voila -- your soul would be saved.

Montani semper liberi

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by: Sadie Baker @ Sat Jun 06, 2009 at 21:54:21 PM UTC

[ Parent ]