Month: April 2006

Bad theology

My principle objection to the so-called “Intelligent Design” movement is the damage it does to science, but religious people like the Rev. George Coyne have correctly pointed out that it’s damaging religion as well: Coyne said the subculture of fundamentalist Christianity that insists on the literal truth of the Bible “is a plague in our … Continue reading “Bad theology”

My principle objection to the so-called “Intelligent Design” movement is the damage it does to science, but religious people like the Rev. George Coyne have correctly pointed out that it’s damaging religion as well:

Coyne said the subculture of fundamentalist Christianity that insists on the literal truth of the Bible “is a plague in our midst,” obscuring the deeper marvel of creation.

“The intelligent design movement belittles God,” he told reporters before the event. “It makes God a designer, an engineer. The God of religious faith is a god of love. He did not design me.”

Coyne stressed that on matters of religion and faith, science is “absolutely neutral.” Other speakers echoed that, saying that science and religion operate in separate realms. Where religion is based in faith and concerned with the creation or moral meaning of life, science concerns itself with seeking testable, verifiable explanations for the processes of the natural world.

You have to wonder about the impulse to pick fights you know you can’t win, the apparently central thesis of fundamentalism. All the better to play the victim, I suppose.

On the science front, the discovery of Tiktaalik roseae supplies another missing link between fish and land animals:

Scientists have discovered fossils of a 375-million-year-old fish, a large scaly creature not seen before, that they say is a long-sought missing link in the evolution of some fishes from water to a life walking on four limbs on land.

In two reports today in the journal Nature, a team of scientists led by Neil H. Shubin of the University of Chicago say they have uncovered several well-preserved skeletons of the fossil fish in sediments of former streambeds in the Canadian Arctic, 600 miles from the North Pole.

The skeletons have the fins, scales and other attributes of a giant fish, four to nine feet long. But on closer examination, the scientists found telling anatomical traits of a transitional creature, a fish that is still a fish but has changes that anticipate the emergence of land animals — and is thus a predecessor of amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans.

Tiktaalik sounds like my Sailfin Blenny, Bubba, who perches on rocks resting on his pectoral (front) fins and acts more like a dog than a fish.

Sailfin Blenny

Apple goes Windows

This had to happen: Turning a decades-long rivalry on its head, Apple Computer introduced software today that it says will easily allow users to install Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system on Apple’s newest computers. The software, Boot Camp, is available as a free download on Apple’s Web site and will be part of the next … Continue reading “Apple goes Windows”

This had to happen:

Turning a decades-long rivalry on its head, Apple Computer introduced software today that it says will easily allow users to install Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system on Apple’s newest computers.

The software, Boot Camp, is available as a free download on Apple’s Web site and will be part of the next version of Apple’s operating system, Leopard. It works on Apple’s three lines of computer that run on Intel chips — the Mac mini, the iMac and the MacBook Pro.

I told you so (and so did John Dvorak).

So what’s happening here? Easy, Apple has realized they’re now an MP3 company and not a computer company. So it makes no sense to spend as much as they do on OS development for their computers when they have low-cost alternatives. One way they could go is to Linux, but it’s got so many warts it’s not worth the bother, so the default choice is Windows. Now what happens if Apple packages all their software for Windows, but it just works better on their hardware than anybody else’s? They sell a bunch of hardware, and they sell a bunch of software, so everybody’s happy, including Microsoft and Intel.

What’s the hang-up? It’s interesting to note that Media Center won’t run on the Apple hardware. That should be a gigantic clue to what comes next.

An interesting case

Via Notes in Samsara we learn of the interesting case of Eric Pianka, the University of Texas biology professor who’s been the target of death threats since being awarded the Distinguished Scientist by the Texas Academy of Science. Pianka is out there, to be sure. He believes that burgeoning human populations are a threat not … Continue reading “An interesting case”

Via Notes in Samsara we learn of the interesting case of Eric Pianka, the University of Texas biology professor who’s been the target of death threats since being awarded the Distinguished Scientist by the Texas Academy of Science. Pianka is out there, to be sure. He believes that burgeoning human populations are a threat not only to humans but to the rest of the planetary ecosystem as well:

There is a great urgency to basic ecological research simply because the worldwide press of humanity is rapidly driving other species extinct and destroying the very systems that ecologists seek to understand. No natural community remains pristine. Unfortunately, many will disappear without even being adequately described, let alone remotely understood. As existing species go extinct and even entire ecosystems disappear, we lose forever the very opportunity to study them. Knowledge of their evolutionary history and adaptations vanishes with them: we are thus losing access to biological information itself. Indeed, “destroying species is like tearing pages out of an unread book, written in a language humans hardly know how to read” (Rolston, 1985). Just as ecologists are finally beginning to learn to read this “unread” and rapidly disappearing book of life, they are encountering governmental and public hostility and having a difficult time attracting support. This is simply pitiful. And time is quickly running out.

He forecasts that population growth will ultimately hit a wall and we’ll experience a massive die-off triggered by some sort of disease epidemic. This isn’t a completely idiotic notion, of course, as natural populations do undergo die-off when they grow too large for the carrying capacity of their ecological niches.

But something truly disgraceful has taken place around Pianka, a smear campaign orchestrated by jealous creationists to distort his predictions and malign his character. The person at the center of the storm is an electronics writer and extreme creationist, Forrest M. Mims, the self-styled “citizen scientist.”

Just as “citizen journalists” are often agenda-driven extremists, the citizen scientist Mims is a crazed creationist on a jihad against “evolutionists”, that rat-pack of immoral satanists who’ve wrecked our culture by sowing disrespect for believers in the Easter Bunny and all of his works.

Mumsie hopes Pianka will sue, and I have to agree with the sentiment. The arguments that creationists put up against biology always rely on distortion and willful ignorance, and that sort of thing has be curtailed.

Pianka’s theories don’t satisfy me because humans have the capacity to moderate population growth, and there’s plenty of evidence that we’re doing so, but that’s no excuse to call him a terrorist and to spread lies about him.

Forrest Mims is a liar and a scoundrel, and he should be held accountable for the damage he’s done to Pianka’s reputation.

More at The Austringer.