For Uncommon Descent Question 11: Can biotechnology bring back extinct animals?, we have declared a winner, and it is binary! Twins!
I loved Aussie ID's information about the specifics of attempts to restore the thylacine - he calls it a Tasmanian tiger. Possibly due to culture issues, I am more familiar with hearing the animal called a Tasmanian wolf. But anyone interested should review his information.
I'd love to know what a staked out* sled pack in northern Canada would make of the marsupial Tasmanian. He doesn't look to me like he has three coats of hair, so he might need to work in the office.
I also appreciated Nakashima's thoughtful reflections on the question of how behaviour might not follow the physical recreation of an animal. I suspect he's right; it's an open question indeed.
Each of you must provide me with a valid postal address** in order to receive the prize, a free copy of Steven Meyer's Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009).
If you go here, you will get a bit of background on the contest, and read many interesting contributions, but for now, here is the skinny:
This one's a bit of fun, but there is a serious purpose behind it.In "A Life of Its Own: Where will synthetic biology lead us?" (September 28, 2009 New Yorker mag), Michael Specter reports, "If the science truly succeeds, it will make it possible to supplant the world created by Darwinian evolution with one created by us."
Jurassic Park, anyone?
Additional notes on interesting posts as well.
Go here for more.
]]>Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).
My concern with "neurolaw" (the attempt to scan brains to identify criminal behaviour) is this: Law is, or should be, concerned with "intent", not "motive."
Yes, yes, in detective fiction, everything hinges on motive: Cousin Harry murdered Aunt Sally to get her fortune; plain Jane murdered pretty Kitty because Kitty got the man; squadron leader Beeder murdered that guy because of a long ago wartime betrayal ....
However, real law depends on design inferences, not speculations about motive. Here is the story I sometimes tell to explain that:
Tom and Dick are enjoying beer and wings in a pub.
Suddenly, the conversation becomes loud and animated.
Tom seizes a dinner knife and tries to plunge it into Dick's chest. He is restrained by burly patron Harry and several others.
The whole thing is caught on videocam.
Mid-uproar, the bartender calls the police, who charge Tom with attempted manslaughter.
The police need not know his motive, only his intent - which was pretty obvious. That's a design inference.
Later, the investigating officer learns how the quarrel began: Dick had informed Tom that he was seeing Tom's girlfriend, so Tom should just buzz off. Tom didn't like that idea.
Knowing a person's motive certainly helps us understand the story. But intent - the demonstrated attempt at murder in this case - is what matters in law.
Here's the difficulty: Suppose Tom had just got up from the table and left, and spent three months fantasizing in the wee hours about killing Dick - without ever seeing either Dick or the former girlfriend again. He has plenty of motive, but the fact is, he never did anything.
Then Tom is of no interest to the law, as it now stands - though his family doctor should be concerned. Tom needs a more constructive way to deal with rejection. (He also needs a more faithful girlfriend, but all in good time.)
However, in a materialist environment, I would hardly be surprised to hear theories about Tom's violence genes and violence neurons, some based on neuroscience techniques - even if all the violence was inside his own head. Some may argue for action against Tom "pre-crime". That's where the threat to civil liberties comes in.
Neurolaw seems like materialism applied to law, hence a threat to civil rights, because it can easily confuse motive with intent - overturning centuries of progress in justice.
]]>Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).
Listen here.Intelligently Designed Nanotechnology
As Casey Luskin reveals in this episode of ID the Future, eminent biologists have said that they must continually remind themselves that what they see in biology evolved, and was not designed. But now engineers are turning to biology to replace human technology because biological pathways provide superior solutions to biomedical-technological needs. Is this trend more consistent with an evolved biosphere, or an intelligent designed one? Listen to this podcast and decide for yourself.
Yes, but sometimes people don't see the forest for the trees. The majority of humans think, where it is safe to do so, that there is a God, based on personal experience. No surprise there. If there is a God, he can communicate with humans when he wishes to do so, just as Elizabeth, Queen of England, can do*. And she would be the first to say that her rank is at a fundamentally much lower grade.
The question is, why is this controversial? Why should it be any surprise? Why do I keep running into efforts to prove it is not true?
If that is really science (space aliens, multiple universes), I could not distinguish it from witchcraft or some other foolishness. I think we'd just get more done if we accepted, with Antony Flew , that There IS a God and got on with useful projects in science, like cures for AIDS and non-polluting sources of energy. Oh, and weight loss programs for people who used to suffer from famine but are now afflicted with obesity - an outcome of modern science.
*I still have my father's commission, courtesy Elizabeth's father, advancing him to the rank of officer.
Also: Chris Mooney's War on Intelligent Design
Listen here.
On this episode of ID the Future, CSC's Rob Crowther interviews Casey Luskin about his in-depth response to Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science, correcting fourteen major factual and logical errors in Mooney's chapter on intelligent design. How can Chris Mooney be so wrong on this issue? Listen in and find out.Read the original response to Mooney here.
Yes, well, I don't know why anyone should be surprised. Darwinism has morphed into a major public enterprise and anyone who wants his finger in the pie ... I think we can wait a long time before a guy like Chris Mooney even needs to get anything right.
More stories from the Post-Darwinist:
Interesting design inference concerning a historic photo
Morning coffee!! Bear meets cat ... No! No! Not what you think!
Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy, with comments
Darwinism and popular culture: A tour of the textbooks
(Note: This series may sometimes be interrupted by news from the crisis in intellectual freedom in Canada. If you are not interested, just scroll down.)
]]>Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).
In Does curiosity kill more than the cat?, prof Stanley Fish wonders
Last Thursday, the new Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities James A. Leach gave an address at the University of Virginia with the catchy title, "Is There an Inalienable Right to Curiosity?"Interesting, considering that academic freedom is under huge assault these days.Taking his cue from Thomas Jefferson's "trinity of inalienable rights: 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,'" Leach reasoned that even though Jefferson never wrote about curiosity, "a right to be curious would have been a natural reflection of his own personality."
I have said in private correspondence as follows:
It is good to be curious about the exact cause of Alzheimer syndrome or whether that fellow hanging around in the parking lot has lawful business around here.Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose PS: I know a bit about cats. Curiosity does kill cats sometimes. But kidney disease is their biggest problem. Cats are obligate carnivores. So they generally last as long as their kidneys - or so a vet once told me, and in my experience it is certainly true.It is not good to be curious about whether my neighbour is a closet racist or having an affair with the letter carrier.
I'd say curiosity is an inescapable and necessary human quality that must be steered in an appropriate direction.
Also just up at The Mindful Hack, my blog on neuroscience issues:
Do you really need a refrigerator when you have this?
Materialism and popular culture: The human brain as a machine?
Spiritual Brain: Polish translation rights bought
]]>Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).
Relief at last!
Here, at New Humanist, Raymond Tallis rallies the neuroskeptics ("Neurotrash", Volume 124, Issue 6, November/December 2009). 'Bout time someone did, I'd say. What's really good is that it comes from an unexpected quarter, at least for me.
He writes,
Hardly a day passes without yet another breathless declaration in the popular press about the relevance of neuroscientific findings to everyday life. The articles are usually accompanied by a picture of a brain scan in pixel-busting Technicolor and are frequently connected to references to new disciplines with the prefix "neuro-". Neuro-jurisprudence, neuro-economics, neuro-aesthetics, neuro-theology are encroaching on what was previously the preserve of the humanities. Even philosophers - who should know better, being trained one hopes, in scepticism - have entered the field with the discipline of "Exp-phi" or experimental philosophy. Starry-eyed sages have embraced "neuro-ethics", in which ethical principles are examined by using brain scans to determine people's moral intuitions when they are asked to deliberate on the classic dilemmas. Benjamin Libet's experiments on decisions to act and the work on mirror neurons (observed directly in monkeys but only inferred, and still contested, in humans) have been ludicrously over-interpreted to demonstrate respectively that our brains call the shots (and we do not have free will) and to point to a neural basis for empathy.
Yes, pop neuroscience is beginning to sound more like "evolutionary" psychology all the time.
Responding to Tallis's article's title, "Neurotrash", I wrote to friends to say, more or less,
What we need is a really big neuro-trash can.And, as I like to say, if you don't like English Common Law (= whose basic principle is that the accused is innocent unless proven guilty), please live in some jurisdiction where no one has ever heard of it. We like it here.The result of all this nonsense is that neuroscience gets discredited when it is, used appropriately, an immense help in medicine.
Remember, it was neuroscience that established that stroke victims were losing use of limbs through learned helplessness, not irreversible brain damage. Jeffrey Schwartz, Vince Paquette, Mario Beauregard and others have also demonstrated that non-drug, non-invasive treatments of mental disorders actually work - especially important for those disorders that cannot be effectively treated by drugs or surgery. (I am sure there are others whose work I do not know.)
Here's what I know for sure: I remember the rows on rows of beds in the chronic care hospital I used to volunteer at in the 1960s. Compare that to the much more favourable prospects brought about by the Decade of the Brain (1990s)! But it wasn't easy. One neuroscientist all but lost his career introducing the "learned helplessness" concept (why stroke patients, in many cases, lost the use of limbs through simple non-use). Only neuroscience could really have uncovered that.
That's the real story, and Tallis talks about it. We should stick to it.
It's also why I always say neuroscience should stay close to medicine and far from silliness - like which area of the brain lights up if a woman decides to buy the flaming yellow pants with movie star decals instead of the quiet brown pair*.
Seriously, however, in the justice system, neuroscience, inappropriately used, could be quite dangerous. Cf neurolaw.
If we can't convict an alleged perpetrator of a crime on the external evidence, we should not be trying to scan his brain.
Who cares what that guy thinks anyway?
It's not a crime around here to think, only to act in a way that is outside the law. If the prosecution can't prove he did it, then ... they can't make their case, and that's just too bad for them.
In the meantime, enough with this neurolaw stuff.
(*The Unforgivably Bad Taste region, maybe? Wonder where it is? Not many women could make that work.)
]]>By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent
Former Nature editor Philip Ball once commented that 'there is no assembly plant so delicate, versatile and adaptive as the cell" (1). Emeritus Professor Theodore Brown chose to wax metaphorical by likening the cell to a fully-fledged factory, with its own complex functional relationships and interactions akin to what we observe in our own manufacturing facilities (2). In recent years the seemingly intractable problem of explaining how the first cell came into existence through chance events, otherwise known as the 'Chance Hypothesis', has become more acute than ever as scientists have begun to realize that a minimum suite of functional components must exist for cells to be operational. Stephen Meyer's summary of the current state of this so-called 'minimal complexity' research is profoundly insightful:
"The simplest extant cell, Mycoplasma genitalium - a tiny bacterium that inhabits the urinary tract requires "only" 482 proteins to perform its necessary functions and 562,000 bases of DNA...to assemble those proteins...Based upon minimal-complexity experiments, some scientists speculate (but have not demonstrated) that a simple one-celled organism might have been able to survive with as few as 250-400 genes" (p.201).
For renowned biochemist David Deamer the first cell would at the very least have needed a polymerase enzyme to transcribe from a template such as DNA, a constant source of supplementary materials notably nucleotides, amino acids and ATP and enzymes that faithfully carry out DNA replication during cell division (3). To suppose that even a hypothetical first cell would just come together from a gimish of prebiotic compounds undergoing continuous destructive dilution is to appeal to the miraculous (4). Attempts to reconstruct such a cell start off from a fairly elaborate point of departure in which enzymes and other catalysts are already present and functional (5).
Just how important these functional enzymes are was brought to bear in a study led by University of North Carolina biochemist Richard Wolfenden (6). Wolfenden's team was able to demonstrate how a reaction with a half life of 2.3 billion years occurred in milliseconds when supplied with the necessary enzymes. Such spectacular differences are not uncommon. As Wolfenden remarked:
"What we're defining here is what evolution had to overcome...the enzyme is surmounting a tremendous obstacle, a reaction half-life of 2.3 billion years...Without catalysts, there would be no life at all, from microbes to humans. It makes you wonder how natural selection operated in such a way as to produce a protein that got off the ground as a primitive catalyst for such an extraordinarily slow reaction." (6)
Through a molecular technique known as random mutagenesis, scientists have now quantified the amino acid sequence variability that functional proteins can tolerate. Worthy of note in this field is the work of former Cambridge biochemist Douglas Axe whose data forms a pillar for the case that Meyer presents in his book. Using locally-randomized sequence libraries of a portion of the antibiotic resistance enzyme Beta lactamase, Axe calculated that somewhere between 1 in 10exp50 and 1 in 10exp77 150 amino acid-long protein folds form configurations with a Beta lactamase function (7). Of these one in 10exp50 to 1 in 10exp74 form folded structures that might perform any number of alternative functions (7).
Based on the structural requirements of enzyme activity Axe emphatically argued against a global-ascent model of the function landscape in which incremental improvements of an arbitrary starting sequence "lead to a globally optimal final sequence with reasonably high probability" (7). For a protein made from scratch in a prebiotic soup, the odds of finding such globally optimal solutions are infinitesimally small- somewhere between 1 in 10exp140 and 1 in 10exp164 for a 150 amino acid long sequence if we factor in the probabilities of forming peptide bonds and of incorporating only left handed amino acids.
In a 1981 legal challenge involving the Arkansas Board Of Education, astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe appeared for the defense as an expert witness. Taking on the dogmatic neo-Darwinist view on the origins of life, Wickramasinghe unwaveringly proclaimed that the probability of obtaining the information necessary for making the simplest cell by chance was 1 in 10exp40,000 (8). These estimates not only exceeded by many powers of 10 the total number of atoms available in the universe but also closely matched the minimal complexity predictions discussed above. By pulling together these probabilistic threads of evidence in Signature In The Cell, Meyer has relegated naturalistic life origin models to little more than fanciful speculation. His piece-by-piece dismissal of the chance hypothesis is beautifully executed as is the personal narrative that interconnects the various portions of his scientific story.
Additional Literature Cited
1. Philip Ball (2001) Life's Lesson In Design, Nature, Vol 409 pp. 413-416
2. Theodore Brown (2003) The Art of the Scientific Metaphor, The Scientist, Volume 17, Issue 21, p. 10
3. David Deamer, Jason Dworkin, Scott Sandford, Max Bernstein, Louis Allamandola (2002) The First Cell Membranes, Astrobiology, Volume 2, pp. 371-381
4. Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley and Roger Olsen (1984) The Mystery of Life's Origin: Reassessing Current Theories, Published by Lewis and Stanley, Dallas, Texas, pp.42-68
5.Tamsin Osborne (2008) 'Artificial Cell' Can Make Its Own Genes, New Scientist,1 April, 2008, See http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13568-artificial-cell-can-make-its-own-genes.html
6. Without Enzyme, Biological Reaction Essential To Life Takes 2.3 billion Years: 2008 UNC Study, See http://www.med.unc.edu/www/news/2008-news-archives/november/without-enzyme-biological-reaction-essential-to-life-takes-2-3-billion-years-unc-study/?searchterm=Wolfenden
7. Douglas D. Axe (2004) Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds, Journal Of Molecular Biology, pp. 1295-1315
8. See Chandra Wickramasinghe's testimony at the 1981 Arkansas trial on creation which can be found at http://www.panspermia.org/chandra.htm
Sometimes, when discussing the much misunderstood Scopes Trial, I have referred to the textbook from which Scopes was teaching, Hunter's Civic Biology, which seems to have been an amalgam of civics and biology, with a dose of eugenics thrown in, and smug assertions about "highest" or "lowest". Bad idea. Enough already with total subject confusion, ecological misunderstanding, and useless social conflict. Here's an interesting site where Ron Ladouceur gives us a tour of exotic textbooks of our storied past.
I am glad my own biology teachers focused on the cell theory of life, the germ theory of disease, and the life and times of the endangered ribbon snake (= ecology).
There is only so much students will take away when they graduate (if they do) , and you want it to be something they can make sense of in dealing with their own life and environment.
]]>Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).
In "When Listening to Music, Your Brain Is ‘Moving’ Even If You Are Not," a news release from the Society for Neuroscience (10/15/06), we learn,
One of the best-studied features in orientation maps is known as a pinwheel, a small region in which all orientations are represented in segments that appear to come to a point. "A long-standing question is, 'How are neurons arranged in the pinwheel centers?'" says R.C. Reid, PhD, of Harvard Medical School.and much else.Reid provided the answer by using two-photon calcium imaging, which determines the physiological response of hundreds of cells simultaneously as well as their precise location in the cortical circuit.
"By recording from hundreds to thousands of neurons at each pinwheel center, we demonstrated that pinwheel centers are remarkably well organized," he says.
"Neurons selective to different orientations are arranged in an orderly manner even in the very center," he adds. "There was virtually no mixing of cells with different orientation preferences even at the center. Thus, pinwheel centers truly represent singularities in the cortical map." This finding is suggesting extraordinary precision in the development of cortical circuits.
Ignore all the yap about evolution in the article, which is - as typical - intended to distract attention from the obvious conclusion.
]]>Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).
When it comes to academic triumphs and laudatory honors it can be said that mycologist Paul Stamets has his fair share. Stamets has authored six books on mushrooms, holds over twenty patents, is a winner of the Collective Heritage Institute's Bioneers Award and owns a wholesale business selling alternative medicines. Today he also runs a facility that boasts twenty four laminar flow benches across four laboratories processing between 10-20 thousand kilos of mycelia each week. He has close to a thousand mycelium cultures growing at any given time and is renowned across the world for his view of fungi as the 'grand molecular dissemblers of nature'.
Stamets describes himself in his youth as a hippy with a stuttering habit who could not look people in the eye. He also fondly recalls once telling his charismatic Christian mother that the forest is where he goes to church on Sundays. He spent many years as a microscopist at the Evergreen State College in Washington studying mushroom mycelia with the aid of an electron microscope. There he developed an intense passion for all things fungal even to the extent that he now occasionally appears in public sporting a hat made from Amadou- a fungus that, he boldly maintains, was essential for the portability of fire during man's much-heralded migration out of Africa.
When it comes to mushrooms, Stamets' most radical concept, and perhaps his most attractive one, draws on a human parallel. In fact he proposes that that organized networks of mycelia under our feet form the earth's own 'internet' of sorts carrying antibiotics and enzymes as well as huge numbers of signaling chemicals across trillions and trillions of end branchings. In short, he sees our own Internet superhighway as a mere replica of a highly-successful system that already exists in nature's own backyard. Perhaps surprisingly these networks are not confined to land habitats. Indeed aquatic underwater mushrooms have been discovered in the streams of southern Oregon and mycologists are now busily investigating how these hydrophiles survive and affect surrounding ecosystems.
Agarikon is yet another fungal species that gets mycologists such as Stamets visibly excited. Otherwise known as the 'elixir of long life', this impressively-sized fungus has been used for years as an effective treatment for respiratory diseases such as tuberculosis and is now known to exhibit a very potent effect against the smallpox and flu viruses. There is strong evidence that the active anti-virals in Agarikon might also serve well in the present-day combat against H1N1 and H5N1. In fact so critical to human health are the medicinal properties of this remarkable organism that Stamets has embarked on his own mini-crusade to create the largest Agarikon genomic DNA library in the world.
On a more serious note, many environmentalists claim that today we are fully engaged in the biggest mass extinction event that our planet has ever known. Stamets is not one to shy away from sounding alarm bells and boldly adheres to the claim that 50% of all known species on our planet could become extinct over the next 100 years if swift action is not taken. His use of oyster mushroom mycelia to remove oil pollution is an outstanding example of how we might avert such a bleak endpoint. These saprophytic fungi are gateway species that break down toxic waste through the action of specialized enzymes and thereby allow damaged ecosystems to flourish and rebound. Oyster mushrooms have also been shown to have a dramatic effect on bacterial titers destroying coliform bacteria and Staphylococcus in contaminated waters.
The environmental resiliency of fungi has long fascinated mycologists, and future mycotechnologies might build on this salient property. While Prototaxites- a 30-foot long, 3-foot high mushroom that lived 350-420 million years ago stands as the archetypal giant fungus, the twenty two-hundred acre, one cell thick mycelium mat of Armillaria ostoyae (honey mushroom) now holds the record for the largest organism in the world. Thermo-resilient symbionts such as Curvularia confer a viral-dependent heat tolerance on many grasses allowing them to grow at elevated temperatures, as high as 104 F in some cases.
Fungi can be described as being parasitic, saprophytic, micorrhizal or endophytic in their modes of deriving nourishment. This so-called 'mycological guild' of complementary fungi is what gives rise to a healthy ecosystem. The interactivity of these fungi and other organisms is clearly visible in ant cultivars of the Lepiota mushroom which are used by thatch ants to stop a particularly aggressive parasitic fungus called Escovopsis from invading their nests. In a converse strategy, Metarhizium is a parasitic fungus that kills carpenter ants and is therefore finding application in the protection of buildings from these would-be aggressors. By using the non-sporulating stage of Metarhizium, Stamets has surpassed the carpenter ants' own ability to keep the fungus at bay thereby providing him with an effective treatment against carpenter ant infestations.
Despite such mycotechnological advances, Stamets describes the current state of the field as being under-respected, underappreciated and underfunded. Most importantly he remains steadfastly focused on restoring ecosystems for the enjoyment of generations to come. For those of us actively involved in the evolution/ID debate, Stamets' findings are likewise poignantly relevant. In fact he makes a stunning claim regarding computer and fungal networks noting how "we were destined to create the computer Internet at a time when the earth is in crisis".
That our understanding of network theory and its importance in fungal bioremediation should coincide with our earth's need for ecological intervention introduces a teleological, purposeful perspective to life that contradicts the contingency of orthodox Darwinism. After all a cosmos that is fashioned towards such an endpoint is incompatible with the random, directionless tenet of natural selection. As for the Christian faithful there is one proclamation that makes sense in our current predicament: Thank God that the forests are where mycologists choose to go to church on Sundays!
For further details on Stamets' work see How Mushrooms Can Save The World at http://tiny.cc/iecmw, (Login: Promega; Password: mushroom)
]]>Even though I am not a creationist by any reasonable definition, I sometimes get pegged as the local gap tooth creationist moron. (But then I don't have gaps in my teeth either. Check the unretouched photos.)
As the best gap tooth they could come up with, a local TV station interviewed me about "superstition" the other day.
The issue turned out to be superstition related to numbers. Were they hoping I'd fall in?
The skinny: Some local people want their house numbers changed because they feel the current number assignment is "unlucky."
Look, guys, numbers here are assigned on a strict directional rota. If the number bugs you so much, move.
Don't mess up the street directory for everyone else. Paramedics, fire chiefs, police chiefs, et cetera, might need a directory they can make sense of. You might be glad for that yourself one day.
Anyway, I didn't get a chance to say this on the program so I will now: No numbers are evil or unlucky. All numbers are - in my view - created by God to march in a strict series or else a discoverable* series, and that is what makes mathematics possible. And mathematics is evidence for design, not superstition.
The interview may never have aired. I tend to flub the gap-tooth creationist moron role, so interviews with me are often not aired.
* I am thinking here of numbers like pi, that just go on and on and never shut up, but you can work with them anyway. (You just decide where you want to cut the mike.)
Also just up at the Post-Darwinist:
Darwinism and academic culture: ID film banned
Darwinism and academic culture: Darwinists blither on in the face of the gathering storm
Biotechnology: The quest to bring back extinct animals
Fun with Mark Steyn, but when isn't Mark Steyn fun?
]]>Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).