john fleming weighs in on islam

this has little to do with science, but i had to post it: john fleming, a fantastic english prof at princeton, wrote in yesterday's Daily Princetonian about culturally-instituted disregard for the bellicose nature of islam. he cites what looks like an important new book called: The Myth of Islamic Tolerance. he also complains about the fact that a double standard exists in how the media treats christianity versus islam...

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research on researchers

an anthropologist at Princeton is studying the differences among researchers from different disciplines, such as cultural anthropology and experimenal psychology. with the increase in interdisciplinary research, this is an important topic. the article doesn't give much in the way of 'results', but it mentions that these two fields are ripe for inter-departmental tension because of different methods of research: psychology looks at pseudonatural behavior in contrived environments with few variables, whereas anthropology looks at natural behavior in natural environments with many variables.

i've actually wondered about this myself: natural scientists seem to think and interact in ways that are often consistent within disciplines, such as geneticists behaving as other geneticists. is this nature (people who act this way tend to end up in genetics) or nurture (people who go into genetics end up trained to act this way)? a study of the interactions among researchers of different natural science fields on interdisciplinary projects (especially those in neuroscience, which sees some of the strangest collaborations, from psychologists to physicists) would definitely yield some interesting results about perceived institutional hierarchies within the natural sciences, and how they're played out in professional interactions. actually, i suppose we all know the results already: physicists are snobs, psychologists are strange, and biologists are lovers of minutiae.

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News Round-up

Too many stories, too little time...

1. maybe there isn't life on mars. (science daily)
2. first real-time movie of protein formation from RNA. the lab (Xie) has a paper each in nature and science this week. (science daily)
3. a sorry excuse for yet another review of Dennett's Breaking the Spell. I was particularly disappointed with this author's assumptions about political stance and religious belief. Plus (and this is one of the few times you'll see me supporting Dennett), he didn't really assess the book according to what it's trying to accomplish.
4. panspermia in reverse: life didn't come from outerspace... it went there. (nature)
5. sharks side with the US in war on terror, thanks to implants in their brains. if only convincing humans were so simple... (vnunet, new scientist)
6. review of a new book about a cool 20th c. scientist i hadn't heard of before: J.D. Bernal (nature)
7. neon light as art. (nature)
8. a GFP-tree glows when it's thirsty! (reuters)
9. Mark Noll leaves Wheaton to replace a retiring George Marsden at Notre Dame. for those outside Christian circles, Noll is an essential academic who's helped to reinvigorate the evangelical intellect, especially with his book 'The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind'. to demonstrate his mainstream acceptanceL "His book America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln was named "the most significant work of American historical scholarship" in 2002 by The Atlantic." (christianity today)
10. and more to come...

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Deus ex machina

amazon.com just posted a new book called God from the Machine : Artifical Intelligence Models of Religious Cognition (Cognitive Science of Religion Series). It has an ambitious and strange program: the author creates a model town, then, "using rules for individual and social behavior taken from the social sciences, he models a complex community where residents form groups, learn to trust or distrust each other, and develop religious faith. Bainbridge's straightforward arguments point to many more applications of computer simulation in the study of religion. God from the Machine will serve as an important text in any class with a social scientific approach to religion." it sounds like a lot of fun, but having modeled things with strict physical parameters, I know that you can generally make a model do what you want. i'm interested to check out his models, but i fear that the book will just serve as fodder for social scientists already engaged in undermining any faith.

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God by the Numbers

An article in this month's Christianity Today uses three unlikely coincidences in mathematics and its applications as evidence of a divine mind. all three have shown up at length before:

1. the probability that the universe was created at random, since slight deviations from its finely-tuned physical constants would make sustainable life impossible. (Beckenstein-Hawking formula)

2. the probability that enough favorable mutations could have occurred since the Big Bang 15 billion years ago. (Dembski)

3. the elegance of e^(pi*i)+1=0, about which an MIT math prof once said, "There is no God, but if there were, this formula would be proof of his existence."

if you're interested in this sort of thing, these are each well known examples worth looking into. they're definitely worth thinking about.

i don't find (1) particularly compelling, unless there's an upper bound on the amount of time in which universes can emerge and disappear. without such a temporal bound, any number of universes with any number of tuned parameters could be tried before arriving at the present one. (2) is interesting, but i haven't yet read Dembski's original argument. the way i've heard it presented, this thesis seems to ignore some evolutionary biology. and (3) is pretty incredible, but drawing conclusions from this sort of thing is speculation.

nonetheless, it's worth returning to these improbabilities every once in a while, to marvel that this place exists...

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original research on the origins of origin-science

a cool new article from the history of science looking at the contributions of three early-20th century thinkers on the science of the beginning of life. below are quick notes:

the famous Urey-Miller experiments (you know, the ones from 1953 showing that amino acids could form from a simulated early-earth environment containing the elements and a high-energy source) can be traced to the physicalist contributions of three key scientists:

1. Alexander Oparin - life is a "self-regulating dynamic equilibrium of a system of catalytic reactions". his 1924 pamphlet The Origin of Life revealed his strong physicalist leaning against the weakly-developed alternatives of panspermia (a system in which life pops up all over) and neo-vitalism (which simply rejected any system aiming to explaing biology solely interms of physics and chemistry).

2. JBS Haldane - similar work to Oparin, but applied specifically to the viral system, such as bacteriophage. he emphasized life's reproductive capacity.

3. Leonard Troland - also desired to explain all biology in terms of the "organic catalyst" (enzyme), and emphasized the essential reproductive nature of all life.

these three were physicalists within the domain of biology. of course, we can draw parallels to similar arguments raging today regarding more abstract fields (psychology, sociology, etc), whose dependence (or supervenience) on "lower-level" natural sciences may not be as clear-cut. but, i think we should take care not to extrapolate too far from what science has already demonstrated. in other words, just because we can show that a lot of biology can be explained in terms of the principles of chemistry and physics, it doesn't mean prima facie that more abstract or messy sciences (and especially non-sciences) can be expalined in terms of the principles of natural sciences. to claim that science explains everything when it hasn't is just bad science.

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What's a virus, that you are mindful of it?

scientists have discovered a monstruous virus, called the mimivirus, which "is so much more genetically complex than all previously known viruses, not to mention a number of bacteria, that it seems to call for a dramatic redrawing of the tree of life." (cover article in discover mag). studies of viri have always been enigmatic, from the original experiments prompting continued debates about whether the virus is truly "alive",
to the renegade-style sea-faring science by j craig venter, whose group has discovered millions of new viri in two years (the previous total of known species was 4000).

to be honest, i thought the mimivirus had been discovered several years ago by abc and drew carey (whose humor is anything but contagious) in his sitcom sidekick character of the same name.

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THIS JUST IN: media sensationalizes science!

a UK thinktank has discovered that the media sensationalizes science. INCREDIBLE! we see it all the time in biology research, but, autologically, reports of their finding may be the first account of sensationalized social science...

fortunately, irresponsible reporting isn't true across the board, thanks to innovative grad students doing, for example, this, which tells it like it is.

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some new primate genetics...

two interesting developments in primate/human genetics.

one group has found that some 700 human genes have changed significantly over the last 5 to 10k years. these genes are likely relevant for complex traits such as olfaction, bone structure, skin color and--of particular interest--neurological function...and some strange, lower-level functions, like electron transfer (see stories in nytimes and new scientist). the PLOS biology publication uses a novel analysis of new SNP data from the HapMap Project to demonstrate positive selection.

second, a letter to nature confirms a 30-year-old hypothesis that the phenotypic differences between humans and other primates are regulated by different transcription factors rather than entirely different genes. see reuters science news coverage.

obviously, these findings are consistent with one another. but it's funny that they point to two opposite evolutionary methods to bring about variation among species (changing gene regulation versus changing the genes themselves).

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author aghast: gas geeks don't gas

a short and sweet essay in the NY Times (Feb 28) commends a group of scientists for their recent humility in research on the Oracle of Delphi. they found that a crossing of faults releases trance-inducing gases just below the Oracle, suggesting a physiological reason for her euphoria. the author (William Broad), whose new book on the Oracle was just released this month, rightly praises these scientists: "In short, the scientists, while solving a major riddle of antiquity, wisely left other mysteries untouched."

and again: "The modesty of the Delphic investigators stands in contrast to some of the world's top scientists and their champions, who have claimed that science can answer questions far beyond the usual realm of physical phenomena, such as puzzles of religion, culture, ethics and, most important because of their centrality to the rest, mind and consciousness." after citing the sweeping and unsubstantiated reductionism of Dennett (see earlier post) and E.O. Wilson (see Revisions Magazine, Summer 2005), Broad recognizes that "such views are more hope than fact, as the best theorists concede, and can exhibit a kind of arrogance."

well done.

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how's this a who's who?

a who's who of biotech was just published by nature biotechnology using a readership poll. the journal features Bill and Melinda Gates as leaders in the category of 'ethics and biotech'. they deserve credit, having endowed their foundation which addresses health concerns, among other things, with $29 billion. and, in order for researchers to rope in a grant ($6 bil so far), their disease of interest must be "widespread, neglected, and representative of the public health disparities between developed and developing countries."

the authors concede that "prominent opponents of biotech were not included, although their contribution to the debate about the use and uptake of new technology is a given". they did include a few people who actually do ethics, in the philosophical sense, including Thomas Murray (of the Hastings Center), Renato Martino (Catholic cardinal), and Arthur Caplan (bioethicist). still, how is this a who's who of ethics and biotech if the authors have given places to personalities only on the 'pro' side of the fence? this is like making a who's who of the super bowl and only including the names of seahawks players...

be sure to check the shortlist of nominees (291 in all categories).

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The Tree of Life

a group at the European Molecular Biology Lab in Heidelberg, Germany has published an improved 'tree' of evolutionary relationships in this week's Science. their genomic analysis reduced noise by excluding from analysis those genes introduced by horizontal gene transfer, a process in which genetic material from a parent is swapped into an organism other than its progeny (this has been hailed as "a new paradigm for evolutionary biology", and is potentially very dangerous). fair enough, this may not have much to do with Christianity, but their new analysis is cool.

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