Turner was an English artist who did most of his work in the first half of the nineteenth century. I'm a fan of most of Turner's paintings but I particularly like the seascapes that show Napoleonic era battleships.
Yesterday was 111th anniversary of an editorial published in The New York Sun. The author was Francis Pharcellus Church. See the article on Wikipedia for the complete history of Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.Virginia,
Your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished. Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world. You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding. No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.
Alvin Plantinga defines "fideism" as "the exclusive or basic reliance upon faith alone, accompanied by a consequent disparagement of reason and utilized especially in the pursuit of philosophical or religious truth." The fideist therefore "urges reliance on faith rather than reason, in matters philosophical and religious," and therefore may go on to disparage the claims of reason.[3] The fideist seeks truth, above all: and affirms that reason cannot achieve certain kinds of truth, which must instead be accepted only by faith.[4] Plantinga's definition might be revised to say that what the fideist objects to is not so much "reason" per se — it seems excessive to call Blaise Pascal anti-rational — but evidentialism: the notion that no belief should be held unless it is supported by evidence.I wonder if this belief is widespread? I always thought that Christians wanted their religious beliefs to be rational and certainly the Intelligent Design Creationists are among those who think that God's existence has been demonstrated.
The fideist notes that religions that are founded on revelation call their faithful to believe in a transcendent deity even if believers cannot fully understand the object of their faith. Some fideists also contend that human rational faculties are themselves untrustworthy, because the entire human nature has been corrupted by sin, and as such the conclusions reached by human reason are therefore untrustworthy: the truths affirmed by divine revelation must be believed even if they find no support in human reason. Fideism, of a sort which has been called naive fideism, is frequently found in response to anti-religious arguments; the fideist resolves to hold to what has been revealed as true in his faith, in the face of contrary lines of reasoning.
Specifically, fideism teaches that rational or scientific arguments for the existence of God are fallacious and irrelevant, and have nothing to do with the truth of Christian theology.
[Hat Tip: Friendly Atheist]
The West Wing was one of my favorite TV shows during its time. Maureen Dowd thinks so too 'cause she asked its creator, Aaron Sorkin, to imagine what President Jed Bartlet might say to Barack Obama if given the chance. Her op-ed piece was published in yesterday's New York Times [Seeking a President Who Gives Goose Bumps? So’s Obama].OBAMA The problem is we can’t appear angry. Bush called us the angry left. Did you see anyone in Denver who was angry?Whoa! That doesn't sound like bipartisanship to me!
BARTLET Well ... let me think. ...We went to war against the wrong country, Osama bin Laden just celebrated his seventh anniversary of not being caught either dead or alive, my family’s less safe than it was eight years ago, we’ve lost trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, thousands of lives and we lost an entire city due to bad weather. So, you know ... I’m a little angry.
OBAMA What would you do?
BARTLET GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!
OBAMA Good to get that off your chest?Gee, I almost forgot about the lapel pins. It's how you demonstrate that you've sold out to the framers.
BARTLET Am I keeping you from something?
OBAMA Well, it’s not as if I didn’t know all of that and it took you like 20 minutes to say.
BARTLET I know, I have a problem, but admitting it is the first step.
OBAMA What’s the second step?
BARTLET I don’t care.
OBAMA So what about hope? Chuck it for outrage and put-downs?
BARTLET No. You’re elite, you can do both. Four weeks ago you had the best week of your campaign, followed — granted, inexplicably — by the worst week of your campaign. And you’re still in a statistical dead heat. You’re a 47-year-old black man with a foreign-sounding name who went to Harvard and thinks devotion to your country and lapel pins aren’t the same thing and you’re in a statistical tie with a war hero and a Cinemax heroine. To these aged eyes, Senator, that’s what progress looks like. You guys got four debates. Get out of my house and go back to work.
1. And, in Canada, Stéphane Dion really is a whole lot smarter than Stephan Harper or Jack Layton?
[Big Hat Tip to Chance and Necsssity]
The congresscritter in question being Sherwood Boehlert, who represented New York's 24th Congressional district (1983-2007), and chaired the House Science Committee (2001-2007). Boehlert offers this advice in a video called "Speaking for Science: Bringing Your Message to Policymakers," available for download from the American Chemical Society website.*As you might guess, the effective way to talk to a politician about science is to be brief and to the point and avoid all that sciency stuff that only confuses everyone. You need to stop trying to explain science to the staff member and concentrate on what's in it for the politician.
The video presents two scenarios in which a group of scientists meets with their Congressional representative (who happens to be a member of the House Science Committee, played by Boehlert). As you might guess, the idea is to contrast the effective meeting with the disastrous one.
A press release from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory promotes the work of Michael Zhang and Adrian Krainer who work with splicing factors. In a typical attempt to hype the significance of the work, the press release claims that each human gene has many different variants produced by alternative splicing [CSHL team traces extensive networks regulating alternative RNA splicing]. Biologists involved in the Human Genome Project were frankly astonished to discover that everything that makes us human is the product of a set of only 23,000 or so genes.1 That number in itself, though several times smaller than prior estimates, is not shocking; it is the relative size of other genomes that surprised scientists.This is one version of what I call The Deflated Ego Problem. The "problem" is that some people are really, really, upset about the fact that humans may only have a few thousand genes more than a fruit fly.
The common fruit fly that hovers over your ripening bananas, for instance, possesses some 14,000 genes. It's perfectly obvious that human beings are vastly more complex, biologically, than a fly. Molecular biologists have demonstrated in recent years that it is not the number of genes that is the key to complexity but rather the number and diversity of gene products that a given set of genes can instruct cells to manufacture.
Rather than a single gene ordering the production of a single kind of protein, as scientists used to assume, it turns out that individual genes can in some cases give rise to dozens or even thousands of different proteins, thanks to a phenomenon called alternative splicing.
Some people were surprised and embarrassed by the "low" number of genes in the human genome but others were pretty happy that their estimates were close to the mark [Facts and Myths Concerning the Historical Estimates of the Number of Genes in the Human Genome].
Nature News has an article on the recent conference in Altenberg, Austria that brought together 16 biologists who want to change evolutionary theory. The article by John Whitfield covers both sides of the story reasonably well [Biological theory: Postmodern evolution?].Leaving aside the troublesome adjective, what is the modernism that the Altenburg meeting is meant to move beyond — or to use Pigliucci's preferred term, 'extend'1? Between about 1920 and 1940, researchers such as the American Sewall Wright and the Englishmen Ronald Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane took Charles Darwin's ideas about natural selection and Gregor Mendel's insights into how traits pass from parents to offspring — which many biologists of the time believed antithetical — and fused them into a mathematical description of the genetic makeup of populations and how it changes. That fusion was the modern synthesis. It treats an organism's form, or phenotype, as a readout of its hereditary information, or genotype. Change is explained as one version of a gene being replaced by another. Natural selection acts by changing the frequency of genes in the next generation according to the fitness of phenotypes in this one. In this world view, the gene is a black box, its relationship to phenotype is a one-way street, and the environment, both cellular and external, is a selective filter imposed on the readout of the genes, rather than something that can influence an organism's form directly.This is a view of evolution that doesn't recognize random genetic drift as an important mechanism of evolution. Surely in 2008, a publication like Nature shouldn't be publishing the old-fashioned adaptationist view of evolution? What's wrong with adding one sentence to say that Sewall Wright also took an idea that Charles Darwin never heard of, random genetic drift, and incorporated that idea into our modern understanding of evolution so that we now recognize that random genetic drift is one of the main mechanisms of evolution?
Alex has temporarily suspended blogging on The Daily Transcript because he is Off to Toronto.
Here's a letter that Richard Dawkins sent to New Scientist [Letter: Richard Dawkins on the Royal Society rowThe Reverend Michael Reiss, the Royal Society's Director of Education, is in trouble because of his views on the teaching of creationism.I agree with Dawkins that the position taken by Michael Reiss was not "obviously silly." In fact I think it was a really good idea.
Although I disagree with him, what he actually said at the British Association is not obviously silly like creationism itself, nor is it a self-evidently inappropriate stance for the Royal Society to take.
Scientists divide into two camps over this issue: the accommodationists, who 'respect' creationists while disagreeing with them; and the rest of us, who see no reason to respect ignorance or stupidity.
The accommodationists include such godless luminaries as Eugenie Scott, whose National Center for Science Education is doing splendid work in fighting the creationist wingnuts in America. She and her fellow accommodationists bend over backwards to woo the relatively sensible minority among Christians, who accept evolution.
Get the bishops and theologians on the side of science – so the argument runs – and they'll be valuable allies against the naive creationists (who probably include the majority of Christians and certainly almost all Muslims, by the way).
No politician could deny at least the superficial plausibility of this expedient, although it is disappointing how ineffective as allies the 'sensible' minority of Christians turn out to be.
The official line of the US National Academy, the American equivalent of the Royal Society, is shamelessly accommodationist. They repeatedly plug the mantra that there is 'no conflict' between evolution and religion. Michael Reiss could argue that he is simply following the standard accommodationist line, and therefore doesn't deserve the censure now being heaped upon him.
Unfortunately for him as a would-be spokesman for the Royal Society, Michael Reiss is also an ordained minister. To call for his resignation on those grounds, as several Nobel-prize-winning Fellows are now doing, comes a little too close to a witch-hunt for my squeamish taste.
Nevertheless – it's regrettable but true – the fact that he is a priest undermines him as an effective spokesman for accommodationism: "Well, he would say that, wouldn't he!"
If the Royal Society wanted to attack creationism with all fists flying, as I would hope, an ordained priest might make a politically effective spokesman, however much we might deplore his inconsistency.
This is the role that Kenneth Miller, not a priest but a devout Christian, plays in America, where he is arguably creationism's most formidable critic. But if the Society really wants to promote the accommodationist line, a clergyman is the very last advocate they should choose.
Perhaps I was a little uncharitable to liken the appointment of a vicar as the Royal Society's Education Director to a Monty Python sketch. Nevertheless, thoughts of Trojan Horses are now disturbing many Fellows, already concerned as they are by the signals the Society recently sent out through its flirtation with the infamous Templeton Foundation.
Accommodationism is playing politics, while teetering on the brink of scientific dishonesty. I'd rather not play that kind of politics at all but, if the Royal Society is going to go down that devious road, they should at least be shrewd about it. Perhaps, rather than resign his job with the Royal Society, Professor Reiss might consider resigning his Orders?
It will be interesting to see what happens when the witch-hunters turn their attention to the leading religious spokespersons for the National Academies and NCSE. Kenneth Miller, and Francis Collins might find themselves getting fewer speaking engagements. God only knows how they will react when they learn about Francisco Ayala. Ayala is a biologist who Chaired the National Academies Committee on Revising Science and Creationism. That's the group that published the accommodationist book Science, Evolution, and Creationism, a book that promotes the irrational Doctrine of Joint Belief.When asked if religion should be removed from science courses, Ayala gave a surprising answer.Franscisco Ayala is not only a good biologist, he's also
“Religion is not science, but the fact that science is compatible with religion is an important thing to state in science classes,” Ayala said.
1. John Wilkins addresses this same letter and weighs in against the "accommodationist" charge. Unfortunately, his posting [Dawkins on the nose again] isn't as good as most of what John writes. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was under the weather when he wrote it.
The latest issue of Tangled Bank has been published on Sciene Made Cool [The Tangled Bank #114].Welcome to the #114th edition of the Tangled Bank, a carnival of science bloggers where you’re guaranteed to learn something new and exciting. We’ll start in the classroom, the “traditional” place for learning, ....
Send an email message to host@tangledbank.net if you want to submit an article to Tangled Bank. Be sure to include the words "Tangled Bank" in the subject line. Remember that this carnival only accepts one submission per week from each blogger.
"for his discovery of the nature and mode of action of the respiratory enzyme"
Otto Heinrich Warburg (1883 - 1970 ) received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his contributions to understanding cellular respiration. At the time he received the Nobel Prize, he was credited with discovering the "respiratory enzyme" and demonstrating that it required iron. The idea was that oxygen binds to iron during respiration in the same way that it binds to iron in hemoglobin. Here's how the discovery was described in the presentation speech on the Nobelprize.org website.Definite proof that he was on the track of this well-hidden secret of Nature was obtained by the use of exact measurements of combustion in living cells or, as Warburg calls it, cell respiration. The quantitatively measured variations in the process of combustion under different conditions threw light on the nature of the respiratory ferment. Its tendency to enter into compounds with substances which combine with iron showed that it is itself an iron compound, and that its effects are due to iron.We now know that this is incorrect. Warburg probably worked with cytochrome c which has a iron-containing heme group [Monday's Molecule #88] but cytochrome c does not bind oxygen. It is an intermediate in the oxidation-reduction pathway, contributing electrons to cytochrome c oxidase—the real oxygen binding enzyme. Cytochrome c oxidase does have an iron heme group that contributes to oxygen binding but copper atoms are also intimately involved.
This is a case where the Nobel Prize was awarded to the right person for the wrong reasons. Warburg made lots of contributions to biochemistry. He discovered flavin proteins and did seminal work on oxidation-reduction enzymes that use NAD+ as a cofactor. He also contributed significantly to our understanding of photosynthesis.
