Bachmann is a really scary person

[snousle]

This article from the New Yorker is one of the more alarming things I've read lately.

Here is a quote from a book that was on "Michele’s Must Read List":

Slavery, as it operated in the pervasively Christian society which was the old South, was not an adversarial relationship founded upon racial animosity. In fact, it bred on the whole, not contempt, but, over time, mutual respect. This produced a mutual esteem of the sort that always results when men give themselves to a common cause. The credit for this startling reality must go to the Christian faith. . . . The unity and companionship that existed between the races in the South prior to the war was the fruit of a common faith.

Of course, now she's trying to bury her specific, deliberate endorsements of several batshit-crazy Christian dominionists, and would not talk to the author about them. The idea that she is a serious contender for the presidency is just incredible.

Comments

[equinas.livejournal.com]

I'm not out of my league. I may not be a geneticist but I do have 20 years in medical science. I have read most of Dawkins' books. I find his "research" to be tainted by his agenda. Even uninvolved researchers have commented on such. Case in point: I attended a physics (which I suck at but find fascinating) symposium in Cambridge in '04 where Stephen Hawking was speaking. At the end, someone asked Hawking if he believed in God (he gets that a lot), and brought up Dawkins. I heard Hawking say with his own mouth (well, machine) that although he tended to leave such matters to the life scientists, he believed that Dawkins had to much of "himself" in his work and lacked objectivity. I've read comments by Martin Rees (an agnostic physicist) saying much the same.

Dawkins has this campaign against religion that overshadows his work. He insists that religion and science are mortal enemies. On the other hand, Francis Collins (who even Dawkins lists as one of the greatest scientific minds on the planet) has made it his mission to prove not that there is a creator, but that religion and science are not mutually exclusive. While Dawkins' closest background to genetics is animal behavior and zoology, Collins (as I'm sure you well know) is an MD with a phD in chemistry and a fellowship in human genetics. While Dawkins gives no consideration to the possibility of creationism and seems to think that all creationists disbelieve in evolution, Collins was an atheist who applied scientific methodology to explore his atheism and ended up becoming a believer in both evolution and creation. Collins handily refuted Dawkins at almost every turn in their debate.

Frankly I'm surprised that someone with as much background in genetics as you, would endorse Dawkins' work when it is so blatantly subjective, over Collins who is the true geneticist.

(Sorry for the late response; the net is extremely unreliable where I am at.)

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Dawkins has this campaign against religion that overshadows his work.

Sort of like how Einstein had this hair that overshadowed his contributions to physics? True, but irrelevant. We are reading what might as well be different authors - The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype don't even mention religion, and I was wholly unaware of his advocacy for atheism until recently. I consider this aspect of his career to be uninteresting, and haven't paid any attention to it; his most important scientific contributions are now over 30 years old and IMHO his present-day obsession with atheism has nothing to do with it.

As far as his scientific writing goes, one might say that he is long on philosophy and short on theory, but philosophy is far from irrelevant; without establishing a useful paradigm, you can't even formulate a hypothesis. His success in establishing the gene, instead of the organism, as the most relevant unit of selection created a quiet revolution in biology that is hard to appreciate given the obvious-in-retrospect nature of his observations. On a personal level, reading his beautifully clear analysis of what it means for a trait to "be genetic" influenced everything I did afterwards. You may not consider him the most important scientist in history, but to say he has "no real scientific knowledge at all" is ridiculous.

On the other hand, Francis Collins... has made it his mission to prove not that there is a creator, but that religion and science are not mutually exclusive.

Well, maybe not exclusive with his religion, which involves a remarkably passive god who yields at every turn to mainstream science. With religion like that, who needs atheism? To be clear: he explicitly rejects young-earth creationism as well as "intelligent design". His god seems easy to ignore, which is fine by me, but it is a sign of real desperation that creationists would find comfort in his words.

In the meanwhile, we have ~50% of the United States believing that the earth is less than 10,000 years old and that humans and animals are not descended from common ancestors. Actual creationists want to indoctrinate schoolchildren with this philosophy to the greatest extent they can, while undermining science at every opportunity. This is a very real and very urgent conflict that is being played out every single day. And that, in my mind, is what the conflict between science and religion is about - not between science and a soft-pedaled religion that poses no threat to the materialist worldview, but between science and a vicious, authoritarian, fundamentalist ideology that encompasses the majority of American Christians and arguably drives political conflict in many other areas as well.

FWIW, Collins is a former collaborator, and I met him in person several times. When he was head of NHGRI, I was part of the startup team at Perlegen Sciences, and the bulk of the data that went into his HapMap project was created using the software I created at Affymetrix and Perlegen. This also resulted in one of my more heavily cited publications, in which I produced one of the first large-scale analyses of human haplotype structure. So yeah, I know who he is. My take? I agree with the comment on his Wikipedia page that he is a "skilled administrator". Which is a valuable thing, to be sure, but there is no way I would call him a "true geneticist" under any definition that excludes Dawkins.

[equinas.livejournal.com]

Wow, your study has been cited a LOT! I'm not out of my league when it comes to genetics, but you're definitely out of MY league. I'm not sure exactly what you do or what degree(s) you have, but it's obviously your bag.

I'm going to have to continue to disagree with you, though, about Dawkins vs. Collins. To my admittedly non-expert eye, Collins has far more true genetic science behind his research and his claims. Perhaps I was hasty calling Dawkins a "fool" because I don't like him, obviously he's intelligent, but I don't consider all his findings suspect because of his reasons. Sure, one formulates a theory and then tries to prove it, but he's so adamant that he's unwilling to consider scientific evidence to the contrary. Even though it's not the point of his book, Collins does list strong genetic evidence of an intelligent design (lower case). Yes, he's more of a deist, like myself (and it really annoys me when people who are so hateful to fundamentalist Christians then turn right around and call the non-militants "weak"). The creator could be God, a Spaghetti Monster, or an alien high-school biology student, we don't know. But I prefer Collins approach to applying scientific processes to confirm or change one's belief system. More religious folk should do this.

And you and I need to talk more in real time. I find you very fascinating.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

My degree is in engineering physics, the bioinformatics is essentially self-taught. I was fortunate to have a mentor at Stanford that pointed me in all the right directions. My resume is plagued by second-authorship, since you pretty much have to have a Ph.D. to be a principal investigator, but it's not like I want to spend the rest of my life applying for grants anyway. :-P Lately I haven't been writing papers at all; I now consult for a drug discovery company and most of the work has been proprietary.

It's worth noting that a lot of scientists go a little batty when they retire. The ones that get Nobel prizes seem particularly susceptible. I would not be surprised if Dawkins had gone slightly past cranky in the past few years.

If there is anyone that is worth reading concerning evidence for supernatural influence in the world then it is surely Collins, I will give it a look. I am not actually allergic to the idea but I get real testy when an author dismisses, or is not even aware of, what science actually says. The whole god-of-the-gaps argument has a bad habit of imagining gaps that don't exist. I would be 100% confident that he would not casually ignore evidence in the way the young-earth creationists do.

Are you able to IRC from Afghanistan?

[jstregyr.livejournal.com]

snousle writes: "... a lot of scientists go a little batty when they retire... I would not be surprised if Dawkins had gone slightly past cranky in the past few years."

Well, Dawkins did marry a Time Lord (er, Time Lady)...

And - no - Dawkins did not marry a South Park school teacher.

[equinas.livejournal.com]

Collins addresses the God-of-the-gaps argument and lays out the scientific reasons why he believes it is both inadequate and unnecessary. "The Language of God" is this book I would recommend you starting with. I'll go back and read some earlier Dawkins before the atheism fixation.

I can IRC from Afghanistan securely (via SSH) if we can sync up our schedules. I'm 8.5 hours ahead of you, I think.