I LIKE WENDEE

Wendee Holtcamp, that is. She's a professional science writer, a Ph.D candidate, the author of 'The Fish Wars' (a must-read for partisans in the evo/creo wars, I think) and she has a blog, here.

Here Wendee tries to see the forest for the trees where fundamentalism and faith are concerned. Check it out!

PLEASE JUNK THIS ARGUMENT

I'm warming up for my exchange with Vox Day by trading thoughts with some of his readership, and one of them repeated a trope that I hear a lot from people who profess to be interested in defending the integrity of science. They are concerned that 'evolutionary bias' may be preventing good science from being done: that is, that a current model for this or that phenomena, derived from evolutionary theory, is not going to be challenged even if false, etc.

That raises a number of points which we could debate another day: whether science is wedded to philosophical naturalism, as Philip Johnson has made a career of asserting, or the proper role of existing paradigms in guiding research programs, or whether astronomers have 'gravitational bias.' All interesting, but what I want to focus on is the 'junk DNA' version of this hypothesis. According to some, the suggestion that non-coding DNA was 'junk' was quickly embraced by scientists eager to deny design, and this bias harmed the practice of science.

Well. Larry Moran doesn't think much of this argument, and neither do I, but I actually had to research this for all of 15 minutes to place this it in context, and provide the facts needed for my reply, a truncated version of which follows:

" Introns were discovered by Sharp and Roberts's group at MIT in 1977, for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize (1993).

In 1978, Gilbert and others began interpreting this finding as implying that non-coding DNA is vestigial 'junk' with no function. The term 'junk DNA' is associated with two influential papers (Doolittle and Sapienza, Orgel and Crick) which appeared in Nature in 1980. The discussion of function in these papers was speculative, nuanced and there was a call for more research. These facts are often omitted by ID creationists eager to impute 'evolutionary bias.'

(T. Ryan Gregory is, if anything, even more alarmed at the way these ideas have been reported versus to how they were presented in the literature. He has some informative comments here, along with extensive quotes from the above papers demonstrating that they never ruled out functional explanations for non-coding DNA out of deference to evolution.)

That was less than 30 years ago. The necessary tools for testing these claims (PCR, DNA fingerprinting, etc.) did not exist at the time the Nature papers were published and they did not become widely available until the early 1990's.

Studies were published as early as 1992 that showed preferential sorting of 'junk DNA' within the genomes, and actual evidence of function for introns was published by 1994. By 2003, writing in Scientific American, W. Wayt Gibbs remarks, paraphrasing John Mattick, that the failure to recognize the importance of introns “may well go down as one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology.”

Yeah, well, it was a "mistake" that was corrected by the scientific community within less than two decades once the tools were developed to test the claim. Contrast that with the two millenia that Aristotelian essentialism hindered the emergence of population thinking in biology, or the long constraint that the church-endorsed Ptolemaic model held in astronomy.

I'm going to let Professor Moran have the last word, because he's so much more indignant than I am. Just remember, kids, that while individual scientists as a whole may be blinded to this or that piece of evidence (we're all human), the scientific community as a whole is always shining lights in dark holes, gradually bringing more and more of the natural world into sharper focus. Compared to the creationists, we are the one-eyed men, and that makes us kings.

TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT

We're Number 1!

The San Joaquin Valley, that is, specifically the town of Arvin. This story, forwarded to me by my colleague Sean Boyd, isn't exactly news to those of us who live here.

When I came to Fresno County in 1980, you could see the mountains along its eastern perimeter virtually every day that was bright and sunny. Nowadays, that only happens in the 24 hours immediately following significant amounts of rain. Our air quality is abysmal, and unlikely to improve for decades. In fact, in Arvin's case, it's the nation's smoggiest, and we're too close for comfort.

Anyway, to provide some context for y'all who choose to read this story, I've made the graphic you see here. The green box is a blow-up of that region of Kern County and the red square in the center of the map is the approximate location of

Two personal anecdotes bear repeating here:

1) Sean Boyd, who worked in our region for over 25 years as a radio and TV weatherman, has the unusual distinction of being fired for (no lie) refusing to cook his weather forecasts to suit the political agenda of his bosses, which you can read about here;

2) My mother and I once spent a miserable day in retrieving my car (which had broken down on the main highway) only for hers to break down as well, with both vehicles on the side of the road. (Again, the map provides context) The Highway Patrol summoned the guy who owned the only towing business within an hour's drive, and he drove about 20 minutes to meet us and our two broken-down vehicles. He towed us to Arvin, where the cars were worked on by an ingenious (but almost certainly undocumented) Hispanic who did not speak English on a property owned by the tow truck guy---who was also the town's mayor and school superintendent. Let's just say they had us where they wanted us, and made us an offer to fix the cars that my mother couldn't refuse. Poor Mom. First, she got me for a son, and then this.