Group items tagged

religious zealots who have been poisoning the minds of the young

Gnu Atheists are so dang angry. Damned right we are. The real question is why everyone else isn't.

Idiot America

The sea our country is drowning in is a raging religiosity, wave after wave of ignorant arguments and ideological absurdities pushed by tired dogma and fervent and frustrated fanatics.

The solution, the only longterm solution, is the sanity of secularism.

pseudoscientific BS like intelligent design

disease

if you're one of those people trying to defend superstition and quivering in fear at the idea of taking on a majority that believes in foolishness, urging us to continue slapping bandages on the blight of faith, well then, you're part of the problem and we'll probably do something utterly dreadful, like be rude to you or write some cutting sarcastic essay to mock your position. That is our métier, after all.

the Gnu Atheists have values, too, and premiere among them is truth. And that makes us uncivil and rude, because we challenge the truth of religion.

Evolution is a real, and it is a process built on raw chance driven by the brutal engines of selection, and there is no sign of a loving, personal god, but only billions of years of pitiless winnowing without any direction other than short-term survival and reproduction. It's not pretty, it's not consoling, it doesn't sanctify virginity, or tell you that god really loves your foreskin, but it's got one soaring virtue that trumps all the others: it's true.

So, scientists have an incentive to cover up

the mechanism Darwin discovered for building adaptations is the only game in town. Any explanation of the very existence of even the slightest adaptation must be Darwinian. 

Ever since Newton physics has ruled out purposes in the physical realm. If the physical facts fix all the facts, however, then in doing so, it rules out purposes altogether, in biology, in human affairs, and in human thought-processes.

The fundamental laws of nature are mostly timeless mathematical truths that work just as well backwards as forward, and in which purposes have no role.

the process that Darwin discovered–random, or rather blind variation, and natural selection, or rather passive environmental filtration–does all the work of explaining the means/ends economy of biological nature that shouts out ‘purpose’ or ‘design’ at us. What Darwin showed was that all of the beautiful suitability of living things to their environment, every case of fit between organism and niche, and all of the intricate meshing of parts into wholes, is just the result of blind causal processes. It’s all just the foresightless play of fermions and bosons producing, in us conspiracy-theorists, the illusion of purpose.

When it comes to life, natural selection, it turns out, is the only game in town.

One source of meaning on which many have relied is the intrinsic value, in particular the moral value, of human life. People have also sought moral rules, codes, principles which are supposed to distinguish us from merely biological critters whose lives lack (as much) meaning or value (as ours). Besides morality as a source of meaning, value, or purpose, people have looked to consciousness, introspection, self-knowledge as a source of insight into what makes us more than the merely physical facts about us. Scientism must reject all of these straws that people have grasped, and it’s not hard to show why. Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality.

Just because there is strong selection for a moral norm is no reason to think it right. Think of the adaptational benefits of racist, xenophobic or patriarchal norms. You can’t justify morality by showing its Darwinian pedigree.

The process of natural selection is not in general good at filtering for true beliefs, only for ones hitherto convenient for our lines of descent.

we can’t invest our moral core with more meaning than this: it was a convenience, not for us as individuals, but for our genes. There is no meaning to be found in that conclusion.

In some cases, what appears to be a nontranslated pseudogene can, in fact, code for truncated proteins (Kandouz et al. 2004; Zhang et al. 2006). Nevertheless, the evidence that some pseudogenes can exert regulatory effects on their protein-coding cousins is mounting.

For the large part, pseudogenes have been overlooked in the quest to understand the biology of health and disease, to the extent that pseudogene probes are often absent from commercially available microarrays. As evidence emerges that pseudogenes are deregulated in disease, and indeed that their deregulation can contribute to diseases such as diabetes and cancer, the prevalent attitude that they are nonfunctional relics is slowly changing.