My passion is based on evidence.
Don’t squander precious ignorance by researching it away.
It is the effects on the world of successful active germ-line replicators that we see as adaptations.
To try to make a man, you would have to work at your biochemical cocktail-shaker for a period so long that the entire age of the universe would seem like an eye-blink, and even then you would not succeed.
Radiation all along the larger spectrum can be unwoven in the same kind of way as the rainbow, although the particular instrument we use for the unweaving – a radio tuner instead of a prism, for instance – is different in different parts of the spectrum.
But how can there be a perversion of faith, if faith, lacking objective justification, doesn’t have any demonstrable standard to pervert.
Incidentally, I’m puzzled why, with so much oxygen about, thing didn’t burst into flames all the time. Perhaps they did.
Those people who leap from personal bafflement at a natural phenomenon straight to a hasty invocation of the supernatural are no better than the fools who see a conjuror bending a spoon and leap to the conclusion that it is ‘paranormal’.
Hijacking by pseudoscience and bad science fiction is a threat to our legitimate sense of wonder.
To regard an organism as a replicator, even an asexual organism like a female stick insect, is tantamount to a violation of the ‘central dogma’ of the non-inheritance of acquired characteristics.
A professorship of theology should have no place in our institution.
It is in the nature of scientific truths that they are waiting to be discovered, by whoever has the ability to do so. If two different people independently discover something in science, it will be the same truth. Unlike works of art, scientific truths do not change their nature in response to the individual human beings who discover them. This is both a glory, and a limitation, of science.
A stick insect looks like a replicator, in that we may lay out a sequence consisting of daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter, etc., in which each appears to be a replica of the preceding one in the series. But suppose a flaw or blemish appears somewhere in the chain, say a stick insect is unfortunate enough to lose a leg. The blemish may last for the whole of her lifetime, but it is not passed on to the next link in the chain.
In 1846, two mathematical astronomers, J. C. Adams in England and U. J. J. Leverrier in France, were independently puzzled by a discrepancy between the actual position of the planet Uranus and where it theoretically should have been. Both calculated that the perturbation could have been caused by the gravity of an invisible planet of a particular mass in a particular place. The German astronomer J. G. Galle duly pointed his telescope in the right direction and discovered Neptune.
In other words, when their loyalty to Judaism was removed from the calculation, the majority of the children agreed with the moral judgements that most modern humans would share. Joshua’s action was a deed of barbaric genocide. But it all looks different from a religious point of view. And the difference starts early in life. It was religion that made the difference between children condemning genocide and condoning it. In.
You go after crude, rabble-rousing chancers like Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, rather than sophisticated theologians like Tillich or Bonhoeffer who teach the sort of religion I believe in.
The wolfish horror of the worst scriptural verses is cloaked under various forms of sheep’s clothing: the words are not meant to be taken literally, they are ‘metaphorical’.
The flagellar motor of bacteria is a prodigy of human nature. It drives the only known example outside of human technology of a freely rotating axle.
Jesus was a loyal Jew. It was Paul who invented the idea of taking the Jewish God to the Gentiles. Hartung puts it more bluntly than I dare: ‘Jesus would have turned over in his grave if he had known that Paul would be taking his plan to the pigs.’ Hartung.
However small the minority of planets with just the right conditions for life may be, we necessarily have to be on one of that minority, because here we are thinking about it.