Quintessence of Dust explores science, society, and human nature, focusing on genetics, development, evolution, neuroscience, systems biology, and topics related to scientific literacy. I occasionally discuss intelligent design, creationism, science denial, and other political/social influences on scientific literacy. Additional topics: philosophy, baseball, scientific culture, and Shakespeare. My main theme is scientific explanation.

Stephen Matheson

My chapter-by-chapter commentary on Signature in the Cell will resume shortly. But I can't resist writing a little about someone I know who did something extraordinary. Here's the short version.

A quick note about a hero

1. Get your genome sequenced for $48,000. I would so do this. In the meantime, we bought the Matheson family DNA test for my dad for Father's Day. I'm following this series at Siris: Philosophical Sentences explained. You know the old chestnuts: Cogito ergo sum, God is dead, virtue is its own reward, cleanliness is next to godliness... heh. Brandon tells us where they came from and a little about them.

Weekly sampler 24

My foray into the land of Intelligent Design partisans last month was both interesting and frustrating. I was able to explain a little of why I will never embrace the sad, sick movement, and I learned a little more about what's under the hood of that wrecked vehicle.

Why one should wash thoroughly after visiting Uncommon Descent

This is a continuation of the exchange from two weeks ago. (I've been re-posting my contributions here for the benefit of those who (like me) don't read Uncommon Descent.

Uncommon Descent conversation, part 6

So Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute, a founder of the ID movement, wrote a book called Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. It came out last summer, and I ignored it. I ignored it because it didn't seem interesting or important or new, and there's always something interesting and important and new to read. (I recently finished The Road.

Signature in the Cell: beginning the review

About a week and a half ago, I was infected with an evolving blog meme, and I think the only way to get better is to pass it on. Brian over at Laelaps tagged me; maybe he's annoyed about my suggestion to his profs that they assign him more homework, or maybe he's indignant at my mention of the RU Screw. I know he wants to be a transitional fossil, but I doubt he wants to be an evolutionary dead-end, so I'll help him out just this once.

PZ's mutating meme

It's exciting to live in the era of evolutionary genomics, when new genomes are being published approximately once a week, and the light of genomic analysis is being trained on more and more branches of the tree of life.

Wait...did you say "eldritch?"

Can you tell which of the authors quoted above won a Pulitzer? Heh. Back to the big lie about "junk DNA" as told by anti-evolution propagandists. The first theme in this cesspool of creationist folk science, as I described in the first installment of this series on "junk DNA", is this: that "junk DNA" is functional and therefore that evolutionary claims regarding its origin are mistaken.

Talking trash about "junk DNA": lies about "function" (part II)

I've mentioned before that we've had an intelligent design proponent (code named Timaeus) as an official guest on the ASA email list. The discussion has been mostly useful. One thing that became clear early on was the fact that Timaeus is not a scientist and has not read much science outside of the works of ID defenders.

Critiquing Nature's Destiny by Michael Denton, Part I

So there hasn't been a post on Quintessence of Dust in three months. Here are some reasons for this. We're in the midst of a distracting crisis at Calvin College right now. I won't talk about it here, but it's very serious and has already affected my relationship with the college. I recently completed a major writing project, a book that I coauthored with a colleague at Calvin. Not much else to say about that at this point.

Resurrection

Recently I was reading a superb review article [doi] on the subject of a famous and important cellular signaling pathway called the Notch pathway.

Deep homology and design: a new series

It is of course a cliche to state that eukaryotic cells (i.e., cells that are not bacteria) are complex. In the case of an animal, tens of thousands of proteins engage in fantastically elaborate interactions that somehow coax a single cell into generating a unique and magnificent organism.

Evolution cheats, or how to get an old enzyme to do new tricks

I've reviewed a few books over the years here at

 Quintessence of Dust

, but

 From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution

by Simon Conway Morris was the first book I blogged through that I was genuinely excited about reading.

Beshrew my heart but I pity the man. Final reflections on From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds by Simon Conway Morris

Dear Steve:  It was good to meet you last month at Biola.

An open letter to Stephen Meyer

There's not much point in "reviewing" a prologue, so let's start instead with some impressions gleaned from reading the prologue and the first chapter while leafing through the rest of the book. This is clearly a pop-science book and not a serious work of scholarship. That's not an insult, just an observation.  Continue reading...

Signature in the Cell: preliminary observations and prologue

What kind of universe should one expect to see, as a Christian, or as an atheist, or whatever? Is design (conveniently defined by fellows of the Discovery Institute) something that a Christian should expect to see? That's the question I ask over at Clashing Culture, reflecting on some of the weird theological claims of some ID proponents (and of Richard Dawkins). Wander over and weigh in.

Should we expect design?

A few interesting and/or important tidbits for Monday. Brian at Laelaps provides a list of some very useful books available electronically for free. Authors include slouches like Cuvier, Lyell and Huxley. PZ Myers has an excellent new column up at SEED Magazine, discussing the pufferfish genome and referring to Ryan Gregory's excellent work.

Weekly sampler 19

The wing of a bat is an amazing thing. It's not just a wing; it's clearly a modified mammalian limb. A bat looks like a lot like a rodent with really long, webbed fingers on elongated arms. Image from Animal Diversity Web at the University of Michigan.

How the bat got its wing

The next Tangled Bank science blog carnival will be here at Quintessence of Dust on Wednesday. Send me your submissions! The previous edition included articles on cooking &amp; evolution, shower temperatures, dental plaque, and plant identification, all with a theme of keeping warm.

Call for submissions: Tangled Bank #98

When I was in grad school, some of us figured out a basic rule of thumb regarding the titles of scientific research papers: if the title is in the form of a question, the answer is almost always "no." Here, I'll review a journal article with a question for a title, and its answer appears to be the same as the answer to the question that forms the title of this blog entry.

Do ID theorists generate data?

UPDATE: answers posted at the end. Which of these plant specimens doesn't belong? (Images will be properly credited in a forthcoming article which will explain why they're so interesting.)  The images are all the same magnification, but have been colorized so that the color won't give you any clues. Focus on the structure of each specimen, and pick one that doesn't belong with the others.

Pop quiz!  Put your browsers away.

If you have only read the more superficial descriptions of intelligent design theory, and specifically the descriptions of irreducible complexity, you might (reasonably) conclude that Michael Behe and other devotees of ID have claimed that any precise interaction between two biological components (two parts of a flagellum, two enzymes in the blood clotting cascade, or a hormone and its receptor) cannot arise through standard Darwinian evolution.

How to evolve a new protein in (about) 8 easy steps

As a Christian biologist (and now Christian biologist blogger), one of my goals is to help Christians understand biology. And right now, that means I need to focus on helping Christians see the worthlessness of most of the ideas in the Intelligent Design movement, and especially to help Christians see how embracing ID is both theologically and intellectually unwise. Well, John Farrell is a an ally, and he's a great read.

In rage deaf as the sea, hasty as fire.

One of the most effective metaphors for evolutionary change is the image of an exploration of a space, perhaps a map that shows "fitness peaks" or, better, a library of possibilities. The philosopher Daniel Dennett, writing in

 Darwin's Dangerous Idea

, suggested The Library of Mendel as a way of thinking about the total set of possible gene sequences.

The library of possible proteins is beyond vast. Does this cause us to view evolution as harder than it is?

In the cartoon version of evolution that is often employed by critics of the theory, a new protein (B) can arise from an ancestral version (A) by stepwise evolution only if each of the intermediates between A and B are functional in some way (or at least not harmful). This sounds reasonable enough, and it's a good starting point for basic evolutionary reasoning.

Molecular evolution: improve a protein by weakening it

Given that disputes over the existence and meaning of the phylotypic stage and the hourglass model have simmered in various forms for a century and a half, the remarkable correspondence between the hourglass model and gene expression divergence discovered by Kalinka and Varga and colleagues would be big news all by itself. But amazingly, that issue of

 Nature

included two distinct reports on the underpinnings of the phylotypic stage.

It's just a stage. A phylotypic stage. Part III: Fish and more

The controversy about the existence of the phylotypic stage is more than some bickering about whether one blobby, slimy fish-thing looks more like a Roswell alien than another one does. It's about whether the phylotypic stage means something, whether it tells us something important about development and how developmental changes contribute to evolution.

It's just a stage. A phylotypic stage. Part II: The flies

Here are some further observations on the Stephen Meyer book-signing appearance. Part I dealt with Meyer's talk and the other festivities. Here I'll describe the last third of the event, in which Art Hunt and I (the "powerful group of credentialed critics") spent a short time questioning Meyer.  Continue reading...

Bread and circus: Signature in the Cell at Biola (Part II)

Go to An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution to see a two-part series I contributed, on evolution and creation at Calvin. The first part, posted on Monday, describes the intense controversy of the 1980's and 1990's at Calvin (and in the Christian Reformed Church). The second part went up today, and contains my musings on the current climate.

Evolution and creation at Calvin College

Shall we play a game? Recall Hugh Ross' fictional tale about the "team of physicists" that remade molecular genetics. Ross claimed, falsely, that:  The biological truth is the opposite: amount of DNA, "junk" or otherwise, is so uncorrelated with other aspects of biology that the situation was termed a paradox when it was first uncovered. Well...let's see the paradox in living color.

Weekly sampler 12

A few days ago I wrote about scientific thinking as an antidote to intuition. Not just an alternative to it, but something like the opposite of intuition. The intentional, energy-consuming move to a systematic deliberative mode of thought is utterly different from the easy and instantaneous nature of intuition.

Science, intuition and the "strange inversion of reasoning"

Okay, wow, that was a long hiatus. I can explain, really I can. Here's a report on my activities in the last six weeks. I wandered into Telic Thoughts in search of intelligent intelligent design advocates.

And we're back!

It's snowing again. Cycling seems like a childhood memory. You'd think this would give me more opportunities to work on blog posts. Gah.  My friends and colleagues, Debbie and Loren Haarsma, were the subject of a nice local news story, focusing on their work as scientists and Christians. They have a superb new book out, which I've promised to review here sometime soon.  Is evolution too difficult or complicated for secondary students to grasp?

Weekly sampler 8

I recently recommended a very nice new blog by Mike Beidler called The Creation of an Evolutionist. It's subtitled "My journey from young earth creationism to evolutionary creationism," and it's downright fun to read. Mike is engaging and bright. He writes with enthusiasm and joy, so it's hard to imagine that his journey might have been difficult in places. But I'm sure it was.

Crossing the divide

So is evolution a weapon of unbelief, empowering the dark forces of atheism in their assault on Christendom by air, land and sea? It's sure easy to hear the dogs of war howling in the background of the weird debate over whether the NCSE is biased toward belief. I don't have time to post my thoughts on that debate right now.

Stealing it back

Now this is interesting. I can think of plenty of interesting Shakespearean scenes involving conflict and disputation. [Takes a bow] But I couldn't recall the word 'disagree' anywhere in, say, Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, or even Macbeth.

When it's not just a disagreement

Interestingly, Meyer's book is getting a lot of attention right now. At the Jesus Creed, the excellent RJS is also blogging through the book. At Biologos, a guest piece by Francisco Ayala focuses mostly on theological issues. (I like Ayala a lot. I dislike his post a lot.) The ASA has finally decided to establish some blogs, one of which will host discussions of books. The first book under consideration is Signature in the Cell.

Signature in the Cell: other reviews

There's usually no point in piling on when the minions of the ID movement get their just deserts after some typically brainless culture-war test launch. Consider the responses (by, most notably, Ian Musgrave at the Panda's Thumb) to the most recent rendition of the ID movement's hilariously idiotic fixation on a particular computer program written by Richard Dawkins. It seems there is little to add.

Weasels, clouds and biomorphs, part I

I still owe you a summary of Howard Van Till's address at the Grand Dialogue and something about Richard Colling's talk at Calvin. Plus I'm barely halfway through the "junk DNA" series, and I haven't gotten to the part where I show you just how irresponsible Hugh Ross and Reasons to Believe really are. Sorry about that;

Weekly sampler 7

About 2 months ago, I finished a series on Michael Behe's latest book, The Edge of Evolution. I concluded that it was a terrible book, displaying significant errors of both fact and judgment. The book's main argument is a population genetics argument, and Behe seems to have little knowledge or understanding of that difficult subject.

Why I'm not a Behe fan: conclusion and a challenge

Like every other scientist I know, I'm a big believer in peer review. The self-checking mechanism that peer review represents is surely one big reason for the success of science. Accountability, error checking, "wisdom in many counselors," and enforcement of community standards -- those are some ways of expressing the benefits of peer review.

Peer review of my blog...let's see Behe try this.

Genetic hitchhiking is thought to be an inevitable result of strong positive selection in a population. The basic idea is that if a particular gene is strongly selected for (as opposed to selected against), then the chunk of the genome that carries that gene will become very common in the population.

Harmful genes, and sneaky, too: Genetic hitchhiking in the human genome

The next post will discuss recent evidence for genetic hitchhiking in humans. So, what do we mean when we say that genes can hitchhike? To make sense of this phenomenon, we first need to review chromosomes and sexual reproduction. Most people know that sexual reproduction creates offspring that are genetically distinct from both of the their parents.

Genetic hitchhiking in English

I think I stopped having this dream sometime when I was a postdoc. Or maybe I didn't shake free till I got a real job... Mine was always a language class, so everyone was jabbering away in Spanish or something, just to magnify the horror.

Do you ever have this nightmare?

Michael Behe's name has come up around here a lot lately. During the lovefest over on Uncommon Descent, they mentioned him both as a scientist and as a Martyr, and here on QoD, a regular commenter named Bilbo has mentioned Behe a few times, noting that he finds Behe's argument in The Edge of Evolution compelling.

Why I'm not a Behe fan, Part I

I would bet that many of you have explored Thomas Robey's excellent blog, Hope for Pandora, focused on medicine, science and religion.

Clashing Culture: an interesting new conversation

1. A nice new Tangled Bank went up yesterday at The Beagle Project Blog, which is a cool site worth visiting at other times, too. Last week saw the unveiling of the Evangelical Manifesto, "an open declaration of who Evangelicals are and what they stand for," which seeks "to rally and to call for reform." The document has sparked some pretty intense discussion among Christians I know.

Weekly sampler 18

Quiz 2. (Directions, and rationale, can be found in a previous post.) Ready? Which organism has the larger genome? This one? Or this one? 1  2  3  Which of these organisms displays the greatest "degree of advancement"? Which would require the most "information" to build and maintain? What predictions would design theorists such as William Dembski and Hugh Ross offer us in this exercise? Think, people.

Quiz 2 on genome size.  How's it going so far?

Mendel's Garden is a genetics blog carnival overseen by Rich over at evolgen. The new edition is up at Another Blasted Weblog and there's some excellent stuff in there, including some very Mendelian tidbits. Next month's edition will be right here at Quintessence of Dust.

Mendel's Garden #27

At about the same time that I posted on Tony Campolo's flawed piece on Darwin and racism, Christopher Heard posted a vastly better analysis – "Campolo gets Darwin all wrong" – on Higgaion. Required reading. There may be a quiz.

More on Campolo, Darwin, and Hitler

Well, wow, for the second year now one of my posts has been selected for inclusion in the science blogging anthology, The Open Laboratory. Last year it was the teosinte review; this year the honor goes to the post on Darwin's tomatoes. This year's anthology includes 50 blog posts on various scientific topics, and it looks like an excellent collection.

Quintessence of Dust anthologized again

One of my main goals in this blog is to help non-scientists (Christian readers in particular) understand science and God's world, by reviewing and explaining recently-published scientific research.

Blogging on peer-reviewed research

An example of purely naturalistic explanation

Well, it's August 3, 2007, and I'm setting up my blog. It's called Quintessence of Dust, and it will deal with issues of science and Christian faith, focusing on genetics, development, evolution, neuroscience and topics related. I'll regularly address intelligent design and creationism, among other scientific issues that attract the attention of evangelical Christians. My main theme will be scientific explanation.

Kicking off my blog

It's early January 2023, a little before sunset in Tucson. Live image below, showing the glorious Santa Catalina mountains (the snow on the upper reaches is more apparent earlier in the day) and my dinner preparations (shrimp and veggies on the grill). I've decided to start writing here at

 Quintessence of Dust

, after another long hiatus. Here are some of my reasons.

Quintessence of Dust 2023 restart: the why

As I work on a book that will claim that evolution is easy, I have a parallel task of exploring the reasons we sense that it is hard or even impossible. Some of those influences are the result of efforts by religions to maintain dependence on supernaturalism or to defend ancient sacred writings. Some are the result of antipathy to science itself, framed in terms of culture war.

Scientific thinking as the antidote to intuition

Evolution is easier than we think, and one great way to see why is to look at what we know about protein evolution. Proteins have been evolving on our planet for about 4 billion years. Their appearance almost certainly precedes the beginning of life itself. We still don't know how the whole thing got off the ground, but once the stage was set (in living cells), evolution began exploring Protein Space.

Protein Space and the Protein Universe: Introduction

'Genome' is now a pretty standard word in our social vocabulary.

The known unknowns of biology: welcome to the unknome

This blog's name captures my longstanding interest in human nature: humans are apes, and animals, and yet somehow able to create music and gods, and sometimes plays like

 Hamlet

. But what's that strange word at the beginning, 'quintessence'? Here's the context from

 Hamlet

: The word's history suggests that Shakespeare was (as usual) playing games with words and his audience (all quotes from the OED): So, it seems Hamlet is

Thoughts on quintessence, mutation, and evolution

Let's think of places on Earth where scientists have done great big natural "experiments" on evolution. Looking east from near the top of Mount Lemmon, January 2021  Here are some that ought to come to mind (in no particular order other than the first):  1. The Galapagos Islands, with their famous finches and their less-famous tomatoes and all their otherworldly animals, probably belong at the top of the list.

Sky Islands: one of Earth's great evolution laboratories

I do apologize for this dull cliche, but I know I'm right about this: change is hard. I don't mean that it's hard to adapt after someone or something forces a change on you. That's true too, but it's not my topic here. I'm talking about this: you want to change, or you need to change, or both. You know what the change has to be. Maybe you know what the first step has to be. It's change, and it's hard.

Change is hard. Evolution is Easy. Episode 1 of many.

What is a library? If you ask a biologist (especially a molecular biologist) this question, they are likely to ask for clarification. In their work, they are likely to make regular use of two very different kinds of libraries. The first is the kind that we've had for millenia: a collection of books, journals, and media that is

 ordered and curated

by people. These are the OG libraries, with 'book' at the very root of the word.

Contemplating libraries in biology. Not that kind. Not that one either.

March of 2020 seems a very long time ago. The coronavirus pandemic was roaring to life in the US, and it had arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I lived and worked. I was leading an international team of editors, half of whom worked in the Cell Press office in Cambridge near the MIT campus. That month, the goal was to flatten the curve, so that our great hospitals and their heroic staffs would not be overwhelmed by COVID patients.

An extrovert's response to the nightmare of remote work

The messy smelly death of social media is causing a few meaningful losses — most notably damage to or destruction of some online communities that really were valuable. There are some things to lament. Black Twitter, for example, was and is a vibrant and important community.

A blogging festival! I'm in for Blaugust 2023

One of the most interesting books I've read in the last few years was

 The Gene's-Eye View of Evolution

by J. Arvid Ågren. The author explains the gene's-eye view both scientifically and historically, and I hope to write about the book sometime soon. But for now there's one point he makes that I found fascinating.

Design without a designer: the "British tendency" and introduction

One motivation for relaunching

 Quintessence of Dust

was my desire to write about things I'm reading, whether books or articles. So here is this month's entry in my new series,

 What I'm reading

, posted at the start of every month.

 Fiction


 Hester

by Laurie Lico Albanese

What I'm reading in August

I've been writing and thinking about design in biology since I started

 Quintessence of Dust

. I want to write and think about it a lot more, so in my last post I introduced my view of the concept and pointed ahead to this post, which consists of edited excerpts from some conversations at a discussion forum at the Peaceful Science site. You will find links to those conversations in the previous post.

Design without a designer: explaining and answering some questions

Full series on

 From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution

by Simon Conway Morris.

Reviewing From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds by Simon Conway Morris: Full series

The concept of randomness is caught up in evolution, in two broad ways. The first and most famous aspect is the oft-misunderstood randomness of mutation. The second aspect is the role of chance in the trajectory of evolution. It is this question—is evolution predictable, or is it a random "drunkard's walk"—that Conway Morris tackles in the second chapter of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution.

Confusion and convergence, but no "myth of randomness." Chapter 2 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

It's one of the most famous misquoted lines in the English language, spoken by Lady Gertrude (Hamlet's mom) during the intense scene featuring a play ("The Mousetrap" aka The Murder of Gonzago) within a play, intended by Hamlet to be "the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King." The character in "The Mousetrap" has delivered some sappy lines about commitment and widowhood, designed to flush out the King and Gertrude.

The author doth protest too much, methinks. The disastrous Chapter 5 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

If you read about natural history, even just popular accounts, you know about the epic mass extinctions visited on the living world throughout life's tenure on Earth. Words like 'devastating' and 'catastrophic' barely capture their scale—the most thorough purge is called The Great Dying and extinguished at least 95% of the species on the planet. And this isn't just animals dying. It's whole

 lineages

dying.

Mass extinction as acceleration: Chapter 3 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

One motivation for relaunching

 Quintessence of Dust

was my desire to write about things I'm reading, whether books or articles. So here is the second (late) entry in my new series,

 What I'm reading

, posted at the start of every month.

 Fiction


 Fragile Things

by Neil Gaiman Continued from April.

What I'm reading in May

Warning: this post includes

 spoilers

for

 Black Widow

,

 Avengers: Endgame

, and

 Spider-Man: No Way Home

. Seems a small price to pay to understand the biophysical limits of the biosphere, but it's your call. So, are you

 sure

you want that superpower? Have you noticed that superheroes usually have difficult lives and crushing responsibilities?

Superheroes and limits: more on Chapter 1 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

It was the subtitle of this book (

 From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution

by Simon Conway Morris) that reeled me in, combined with my inability to resist reading the thoughts of Conway Morris on what that subtitle advertises: "Six Myths of Evolution." I'm about halfway through the book, and through three of the six myths.

Reviewing From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds by Simon Conway Morris: introduction and overview

One of my motivations for relaunching

 Quintessence of Dust

was my desire to write about things I'm reading, whether books or articles. So here is a new series, pretty basic: What I'm reading, posted at the start of every month.

What I'm reading in April

I have been thinking regularly about complicity for the last several years. It became a central ethical theme of mine in 2016 and it has occupied my thoughts and ideas since.

Thoughts on complicity before reading Complicit by Max Bazerman

Let's start with full disclosure. John Farrell is a good friend, and we met here at

 Quintessence of Dust

more than 15 years ago*.* John was one of the first people to read and comment on (and link to) the blog. We share many passions: science, faith/science interactions, writing, the Boston Red Sox, Shakespeare, and Harvard Square.

The Day Without Yesterday by John Farrell: introductory comments

In my previous post I attempted to identify all the ways that a new gene can come about, after defining what I meant by "new" and "gene." Two questions came up, one a comment on the post, and the other via Facebook. 1. What about exon shuffling? Isn't that a mechanism by which new genes are made?

Gene-making: some questions answered

What would it take to make a completely new gene? Interesting question, but first let's agree on roughly what we mean by a "new gene." Here is how I defined the topic when discussing unique human attributes: "Creation of Eve." Was she completely new? So you see we mean something a lot more "new" than, for example, the human-specific version of the FoxP2 gene, which I have discussed before. And we mean something that is born overnight.

Can someone make me a new gene?

We humans think we're pretty special. Here's Hamlet, in the speech that gave this blog its name: Kemble in the role of Hamlet. Courtesy of Wellcome Images.

Does it take special genes to make a special human?

The human brain is often described using literally cosmic superlatives. Here is V.S. Ramachandran, a renowned neuroscientist:  That's some serious complexity there, yes, but hidden in the description is a mundane reality: the human brain is made of neurons which make synapses with other neurons, which means that it's made of the same stuff as the brain of a sloth or a goldfish or an earthworm.

A mystery gene in human brain development: discovering ARHGAP11b

On Friday in the Christian Perspectives in Science seminar at Calvin College I gave a little talk on theistic evolution. The idea was to get some feedback on the simple ideas that I'll present at a symposium at the North American Paleontological Convention (NAPC) in Cincinnati in June. The symposium is titled "The Nature of Science and Public Science Literacy" and it's part of Education and Public Outreach Day at the NAPC.

Theistic embryology: the gathering storm

Last Friday I mentioned a dispute surrounding the comments of some of the advocates of "framing" in science communications. The claim was that the engagement of pseudoscience – or what I would call folk science – is unwise, at least because the attention "enables" the purveyors of such swill.

Who speaks for science? Or, why loud atheists are NOT the problem

My comment on Uncommon Descent yielded a single response, from one StephenB, who had two things to say.

Day 2 on Uncommon Descent: waiting for the axe to fall

The June issue of

 The Atlantic

includes a deep profile of the accomplished but not-very-well-known comedian Albert Brooks. Here's a glimpse of his view of writing: I found a few interesting nuggets in that paragraph. His vision of writing as something you don't stop once you've started seems odd at first. The architect metaphor is funny, sure, but I wonder if his view is rare among writers.

Albert Brooks on writing: "it's one of the last things you can do without permission"

This week in the Blaugust 2023 blogging festival, the broad theme is "Introduce yourself." Yesterday I alluded to my bardolatry and its place in the cornerstone of

 Quintessence of Dust

, but that's not really an introduction. So here is a bit more about me: I love the

 Star Wars

universe and I'm into evolution, and both of those things are deeply connected to my main tendency—I'm a rebel.

Rebel scum

In my previous post, I started to explain a fact that some people (who don't know me) seem to find surprising or noteworthy. Michael Behe is a Christian who accepts common ancestry and an ancient cosmos, so you'd think I would be excited about the work of a fellow "theistic evolutionist." But I'm not. Two overall problems come to mind.

Why I'm not a Behe fan, Part IIA: the malaria scam

One motivation for relaunching

 Quintessence of Dust

was my desire to write about things I'm reading, whether books or articles. So here is this month's entry in my new series,

 What I'm reading

, posted at the start of every month.

 Fiction


 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin Recommended by colleagues on our PLOS Slack channel and in a great review at NPR.

What I'm reading in June

I previously posted the abstract of a talk I gave at Calvin last month in which I test-drove my "theistic embryology" metaphor that I'll present at the North American Paleontological Convention in Cincinnati in two weeks. Now the audio and my simple slides are posted on Calvin's e-zine, Minds in the Making. Lots of jokes. And now my name's spelled right.  About halfway through, I refer to "10 dangers of theistic evolution" at Answers in Genesis.

Theistic embryology: the talk

Last month I had an interesting conversation with Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute (DI), at Evolution News and Views (ENV), a DI blog/site that recently opened some articles to comments. The topic of the original post was common ancestry in humans and other primates, but Casey and I discussed various aspects of design thought. One subject that came up was the falsifiability of design.

Design and falsifiability

Last month, PZ Myers wrote an interesting piece at the Panda's Thumb in which he discussed some problems with very simple models of evolutionary genetics. One of his main themes was the idea that many genetic changes are neutral with regard to fitness;

How bad genes can escape the Grim Reaper (and why this is good)

To find out, and to read some of the best recent blogging on evolution, visit the new Carnival of Evolution, 35th Edition, at Lab Rat. And go to the official carnival page to learn more about the Carnival of Evolution and perhaps to sign up as a future host.

How do fish adapt to life in hydrogen sulfide?

Welcome to the 34th Edition (1 April 2011) of the Carnival of Evolution, and welcome to Quintessence of Dust. It's nice to be hosting this fine carnival, and to see that it's still going strong.  I've organized the carnival under some chapter and section headings that I got from some old Victorian's magnum opus, but I think you'll find the topics require no further creative embellishment.  Continue reading...

34th Carnival of Evolution

So why is it that I and many other biologists hypothesize that introns are mostly non-functional? (I'll assume that you've read the previous posts, and that you understand what it is that I mean when I challenge claims that introns are functional elements in an information-rich genome.

Introns. Let's think about this, people. Part IV.

What does it mean to claim that an intron has a function? The question is obviously important, at least as long as there are disputes about whether introns have "functions" and whether science ignored them for decades. Now, I can't help the ID people with their propensity for repeating falsehoods about the history of "junk DNA" and the role of "Darwinism" in its characterization.

Introns. Let's think about this, people. Part III.

Here I'm continuing my discussion of the

 Signature in the Cell

book-signing event at Biola University on 14 May. You'll want to read Parts I and II before reading on. My second question to Steve Meyer was the one question I most wanted to ask him, both out of personal curiosity and because I thought the answer would help demystify many of his claims. The exchange that resulted was memorable – on that, everyone seems to agree.

Bread and circus: Signature in the Cell at Biola (Part III)

It's time to talk about introns and function, so at least the ID people and I can agree on what we're disagreeing about. First, though, a little housecleaning. When confronting the avalanche of misinformation on so-called "junk DNA" from intelligent design creationists, it can be hard to know where to start.

Introns. Let's think about this, people. Part I.

U2 can't make it to Michigan this year, due to Bono's back injury. (Me: "Ouch. He'll be fine." My girlfriend Susan: "What do you expect? He's old. He should pack it in.") So here are my attempts to fill the void.  Continue reading...

It's okay, Bono. I'm on it.

...oh, Boston you're my home. Well, it was for five years, if Woburn counts as "Boston." And the lab was at least half my life, so sure, Boston was my home. But anyway, Wednesday through Saturday I'll be at Gordon College, on the North Shore, about 40 minutes from where we used to live, at this Biologos conference. And the point of all this?

Quintessence of Dust

"And your horse now would make him an ass"