I very seldom read Uncommon Descent, for lots of reasons, two of the most prominent being that I am angered and sickened by culture-war rhetoric and I am uninterested in "design" as an explanation.

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.

Several weeks ago, a commenter (Donald) asked an interesting question about natural selection and genetic variation, and I promised to address it because I want the issue to be a theme on QoD in the coming months. Here's Donald: The blog article that Donald is citing is at The Wild Side by Olivia Judson, and the figure of 100,000 deleterious mutants for every helpful one is widely referenced.

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.

It's Opening Day, and it mustn't pass without mention here at QoD, especially since probability, randomness and the supernatural are such central topics around here. Manny connects, game 2 in Japan. Image from Boston Globe online. I've already confessed that Stephen Jay Gould is one of my favorite authors, and some of his essays I mark for repeat visits.

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.

Here at Calvin we used to have a super-cool club called SNUH, which sought to discuss and enjoy The Simpsons. I was a guest speaker there twice, but their biggest catch by far was Prof. Tony Campolo, who came to Calvin three years ago, specifically in response to an invitation from the wacky SNUH.

Junk DNA is still a-happening. Ryan Gregory's blog Genomicron is the place to learn about it. He's especially adept at driving trucks through the gaps in ID claims about non-coding DNA. My gestating posts on the subject [sigh] will focus more on Reasons To Believe. Watch for a quote from Obi-Wan! So here are some things I've been munching on this week.

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.

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.