Agreed in totality, pal. What miller says and means don't line up, all I was going for. His "Darwin's god" is, in fact, closer to when Russell said the only god he believed in was "Spinoza's god." He might have just been paying homage. I just don't understand scientists like Miller and (to a much greater extent) Francis Collins. I don't have half the gripes with Miller that I do with Collins, who takes funding from places like the Discovery Institute and only insists the world is older than six thousand years if pressed.
Likewise, Miller's work on the "missing" chromosome between humans and other primates is some of the most (pardon the pun) damning evidence against a faith-based science, yet he bends over backwards to delineate separate magisteria (don't even get me started on Gould and the way Biblical literalists misquote him). Why?
I say that's the price of faith: Bending your observations to fit it. It doesn't make believers (in either gods or illusory wills, free or otherwise) less intelligent than deterministic reductionists, but it does make them problematic as scientists. That Collins is head of the HGP is baffling, but BYU graduates getting tenure at other university science departments is equally so.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Monday, March 5, 2007
the first biologist
it's looking like i have a long night of typing ahead of me, but this has to be deposited into the world while it is still fresh in my mind. yesterday i decided i would become the world's first biologist. this is seemingly impossible. after all, there's already been a first biologist. in fact, i think it might be aristotle himself that holds the title. how can i be the first biologist if the placement has come and gone? what's more, most of my childhood heroes have been biologists of one fashion or another: linnaeus, lamarck, darwin, mendel, buckland, mantell, owen, watson, crick, dawkins, horner. how can i rightly call myself the first biologist without casting a pall upon my youth's idols?
i rationalize it in the same way i rationalize my displeasure with capitalization. i know it's incorrect. the grammar drilled into me since prepubescence tells me that some things deserved to be capitalized. proper nouns, for instance. they deserve special attention, that's what my teachers were taught and that is simply the way of things. without capitalization, a paper is lacking, a paragraph is fault, a sentence is wrong. but by sheer force of will, i do not capitalize. i resist its fastidious urge. instead, i preserve the equality of words, in my mind at least, by not capitalizing any of them.
likewise, i think it unfair to call the spot of world's first biologist taken. When it was thought the sun revolved around the earth, someone spoke out against it by calling him or herself the first astronomer. when the world was flat, some man or woman was the first to say round. their identity is of little consequence, as these facts would have, in all eventuality, come to light with or without them bearing the torch. but when others were satisfied with being in agreement, these men and women, right or wrong, stood against the grain. some are remembered. most aren't.
i think biology is on the verge of consilence. but we have yet to see it for what it is. i have plenty more to say, and an ever decreasing amount of time to say it in. let that be enough for tonight.
i rationalize it in the same way i rationalize my displeasure with capitalization. i know it's incorrect. the grammar drilled into me since prepubescence tells me that some things deserved to be capitalized. proper nouns, for instance. they deserve special attention, that's what my teachers were taught and that is simply the way of things. without capitalization, a paper is lacking, a paragraph is fault, a sentence is wrong. but by sheer force of will, i do not capitalize. i resist its fastidious urge. instead, i preserve the equality of words, in my mind at least, by not capitalizing any of them.
likewise, i think it unfair to call the spot of world's first biologist taken. When it was thought the sun revolved around the earth, someone spoke out against it by calling him or herself the first astronomer. when the world was flat, some man or woman was the first to say round. their identity is of little consequence, as these facts would have, in all eventuality, come to light with or without them bearing the torch. but when others were satisfied with being in agreement, these men and women, right or wrong, stood against the grain. some are remembered. most aren't.
i think biology is on the verge of consilence. but we have yet to see it for what it is. i have plenty more to say, and an ever decreasing amount of time to say it in. let that be enough for tonight.
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