This Friday's quote comes from the article, "The Mother of All Problems" by molecular biologist Franklin Harold, webbed on Steve Jones' website.

Living things are so much part of everyday experience that we scarcely realize how strange they are, and how sharply they differ from inanimate objects. All organisms, from bacteria to humans, are exceedingly intricate molecular systems that have the unique capacity to make themselves. On the level of the individual, each one grows and reproduces its own kind. Collectively, on a timescale of millennia, they continuously make themselves over, adapting to changes in their external and internal environments. Nothing else in the known universe has such powers. Living things obey all the laws of chemistry and physics, and we have learned an enormous amount about the molecular mechanisms that underlie all biological operations. We know much less about how these components and processes are organized in space, and almost nothing about their origin when the world was young. Our knowledge is vast, but our understanding is partial and full of gaps; for all its familiarity and ubiquity, life remains fundamentally mysterious.

Those interested in reading more from Harold should check out his brilliant book, The Way of the Cell.

From the dictionary:

naturalism
n 1: the doctrine that the world can be understood in scientific terms without recourse to spiritual or supernatural explanations.

But when that is converted into the method of science (methodological naturalism) it turns into: Science must not invoke spiritual or supernatural explanations.

Does it strike anyone else as strange that science is being religiously defined?

Comparing "aperiodic crystals" to standard crystals, Erwin Schrodinger once wrote, "The difference in structure is the same kind as that between ordinary wallpaper in which the same pattern is repeated again and again in regular periodicity and a masterpiece of embroidery, say a Raphael tapestry, which shows no dull repetition, but an elaborate, coherent, meaningful design traced by the great master."

Jason Rosenhouse replied to my long, boring post. My point in that post was to point out that there are two different understandings of what "Methodological Naturalism" is. I believe that that the most common understanding of methodological naturalism (I'll call it MN-1) is the one I outlined in my original post:

Methodological naturalism is a recent term for the rule that science must be restricted to natural processes or the rule that science cannot refer to the supernatural or the rule that scientists, while doing science, must act as if the supernatural does not exist. Keep in mind that this is very often claimed to be part of the very definition of science. It is a rule that has to be followed in order for something to be science.

I didn't really argue for that being the standard view of what MN-1 is because I've always understood it to be a pretty standard definition. In the comments I did point to Del Ratzsch's paper here (Section 4). Ratzsch cites a good half dozen or so people (from Michael Ruse to Richard Lewontin to Euginie Scott) that hold this position.

Rosenhouse's paper was primarily devoted to putting forth the idea that science is essentially a pragmatic enterprise with the goal of understanding the workings of nature. Because of it's pragmatic nature, "[a]ny investigative technique that brings us closer to this goal can reasonably be considered part of science." Under this view, Rosenhouse says that methodological naturalism (I'll call this view MN-2) would be better understood as a "pragmatic rejection of supernatural hypotheses."

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Critics of intelligent design often present themselves as a unified front, merely interested in protecting good science. But it's becoming more and more obvious that there are really two camps among the critics' crowd. On the one hand, there are the moderates, who believe that evolution is readily compatible with theism, and who claim that the problem is simply fundamentalist religion. On the other hand are the hardliners, who thinks evolution is incompatible with theism, and who see the discussion over evolution as simply the latest battle in the war between theism and atheism.

The disagreements between these two camps are usually downplayed, but sometimes tempers flare. The most recent spate started when Daniel Dennett, professor of philosopher at Tufts University, accused moderates such as Eugenie Scott, the director of the National Center for Science Education, of "evasiveness" on the subject of evolution and religion, thus contributing "to ongoing confusion in the US." Confusion about the fact that evolution is incompatible with theism, he might as well have written.

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On Telic Thoughts, we like to focus on aspects of life and evolution that help us see evolution as something that may be more interesting than conventional neo-Darwinian explanations would have us expect. But it looks like good old-fashioned, Darwinian gradualism may have played the crucial role in whale evolution:

the gradual shrinkage of the whales' hind limbs over 15 million years was the result of slowly accumulated genetic changes that influenced the size of the limbs and that these changes happened sometime late in development, during the fetal period.

Relying on anatomical data, the researchers argue that Sonic hedgehog (a crucial gene in limb development) was inactivated late in whale evolution.

On the other hand, another report on the same study tells us that taking Sonic hedgehog offline early on seems to have been the key event in dolphin evolution.

Fire up your speakers and listen to this hillarious rant against intelligent design. It sounds like a parody, but apparently the guy's for real, and some of the ID critics are already voicing their approval. My favorite part:

These Christian fundamentalist pyschotics are so power-mad, they will stop at nothing: Willful ignorance, intimidation, and supression of information are their tools! Intelligent design, absence-only sex-ed; the new Dark Ages are upon us! Hang on folks, this century is going to be a rough ride!

Question: If you believe intelligent design is nothing but a fundamentalist plot to bring back the Dark Ages, what's the chance that you'll be able to be evaluate the issue objectively?

Update: Thanks to "tragicmishap" and Mats, there's now a transcript available. Thanks also goes out to JoeManzari for finding a picture of poet-sage Henry Rollins.