HT: Farshad

Okay, so I am a little slow, but while surfing around the internet, I came across an editorial from physicist Lawrence Krauss entitled, Survival of the Slickest. Krauss laments his experience with ID in the political arena:

During the debate, it became clear that I was competing with a well-organized marketing machine. These intelligent individuals were willing to tailor their message, even if it meant hiding their true motivations.

Yet despite the way this troubles him, Krauss then advises the scientific community to mimic this marketing approach:

So having lost the PR battle, how can scientists hope to win the war over educating young people? Scientists must learn that fighting lobbyists is not the same as debating scientific ideas in journals. In science, incorrect ideas will ultimately be weeded out. But in a society in which marketing is king, the scientific community will have to learn to use the weapons of sound bites and emotional arguments. In short, we must deploy all the tools that are used to sell cars, diet drugs, and intelligent design.

This is a stunning piece of advice, where the scientist not only uses the end to justify the means, but in the end, becomes no different from the ID proponents he criticizes.
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My original Dawkins Fest was interrupted when the Dawkins essay was temporality removed from the Internet. Since then, it has reappeared on the much more widely-read Huffington Post, thus it seems worth reposting the Dawkins Fest, this time in its entirety.

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Richard Dawkins writes:

Religion may be nonsense, but isn’t it harmless nonsense, like astrology and crystal balls? Why be so hostile? (Scientists have a particular reason to be hostile to any systematically organized effort to teach children to reject evidence in favour of faith, revelation, authority and tradition. Religion teaches people to be satisfied with petty, small-minded non-explanations or mysteries, and this is a tragedy, given that the true explanations are so enthralling. Moreover, such hostility as I have is limited to words. I am not going to bomb anybody, behead them, stone them, burn them at the stake, crucify them, or fly planes into their skyscrapers, just because of a theological disagreement).

Yet the hostility to religion has not always been limited to words.

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[Albert de Roos is a cell biologist from Amsterdam, who has previously graced Telic Thoughts with this guest post about applying engineering principles to evolution. We've invited him to write about his latest article, published in the journal Artificial Life. Not because we agree with everything he has to say (nor vice versa), but because we find it to be an interesting approach, which may jolt researchers into thinking about evolution in new terms. Don't forget to check out Albert de Roos' blog]

A design hypothesis for the evolution of the nucleus
By Albert de Roos, Ph.D. Cell Biology

Recently, I published an article about the origin of the nucleus. Basically, I pose that the nucleus arose in evolution when a nucleus-like cell generated an extra plasma membrane around itself. Or in other words, when we take the current nucleus, we are looking at the direct descendent of a free living ancestor cell. Genetic material that is wrapped in a double membrane with large simple pores in them that keeps macromolecules such as DNA, RNA and proteins inside, while nutrients and waste is free to diffuse in and out.

This article is not 'just another theory' about the origin of the nucleus, but it is derived from an engineering framework named 'design by contract'. This concept is used in the development of software where components of systems communicate according to defined interfaces or contracts. As long as you don't change existing interfaces, you can extend the system. You can directly apply that to evolution: you can add new functionality, as long as you keep existing interfaces intact. The conserved mechanisms for translation, transcription, splicing etc. can be considered to reflect these constant interfaces in this engineering view. Conservation is thus regarded as an inevitable consequence of extension since any evolutionary process that would require extensive rework in critical systems would never survive because of the direct fitness costs.

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Gary Wolf has a piece in Wired Magazine, "The Church of the Non-Believers", in which he skewers what he calls the "New Atheistm": Richard Dawkins with his desire to label a religious upbringing as "child abuse", Sam Harris with his apocalyptic visions of religion bringing civilization to a halt, as well as the disastrous attempt to label themselves "Brights". As an agnostic, Gary Wolf is in agreement with Dawkins et al.'s general beliefs, but is put off by the fact that in their fanaticism, the "New Atheists" resemble the fundamentalists they so despise:

The New Atheists have castigated fundamentalism and branded even the mildest religious liberals as enablers of a vengeful mob. Everybody who does not join them is an ally of the Taliban. But, so far, their provocation has failed to take hold. Given all the religious trauma in the world, I take this as good news. Even those of us who sympathize intellectually have good reasons to wish that the New Atheists continue to seem absurd. If we reject their polemics, if we continue to have respectful conversations even about things we find ridiculous, this doesn't necessarily mean we've lost our convictions or our sanity. It simply reflects our deepest, democratic values. Or, you might say, our bedrock faith: the faith that no matter how confident we are in our beliefs, there's always a chance we could turn out to be wrong.

Indeed. You can find extremists on both sides, whether the issue is intelligent design or the existence of God. Extremists see everything in terms of black or white, and even the slightest disagreement with them will get you branded as "one of them" (as when Dawkins et al. refuse to work with critics of the Pope's stance on birth control, just because those critics happen to be Catholics). Fortunately, such extremists will rarely get anything done, as they will isolate themselves in closed enclaves and consume each other in internal witchhunts.

It's deeply overcast outside my window now as a dreary mid-autumn drizzle falls. The air is chill with a strong aroma of wet, fallen leaves as I carry a few old-lady sized loads of split firewood from the stack to the basement cache so we'll be warm tonight.

The tulip poplars have shed most of their yellow, though the maples are still impossibly flame-orange and the dogwoods are deep crimson with a dash of brilliant scarlet from the berries, to match the Christmas glory of the old she-holly out back. The sassafras is rusty, the beeches have yet to go from green to gold, and those wily, ancient oaks are always the last to give up their autumnal ghosts. The pumpkins are out of the field, packed in straw out in the root cellar, the garden weeks-since put to sleep.

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Richard Dawkins explains the recent rash of atheistic books. According to him, publishers everywhere have been frightened by Bush and "are now falling over themselves to bring out atheistic books from which they would have run a mile only a few years ago."

He continues:
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