With the New Atheist movement gaining some traction, and the Ben Stein movie promising to flare up the culture wars aspect of ID, I'd like to remind people of an important point* "“ don't stereotype. I would encourage people to read (or re-read) Steve Petermann's excellent essay, Stereotyping: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. As Steve notes:

So stereotypes can be of great help in navigating and dealing with the world. However, as many have noted there can also be problems with them. They can be both good, bad, and ugly. Since a stereotype is quick and doesn't require any reflection, if it wrongly represents the person or group it can mislead. What follows can be unfounded biases and prejudices. The bad of stereotypes is that since they tend to thwart doing the hard evaluative work they can be wrong with bad consequences. Now this mis-stereotyping can be bad, but there can also be an ugly aspect to stereotyping. The promotion of certain stereotypes can be dishonest. In this case certain people or groups try to pin a stereotype on other people that is not warranted. Since stereotypes are shared beliefs, when one is misapplied on purpose this dishonestly creates a false perception about a group in the public eye.

Since activists such as Dawkins and Harris may lead people to stereotype the entire scientific community as militant atheists wanting to eradicate religion, it is crucial not to be tempted by the bad and the ugly of stereotype. As critical thinkers, we must always remember four things.

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From here:

Scientists have shown in literally thousands of studies that the p53 gene deserves its reputation as "the guardian of the genome." It calls to action an army of other genes in the setting of varied cell stresses, permitting repair of damaged DNA or promoting cell death when the cell damage is too great. A key net effect of p53's action is to prevent development of cancerous cells.

Now, University of Michigan Medical School scientists provide the most thorough evidence yet that p53 also regulates a trio of genes from the realm of so-called "junk" genes "” the roughly 97 percent of a cell's genetic material whose function is only beginning to be understood.

Biologist Paul Myers is upset with President Bush, the Republicans, the Discovery Institute (proponents of Intelligent Design) and "the theocrats, faith-healers, and snake-oil artists." Dr. Myers feels that they have betrayed "the promise of the Enlightenment" and "the cause of civilized humanity." While Dr. Myers' intentions to defend the Enlightenment and Civilization are noble, I am concerned that he may have inadequatedly consulted with his enlightened colleagues in other departments. The reason I am troubled is found in his language of violence.

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Since the recent flare up of the Culture Wars theme has set some people on edge, it's time to take a breath and enjoy the scenery.

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Clayton Cramer discusses the likelihood that dominionist Christians are going to take over and institute a theocracy. (HT: Positive Liberty)

If all the "dominionist Christians" in the United States got together and organized a coup d'etat, there wouldn't be enough of them to take over Horseshoe Bend. I'm pretty sure that I've never met one. The only place that I have ever seen a "dominionist Christian" is being interviewed on some Bill Moyers documentary.

In my previous essay, I offered some support for viewing RecA as an evolution gene: it is ubiquitous, ancient, and plays a key role in the important and evolutionarily significant process of recombination. Also, the endosymbionts suggest that it can act like a switch when it comes to genomic integrity over time.

I've raised this all as an alternative perspective, where "RecA's functions are more fully realized across generations, something we would expect from an evolution gene." In other words, it's a question of observational scale. If, for some reason, we were restricted to making observations on the scale of milliseconds, we might be under the impression that RecA's function is to bind ATP, because the DNA repair functions of RecA are dependent on more time and other machinery. Thus, I'm raising a perspective that expands time even further, noting that DNA repair and recombination (what we measure in the lab) is part of the evolution-function of the gene (how an observer with a larger time frame might see it).

In my last essay, I mentioned that RecA was universal among free-living bacteria and that its amino acid sequence was strongly conserved. It's now time to consider another aspect.

More

From here:

Kinase mediated phosphorylation is generally recognised as the major regulator of virtually all metabolic activities in eukaryotic cells including proliferation, gene expression, motility, vesicular transport and programmed cell death. Dysregulation of protein phosphorylation plays a major role in many diseases such as cancer and neurodegenerative disorders. In addition, the elucidation of many kinase cascades has proved pivotal for understanding and manipulating cellular behaviour in a variety of divergent eukaryotes.

Within these organisms a wide rage of kinases has been defined. The human genome contains over 500 protein kinase genes, whereas the genome of a small plant like Arabidopsis thaliana, the mouse-ear cress, contains nearly 1,000. Despite this diversity, a team led by Maikel Peppelenbosch, PhD, a professor of Cell Biology at the University Medical Center in Groningen, the Netherlands, has established that all eukaryotic kinases share a common set of substrates, nine amino acid segments shared by all proteins that are known to be phosphorylated.
["¦]
These results indicate that, although probably thousands of different kinases have developed during the 2.4 billion years of eukaryotic evolution, they show no significant functional difference. Furthermore, the results suggest the presence of a set of kinase substrates in an ancestral eukaryote that has remained unchanged in eukaryotic life, so the earliest eukaryotes may have been less "˜primitive' than generally thought.

I guess I'm late to the party, as everyone here has probably heard about Ben Stein's new movie, Expelled. This is not a movie that comes from the Discovery Institute. So why did Stein and the movie producers decide to make this movie? I'd say the clues from their web page are rather obvious. Apparently, the widespread media attention to Sternberg's treatment and the decision to deny Gonzalez's tenure got somebody's attention. Imagine that. Adding to this is the significant role played by none other than Richard Dawkins, whose popular anti-religious crusade now includes telling people to "shut up." In other words, it looks like the words and behavior of the critics of ID suceeded in getting Stein et al.'s attention.

Anyway, what will be most interesting to watch is the reaction from many of the critics. Apart from the expected gnashing of teeth and cursing, we can expect them to bash and smear Stein and the producers of the movie. In other words, the critics will give us a "live show" demonstration that will validate the basic message of the movie!

If you come across any "science blogs" bashing and smearing over the following months, be sure to send us the links.

Ed Brayton has published a blog entry related to Nick Matzke's Panda article which was mentioned at Telic Thoughts. Nick had made the point that the term intelligent design can be traced to the 1989 textbook Pandas and People. Nick argues that this was a response to the 1987 Edwards decision which, in his words, "made creationist terminology difficult to use in textbooks." Of course readers are no doubt aware of all those science textbooks that were loaded with creationist terminology right? Remember all the editing that went on after 1987? Brayton's blog entry titled Crowther's Lies on the Origin of Intelligent Design contains this remark:

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