Video: Defending scientific values

Just a short post with a video I wanted to share.  Sorry for the lack of activity, I am bogged down with school work lately but will hopefully get back to the swing of things shortly.

Genetic evidence linking T-Rex to modern birds.

I found this article over on another atheist blog and thought it might be of some interest to my readers.

Source

(April 12) – An adolescent female Tyrannosaurus rex died 68 million years ago, but its bones still contain intact soft tissue, including the oldest preserved proteins ever found, scientists say. And a comparison of the protein’s chemical structure to a slew of other species showed an evolutionary link between T. rex and chickens, bolstering the idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs.

The collagen proteins were found hidden inside the leg bone of the T. rex fossil, according to two studies published in the April 13 issue of the journal Science. Collagen is the main ingredient of connective tissue in animals and is found in cartilage, ligaments, tendons, hooves, bones and teeth. It yields gelatin and glue when boiled in water.

“I mean can you imagine pulling a bone out the ground after 68 million years and then getting intact protein sequences?” said John Asara of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, lead author of one of the studies. “That’s just mind boggling how much preservation there is in these bones.”

The previous record holder for the oldest protein tissue belonged to collagen found in a 100,000- to 300,000-year-old mammoth bone.

The new finding will be viewed skeptically, admitted one of the researchers involved in the two studies. “It’s very, very, very controversial because most people have gone on record saying there’s an absolute time limit to anything that’s protein or DNA,” said Mary Schweitzer, a molecular paleontologist at North Carolina State University.

Matthew Carrano, a dinosaur curator at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in either study, said the protein findings are robust. “Here are the pieces of the protein. If you’re going to refute this you have to explain how these pieces got in there,” Carrano said in a telephone interview.

“It’s not another molecule mimicking the protein and giving off a similar signal. This is the actual sequence.”

“I’m grateful that he was able to get the [amino acid] sequences out. That’s the Holy Grail,” Schweitzer told LiveScience.

This finding supports the idea that chickens and T. rex share an evolutionary link and bolsters previous research showing that birds evolved from dinosaurs and that birds are living dinosaurs.

“Here we have a real molecule from a real dinosaur, and it’s much more similar to a bird than it is to anything else,” Carrano said.

12 Questions for Atheists

Those of you who know me personally are aware that I spend quite a bit of time following the religion and science discussions on youTube. Some of you have gone so far as to call it an unhealthy amount of time. Well, the other day I was browsing some of the videos, looking for new material, when I came across one posing twelve questions to atheists. I thought I would put together a quick post with my responses as an interesting exercise.

1. What would you need in order to become a believer?
I, like many atheists, require verifiable evidence. The simplest answer to your question would be that God himself would present himself and submit to demonstrations of genuine miracles. This would be a feat as he would not only have to do something truly forbidden by the laws of nature as I know them, but those violations would also have to hold up under careful scrutiny. After all, magicians often do things that confound me at first sight but after careful examination their trick is revealed. You certainly wouldn’t call Penn and Teller Gods after a single show.

I know that many theists will point out that God will not present himself to us as he, for unknown reasons, finds some sort of merit in our faith. Given that, I guess could even lower the bar a bit and ask you to provide evidence that your respective holy books have some sort divine insight. I don’t believe this can be done. I don’t believe that books, such as the bible, can be even make the first step and be historically verified from outside sources. But, since Rome wasn’t built in a day, you can consider that to be the first challenge.

2. Why are you an atheist?
This is almost the same question as above. I am an atheist because I have not seen sufficient reason or evidence to accept the God hypothesis. I don’t think I have to say anything else to that.

3. Why do you think a belief in deity has permeated almost every society and culture since the dawn of mankind?
This is a very interesting sociological and psychological question and I cannot do it justice as it falls far outside my range of expertise. However, I am willing to venture my best guess.

We know from psychological studies that humans are pattern seeking animals. Our brains seem to be very well developed to find patterns were they exist. This is may be related to why we excel at science. As a byproduct of this, I suspect our brains tend to try to extrapolate patterns even when we lack sufficient information. We look for explanations for things and we therefore tend to invoke something we can relate to as a possibility. I find this argument particularly compelling when you look at the biblical god as a literary figure and realize he behaves very much like an angry human. In short, societies of the past personified nature in order to try to understand the observed patterns existing within it. The first approximation you can then make is to invoke a man-like intelligence.

4. Why does existentialism make sense to you?
I was not aware that existentialism made sense to me?! Jokes aside, aspects of it do in that I feel my free will governs quite a few of my actions. It is what prevents me from getting emotional about some things or lets me make decisions based on what I want rather than what I think is expected of me. However, I do freely recognize that I am product of evolution and that there are certain things hardwired to in my brain. The fact that food tastes good and that I want to have sex are both products of that process, chemically hardwired for my fitness to survive and reproduce. My current line of thinking on this is that our minds work based on a combination of conscious and unconscious desires.

5. Of either faith, Islam or Christianity, which of these two makes the most sense to you? You must pick one.
No. Neither of these make sense to me in the light of our modern pool of knowledge and they both look equally wrong in my eyes.

6. Have you ever, even for a moment, believed in a God(s)?
I came to terms with my own mortality at a very young age and it disturbed me to the point where are there still, years later, nights when the idea keeps me awake. At the time I was hysterical about the thought of dying and losing my ability to interact with the world. My mother tried a number of things in attempts to calm me down and I spent some time seeing a child therapist with, as I recall, marginal results. Now, my mother was brought up to some extent in a Christian home and, in an effort to give me some comfort, she talked me about the ideas of God, heaven and the afterlife. There was a long time where I did believe it and it did give me some comfort. However, as time went on doubt accumulated. Evidence accumulated. My education accumulated. And in the end, I finally rejected the idea.

7. If you die as an atheist are you prepared to go to hell?
My first reaction is to say that, yes, I am prepared to go to some place that doesn’t exist. I am also prepared to go to candy mountain, Gotham city, and Allah’s heaven with its 72 virgins. However, for the sake of argument, if Hell exists as you believe it, then of course I am not prepared to go there. My brain has a very difficult time comprehending the notion of eternity (and I have studied a lot of math, including notions of infinity) let alone a notion of eternal suffering. How could anyone be “prepared” for that.

This does however raise an interesting question – why does God seem to have only a single degree of punishment? As humans, we understand that there are degrees of crime and therefore degrees of retribution. We sentence people to prison terms ranging from a few days, to life or even execution, depending on the severity of their crimes. Why does a God, infinitely superior to us, both morally and intellectually, not make this kind of distinction. Surely coveting my neighbors wife’s ass and murdering babies are on two very different planes of infraction!

However, if you allow for religion to be a man made invention some sense can be made. If you’re designing a belief structure centered around a the threat of a horrible punishment in order to pacify a population, wouldn’t you make that punishment the most horrific thing you can imagine? Then what is to stop you from assigning that punishment to everything you happen to disagree with? I am presently reading “Guns, Germs and Steal” by Jared Diamond. The book largely deals with the rise of civilization and addressing why the European civilization rose to dominance in the world. One of the things touched on is that populations, after reaching a certain density must consolidate their decision making. One way of doing this is to assign power to a class of individuals, and in this light, the rise of religion has a key role to play in subduing the public.

Now, let me turn that question around on you. Are you prepared to go to hell if any of the other religions are right and you’re wrong? Are you prepared for no afterlife if we’re right and there is no God? Have you even though about the question you are asking me?

8. Morality seems to change with the times in the atheist community. Why are morals so subjective within the atheist community?
Anyone who has tried to discuss morals to any real extent quickly realizes that there are few moral absolutes. You can always find a time when the morals you held dear were not held by the majority. Times change and so do the things that we consider to be right and wrong. Slavery has been abolished and women have been given the right to vote. As new information is brought to us we revise what we consider to be right. But, as with the last question, this one can be applied to you. Why have the morals of your worldview changed over time? Why do you not hold to old testament law when Jesus clearly stated it still held. The answer is simple – you can’t under the pressure of modern, multicultural society. The context of your laws has changes and so you revise which ones you hold to be genuinely true.

9. Why, if you are an atheist, do you spend so much time speaking about religion (especially the christian faith?)
Simply put, I think religion does more harm than good in modern society. I also think it should be held to the same critical standards we hold everything else to. Religion teaches people to look at things with less critical eyes in a time when critical thinking is one of the most important values we can instill in ourselves. We have a large, densely packed society. Because of this we are forced to consolidate decision making to our elected leaders. In order to unsure that the voice of the majority is heard we should be looking very critically at the people we entrust to wield that power. This is to say nothing of the genuinely poor lack of scientific understanding fostered by literal interpretations of scripture or the denial of equal rights to women and homosexuals promoted by some faiths.

10. Why does so many of your interests (art, and entertainment) center around human suffering and tragedy? Does this reflect an inner turmoil because of the absence of god?
First of all, my interests are far more extensive than art and entertainment focused on human suffering and tragedy.

Why does some art focus on suffering and tragedy? Maybe it reflects the nature of human existence? I like to think art is an avenue for helping us express ourselves and yes, to some extend, that includes frustration with suffering and tragedy. This can just as easily be steaming from the absence of a loved one as it could from the love of something not understood by others.

11. If Jesus were physically alive today, and preaching the same message as he did before, would you accept his teaching as being valid and viable to our community and your own personal life?
Of course I would accept some of his teachings. The golden rule, (which by our best estimates wasn’t actually coined by him) of do on to others as you would have them do to you, is a good rule. However, I would not accept his claims to be the son of God without compelling evidence. I also would not accept his support of old testament law as I find a great deal of it to me morally repugnant. The point being that I would accept the ideas I felt were justifiable and reject anything that seemed to be a little wacky. Again, it’s about having a critical eye for what is presented to you. Part of that is recognizing that we can agree with people on some points while disagreeing on others. It’s not an all or nothing deal. You agree with me that murder is wrong but you don’t agree with my (lack of) religious belief.

12. Considering all the opinions you express about the dangers of religion and the world’s problems, why don’t you offer any solutions to the problems on a specific level?
Of all the questions on this list this is the only I find genuinely offensive. Secular science has offered uncountable solutions to innumerable problems on a very specific levels. It is science, not religion, that has brought you the modern lifestyle you value so much. Modern biology and medicine has extended your life expectancy by up to four to five times from that of the religious dominated dark ages. It has been said that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Our modern understanding of medicine would not be possible through an understanding gained by “theistic sciences” such as intelligent design.

The religious solution to the AIDS epidemic is to teach abstinence, which has no provable record of preventing the spread of STDs, while blocking our attempts to educate and provide condoms. Both of the these have been proven to be effective in combating the spread of disease. Stem cell research in the US has been ground to a halt by the religious right despite its potential to end enormous amounts of human suffering. Astronomy has has provided more insight into our place in the universe than any reading of a holy books could hope to. The Christians even went so far as to excommunicate Copernicus for correctly asserting the earth revolved around the sun.

I could continue but I think I made my point. There has not been a single problem facing the world that secular science has not handled better, by any conceivable metric, than any religious based initiatives.