TOP 100 SCIENCE SITES
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| Does Your Language Shape How You Think? The idea that your mother tongue shapes your experience of the world may be true after all. feeds.nytimes.com |
Creation in a gulping worm The exquisite complexity of a tiny and wholly insignificant creature shows Richard Dawkins is right about creationismSome years ago I wrote a book about a very small, transparent hermaphrodite worm, described by Lewis Wolpert as the most boring organism in existence.The fascinating thing about this nematode, c.elegans, was that it was the best understood and most studied multi-cellular organism in the world, the first to have its genome completely sequenced; yet it still wasn't understood. You would have thought it would be quite impossible for it to do anything unpredicted or impossible to understand. It has no brain, and only 959 cells (for the hermaphrodite). Every single cell in its body is now mapped from the moment of emergence to its death. But until recently, no one knew how it did anything so simple and vital as feed itself. We knew what it ate – bacteria – and how it crushed and digested them; but the worm is a filter feeder, which manages somehow to separate the bacteria from the liquid that they swim in and no one knew exactly how. It was all in the fine timing of the contractions as it swallows, but there are no physical filters in the worm. Whales have whalebone, but worms have no wormbone. Now a kind reader of the book has sent me a paper which he published last year which shows exactly how the filtering was done. Using very high speed video – 1000 frames a second – the team managed to isolate the way that two independent patterns of contraction separate the solid from liquids in a passage smaller than a human hair. I think it is reasonable to say that in purely formal terms there is more complexity and harmony in the stomach of an almost invisible nematode worm than in the most complex and harmonious work of art ever created. The worm is, as I say, quite stupefyingly boring, small and, by animal standards, simple. It lives in literally uncountable billions in earth all over the world. But when you contemplate the effort, the time and the money required to unravel the complexity of even so insignificant a creature, it is easier to understand the futility of creationism. If you imagine all this complexity, replicated all over the biosphere, as the project of an intelligent designer (to coin a phrase) then the designer herself would have to be unthinkably complex and capable and thus the product of some yet more unthinkably complex and capable entity, itself the product ... This is a point that Richard Dawkins makes in the God Delusion. He thinks it's a scientific argument against God's existence. To a believer, though, it's a theological argument about God's nature. It tells him what She can't be. At least, by establishing that the complex and intelligent designer is both inconceivable and in some sense logically impossible, Dawkins has established that God is not such a creature, since She, should She exist, is by definition logically necessary and in some sense conceivable as well. This doesn't of course prove anything about God's existence. It certainly won't persuade anyone who supposes God is either a scientific hypothesis or an untruth. But it does help, I hope, to show one of the ways in which these people and their opponents talk right past each other, even when they do so in good faith.ReligionBiologyAtheismAndrew Brownguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Second whale birth reported in Derwent There have reports of another southern right whale being born in Hobart's River Derwent. abc.net.au |
Scientists claim cuts will harm economy Hundreds of scientists have been holding a rally outside the Treasury to protest against cuts in their funding. bbc.co.uk |
$700,000 from Gates to help protect CA climate law By 2010-10-21T06:12:23ZSACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- The campaign against Proposition 23 - the ballot initiative that would push back California's landmark global warming law - is getting another big financial boost from a high-tech billionaire.... hosted.ap.org |