of ‘heaven rejoiceth over a sinner who repenteth’.
But if there were, it could be applied to the elaborately camouflaged scribe in holy orders George Pitcher, who in today’s Daily Telegraph writes Thank God and science for Claudia Castillo’s new windpipe.
The media reports of a happy, healed Ms. Castillo are indeed a cause for giving thanks. To the scientists who slaved (I have no doubt) over failed attempt after failed attempt to make the stem cells populate donor tissue until thier techniques showed signs of promise then were successful. To the doctors who diagnosed Ms. Castillo’s TB and kept her alive until this remarkable technique had been refined and declared safe. And to the surgeons, nurses and technicians who opened her chest, excised the diseased trachea and implanted the rejection-resistant replacement.
The Lancet paper has yet to be published but, Rev Pitcher, for all your very welcome words of appreciation for science, I doubt God will be a co-author.
So shall we say ‘humanity rejoiceth for the scientists who healeth’?
God was not their lab supervisor.
Hear hear. Love your tag.
Religion, like everything else evolves and adapts. Wait until you see more Reverends and Popes, Mullahs and Rabbis and Swamis giving various interpretations to scientific advances and how it fits in with their metaphysical /spiritual world dominated by God and his powers.
I feel a “God is my co-author” bumper sticker coming on.
HAHAHAH!
That sounds like a challenge… I can see the ‘author contributions now’:
Funny how the more ‘powers’ scientist’s acquire, the more ‘free ride’ authorships come their way.
Wheere would God go in the author order?
I think God should just be in the acknowledgements.
I think that God is always in the acknowledgements. Just not mentioned as such. Men of science of equal stature to yourself, Mr Darwin – I am thinking of Messrs Einstein and Messrs Newton – would have agreed. Time was when scientists saw their purpose was too understand the mind of the creator, and I see no reason to deride that view, whether you subscribe to it or not. The mark of a scientist is to keep an open mind. I think you should talk to your friend Mr Huxley about this.
Agree. Something like “(such and such) kindly provided the cloned sequence to create the construct. God kindly provided the material world that made the experiment (and the experimenters) possible”
They say the Devil is in the detail, which puts him in the Methods and Materials section.
@Matt – They say the Devil is in the detail…
But it has also been said that “God is in the details”. Which means that the wave-function for the details is a superposition of two very orthogonal functions.
So, that’s why quantum mechanics exsits…!
Dr Gee, last I heard of Mr Huxley’s words on the matter he has talking of strangling men of the cloth who attacked my theory ‘like snakes’.
What happy days those snake-strangling soirees at Down House were!
I am of the firm opinion that both God and the Devil belong firmly with ‘data not shown’.
Because there is none.
wow, I don’t know what’s better, the original post or the comments section! FWIW I’m with H.G. of Cromer, Norfolk on this one. But, just as I don’t credit my PhD supervisor on papers written during my postdoc, I don’t think we need to list
HimHerItThema higher power. Not, of course, that I’m suggesting my PhD advisor is some divine being, far from it, he is a proud athiest, however credit where credit is due, I wouldn’t be here publishing without his intervention, but in the natural order of things we have moved on from direct acreditation.damn I’m rambling…what the
helldevilHuxley is in my coffee?!Fie on you Mr Darwin – Mr Huxley was an agnostic, which is the only position to be that is consistent with a scientific frame of mind. It’s not the atheism I mind so much as the air of insufferable know-it-all smugness it generates, when any true scientist would understand that we in fact know very little, and those who say otherwise are braying witlessly into a void of a vastness they will not comprehend. I know you’re 200 years old next year – and frankly, Sir, it shows.
Dr Gee, last I heard of Mr Huxley’s words on the matter he has talking of strangling men of the cloth who attacked my theory ‘like snakes’.What happy days those snake-strangling soirees at Down House were!
What makes this insulting remark doubly insulting is that at present I am busting my balls at Nature preparing for Mr Darwin’s anniversary. Hardly five minutes go by when someone doesn’t email me or buttonhole me in person to solicit my opinion on this Darwin elaboration, or that Darwin initiative or some such balderdash. Perhaps now I can tell them with justification that he was a fool, no better than a common knave, who happened to get lucky. But oh, at what a cost: what it must be to have HWMNBN sticking to you like excrement to one’s overshoes.
My attempts to be lighthearted about this obviously failed and were ill-judged. I apologize for having caused insult to your efforts.
I think God should just be in the acknowledgements.
Already been done — one of my collegues is handling such a situation at the moment. Our guidelines state that if you acknowledge somebody in a paper, you must tell them first, and make sure they’re happy to be acknowledged. The authors will therefore have to demonstrate that they have God’s permission…
so much as the air of insufferable know-it-all smugness it generates
This pervasive (at least in the blogosphere) attitude, as well as the ridiculous internecine squabbling over humanist vs. rationalist vs. skeptic vs. Brights labels, makes me reluctant to identify as an atheist. My reluctance has little or nothing to do with fear of reprisal or
phosphorylationproselytizing from religious acquaintances.Henry, with you. Do we have to alienate even those scientists who bust their backsides because they believe in God (and are not even creationists…)? (Now I feel for some reason that I have to add that I don’t). Maybe the patient and her family are firm believers – who knows, their belief/spirituality might even have helped them through the whole thing?
Well I’m with Mr Darwin. I think the response to his amusing comment was out of proportion.
Nature editors are constantly being asked by people to comment on this or that item, not only your anniversary, in any event. It is part of our jobs, and done with good humour and without rancour (and the other material mentioned).
Me too, Maxine. This post made a fair point with politeness and humour, insulted nobody, and for which, ‘Charles’, you owe no apology.
… Except that Mr Darwin’s characterization of the attitudes are selective and pander to modern atheist fundamentalist claptrap rather than historical accuracy. If you are going to pretend to be Darwin you should try to do so authentically and not subvert his name in the cause of some modern sectarian nonsense that has very little to do with science. Either behave as Darwin would or use your real name – to remain as you are is just dishonest.
Maxine, you should know better. I am currently involved in at least 2 big editorial projects about Darwin, as I am the senior evolutionary biologist at nature. To see Darwin the subject of the prevalent nonscientific dawkinsian fundamentalism is unutterably painful.
Lee, you are beyond help.
… Except that Mr Darwin’s characterization of the attitudes are selective and pander to modern atheist fundamentalist claptrap rather than historical accuracy. If you are going to pretend to be Darwin you should try to do so authentically and not subvert his name in the cause of some modern sectarian nonsense that has very little to do with science. Either behave as Darwin would or use your real name – to remain as you are is just dishonest.
Maxine, you should know better. I am currently involved in at least 2 big editorial projects about Darwin, as I am the senior evolutionary biologist at nature. To see Darwin the subject of the prevalent nonscientific dawkinsian fundamentalism is unutterably painful.
Lee, you are beyond help.
It appears I’m not the only one with a drinky wink inside me this evening, Dr. G. Double posting on your own blog? A cheap trick to up your own hit count, surely not?
Anyway, religion. I’ve got it all figured out. Whether I tell you or not will determine whether I’m religious or not. One way or the other.
Like Charlie said, don’t drink and blog.
Except it ain’t henry’s blog. Sorry, old bean. See the last comment above.
No drinks. Just an iPhone and a dodgy connection from a train stuck somewhere outside Colchester. And, I see, no engagement with the actual arguments.
Poor dear, my commiserations. My metro journey home was flawless. Not even bothered by
otherdrunks as is usual on late night Helsinki public transport. You deserve a Pims and lemonade for your travails.I’m not sure which was worse – the fact that the train was stuck, or that it was stuck outside Colchester. Honestly, things moved faster in the old days. Boudicca would have arrived, sacked the city and gone home by the time that National Express East Anglia arrived.
But I think that what I object to most is the wanton revisionism, that the likes of HWMNBN have perverted Darwin into some kind of secular saint, and a figurehead for their own sectarian cause.
Listening to the Darwin industry you get the impression that nobody knew anything until Darwin arrived from Heaven on his golden chariot bearing his Commandments, when the actual events showed that his ideas went into eclipse for half a century until their rehabilitation by Morgan’s students (Morgan himself being anti-Darwinian). I have read a mainstream student textbook from 1916 (Russell’s Form and Function) that is overtly Lamarckian.
A key figure in this was Bateson, and one of his key books was Materials for the Study of Variation of 1894, which includes an astonishing tirade against the vacuity of natural selection, for want of any known substrate of inheritance (Bateson went on to invent genetics a few years later). Bateson’s contribution was pivotal, though I have seen him ridiculed and belittled by one of HWMNBN’s acolytes (one of the Ridley’s – I can’t remember which) as an eccentric marginal figure of no account.
Our ersatz Darwin seems to cleave more to the cardboard cut-out idol that the school of HWMNBN seems to want to worship, rather than the real man, who wasn’t a ‘Darwinist’ but a man of his time, who read, knew about and was influenced the then current work by the likes of Goethe, Geoffroy and so on – works which we would nowadays see as peculiar, partly because we cannot see anything now but through the lens of evolution.
It sort of make sense that his ideas went into eclipse for half a century until their rehabilitation: after all, without mendelian genetics natural selection does not make a lot of sense as a mechanism to explain evolution.
The problem is that what we call Darwinism nowadays has only a vague resemblance to what’s actually written on “The Origin of Species” (the creationists usually take advantage of this by choosing to attack the text from 1859). Granted, the general idea is there in embrionary form, but I’m of the opinion that the debate would greatly benefit from achange of name
I’m with you, Christian. What people forget is that Darwin was not a ‘Darwinist’ – he was a man of his time. As such, many of his early ideas on what he called ‘transformation’ were informed by ideas around at the time, many of which we’d think most peculiar. I’d recommend Robert J. Richards’ book The Meaning of Evolution as an essential primer on Darwin’s early ideas and how they developed. Darwin’s views on heredity were as wacky as anyone else’s – his notion of ‘gemmules’ was rapidly skewered by Galton, on experimental evidence (I give an account of this in my own book Jacob’s Ladder).
Well, I think we can safely rule out Henry as the mystery Darwin blogger.
It only takes reading a few posts here to see that this blog was never meant to be a serious, biographical reflection of Charles Darwin’s ‘true’ psyche or character but rather simply a clever writing device. It has been consistently lighthearted and, at its best, ripsnortingly funny; the faux Victorian posts (and comment threads) only added to the humour and interest.
I for one think the blogosphere is a less interesting, less entertaining place now that Mr Darwin has apparently been shooed back into the quietude of Westminster Abbey.