"[W]e all marry Gomer -- Boundless has a great article for men about the pitfalls of spouse shopping: Stop Test-Driving Your Girlfriend
Quote of the Week -- From William Vallicella at Maverick Philosopher: "I am disappointed in myself for allowing myself to be disappointed in others. He who seeks what cannot be found is bound to be disappointed. So I am disappointed in my failure to adjust my expectations to what reality allows."
The Overweight State -- The CDC tracked the the rise of obesity in each state over a twenty year period. Watch as your state grows fatter before your very eyes! (HT: BoingBoing)
Devotional Blog Spotter -- George P. Wood, associate pastor at SeaCoast Grace Church in Cypress, CA, is blogging a series on Romans.
Old Glory and the Old Rugged Cross -- After thirty years as an American evangelical you’d think I’d be used to seeing an American flag in the church. But while I respect the symbol of our country, I’ve never been comfortable with an object that inspires patriotism sharing the stage with the symbol of our Savior’s sacrifice. Mike Hess shares some of these same concerns in his post on The Flag and the Church.
GPS-based Google Ads -- Google's CEO Eric Schmidt wants to have personally tailored radio ads delivered to us via a GPS location-based delivery system. The example Schmidt gives is that while driving past a clothing store, a radio ad could remind us that we need a pair of pants and instruct us to turn left at the upcoming clothing store.
Do we really need our cars telling us where to go and what to buy? Some of us have this sort of system in place already; it's called a cell phone and a wife.
Does SENS make sense? -- Technology Review has an interesting article on The Sens Challenge. Last year, Technology Review offered a $20,000 prize to any molecular biologist who could demonstrate that biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey's "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" (SENS) was "so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate." TR put together a panel of five judges to review the challenges and to "determine whether de Grey's proposals were science or fantasy." In the final analysis, none of the judges found the challenges convincing:
At issue is the conflict between the scientific process and the ambiguous status of ideas that have not yet been subjected to that process.
The scientific process requires evidence through independent experimentation or observation in order to accord credibility to a hypothesis. SENS is a collection of hypotheses that have mostly not been subjected to that process and thus cannot rise to the level of being scientifically verified. However, by the same token, the ideas of SENS have not been conclusively disproved. SENS exists in a middle ground of yet-to-be-tested ideas that some people may find intriguing but which others are free to doubt.
If you substituted the terms "Intelligent Design" for "SENS" in that paragraph, would they still feel the same way?
Aubrey de Grey is accused of distorting, misrepresenting, exaggerating, and misunderstanding much of gerontological research. (He is also not trained in that field.) Eerily similar to ID, indeed.
fyi...you might be interested...Fuller professor Dr. Ray Anderson is a guest blogger on my blog, talking about his new book, "An Emergent Theology for Emerging Churches"
rhett
Joe, Joe, Joe.....you know if you're going to pander for intellectual affirmative action for ID theory at least go for the gold and demand it cut in line at the top. You're basically saying that ID deserves to be elevated to an untested quack theory rather than a simple quack theory?
Actually the article is worth reading, especially this:
that probably nicely sums up the status of intelligent design at the moment. Perhaps not unworthy of discussion but lacking a compelling case. Unlike ID, though, SENS advocates are not trying to force biology textbooks to teach SENS as an 'alternative theory'
I'm all for advances in biogerontology, but rather doubt science can overcome major factors in genetic mutation, such as radiation from the sun.
John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris, in The Genesis Flood, suggested that the longevity of the antediluvian patriarchs was due to the presence of a water vapor canopy that protected the earth from physically and genetically harmful solar radiation.
Their theory was that said canopy (“the water above the expanse,” Gen. 1:7) was pricked by the finger of God, as it were, and disintegrated into rain over the next 40 days and 40 nights, causing the worldwide Noahic flood. The biblical record shows human life spans dropping off after that.
Blessings.
If you substituted the terms "Intelligent Design" for "SENS" in that paragraph, would they still feel the same way?
I'm certain they would not.
I happen to have written on de Grey and SENS, and have corresponded with the founder of the organization that set up this review challenge. I'm also reading the reports and will be blogging on it soon.
The difference between life extension (or SENS) and intelligent design is, in broad terms, two-fold. For one thing, SENS is a technical research program aimed at developing technologies for accomplishing specific medical goals - it is an extrapolation of existing medical knowledge in specific ways; "intelligent design" is a proposed broad theory aimed at explaining an entire far-ranging field of science (essentially, all of biology, and large parts of related fields). So, fundamentally, they exist at different "levels" of technical knowledge - one at the level of practical detail, the other of theoretical synthesis. This puts SENS much closer to achievable practical results - whether SENS will work is a question of whether certain research programs based on already-settled science will succeed, but whether ID will be accepted depends on developing and substantiating an all-encompassing theory.
The second difference is that, as noted already, SENS is an active research program based upon existing scientific knowledge. SENS is being researched by actual scientists working in actual laboratories. Hundreds of papers have been published within the SENS paradigm, and many more on closely-related life-extension research projects. Intelligent design, by contrast, is nothing more than an ideology - a conclusion based on no data. It exists largely in the minds of non-scientists and cranks, and is currently being research by . . . absolutely nobody. There has been exactly one paper from an ID standpoint published in a peer-reviewed journal, and that was a scheme perpetrated by the editor, who was associated wtih a creationist institution and bypassed the normal review mechanism and blind-review control process to publish - without telling anyone else on the journal - a paper submitted to him personally by another creationist. No one else has ever done any confirmable research on the subject. The one respected scientist prominent in the ID community, Michael Behe, has proposed the only known testable proposition in ID (that some biological structures cannot have evolved because they are "irreducibly complex" - which is in fact not an argument for ID, but merely against some forms of evolution); he steadfastly refuses to state the proposition in a formal way in which it can be tested, after having repeatedly been asked to do so. He himself has not attempted to test it and refuses to cooperate with any one else in doing so. (He testified in the 2005 Dover, Pennsylvania School Board trial in favor of teaching ID in public schools. On examination, he admitted that no one had ever conducted an actual laboratory test of any proposition under ID. He also defended ID as real science, using a definition of science which he agreed also includes astrology. His testimony was cited by the judge as evidence in favor of his ruling against ID.) In short, ID is not an active field of science at all. It could hardly be, because it is not science, but at any rate nobody in that "field" is even pretending it is science - they are doing nothing whatsoever and have produced nothing whatsoever. Whether or not SENS works in the end, it is an active research program producing real results.
To make that clearer, what the report meant by saying that SENS cannot yet be judged is that we cannot yet tell wether it will reach its final goal - the achievement of consistent progress in extending the human lifespan at a rate faster than the increase in death rate with advancing age (in other words, that science will catch up with old age, solving medical problems of aging faster than they arise, even for elderly people). That goal, obviously, requires a tremendous amount of progress in a variety of distinct medical fields (de Grey has a list). The goal has not been reached, but there are documentable results in each of the subphases. So real and productive science is being done on SENS, while nothing at all is being done on ID. Neither program has yet reached its goal, but one is making progress - enogh progress that a team of experts has decided it is worth continuing. The other has done nothing, and its most prominent proponent literally refuses to do anything. That's a huge difference, and clearly justifies a very different assessment of the likelihood of either one succeeding.
Thanks for the note on "Stop Driving Your Girlfriend."