The Problems With The Selfish Gene

Lots of people fail to understand that the "selfish gene" is a metaphor. They criticize Richard Dawkins for promoting the idea that genes can actually take on the characteristics of selfishness.

Andrew Brown and Mary Midgley are prominent examples of people with this kind of misunderstanding and Jerry Coyne has set them straight in Poor Richard’s Almanac: Andrew Brown and the Pope go after The Selfish Gene and “Selection pressures” are metaphors. So are the “laws of physics.”

However, there are two other problem with the metaphor. The first is rather trivial, it refers to the fact that it's actually alleles, or variants, of a gene that are "selfish." Dawkins knows this. He explains it in his book but I don't think he puts enough emphasis on the concept and in most parts of the book he uses "gene" when he should be saying "allele." I grant that The Selfish Allele is not a catchy title.

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Monday's Molecule #217

Last week's molecule was the 5′ cap structure on eukaryotic mRNA. Lot's of people got it right. The winners were Mark Sturtevant and Jacob Toth [Monday's Molecule #216].

As you know, the general public is very gullible. Millions of people have been duped into taking various supplements on the grounds that these supplements will improve their health and/or correct for a deficiency in their diet. These people will freely donate millions of dollars to the quacks who prey on their stupidity. Today's molecule is one of these supplements. Give the common name and the specific name that identifies this particular variant.

Email your answers to me at: Monday's Molecule #217. I'll hold off posting your answers for at least 24 hours. The first one with the correct answer wins. I will only post the names of people with mostly correct answers to avoid embarrassment. The winner will be treated to a free lunch.

There could be two winners. If the first correct answer isn't from an undergraduate student then I'll select a second winner from those undergraduates who post the correct answer. You will need to identify yourself as an undergraduate in order to win. (Put "undergraduate" at the bottom of your email message.)

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DM Heikki Koskenniemi (1919-2013)

Pictured here with his his wife, Anna-Liisa.
Wikipedia Finland has a brief entry

J'ai le penible devoir d'annoncer le deces du Prof. Heikki Koskenniemi, survenu le 26 septembre 2013, a la veille de son 94e anniversaire. Je reproduis ci-dessous un extrait du courriel que son fils a adresse vendredi au secretariat de l'AIP.
Papyrologists will learn with sadness of the death of Prof. Heikki Koskenniemi on 26th September 2013, on the eve of his 94th birthday. You will find below an abstract from the email his son sent on Friday to the AIP secretariat.
Alain MARTIN
* * *
My dear father, Professor Heikki Koskenniemi, died in Christ very early yesterday in Turku.
Heikki Koskenniemi received his training by Prof. Vittorio Bartoletti in Florence in early 1950's and he visited papyrological conferences as long as it was possible for him. With my son, Johannes Koskenniemi, we will publish my father's edition of P.Turku together, hopely in 2014.
The international network of papyrologists meant to my father more than I can tell. Please, tell everyone who still remember him, our deepest gratitude for the kindness you showed to Heikki Koskenniemi.

Dark Matter Is Real, Not Just Noise or Junk

UPDATE: The title is facetious. I don't believe for one second that most so-called "dark matter" has a function. In fact, there's no such thing as "dark matter." Most of our genome is junk. I mention this because one of the well-known junk DNA kooks is severely irony-impaired and thought that I had changed my mind.

A few hours ago I asked you to evaluate the conclusion of a paper by Venters and Pugh (2013) [Transcription Initiation Sites: Do You Think This Is Reasonable?].

Now I want you to look at the Press Release and tell me what you think [see Scientists Discover the Origins of Genomic "Dark Matter"].

It seems pretty clear to me that Pugh (and probably Venters) actually think they are on to something. Here's part of the press release quoting Franklin "Frank" Pugh, a Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at Penn State.

The remaining 150,000 initiation machines -- those Pugh and Venters did not find right at genes -- remained somewhat mysterious. "These initiation machines that were not associated with genes were clearly active since they were making RNA and aligned with fragments of RNA discovered by other scientists," Pugh said. "In the early days, these fragments of RNA were generally dismissed as irrelevant since they did not code for proteins." Pugh added that it was easy to dismiss these fragments because they lacked a feature called polyadenylation -- a long string of genetic material, adenosine bases -- that protect the RNA from being destroyed. Pugh and Venters further validated their surprising findings by determining that these non-coding initiation machines recognized the same DNA sequences as the ones at coding genes, indicating that they have a specific origin and that their production is regulated, just like it is at coding genes.

"These non-coding RNAs have been called the 'dark matter' of the genome because, just like the dark matter of the universe, they are massive in terms of coverage -- making up over 95 percent of the human genome. However, they are difficult to detect and no one knows exactly what they all are doing or why they are there," Pugh said. "Now at least we know that they are real, and not just 'noise' or 'junk.' Of course, the next step is to answer the question, 'what, in fact, do they do?'"

Pugh added that the implications of this research could represent one step towards solving the problem of "missing heritability" -- a concept that describes how most traits, including many diseases, cannot be accounted for by individual genes and seem to have their origins in regions of the genome that do not code for proteins. "It is difficult to pin down the source of a disease when the mutation maps to a region of the genome with no known function," Pugh said. "However, if such regions produce RNA then we are one step closer to understanding that disease."

I'm puzzled by such statements. It's been one year since the ENCODE publicity fiasco and there have been all kinds of blogs and published papers pointing out the importance of junk DNA and the distinct possibility that most pervasive transcription is, in fact, noise.

It's possible that Pugh and his postdoc are not aware of the controversy. That would be shocking. It's also possible that they are aware of the controversy but decided to ignore it and not reference any of the papers that discuss alternate explanations of their data. That would be even more shocking (and unethical).

Are there any other possibilities that you can think of?

And while we're at it. What excuse can you imagine that lets the editors of Nature off the hook?

P.S. The IDiots at Evolution News & Views (sic) just love this stuff: As We Keep Saying, There's Treasure in "Junk DNA".

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Venters, B.J. and Pugh, B.F. (2013) Genomic organization of human transcription initiation complexes. Nature Published online 18 September 2013 [doi: 10.1038/nature12535] [PubMed] [Nature]

The Extraordinary Human Epigenome

We learned a lot about genes and gene expression in the second half of the 20th century. We learned that genes are transcribed and we have a pretty good understanding of how transcription initiation complexes are formed and how transcription works.

We learned how transcription is regulated through promoter strength, activators, and repressors. Activators and repressors bind to DNA and those binding sites can lie at some distance from the promoter leading to formation of loops of DNA that bring the regulatory proteins into contact with the transcription complex. Much of our basic understanding of this process was derived from detailed studies of bacteriophage and bacterial genes.

THEME:
Transcription
Later on we learned that eukaryotic genes expression was very similar and regulation also required repressors and activators. We discovered that gene expression was associated with chromatin remodeling that opened up regions of the chromosome that were tightly bound to histones in 30nm or higher order structures.

Building on studies in prokaryotes, we learned about temporal gene regulation and differentiation. Much of the work was done in model organisms like Drosophila, yeast, C. elegans, and various mammalian cells in culture.

By the end of the century I was pretty confident that what I wrote in my textbook was a fair representation of the fundamental concepts in gene expression and regulation.

Turns out I was wrong as I just discovered this morning when I read the opening paragraph of a review by Rivera and Ren (2013). Here's what they say ...

More than a decade has passed since the human genome was completely sequenced, but how genomic information directs spatial- and temporal-specific gene expression programs remains to be elucidated (Lander, 2011). The answer to this question is not only essential for understanding the mechanisms of human development, but also key to studying the phenotypic variations among human populations and the etiology of many human diseases. However, a major challenge remains: each of the more than 200 different cell types in the human body contains an identical copy of the genome but expresses a distinct set of genes. How does a genome guide a limited set of genes to be expressed at different levels in distinct cell types?

Wow! The textbooks need to be rewritten! We didn't learn anything in the last century!

It took me the whole first paragraph of this paper to realize that the rest of it was probably going to be worthless unless you were interested in technical details about the field. That's because I'm not as smart as Dan Graur. He only read the title, "Mapping Human Epigenomes" and the abstract before concluding that the authors were speaking in newspeak¹ [A “Leading Edge Review” Reminds Me of Orwell (and #ENCODE)].

The Rivera and Ren paper is a "Leading Edge" review in the prestigious journal Cell. It covers all the techniques used to study methylation, histone modification and binding, transcription factor binding, and nucleosome positioning at the genome level. According to the authors, people like me were fooled by studies on individual genes, purified factors, and in vitro binding assays. That didn't really tell us what was going on.

Apparently, the most effective way of learning about the regulation of gene expression in humans is to analyze the entire genome all at once and read off the data from microarrays and computer monitors. (After shoving it through a bunch of code.)

Overwhelming evidence now indicates that the epigenome serves to instruct the unique gene expression program in each cell type together with its genome. The word "epigenetics," coined half a century ago by combining "epigenesis" and "genetics," describes the mechanisms of cell fate commitment and lineage specification during animal development (Holliday, 1990; Waddington, 1959). Today, the "epigenome" is generally used to describe the global, comprehensive view of sequence-independent processes that modulate gene expression patterns in a cell and has been liberally applied in reference to the collection of DNA methylation state and covalent modification of histone proteins along the genome (Bernstein et al., 2007; Bonasio et al., 2010). The epigenome can differ from cell type to cell type, and in each cell it regulates gene expression in a number of ways—by organizing the nuclear architecture of the chromosomes, restricting or facilitating transcription factor access to DNA, and preserving a memory of past transcriptional activities. Thus, the epigenome represents a second dimension of the genomic sequence and is pivotal for maintaining cell-typespecific gene expression patterns.

Not long ago, there were many points of trepidation about the value and utility of mapping epigenomes in human cells (Madhani et al., 2008). At the time, it was suggested that histone modifications simply reflect activities of transcription factors (TFs), so cataloging their patterns would offer little new information. However, some investigators believed in the value of epigenome maps and advocated for concerted efforts to produce such resources (Feinberg, 2007; Henikoff et al., 2008; Jones and Martienssen, 2005). The last five years have shown that epigenome maps can greatly facilitate the identification of potential functional sequences and thereby annotation of the human genome. Now, we appreciate the utility of epigenomic maps in the delineation of thousands of lincRNA genes and hundreds of thousands of cis-regulatory elements (ENCODE Project Consortium et al., 2012; Ernst et al., 2011; Guttman et al., 2009; Heintzman et al., 2009; Xie et al., 2013b; Zhu et al., 2013), all of which were obtained without prior knowledge of cell-type-specific master transcriptional regulators. Interestingly, bioinformatic analysis of tissue-specific cis-regulatory elements has actually uncovered novel TFs regulating specific cellular states.

So, what are all these new discoveries that now elucidate what was previously unknown; namely, "how genomic information directs spatial- and temporal-specific gene expression programs"?

This is a very long review full of technical details so let's skip right to the conclusions.

Six decades ago, Watson and Crick put forward a model of DNA double helix structure to elucidate how genetic information is faithfully copied and propagated during cell division (Watson and Crick, 1953). Several years later, Crick famously proposed the "central dogma" to describe how information in the DNA sequence is relayed to other biomolecules such as RNA and proteins to sustain a cell’s biological activities (Crick, 1970). Now, with the human genome completely mapped, we face the daunting
task to decipher the information contained in this genetic blueprint. Twelve years ago, when the human genome was first sequenced, only 1.5% of the genome could be annotated as protein coding, whereas the rest of the genome was thought to be mostly "junk" (Lander et al., 2001; Venter et al., 2001). Now, with the help of many epigenome maps, nearly half of the genome is predicted to carry specific biochemical activities and potential regulatory functions (ENCODE Project Consortium, et al., 2012). It is conceivable that in the near future the human genome will be completely annotated, with the catalog of transcription units and their transcriptional regulatory sequences fully mapped.

I hope they hurry up. Not only do I have to re-write my description of the Central Dogma² but I'm going to have to re-write everything I thought I knew about regulation of gene expression and the organization of information in the human genome. That's going to take time so I hope the epigeneticists will publish lots more whole genome studies in the near future so I can understand the new model of gene expression.

Keep in mind that this paper was published in Cell where it was rigorously reviewed by the leading experts in the field. It must be right.

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[Image Credit: Moran, L.A., Horton, H.R., Scrimgeour, K.G., and Perry, M.D. (2012) Principles of Biochemistry 5th ed., Pearson Education Inc. page 647 [Pearson: Principles of Biochemistry 5/E] © 2012 Pearson Education Inc.]

1. Newspeak was first described in 1984 proving, once again, that George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) was a really smart and prescient guy. For another example see: What Is "Science" According to George Orwell?.

2. Apparently I didn't read the Crick (1970) paper as carefully as they did.

Rivera, C.M. and Ren, B. (2013) Mapping Human Epigenomes. Cell 155:39-55 [doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2013.09.011]

Transcription Initiation Sites: Do You Think This Is Reasonable?

I'm interested in how scientists read the scientific literature and in how they distinguish good science from bad science. I know that when I read a paper I usually make a pretty quick judgement based on my knowledge of the field and my model of how things work. In other words, I look at the conclusions first to see whether they conflict with or agree with my model.

Many of my colleagues do it differently. They focus on the actual experiments and reach a conclusion based on how the perceive the data. If the experiments look good and the data seems reliable then they tentatively accept the conclusions even if they conflict with the model they have in their mind. They are much more likely to revamp their model than I am.

I'm about to give you the conclusions from a recently published paper in Nature. I'd like to hear from all graduate students, postdocs, and scientists on how you react to those conclusions. Do you think the conclusions are reasonable (as long as the experiments are valid) or do you think that the conclusions are unreasonable, indicating that there has to be something wrong somewhere?

The paper is Venters and Pugh (2013). It's title is Genomic organization of human transcription complexes. You don't need to read the paper unless you want to get into a more detailed debate. All I want to hear about is your initial reaction to their final two paragraphs.

Consolidated genomic view of initiation

...The discovery that transcription of the human genome is vastly more pervasive than what produces coding mRNA raises the question as to whether Pol II initiates transcription promiscuously through random collisions with chromatin as biological noise or whether it arises specifically from canonical Pol II initiation complexes in a regulated manner. Our discovery of ~150,000 non-coding promoter initiation complexes in human K562 cells and more in other cell lines suggests that pervasive non-coding transcription is promoter-specific, regulated, and not much different from coding transcription, except that it remains nuclear and non-polyadenylated. An important next question is the extent to which transcription factors regulate production of ncRNA.

We detected promoter transcription initiation complexes at 25% of all ~24,000 human coding genes, and found that there were 18-fold more non-coding complexes than coding. We therefore estimate that the human genome potentially contains as many as 500,000 promoter initiation complexes, corresponding to an average of about one every 3 kilobases (kb) in the non-repetitive portion of the human genome. This number may vary more or less depending on what constitutes a meaningful transcription initiation event. The finding that these initiation complexes are largely limited to locations having well-defined core promoters and measured TSSs indicates that they are functional and specific, but it remains to be determined to what end. Their massive numbers would seem to provide an origin for the so-called dark matter RNA of the genome, and could house a substantial portion of the missing heritability.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Keep in mind that this is a Nature paper that has been rigorously reviewed by leading experts in the field. Does that influence your opinion?

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Venters, B.J. and Pugh, B.F. (2013) Genomic organization of human transcription initiation complexes. Nature Published online 18 September 2013 [doi: 10.1038/nature12535] [PubMed] [Nature]

Stephen Meyer Says That Constant Mutation Rates Are a "Questionable Assumption"

Stephen Meyer is trying to make the case that the primitive animals of the Cambrian explosion really did arise suddenly as fully formed and distinct species. He says that the evidence points to God(s).

Scientists, on the other hand, have been exploring other possibilities and testing various models. They have shown that the molecular data is not consistent with sudden origins. Instead it shows that all of the major animal phyla are related and that their common ancestors probably lived millions of years before the Cambrian explosion. Thus, the evidence indicates deep divergence and the lack of transitional fossils does not prove the non-existence of these ancestral forms.

In order to support his creationist view, Meyer has to discredit the molecular evidence. We've already seen that he has five arguments against the data [Darwin's Doubt: The Genes Tell the Story?]. The first three were: (1) there are no transitional fossils [The Cambrian Conundrum: Stephen Meyer Says (Lack of) Fossils Trumps Genes]; (2) different molecular phylogenies do not agree in all detail [Stephen Meyer Says Molecular Evidence Must Be Wrong Because Scientists Disagree About the Exact Dates]; and (3) different genes evolve at different rates [Stephen Meyer Says Molecular Data Must Be Wrong Because Different Genes Evolve at Different Rates].

None of those arguments are correct and one of them (#3) is just plain silly.

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2013 Toronto Science Festival

The University of Toronto is sponsoring a "science" festival with three talks tomorrow and Saturday. You have to buy tickets at: tickets.

There's two technology talks and one science talk. I'm going to the only science talk at the science festival. There are a bunch of other things going on, see the entire program.

Friday, Sept. 27th 7pm– "Human Exploration of Space: 50 Years and Counting": Space Shuttle veteran and first Canadian on board the International Space Station, Julie Payette

“High achiever” barely begins to describe Julie Payette. Masters degree in engineering, pilot, IBM engineer, Officer of the Order of Canada, singer with symphonies in Montreal, Toronto, and Switzerland, conversant in six languages, and now Director of the Montreal Science Centre. Oh, did we mention she was orbiting the Earth, using a giant robot arm to build a space station by the time she was 35? Julie will kick off the festival by sharing her unique insights into the past, present, and future of human space exploration.

Friday, Sept. 27th 8pm– "Brave Genius: Jacques Monod, Chance, and our Place in the Universe": Evolutionary biologist and “evo devo” pioneer, Sean Carroll

Biologist and Nobel Laureate Jacques Monod once remarked that “the most important results of science have been to change the relationship of man to the universe, or the way he sees himself in the universe.” Discoveries in molecular biology, evolutionary biology, and geology over the past half-century have profoundly reshaped our picture of human origins, and revealed the enormous role of chance in the fate of life on Earth. Join evolutionary biologist Sean Carroll as he chronicles some of those discoveries through Monod’s eyes, whose own ascent from struggling graduate student to leader within the French Resistance, co-founder of molecular biology, and emergence as a public figure and leading voice of science involved a great deal of chance, and courage.

Saturday, Sept. 28th 7pm– "Postcards from Mars": Mars rover imaging scientist, Jim Bell

Don’t worry if your application to live on Mars was rejected. You can still visit the Red Planet through the spectacular imagery captured by a trio of Mars Rovers—Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity. Planetary scientist Jim Bell was instrumental in developing cameras and processing images from the three robotic explorers and in his talk “Postcards from Mars”, he’ll share his favorite vistas of our planetary neighbour with you. Through the beauty of these photographs, you’ll see why Bell can be described as a scientist, an explorer and a nature photographer.

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Hypocrisy

Chris DiCarlo talked about fallacies in our class today. We're trying to teach students how to recognize the most important logical fallacies that they are likely to encounter in debates and discussions. He also talked about the importance of consistency and how being caught out as a hypocrite can be devastating to your cause.

Speaking of hypocrisy, the Popular Science website has just banned comments. Apparently they were getting overwhelmed with crackpots and kooks [Why We're Shutting Off Our Comments].

A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

There are plenty of other ways to talk back to us, and to each other: through Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, livechats, email, and more.

That's not hypocritical. The hypocrisy comes from Uncommon Descent where someone names "nullasalus" blogged about the Popular Science decisions [Popular Science shuts down comments, citing the presence of dissent from the scientific consensus]. Here's what he/she/it said

Science is not what’s being championed at Popsci.com, nor is ‘bedrock scientific doctrine’ challenged by dissent. Consensus is. Orthodoxy is. Likewise, being ‘politically motivated’ with regards to science is not a problem – it is having political, social and even religious views that PopSci has decided are unacceptable. Dialogue and discussion is welcomed by the self-appointed champions of science – if and only if it results in an outcome they favor. If they suspect it doesn’t, then the dialogue and discussion is over.

Why, it’s almost as if science was never really the concern to begin with.

I was going to make a comment but I can't because I've been banned. Apparently the people at Uncommon Descent have decided that my views are unacceptable. I also can't make any comments over on Evolution News & Views because they don't allow comments.

That's what hypocrisy looks like.

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An "Atheist" Defends Intelligent Design Creationism

Bradley Monton is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. On his website he says he specializes in the philosophy of time, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science (especially physics). He doesn't appear to have any expertise in biology or evolution but he's interested in Intelligent Design Creationism.

A few years ago (2009) he published a book with a provocative title: Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design. Normally I wouldn't pay much attention to such a book but Salvo magazine ("Society, Sex, Science") just published an interview with him [Beyond Belief (or the Lack Thereof)]. It ain't pretty.

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Monday's Molecule #216

Last week's molecules were guanine and adenine. Everyone should have known these structures but only undergraduate Zhimeng Yu got it right! [Monday's Molecule #215].

You probably didn't memorize the structure of this week's molecule but you should be able to recognize it and check your answer in a textbook or on the web. What it is it? (I don't know why it has a gray background. Can anyone help? Fixed.)

Email your answers to me at: Monday's Molecule #216. I'll hold off posting your answers for at least 24 hours. The first one with the correct answer wins. I will only post the names of people with mostly correct answers to avoid embarrassment. The winner will be treated to a free lunch.

There could be two winners. If the first correct answer isn't from an undergraduate student then I'll select a second winner from those undergraduates who post the correct answer. You will need to identify yourself as an undergraduate in order to win. (Put "undergraduate" at the bottom of your email message.)

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ZPE 187 (2013)

INHALT
Ameling, W., Ein Altar des Maussollos in Labraunda ... 215 

Bartels, J. – Willi, A., Co[mmodu]s oder Go[rdianu]s? Neulesung eines Meilensteins aus der Provinz Moesia inferior ... 302 

Bevan, G. – Lehoux, D. – Talbert, R., Reflectance Transformation Imaging of a ‘Byzantine’ Portable Sundial ... 221 

Bremmer, J. N., Divinities in the Orphic Gold Leaves: Euklês, Eubouleus, Brimo, Kybele, Kore and Persephone ... 35 

Brun, P., Y avait-il vraiment des anti-Macédoniens à Athènes entre 338 et 323? A propos d’un nouveau fragment d’Hypéride Contre Diondas ... 87 

Chaouali, M., Une nouvelle inscription des carrières de marbre de Chimtou (l’antique Simitthus) 305 

Cribiore, R. – Davoli, P., New Literary Texts from Amheida, Ancient Trimithis (Dakhla Oasis, Egypt) 1 Dale, A., Hipponax fr. 42 IEG2 = 7 Degani ... 49 

Danbeck, D., Hesiod, Catalogue of Women 85+117 15 – Four Formerly Hesiodic Fragments ... 31 

Daris, S., Nota a P.Oxy. XIV 1747 ... 263 

Dettori, E., Su Callim. fr. 23 Pf. (25 Mass.) ... 101 

Dickey, E. – Ferri, R. – Scappaticcio, M. Ch., The Origins of Grammatical Tables: a Reconsideration of P.Louvre inv. E 7332 ... 173 

Eck, W. – Pangerl, A., Neue Diplome mit den Namen von Konsuln und Statthaltern ... 273 

Efstathiou, A. A., [Aristotle] Athenaion Politeia 48.4 ... 84 

Engelmann, H., Schenkung und Nießbrauch (TAM II 189 und 190) ... 220 

Furley, W., P.Oxy. 2658 (= PCG vol. 8.1103) – Menander’s Perikeiromene after all? ... 93 

Gagliardi, P., Le Muse Pierides nel papiro di Gallo? ... 156 

Henry, W. B., A Papyrus of Old Comedy (P. Oxy. 863 + 2806) 52 Kató, P., Von der Verlosung zum Verkauf des Priestertums oder umgekehrt? Bemerkungen zu einer lex sacra aus Antimachia (Kos) ... 211 

Kuznetsov, A., Sweet Protogenes’ Grave ... 132 

 Lucarini, C. M., ἀσυνάρτητοι στίχοι ... 53 

Massaro, M., Un “iter” ... di fantasia. Revisione e commento di CIL VI 5953 / CLE 1068 ... 164 

Minutoli, D., Plato, Res Publica III, 405 a8–b2; 405 c7–d2 (PL III/1003) ... 81 

Mullen, A., New Thoughts on British Latin: a Curse Tablet from Red Hill, Ratcliffe-on-Soar (Nottinghamshire) ... 266 

Occhipinti, E., The Ships in the Battle of Notion: a New Supplement for Lines 9–12 of the Florence Papyrus (PSI 1304) 72 van Oppen de Ruiter, B. F., Argaeus, an Illegitimate Son of Alexander the Great? ... 206

Phillips, T., Callimachus on Books: Aetia fr. 7.13–14 ... 119 

Piccinini, J., A Forgotten Votive Plaque from Dodona: a Brief Addendum to P. A. Hansen, Carmina Epigraphica Graeca ... 69 

Piso, I., Zum Judenkrieg des Q. Marcius Turbo ... 255 

Ryholt, K., The Illustrated Herbal from Tebtunis: New Fragments and Archaeological Context ... 233 

Sánchez-Ostiz, Á., Cicero Graecus: Notes on Ciceronian Papyri from Egypt ... 144 

Todisco, E., Esempi di alfabetismo nella campagna romana in età imperiale (Italia e province occidentali) ... 295 

Torallas Tovar, S. – Worp, K. A., An Interesting Mummy Label in Leiden ... 230 

Tracy, St. V., IG I3 259–272: the Lapis Primus – Corrigenda Selecta ... 191 

Tran, N., Le cuisinier G. Iulius Niceros et la domesticité royale de Maurétanie ... 310 

Tsantsanoglou, K., Critical Observations on Posidippus’ Testament (118 A.–B.) ... 122 

Vanbeselaere, S., The Gaii Valerii. Gaius Valerius Longus’ Alleged Archive and His Relatives ... 239 

Vassallo, Chr., Ein vergessenes Fragment eines sokratischen Dialogs: PSI XI 1215 ... 77 

Wijma, S. M., The “Others” in a lex sacra from the Attic Deme Phrearrhioi (SEG 35.113) ... 199 

Woodman, A. J., A Note on Res Gestae 34.3 ... 154 

Corrigendum zu ZPE 186, 2013, 82–83 (Sophokles, Ichneutai) ... 190

Scribal Practice Conference

Scribal Practice
Documenting the Australian Research Council project: 'Knowledge Transfer and Administrative Professionalism in a Pre-Typographic Society: Observing the Scribe at Work in Roman and Early Islamic Egypt' 

MALCOLM.CHOAT [@] MQ.EDU.AU;
JENNIFER.CROMWELL [@] MQ.EDU.AU;
RACHEL.YUEN [@] MQ.EDU.AU;
RAYMOND.DOSOO [@] MQ.EDU.AU

PAPERS

Abstracts
Observing the Scribe at Work

Of interest here: 
Abstracts

Rodney Ast (University of Heidelberg)

Lectional Signs in Greek Documents as Indicators of Scribal Practice and Training

Aside from a couple well-attested diacritical marks (the trema and apostrophe), lectional signs and punctuation are not common in Greek documentary papyri. Where they do occur, however, they can be as instructive about scribal practice and training as the better-known benchmarks of, e.g., palaeography, orthography, and grammar. They can, in short, tell us something about the habits and education of scribes.

My aim in this paper is to investigate scribal behaviour by examining the types of lectional signs and punctuation marks (accents, middots, etc.) employed in a variety of types of documents, from private letters to petitions to receipts. I will consider factors that might have dictated their use in specific cases, such as the perceived need for formality on the writer’s part or the desire to avoid ambiguity. Furthermore, I will evaluate, to the extent allowed by the evidence, the broader historical and cultural contexts of the documents, including the archives to which they belong, the archaeological sites that produced them, and the periods in which they were composed.

Marie-Pierre Chaufray (University of Bordeaux 3)

Scribal Practice in Dime

The village of Dime in the Fayyum has yielded a great number of literary and documentary papyri dating from Roman times, both in Egyptian and Greek. The texts written in Egyptian come mostly from the temple of Soknopaios, the main temple of the village. Thus, scribal practice can be studied at different levels: in the comparison and the relationship between literary and administrative texts written by the same scribes; in the question of professionalism through the redaction of contracts, for which one can witness a certain continuity with the Late Ptolemaic period; in the persistence of scribal practice in Demotic for the internal administration of the main temple of the village (receipts, agreements and accounts). My paper will focus mainly on this last point by studying the way internal administrative papers and records were written and kept in the temple of Soknopaios. It will deal with the material aspect of writing (use and reuse of papyrus, handwritings, marks of control, costs of writing) to observe priestly scribes at work within the temple from the 1st to the 3rd century AD.

Malcolm Choat (Macquarie University, Sydney) and Korshi Dosoo (Macquarie University, Sydney)

The Use of Abbreviations in Duplicate Documents from Roman Egypt

The use of abbreviations is a common phenomenon in administrative and official documents (either those written by the administration, or destined for official eyes). This is too easily dismissed as the unremarkable result of random variation: a closer look at the evidence suggests that both the use and the form of abbreviation may be highly revealing, varying between classes of words (common administrative formulae or more informationally dense personal details), the physical environment in which the word occurs (line initial, medial or final) and in the type of abbreviation used (e.g. raised final letter, supralinear stroke).  The case of duplicate documents is particularly revealing, providing not only a corpus within which the abbreviational tendencies of individual scribes can be observed, but sources within which the scribe’s consistent or inconsistent treatment of identical words in identical texts is clearly visible, highlighting professional or individual scribal preferences, and the ways in which abbreviations contrary to these preferences may originate in earlier iterations of the document. The latter tendency may help us to discern the priority of duplicates. As test cases for this approach, we will examine a range of document types which cover a wide temporal and geographic range, and which contain both highly standardised formulae and extremely open-ended information specific to each declarant.

Jennifer Cromwell (Macquarie University, Sydney)

Tax, Palaeography, and Coptic Scribes in the Early Islamic Administration

In the first century after the Islamic conquest of Egypt in 641 AD, the country underwent major administrative changes. For the first time, administrative texts were written in Coptic and many of these involve taxes, especially the religious poll tax introduced by the new rulers. One striking aspect of this change is seen in the similarities witnessed in Coptic scribal practice in the corpus of bilingual Coptic-Greek tax documents written between the 690s and 720s in the area from Hermopolis to Hermonthis. This paper will examine the formulaic and palaeographic similarities found in one particular group of texts—tax demands issued from the office of Arabic officials—in order to examine the role of Coptic scribes in the administration during this period.

Hans Förster + Ulrike Swoboda (University of Vienna)

Copying Translated Texts: The Example of the Sahidic Version of the Gospel of John

A current research project (Austrian Science Fund/FWF project P24649-G15) is dedicated to the question of translational tendencies and mistakes in two early translations of the Gospel of John: The Latin and the Coptic version. The paper will focus on selected Sahidic manuscripts in order to address the following questions: Is it possible to deduct from the evidence of the manuscripts which training the scribes had? Is it further possible to come to a conclusion as to the actual act of copying? The question would be whether this was the task of one scribe comparing his work to the manuscript that was copied or whether it was the task of two people: In this case one would read the manuscript to be copied aloud and the other would write his copy from this dictation. These two questions will be addressed, focussing mainly on statistical factors of allographs of carefully chosen words from selected manuscripts. It is obvious that the ability to act as a scribe for a dictated text presupposes a different training from the act of copying a text visually.


Didier Lafleur (CNRS, Paris)

Scribal Habits and Ancient Textual Tradition: The Case of Family 13 Greek New Testament Manuscripts

During the Middle Ages, through all parts of the Mediterranean area, numerous monasteries were renown for their scribal activity. In these monasteries, scribes transmitted in Greek language numerous corpus of all works – literary, scientific, religious – especially the texts of the New Testament. Monasteries of Southern Italy remain today the place where were copied a special group of Greek New Testament manuscripts, known as “Family 13”. All these manuscripts – about a dozen – were copied in the same area, mostly Calabria, between the 10th and the 13th centuries AD. On one hand, they present a similar scribal practice, especially on palaeographical grounds. On the other hand, they are considered by biblical scholars as a first order witness of the Greek New Testament: that means that this group is always quoted in all critical editions. According to textual critics, the readings of these manuscripts are highly valuable because they agree with a text used by Origen in the middle of the 3rd century AD, in Caesarea Palaestina, a thousand kilometers away from Southern Italy.

On the basis of observable phenomena, this paper will emphasize the two sides of scribal knowledge transfer: the physical practice of writing and the evidence of the text tradition. After a short presentation of the documents, we will first consider the daily scribal activity, including the process of writing and the daily use of these manuscripts. We will then focus on the preservation process of a singular textual tradition: How very ancient readings used during the third century by the first Christian communities were still in use in Southern Italy centuries after?

Considered as Christian artefacts, manuscripts reveal quantitative data about knowledge transfer across centuries. The case of the Family 13 manuscripts is an interesting example of the role of scribes in pre-modern societies.


Delphine Nachtergaele (Ghent University)

Scribes in the Greek Private Papyrus Letters

In this paper I investigate the role of scribes in Greek private papyrus letters. When an individual decided to write a letter, he had two options: writing the letter himself or paying a scribe and having the letter written. Many papyrus letters were the result of the work of a scribe. Outsourcing the task of writing was the only possibility when one was illiterate. But when the sender could write and read, he could pen the letter himself. The first research question in this study is whether the choice to use a scribe or not can be considered a conscious decision. In P.Mich. VIII 469, preserved in the archive of Claudius Tiberianus, the decision not to hire a scribe seems to be taken deliberately: the fact that the letter was written by the sender himself, bears in itself a message to the addressee.

The second and main query is whether the intervention of a scribe has an effect on the language used in the letters. At first sight, the influence of the scribe seems rather limited. However, the investigation of letters preserved in archives can shed more light on this matter: in different case studies, I compare the language of one single sender in autographical letters and in letters written by a scribe. The archive of Asklepiades shows the effect scribes can have on the epistolary language: in the letters from Isidora to her brother Asklepiades there is a marked linguistic difference between the autographs and the letters she dictated to a scribe. In other collections of texts, such as the letters from Eudaimonis in the archive of Apollonios strategos, there is no such difference: the personality of the sender is apparent in all letters, autograph or dictated.

This paper has a double conclusion: firstly, we observe that letter writers make deliberate choices when writing letters: these choices are situated at the level of using a scribe or not, and at a linguistic level. Of course, these findings cannot be generalized, but this paper provides nevertheless an important insight: although the authors of documentary letters cannot be compared to authors of literary works, we should not underestimate the creative capacities of the senders of papyrus letters. Secondly, the influence of scribes on the language of the papyrus letters is rather limited. Mostly, the scribes just penned down what the sender dictated. The language of the papyrus letters can thus safely be assumed to be the language of the letter writer.


Andrew Pleffer (Macquarie University, Sydney)

Signs, Signatories and Scribes: The Function of Scribal Markings in the Fourth Century Aramaic ostraca

The ongoing publication of the fourth century Aramaic ostraca that have surfaced from the region of southern Levant is incredibly important for understanding socio-economic processes and conditions in the western provincial regions of the Persian empire. The study presented here will be subject to the final publication of the remaining ostraca, but hopes to probe and test methodologies that could be applied to the corpus in understanding the function of its individual pieces.

Since the initial publication of the Aramaic ostraca, their function has remained an important and contended issue. For the most part, the Aramaic ostraca are inscribed sherds of pottery that appear to detail, in short-formulaic phrases, the movement and quantities of commodities. Some of the ostraca bear markings that appear in enlarged script and easily distinguishable forms usually positioned at the end of the body of the text and occasionally alongside a signatory.

It is a widely held view that ostraca found in Greece, Egypt, and the Levant functioned as drafts or scrap paper of a scribal bureaucracy. However, the scribal markings in these ostraca have been used to support the suggestion that the ostraca had a wider circulation beyond that of being drafts for papyri record lists. This paper presents a detailed analysis of the scribal markings published thus far. It tracks the physical characteristics of the markings, aspects of scribal identity and the syntactic features of the ostraca, probing possible explanations for their function.

Lucian Reinfandt (University of Vienna)

Scribal Traditions, Social Change, and the Emergence of a Caliphal Administration (642-800 AD)

The activities of scribes in original documents highlight their own cultural and ethnic backgrounds. By this, an identification is possible of members of this important group of social actors, in my case: the personnel of early Islamic chanceries, that are otherwise elusive in the literary sources. Their traces in the documents serve as a basis for a prosopography of these largely anonymous scribes. The following phenomena are useful for my analysis: (a) palaeography and layout; (b) phraseology and style; (c) grammar and orthography. Of peculiar importance for the analysis is the multilingual character of early Islamic chanceries with their parallel production of official documents in Arabic, Coptic, and Greek in the western parts of the caliphal empire and Iranian languages in the East. In my paper, I will present a ‘mapping’ of chancery scribes in Egypt after the Muslim conquest. This will be held against two major developments: the successive Arabisation of the chanceries in the wake of reforms initiated by the caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwān in the course of the first half of the 8th century AD; and the ‘takeover’ of the offices by scribes with Iranian background during the late 8th and early 9th centuries AD. Such an approach of ‘observing the scribe at work’ is significant for the historian of Islamicate societies. Processes of Arabisation and Islamisation, i.e. the migration of social groups, the exchange of administrative personnel in the chanceries, and the phenomenon of religious conversion, become visible that seem otherwise undetectable. These had deep impact on the development of Muslim rule and administration and contributed to the dissemination of a common imperial culture in peripheries of disparate conditions.


Francesca Schironi (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)

Saving the Ivory Tower from Oblivion: The Role of Scribes in Preserving Alexandrian Scholarship

In this paper I will analyse the crucial role that scribes from the Ptolemaic to the Byzantine periods played in disseminating the philological work of the Alexandrian scholars on Homer in Egypt and beyond. I will review the scribal evidence from the Ptolemaic period to the Byzantine era and show that the format of the Homeric editions changed in the centuries after the work of the Alexandrians: scribes were embracing the innovations introduced by the Alexandrians both in the book layout (divisions into books, end-titles) and in the most technical aspects of Alexandrian philology (variant readings,exegetical comments, critical signs added in the margins). Manuscript evidence thus shows that scribes from the 2nd century BC to the 10th century AD had two distinct and fundamental roles in the Homeric tradition: they preserved the most technical aspects of Alexandrian scholarship and they also disseminated its more popular innovations (like the book division). The activity of the scribes therefore ensured that Alexandrian scholarship did not remain a dry intellectual product locked into the Library with no future, but on the contrary permeated book production and literary discourse in the following centuries, and ultimately informed our own reception of the Homeric texts.

Valeria Tezzon (Humboldt University, Berlin)

How many scribes in P.Berol.13270? New considerations about the handwriting

One of the problematic aspects of P.Berol. 13270 is the identification of two supposed scribes involved in the text redaction: in 1924 Ulrich Wilcken observed that the text must have been written by two writers and recognized two different kinds of handwriting: one “strong and plain” and the other “slighter and more delicate”; moreover he added that each scribe might have used his own calamos, which also influenced the ductus. This proposal has been largely accepted. Recently, Bendetto Bravo has carefully described the alternation of the supposed two writers, suggesting also a possible change of calamos between the writers. The differences recognized in the handwriting will be examined in order to verify a possible different explanation for the highly problematic presence of two writers.


Marja Vierros (University of Helsinki)

Scribes and Other Writers in the Petra Papyri

The carbonized papyrus dossier from Petra, metropolis of the Roman province Palaestina Salutaris/Tertia, presents a group of documentary texts all written in Greek in the sixth century AD, and all found from the same small side room in the Church of Virgin Mary. Most of the texts were written in Petra, and some in nearby villages. The documents are mainly contracts, tax receipts, donations, settlements of disputes, etc., all somehow relating to the possessions of an ecclesiastical family belonging to the uppermost stratum of society. They also seem to represent high standard Byzantine Greek language and notarial practices. In this paper, I will collect together all the information on the writers appearing in these documents. These were the notaries (symbolaiografoi), who drew up the lengthy legal texts. Some of them we know by name, some only by their handwriting, spelling and perhaps other linguistic features. The people whose matters the documents dealt with usually signed the contracts themselves or used signatories; the signatures were long because it was necessary to repeat the contents of the contract. The signatures present various levels of literacy. The documents also included short signatures of witnesses. Some less important documents were not written by notaries, but by the people themselves. Now that almost all the texts from the dossier are published or very near to being published, it will be possible to draw conclusions about the writing skills and scribal practices in Petra.

M.-H. MARGANNE et B. ROCHETTE (éds) Bilinguisme et digraphisme dans le monde gréco-romain l’apport des papyrus latins

Bilinguisme et digraphisme dans le monde gréco-romain l’apport des papyrus latins
par Marie-Hélène MARGANNE et Bruno ROCHETTE (éds)

Presses Universitaires de Liège
ISBN : 978-2-87562-022-4
Année de publication : 2013
Prix : 30.00€
Pages : 242



http://www.presses.ulg.ac.be/jcms/c_11006/bilinguisme-et-digraphisme-dans-le-monde-greco-romain

Présentation du volume

Bien moins nombreux que les papyrus grecs, les papyrus latins présentent néanmoins un grand intérêt pour l’étude des contacts entre les deux langues officielles du bassin méditerranéen antique, à savoir le grec et le latin. Ces contacts se manifestent non seulement par l’existence de papyrus bilingues, mais sont aussi perceptibles à d’autres niveaux : les emprunts lexicaux dans les papyrus documentaires et l’influence d’une écriture sur l’autre. Ces aspects ont été fortement renouvelés ces dernières années, mais n’ont pas fait l’objet d’une réflexion plus globale sur les phénomènes inter-linguistiques en Egypte gréco-romaine. La Table Ronde organisée à Liège les 12 et 13 mai 2011 a voulu proposer des pistes de réflexion sur cette thématique. Elle souhaitait aussi faire le bilan des avancées récentes de la papyrologie latine en prenant en considération deux phénomènes étroitement liés, le bilinguisme et le digraphisme. Cette synthèse doit permettre de mesurer les progrès de la recherche dans ce domaine et de donner une impulsion à la mise à jour du Corpus des papyrus latins de Robert Cavenaile, lequel date de 1958.

Table des matières

Bruno Rochette
Papyrologie latine et bilinguisme gréco-latin : des perspectives nouvelles

Marie-Hélène Marganne
Le CEDOPAL et les papyrus latins : pour une mise à jour du Corpus Papyrorum Latinarum de Robert Cavenaile

Alain Martin
Réflexions d’un bibliographe

Nathan Carlig
Une bibliographie critique relative au bilinguisme grec-latin

Johannes Kramer
Les glossaires bilingues sur papyrus

Paolo Radiciotti (Ϯ)
Digrafismo nei papiri latini

Marco Fressura
Tipologia del glossario virgiliano

Maria Chiara Scappaticcio
Lectio bilingue, bilinguismo della lectio. Sull’accentuazione grafica nei papiri latini: sondaggi dai PNess. II 1 e 2

Gabriel Nocchi Macedo
Bilinguisme, digraphisme, multiculturalisme : une étude du Codex Miscellaneus de Montserrat

Hilla Halla-aho
Bilingualism in Action: Observations on Document Type, Language Choice and Greek Interference in Latin Documents and Letters on Papyri

Notices des éditeurs

Marie-Hélène MARGANNE est Directrice du Centre de Documentation de Papyrologie Littéraire (CEDOPAL) de l’Université de Liège où elle enseigne la papyrologie littéraire et la paléographie grecque. À la fois papyrologue et historienne de la médecine, elle est l’auteur de nombreuses publications sur les papyrus médicaux, le livre et les bibliothèques antiques.

Bruno ROCHETTE est Professeur de langues et littératures classiques à l’Université de Liège et Président du Comité de gestion du Centre de Documentation de Papyrologie Littéraire (CEDOPAL). Ses recherches sont consacrées au bilinguisme gréco-latin.

BIFAO 112

Bulletin de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale 112

Note especially:

Cuvigny (Hélène)
« Quand Hèroïs aura accouché… » ἐάν = ὅταν dans l’expression de l’éventuel.
Les papyrologues sont rarement conscients du fait que, dans la koinè, la conjonction ἐάν (« si ») doit être parfois traduite « quand ». Ce glissement sémantique, qu’on rencontre principalement dans les lettres privées, est propre à la langue familière et découle de la crainte superstitieuse d’irriter les dieux si l’on se montre trop sûr de l’avenir.

Mots-clés : ἐάν – papyrologie – lettre.

Few papyrologists know that, in the koine, the conjunction ἐάν (“if”) must sometimes be translated “when”. This semantic shift, mainly found in private letters, is colloquial and originates in a superstitious fear of angering the gods of being too confident about future.
Keywords: ἐάν – Papyrology – Letter.

Delattre (Alain)
Trois papyrus du monastère de Baouît.
Les fouilles du musée du Louvre et de l’Ifao sur le site de Baouît ont permis de mettre au jour en 2007 des dizaines de fragments de papyrus dans un ermitage de la partie nord du monastère. Je propose ici l’édition de trois papyrus, coptes et grec, bien conservés : un contrat relatif à des terrains, apparemment signé par les plus hauts responsables du monastère (viiie siècle), un reçu de taxe grec (milieu du viiie siècle) et une liste d’objets (viie siècle).

Mots-clés : Baouît – papyrus – copte – grec.

During the excavations undertaken by the Musée du Louvre and the Ifao on the site of Bawit in 2007, dozens of papyrus fragments have been found in an hermitage of the northern part of the monastery. I submit here the edition of two Coptic and one Greek papyri, all well-preserved: a contract relating to landholdings, apparently signed by the highest authorities of the monastery (8 th cent.), a Greek tax-receipt (mid 8 th cent.), and a list of objects (7 th cent.).
Keywords: Bawit – Papyri – Coptic – Greek.

Elmaghrabi (Mohamed Gaber)
Two Letters Exchanged between the Roman Forts of Dios and Xeron (Eastern Desert of Egypt) concerning a mulokopion.
Édition de deux lettres en grec sur ostraca (iie s. apr. J.-C.) trouvées en 2007 et 2012 lors des fouilles de Dios et de Xèron, praesidia romains qui voisinaient dans le désert Oriental en Égypte. C’est le premier exemple d’une lettre et de sa réponse parvenues chacune à leur destination. Elles concernent un outil appelé mulokopion, mot rare pour lequel un sens est proposé.

Mots-clés : ostraca grecs – correspondance – Égypte romaine – désert Oriental – praesidium – Dios – Xèron – armée romaine – mulokopion – meule.

This article presents two Greek letters written on ostraca which had been found during the excavations recently conducted in the two Roman praesidia of Dios and Xeron, in the Eastern desert of Egypt, in 2007 and 2012. They are a letter and its answer exchanged between the two praesidia in the second century AD concerning a tool called mulokopion. The two ostraca are of notably interesting as being the first examples of letter and reply found in its intended destination. The edition is supplemented by a discussion about the possible meaning of the word mulokopion.
Keywords: Greek ostraca – Correspondance – Roman Egypt – Eastern Desert – Praesidium – Dios – Xeron – Military – mulokopion – Mill.

My American Dialect

I finally got to take the quiz at Dialect Quiz & Survey. The server is often overloaded and answering the 140 questions takes more than one hour because of the slow server.

My dialect is most like that of Buffalo NY, which is hardly a surprise since it's the closest American city to Toronto. (I grew up in Ottawa but I don't have much of an Ottawa Valley accent.)

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Do the IDiots Really Know What Evidence Looks Like?

I've been dealing with Intelligent Design Creationists for over twenty years. I've spent a lot of time addressing their scientific misconceptions and trying to explain where they've gone wrong. A few years ago, for example, I posted a whole series of article on Jonathan Wells' book The Myth of Junk DNA. A few weeks ago I explained why Jonathan McLatchie was wrong about pseudogenes.

Lately, I been focusing on one of the chapters in Darwin's Doubt—it's the one on molecular evolution and I know something about that subject. It has been pretty easy to show why Mayer is wrong about his conclusions.

That's why it's so frustrating to read what journalist Tom Bethell said the other day on Evolution News & Views (sic) ["What Is the World Really Like?" Darwinism, Materialism, and How They Relate].

The explicit materialism of the Darwinians is the mirror image of creationism. Creationists are easy for scientific materialists to rebut, because the materialists can say, "That is just your belief. We don't have to accept that." In a parallel way, we can say to the materialists: "That is just your belief. We don't have to accept that. And it is the real basis of your evolutionism."

In between the Creationists and the Materialists we encounter the scientific evidence that makes the materialist position increasingly improbable -- the evidence that Stephen Meyer recently presented in Darwin's Doubt: information theory, insufficiency of the fossil record, epigenetics, complexity of life at the molecular level, and so on.

Increasingly, it seems to me, the Darwinians are responding to this science by saying (in effect): "Bah! We won't read that! It's creationism in disguise." They get graduate students like Nick Matzke, or incompetents like John Farrell (in National Review of all places), to do the work for them. All along the Darwinists have found that their materialism has allowed them to lie back and relax without really bothering to study the evidence.

Now that may be changing. They are being put in a position where they just might have to hit the books. I suspect it is not a prospect that they relish.

Keep in mind that this is written by a man who denies that humans cause global warming and denies that HIV causes AIDS.

He has no idea what evidence looks like.

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Why Are IDiots So Nasty?

You've probably noticed that in addition to being stupid most IDiots are not very respectful of scientists (i.e. Darwinists). William J Murray¹ explains why religious people have to be mean and nasty [Can We Afford To Be Charitable To Darwinists?].

I used to be one that diligently attempted to provide Darwinists charitable interaction. I tried not to ridicule, demean, or use terms that would cause hurt or defensive feelings. My hope was that reason, politely offered, would win the day. My theistic perspective is that returning the bad behavior I received at sites like TSZ would be wrong on my part. I thought I should stick to politely producing logical and evidence-based exchanges, regardless of what Darwinists did. I note that several others here at UD do the same. Lately, however, I’ve come to the conclusion that what I’m attempting to do is the equivalent of bringing a knife to a gun fight; polite reasoning with Darwinists, for the most part, is simply setting up our own failure. It’s like entering a war zone with rules of engagement that effectively undermine a soldier’s capacity to adequately defend themselves, let alone win a war. While pacifism is a laudable idea, it does not win wars. It simply gives the world to the barbarians.

And that’s the problem; a lot of us don’t realize we’re in a war, a war where reason, truth, religion and spirituality is under direct assault by the post-modern equivalent of barbarians. They, for the most part, have no compunction about lying, misleading, dissembling, attacking, blacklisting, ridiculing, bullying and marginalizing; more than that, they have no problem using every resource at their means, legal or not, polite or not, reasonable or not, to destroy theism, and in particular Christianity (as wells as conservative/libertarian values in general). They have infiltrated the media, academia and the entertainment industry and use their influence to generate narratives with complete disregard for the truth, and entirely ignore even the most egregious barbarism against those holding beliefs they disagree with.

Wars are what happen when there is no common ground between those that believe in something worth fighting for. There is no common ground between the universal post-modern acid of materialist Darwinism and virtually any modern theism. There is no common ground between Orwellian statism-as-God and individual libertarianism with freedom of (not “from”) religion. There is only war. One of the unfortunate problems of war is that certain distasteful methods must be employed simply because they are the only way to win. In this war, in a society that is largely a low-information, media-controlled battleground, logic and reason are, for the most part, ineffective. The truth is ineffective because it is drowned out by a concerted cacophony of lies, or simply ignored by the gatekeepers of low-information infotainment. What has been shown effective is the Alinsky arsenal of rhetoric, emotional manipulation, and narrative control.

I would find it distasteful to pick up a gun in a ground war and have to shoot others to defend my family and way of life, but I would do so. Should I not pick up Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and employ the weapons of my adversaries, if it is the most effective way – perhaps the only way – of winning the cultural war? There comes a point in time where all the high ground offers is one’s back against the precipice as the barbarian horde advances.

I understand where he's coming from. He's a good Christian who advocates "lying, misleading, dissembling, attacking, blacklisting, ridiculing, bullying and marginalizing" because that's what his opponents do. (And because his versions of truth, logic, and reason have proven to be ineffective.)

BTW, did you notice that he forgot to pretend that the Intelligent Design Creationist movement was all about science, not religion? Oops.

Note to William Murray: If you really were trying "not to ridicule, demean, or use terms that would cause hurt or defensive feelings" then why did you call us "Darwinists"?

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1. I assumed that he was the Baptist minister but apparently it's a different William J. Murray.

IDiots Love Epigenetics

I read everything posted on Uncommon Descent and Evolution News & Views. These are the most important blogs for learning about Intelligent Design Creationism. The posts on those two blogs represent the very best that Intelligent Design Creationism has to offer. Their best minds are behind the posts.

Here, for example, is Denyse O'Leary in action: Turns out some Texas media DID believe Texas bans discussion of evolution.

... epigenetics is to Darwin’s darlings what relativity and quantum mechanics are to Newtonian physics, only worse, much worse. Newtonian physics was useful within its scale. Darwin’s magical mechanism of natural selection is more like phlogiston, which supposedly produced fire the way Darwinism supposedly produces mind from mud.

And if nothing really happens that way, what becomes of Darwin’s magical mechanism? It’s phogliston, the substance that need not exist!

Seriously, that's the best of the best?

You have to imagine that there are some Intelligent Design Creationists with a modicum of intelligence. Why aren't they speaking up to muzzle people like Denyse O'Leary? She's an embarrassment to their cause.

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Stephen Meyer Says Molecular Data Must Be Wrong Because Different Genes Evolve at Different Rates

Stephen Meyer is promoting the idea that God made all the various types of animals over a short period of time about 530 million years ago. The molecular data refutes that speculation because it shows that the various phyla share common ancestors and many of those ancestors appear long before the Cambrian Explosion.

This data creates a serious problem for the IDiots so they have to discredit it in order to dismiss it. As we've seen in earlier posts, Meyer argues that the molecular data is wrong because: (a) there are no transitional fossils, and (b) different molecular phylogenies do not agree in all detail [see The Cambrian Conundrum: Stephen Meyer Says (Lack of) Fossils Trumps Genes and Stephen Meyer Says Molecular Evidence Must Be Wrong Because Scientists Disagree About the Exact Dates]. He has five anti-evolution arguments altogether [Darwin's Doubt: The Genes Tell the Story?]. The third one is that different genes evolve at different rates.

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On Preparing Students for the 21st Century

Yesterday I attended a meeting organized by the Ontario Ministry of Education. The theme was From Great to Excellent: The Next Phase in Ontario's Education Strategy. The idea was to promote widespread consultation before the Ontario government releases its new plan for education reform next year.

I was attending on behalf of my friend Chris DiCarlo who had to be out of town. He (and I) are promoting the concept of critical thinking; specifically, the idea that it needs to be explicitly taught in a high school philosophy course.

The Minister of Education (Liz Sandals) and several of the senior members of her ministry were there. They told us that today's students are facing unprecedented changes and that the Ontario education system has to change in order to cope. They were mostly thinking about technological change and the possibility that today's students would have new types of jobs and careers.

I'm certain that we can improve our education system but I'm not sure it's helpful, or even correct, to focus on the idea that the next generation will have to cope with situations we never faced in the past. If we could show that our existing education system did a pretty good job of preparing students for change then maybe we should turn our attention to problems other than job training and technological innovation?

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