I completely agree with Hyperbole. It's fascinating how the atheism argument actually turns back on itself with each prod. Almost as if atheism is in and of itself just as ridiculous as, say, Christianity. That is by the definition of the atheists themselves. To Dawkins, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is the unproven science that explains being, and unproven science that may not even exist. As long as he believes this unproven science, though, he can argue away any true religion and the idea of religion itself.

Mostly by visual imagery.

Visualized a cube and plane cutting through it. Spun the cube around in my head until the plane was cutting through all six sides similarly. Then I spun the cube on an axis perpendicular to the plane as a double check. That axis fits directly through the two corners of the cube furthest from the plane, which would make sense.

The first comment amused me a little because when I was 15, my parents were a little concerned because I'd been "acting out" and generally being a teenager so they had me talk to a psychologist and he gave me a bunch of tests like IQ, MMPI, and some other stuff like that before telling my parents that there was nothing for them to worry about and that I was acting like a normal teenager.

However, on the IQ portion of the tests, there were two categories where I "went off the scale", whatever the hell that means. One of those was 3d visualization. :)

The popular articles are a little misleading, because it's not the universe is "dodecahedron shaped" or anything like that, it's that *any* finite 3-dimensional space without a boundary can be described topologically in terms of some polyhedron with its faces identified with each other. In a similar way, any finite 2-dimensional surface can be described topologically as a polygon with its edges connected...here's an article that shows this representation for two different 2-D surfaces, a torus and a Klein bottle:

http://www.jcu.edu/math/vignettes/Mobius.htm

And this article talks more about how the same idea can be used with the faces of a polyhedron to identify the topology of a finite 3-D space:

http://www.mathsci.appstate.edu/~sjg/class/1010/wc/geom/universe2a.html

Anyway, the key is that this is just a mathematical technique for identifying topology, people shouldn't be surprised that the universe is described as being made up of dodecahedrons rather that some curvier or more irregular shape.

The argument that the Y chromosome will disappear in a few thousand years doesn't make much sense to me. Assuming one is not a creationist who believes each mammal species was separately created with a pristine new Y chromosome, the Y chromosomes of all mammals must all trace back to a common ancestor living hundreds of millions of years ago--what does Sykes think has changed that would suddenly make our Y chromosomes unviable? Is he arguing that this is an effect of civilization, medicine, and the consequent relaxed selection pressures on harmful mutations in humans?

Ah, I see at the end of David Burbridge's review that Sykes thinks this argument applies to other species too, so he can't just be thinking of relaxed selection in humans due to civilization. But that makes me think this idea really is completely crackpot--like I said, unless you're a creationist it's not as if a new species will somehow reset its Y-chromosome when it springs into being, it will inherit whatever level of degradation was present in the species it branched off from. The proper unit for thinking about progressive degradation of a gene would be a clade, not a species--any degradation of the Y-chromosome would have been continually building up from the last common ancestor of all animals with a Y-chromosome (which I think would be the common ancestor of all mammals, which would have lived about 200 million years ago). If our Y-chromosome has survived for that many millions of generations, it just doesn't make sense to predict it'll be gone in 5000 more generations unless you can point to some factor that's changed the selection process significantly in recent times.

That's the problem with genetic engineering of humans, it'd probably take generations to perfect...if in a shorter time we develop things like brain/computer interfaces that can effectively increase your brainpower, or much more extensive and safe plastic surgery that can change your appearance in radical ways, then perhaps genetic engineering will never become very popular (or necessary).

Wait, are you calling all of paleontology "butterfly collecting?" What about detailed comparative anatomy of skeletons, cladistics, etc.?

"decent folk...rooted in faith, family and folk"? You were being satirical, right?

One issue not discussed in this article is the relation of liberalism to the development of science and technology. I suspect there is something of a feedback loop here--certain societies may have had cultures that were better "preadapted" to scientific/technological innovation (japan and western europe, for example--see Landes' book 'The Wealth and Poverty of Nations'), and when innovation actually occurs it tends to strengthen the "liberal" aspects of society that are most friendly to scientific progress. If there is any truth to the idea that christianity is more liberalism-friendly than other philosophies, it may in part be an indirect effect of the fact that western christianity was more conducive to the emergence of modern science (which is probably intertwined with the fact that it was more conducive to the development of modern capitalism), although there is controversy among historians of science as to whether it actually was more science-friendly.

>Let's be frank: women who have children >without a husband are harming society.

I just read Judith Rich Harris' "The Nurture Assumption", and she provides a lot of evidence that parenting styles are pretty irrelevant in determining how children come out, and that studies which purport to show that parents make a difference are actually just showing contributions from genes. Harris is not a genetic determinist, but she suggests that peer groups are the important environmental factor in shaping personality/intelligence, not parents. If single mothers raise children that are more likely to have "society-harming" traits, it's probably because they are more likely to have genes for these traits, so you wouldn't help society by encouraging them to get married (although you might help society by encouraging them to avoid unplanned pregnancies).