In Genesis 6:3 God states “…My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.” And yet if you keep reading you note that many people do live beyond 120 year in the Bible. And in the past century people have lived past 120 years. Something is off. In a comment below one individual asserts that “religion – no matter what the denomination is, and always has been a logical absurdity.” I believe when viewed as a system of axioms religious beliefs fall flat on their face due to an internal lack of coherency, and yet they persist.

But just because religion fails as a system of formalized knowledge about the world does not mean that we should chalk it up to historical forces (opium of the masses), abstracted psychological yearnings (wish fulfillment) or an inexplicable irrationality (mass hysteria). I have stated that the religious need seems to be rather lacking in my own person, but, two personal points should get across what I want to communicate:

1) I can still repeat Surah Fatihah, the opening passage of the Koran and the preamble to the daily prayers, when called upon to (in a language foreign to me, and without any ability to break the passage into “chunks”).
2) When I hear a call to prayer I have a difficult time expressing in words the peculiar chill that runs down my spine.

One must keep in context the following facts:

1) I never really believed.
2) My Islamic education was minimal at best.
3) I have never lived in an area with many Muslims.

If I could “delete” my knowledge of the Surah Fatihah, I surely would if that meant I could free up “space” for something far more interesting. But somehow it persists in my memory.1 Humans often live under the illusion that we govern ourselves fully consciously, but a moment of reflection on what you’ve done in the past hour would surely disabuse you of that notion if you still hold to it. You might have taken a shower, locked the door or turned the oven off with barely a recollection of the details, these chores have become “instincts.” Many aspects of our nature are delegated to subroutines or helper programs, and we don’t really have conscious access to what’s going on down there. In theory we can issue a chain of commands, but don’t expect the help to oblige you if they are of one mind. It recalls an acquaintance of mine who was raised a Born Again Christian, and though a vocal atheist now, he still listens to Christian music. Though he didn’t believe in the message, the melodies and themes were familiar to him and still aroused an emotional response that he sought out.

The importance of indepdent cognitive subroutines and emotional associations are just two of the facts that I believe make religion explicable. For whatever reason a minority of any given population tends to dissent from the dominant supernatural narrative of its locale, but unfortunately many of these individuals project their own peculiar psychology on to the rest of the population. I believe a good portion of this minority even verbally assents to the general supernatural narrative but recreates it so that it is intelligible in its own language (ie; theology). I suspect an understanding of religious process is possible, but we need to move beyond assuming that it is either a formal system of thought or that it is at its core irrational, and will never be accessible to systematic inquiry.

1 – Some Muslims would offer this as evidence of the miraculous nature of the Koran, but I could give other examples of things I can’t forget that I would like to.

In 1998 the C. elegans genome was complete. Two years later we had the draft of the human genome. The connection between these two events is the “hook” for Andrew Brown’s In the Beginning Was the Worm: Finding the Secrets of Life in a Tiny Hermaphrodite (also author of the The Darwin Wars, which focuses on the life of George Price and his influence on seminal figures in evolutionary biology like J.M. Smith and W.D. Hamilton). I actually didn’t find the last part of the book that interesting because the topic has been pretty well done. Who wants anymore anecdotes on the toothy Jim Watson? Rather, the first 150 pages (out of some 200) which chronicled the persistence of the brilliant Sydney Brenner1 and the team of researchers that he gathered around him in the late 1960s and 1970s before the worm was “hot” is an interesting anecdote laced analysis of the sociology and psychology of science. This isn’t surprising, Brown has a background as a religion reporter, which showed in The Darwin Wars, and here he goes out of his way to note the quirky socio-religious backgrounds of many of the early wormers (Quakers, Jews and other assorted nonconformists).

There is scientific detail in the book, the simple anatomy of the worm is sketched out (~1000 cells, eukaryotic and multicellular, but not too much!), the benefits of selfing hermaphroditism is highlighted (recessives can be snatched out as one out of four self-crosses are homozygous on the two alleles which produce a non-dominant phenotype) as well as the utility of the rare males in swapping alleles between the lineages. I felt Brown spent way too much time ruminating on Brenner doing Assembly coding back ~1970, it boggles the mind.2 But the meat of the book is the sociology, personality and philosophy. Some of the anecdotes are really bizarre…who would have guessed that the first “picks” were actually toothpicks! The researchers would spend an hour each morning sharpening them and discarding their pile throughout the day. When one of them got the bright idea of sticking a platinum filament to a tong-handle Brenner disapproved, suggesting that brilliance doesn’t forbid obstinacy.

But there are also the “big picture” questions. How far can reductionism go? What is the worth of a model organism? Is there any real point in the Human Genome Project beyond the “It was there” aspect? The book only really gives a good answer on the last question, chalking up Sydney Brenner’s skepticism of the enterprise to age and ego (Brown was gentler, but that’s what he was saying). There are many golden roads, but many dark and thankless ditches in science, and I think the fact that for every winner (as the worm people were) there are innumerable losers. That’s how lab science works, it isn’t measured in individuals as much as man hours many times (the mapping of the worm nervous system for example seemed to be a chore of herculean tedium). The decisions people make aren’t always justifiable, but some of the times their hunches hit paydirt. The good angel on your right shoulder and the bad angel on your left shoulder both give a skewed view of who you are to God on the day of judgement, but summed together they hit the proper mark. Science is filled with good angels and bad angels, and the God of Spinoza judges fairly in the end.

Addendum: Non-science types might find the bitchness of the “fly” (Drosophila) people to the worm people pretty funny. I wonder though, do astrophysicists who study black holes look down on those who model neutron stars???

Update Rikurzhen: Most of the tools are now in place to dissect worm biology from a systems level down to molecules. If there is a logical limitation to reductionism, work on the worm will soon the bumping into it. The genome is complete and feature annotation is greatly simpler in a 100MB genome (worms) than a 3000MB genome (mammals). Reverse genetics using RNAi is ridiculously easy to do (>80% of known genes have been assayed by RNAi for many, many phenotypes). Worms can be grown to population sizes unimaginable for other multicellular model organisms, and many phenotypes can now be assayed with automation. But obviously the most important question is whether this model organism can keep producing new insights into (human) biology. I anticipate that “$1000 genome” sequencing technologies are going to accelerate work on new/existing model organisms just as much as they will human genetics.

1 – Brenner’s father was an illiterate. He, on the other hand, matriculated as an undergraduate at the age of 14.

2 – I recall that back in the 1990s the WordPerfect guys were forced to write the app in Assembly so that they could be closer to machine language and optimize performance. Of course, soon enough Word blew them out of the water, partly because Microsoft could push it via its Office Suite, but also because they were coming out with new versions slapped together (I assume) in a human friendly VB IDE at a much faster clip.

In Razib’s post Patents, genes and Jews some commentators raised concerns about the patents granted, so I thought I’d expound a bit on this particular issue.

There is a long legal debate underlying the patentability of claims that many critics feel should be classified as being within the Common Heritage of Mankind. I get the sense that many objections that we’re going to see on gene patents in the coming years are going to be framed from such a perspective.

We can go back to the 1600’s and the writings of Hugo Grotius in Mare Liberum where he wrote about that the ownership of goods that were created by nature for common use should be forbidden and that common use is viable as long as the object can be used without loss to anyone else. He was at the time writing specifically about the laws of the sea, but many in the years that followed took these principles of international law to apply to to other realms, such as outer space and agriculture.

Twenty-five years ago when Diamond vs. Chakrabarty was decided it brought the issue of patents for life forms front and center into conflict with with the principle of Common Heritage. The ruling set about a flurry of debate regarding plant life and how the gene poor but industrial West was robbing the poor, but gene-rich, Third World of their genetic resources with as much as 95% of world food crops originating in the developing world. If you’re interested in the views of a defender of Indigenous Peoples who isn’t as hysteric as the persecutors of the Human Genome Diversity Project, you might find this page to be of interest. The author doesn’t begrudge the right of those scientists who add value to genetic material to profit from their work but champions the position of Indigenous Peoples so that they too may also profit from the seed material that is collected from their territory. He notes, afterall, that:

The developed countries have already realized enormous benefits from their access to Third World genetic materials. This is perhaps most clear in the case of crop plants. Few of the crops that today make the United States an agricultural power are native to North America. European colonizers found Native Americans growing maize, beans, tobacco, and squash; but these crops had been introduced from Central America and the Caribbean. A truly North American meal would consist only of sunflowers, blueberries, cranberries, pecans, and chestnuts.

Northern Europe’s original genetic poverty is only slightly less striking: oats, rye, currants, and raspberries constitute the complement of major crops indigenous to that region.The crops that one associates today with the agricultural economies of the developed nations – maize, wheat, soybeans, potatoes, alfalfa, barley, sorghum, tomatoes, cotton, tobacco – have in fact been introduced from their areas of origin in what are now the nations of the Third World. The agricultural development that has undergirded the industrialization of the rich but gene-poor North has been predicated on the collection of genetic materials from the poor but gene-rich South.

Does anyone else see the parallels to the genetic information that is being mined from Jewish, Finnish, and Icelandic peoples with most of the benefits flowing to the researchers? I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same arguments flare-up as human gene patents more frequently find their way into the marketplace.

If such a replay does come to pass, it might help to keep in mind how it played out with plant genetics. The effort to redress the situation resulted in a UN Agency, the Food and Agriculture Organization, at it’s 22nd biennial meeting in 1983 to come forth with a resolution 8/83 that stated “plant genetic resources are a heritage of mankind and consequently should be available without restriction.” This resolution, especially Article 2.1 (a) (v) in the Annex to Resolution 8/83, which read “special genetic stocks (including elite and current breeders’ lines and mutants);” put the FAO Undertaking in direct conflict with Diamond vs. Chakrabarty.

Now politics being what it is, and especially UN-centric politics, I happen to think that the FAO undertaking had more to do with advancing the dead horse of the New International Economic Order than it really did with settling the issues of intellectual property law, the prinicples of CHM and International law.

The developed nations were opposed to the FAO undertaking and its attack on IP law and property rights and their position had three main pillars:

1.) A price can’t be assigned to raw germplasm because, while there may contain useful genes, until those genes are evaluated and traits identified, the germplasm is an unknown quantity.

2.) The collection of germplasm doesn’t deprive a country of a good or benefit. If utility isn’t lost, then there is no claim for compensation.

3.) The FAO undertaking was inconsistent with Intellectual Property rights.

The FAO Undertaking would have had to overturn quite a number of patents, and and for the expired patents, their history and reasoning, such as that found in patent #141072 granted to Louis Pasteur for claiming “yeast, free from organic germs of disease, as an article of manufacture” and precedents established in cases such as Argoudelis, Feldman v. Aunstrup, and a host of other rulings.

What we’re seeing with the BRCA2 gene is the gene has existed in certain populations but there was little that could be done medically with regards to its effects until BCRA2 was evaluated and it’s traits identified, and therefore it remained an unknown quantity. Myriad Genetics has though their work in identification and evalution brought value to the identification of the gene, therefore the test for the presence of the gene is their intellectual property. The fact that it is targeted predominantly at Jewish populations who provided the “raw material” for study doesn’t unfairly target them, nor does it exploit them, for without the research performed by Myriad Genetics the presence, and identification, of BCRA2 within the population wouldn’t by itself create any value. The study of Jewish genes doesn’t deprive the community of any goods or benefits and as a community they don’t lose any utility of those genes, so it’s difficult to base a claim of exploitation when a test for BCRA2 is offered to the commmunity.

Slate has an interesting piece up that highlights the controversy with patenting aspects of the BRCA2 gene. Of course the article focuses on the specific case of Jews, but as far as the ultimate issues of intellectual rights relating to genetic sequences and the methods to ascertain their identity, this is the tip of the iceberg. Today we are squabbling over music and film, but in the near future I suspect that we are going to focus less on such trivialities.

Randall has a long post up where he highlights a book titled The Impossibility of Religious Freedom, which addresses the legal implications of religious pluralism. There are many complicated issues here, and I simply ask readers to check out the facts for themselves, but not get too caught up in the details. From the introduction:

This book is about the impossibility of religious freedom. Many laws, constitutions, and international treaties today grant legally enforceable rights to those whose religious freedom is infringed. Stories of the conflict between the demands of religion and the demands of law are daily news items all over the world, and take a familiar patterned form. Schoolgirls in France seek permission to wear the hijab to school. Sikhs in Britain seek exemption from motorcycle helmet laws. Muslim women seek civil divorces in India on the same ground as their Hindu and Christian neighbors. The Jehovah’s Witnesses seek the right to be a recognized religious organization in Russia and to be exempt from patriotic exercises in Greece….

I have read a fair amount about the Reformation as well as the history of Northern Europe in the 16th and 17th century and I support one of the contentions of the author that something rather peculiar happened in places like England1 and The Netherlands during this period, and the full flower of that process can be found in the United States, a nation that gives expression to Christianities, but no support for one state church. Of course, there isn’t a sharp dichotomy between the “Protestant model” and everything else, there is after all a difference between 16th century Spain or 21st century Saudi Arabia and traditional Chinese or Indian attitudes toward pluralism of faith.2 Also, note that one reason I believe Roman Catholicism has been such a success in the United States is that operationally it has become a Protestant religion here, when I listened to Catholics being interviewed on television after the priest scandals talking about how “they cared more about their relationship to Jesus” than “the edicts of the Church” it really struck home. Many Jews also mock the Reform as (in the words of John Stewart) “Christians with curly hair,” but again, the introduction of organs and other Protestant motifs and the popularity of personal “spirituality” as opposed to adherence to the norms of halakah suggests to me a definite inward Protestantization of that faith as well. Will Herberg’s Protestant-Catholic-Jew triumvirate was possible in large part, I believe, because the latter two were fast renorming themselves to adhere to mainline Protestant mores.

1 – Please note that there were multiple Reformations (including a Catholic one, what is termed the “Counter Reformation”). To say that the Protestant Reformation resulted in the trend toward disestablishmentarianism is to ignore the reality that in much of Germany and Scandinavia Lutheranism was closely identified with the temporal powers that be, that in Geneva and Scotland Calvinism became the state church (with some bumps in the road in the latter case). Rather, the road to disestablishmentarianism was seeded by the intransigence of groups like Baptists, Quakers and other assorted “Free Thinkers” who simply could not or would not submit themselves to the religious establishment and had abandoned any pretense of universal societal salvation. The difference between the Roman Catholic and Protestant models was not their mode or median, that is, as a whole Protestantism was not more or less predisposed to disestablishmentarianism than Roman Catholicism, but there was far greater variation because of the nature of Protestantism. It could be argued that in many parts of the Roman Catholic world the church was more separate from the state than in parts of the Protestant world (ie; Scandinavia), but for every Denmark you had a Holland.

2 – Many Hindus take pride in the fact that religious minorities like Jews and Parsis came to India to escape persecution, and rightfully so.

It seems that the lads in Iraq can find some free time to make an absolutely hilarious music video entitled “Is this the way to Armadillo?”

Click here to watch “Is this the way to Armadillo”

UPDATE: Here is the version done by Dutch troops stationed in Afghanistan. Here is the original version that the soldiers are spoofing. Here is the BBC story on how the demand for this video crashed military servers.

RAPID EVOLUTIONARY ESCAPE BY LARGE POPULATIONS FROM LOCAL FITNESS PEAKS IS LIKELY IN NATURE:

individually deleterious but jointly beneficial. Such epistasis gives rise to multiple peaks on the genotypic fitness landscape…Here we develop an analytic expression for Ncrit, the critical population size that defines the boundary between these regimes, which shows that both are likely to operate in nature. Frequent recombination may disrupt high-fitness escape genotypes produced in populations larger than Ncrit before they reach fixation, defining a third regime whose rate again slows with increasing population size. We develop a novel expression for this critical recombination rate, which shows that in large populations the simultaneous fixation of mutations that are beneficial only jointly is unlikely to be disrupted by genetic recombination if their map distance is on the order of the size of single genes. Thus, counterintuitively, mass selection alone offers a biologically realistic resolution to the problem of evolutionary escape from local fitness peaks in natural populations.

Please note I’m not making assertions about the ubiquity of these novel processes. I suspect they play a role in speciation, but I won’t wager any guesses beyond that.

Over at Randy’s place a heated discussion about Islam & homosexuality has broken out (via Abiola). One of the issues that (as always) crops up is the “true” Islam vs. Islamism dispute. To which I ask, what is the more birdy bird, a robin or an ostrich? Both are birds by a checklist definition, or a phylogenetic definition, but when posed this question by cognitive scientists, most people assert that the robin is the more exemplar or prototypical “bird.” Concepts derive from a host of inputs (induction via examples), a few axioms, a general theory of the concept (ie; often a level of telos, which shouldn’t surprise those familiar with evolutionary biology) and the context that the concept is framed within. In other words, most concepts are not derived from a few axioms like the mathematical definition of a triangle. Attempting to use logical methods to falsify someone as a “Muslim” or infer the “natural” implications of being a Muslim are fraught with difficulty because the assumption is that there is a prototypical or ideal Islam that naturally follows from agreed upon axioms. Unfortunately many concepts (most) don’t work this way, they are characterized by a continuous distribution about central tendency (or central tendencies if there are multiple exemplars) with variation and outliers. Additionally, context matters, grey hair is generally clustered with white hair, with black hair being the outgroup, but grey clouds and black clouds are clustered together with white clouds being the outgroup.

Of course, aside from ornithologists and hard-core cladists (yes, you GFA) the question of what is a bird is not ontologically significant. But as I noted yesterday, arcane circumlocutions around the unknowable in the garb of logic is a common tendency when you are talking about heartfelt beliefs that are difficult to approach using rationality or empiricism (politics?), but from the attempt at such a feat comes the impression that there is a truist Islam, closer to the ideal as inferred from the axioms of the faith (by learned scholars in the faith). The problem is that language is not expressed through formal logical notation, and squishiness is a feature not a bug. Consider the idea that “there is no compulsion in religion” in Islam. Sayyid Qutb, the evil genius who was the Marx to bin Laden’s Lenin agreed with this, for you see, his idea was simply that under and Islamic government everyone could choose to be a Muslim or a dhimmi,1 there was no compulsion, and everyone then had the “freedom” to choose Islam as they should. As Bill O’Reilly would say, “Show me where I’m wrong?”

Recommended: A far more adroit explication of concepts can be found at Chris’ blog (I left a lot of stuff implicit obviously, in part because I’m not familiar with this area, it just “makes sense” to me in terms of the religion debates that go on on weblogs), Concepts I: The Classical View, ConceptsII: The Prototypes, Concepts III: The Exemplars, Concepts IV: A Second Revolution and The Importance of Names. If paper is your thang, check out Mind Readings: Introductory Selections on Cognitive Science or Mind: Introduction to Cognitive Science, both have chapters on concepts.

Addendum: Obviously some of the ideas that I hint at about concepts (and categories) have relevance to many socially constructed demarcations with fuzzy boundaries. Longtime readers of this blog might find this from page 102 of Mind Readings amusing: “…sensitivity to correlations of properties with a category enables finger predictions….” Yes Virginia, there is one true reality, and intellectual disciplines are its many faces.

1 – Apostasy is of course not permissible, but one Muslim apologist (see Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out) for this position simply said this did not contradict the “no compulsion in religon” edict because apostasy (from Islam) was an act against nature itself, so it really didn’t fit the bill. Of course, it all makes rational sense.

PLOS Genetics is online today! The full interview with Neil Risch is up. Snip that might interest readers:

Clinton, for example, when the first draft of the human genome sequence came out, made a statement about how all people in the world, in terms of their genetic makeup, are 99.9% the same. His intent—to reduce conflict among peoples—is noble. People on the left, anthropologists and sociologists, do the same thing. They use the 99.9% figure as an argument for social equality. But the truth is that people do differ by that remaining 0.1% and that people do cluster according to their ancestry. The problem is that others could use that information to create division.

One of my favorite biblical scholars, Richard Elliott Friedman, is out with a new book, The Bible with Sources Revealed.1 In the introduction he notes:

…Both traditional and radical scholars…have claimed that the hypothesis [the Documentary Hypothesis] has been overthrown, that “hardly anybody believes that anymore,”…The hypothesis that, supposedly, no one believes anymore continues to be the model in which most scholars work. It continues to be taught in courses in major universities and seminaries. And it continues to be outlined in introductory textbooks on biblical studies. The primary arguments for it continue to go undebated-and frequently unmentioned.

Sound familiar? No doubt many of you who see it written somewhere that people should “teach the controversy” about evolution wonder, “what controversy?” Some of the readers of this weblog make arguments that teaching Intelligent Design makes political or intellectual sense in some fashion, but few would credit the idea that descent with modification and/or methodological naturalism is under some “debate” in the academy. Nevertheless, I have met many evangelical Christians who want to “argue” the “controversy” with me.

Human beings today are specialists. No one can know everything, and so we appeal to authorities. When someone who is a scientist speaks before your church and tells you that there is a controversy as to the validity of the theory of evolution, who are you to disagree? As I’ve noted, many of the people who are movers and shakers in the Young Earth Creationist movement are scientists, of a sort. The problem of course is that science is an enormous field of study, and though over time there are many cross-linkages between the disciplines very few people keep up on the literature even within sister fields. In other words, if you a biochemist, you might not know that much about molecular genetics beyond what you learned as an undergraduate (and conversely). If you are an organic chemist you might not know much about biochemisty. A friend of mine who is in graduate school in chemical physics was telling me about how he regularly observes his Ph.D. advisor bullshit about material he has no clue about because it is embarrassing for him to acknowledge that he hasn’t kept up on the literature in the subfield of his subfield (that is, the corners of the field that his graduate students are focusing on).

I recall a conversation with a friend of mine who was discussing with me the plausibility of quick response to selection in microevolutionary processes. He hadn’t known that I had done a lot of reading in this area of late and so I was up on the literature and the analytic models in circulation, and so when I disagreed with his characterization of plausibilities his comeback was “well, my wife is a veterinarian and she said….” Simply replace “veterinarian” with “doctor” and you have, in my experience, the most common appeal-to-authority I have observed. Since when it relates to specific evolutionary or genetic questions I often do know more about the topic at hand than my M.D. friends I have no problem in brushing aside that appeal to authority, a pro forma deluge of impressive sounding vocabularly usually mollifies the target and we can get back to the normal business of actually exchanging information and progressing in extracting insight via communication. But this sort of interjection is ubiquitous in some fashion. Consider a thread over at the anthropology weblog Savage Minds where a reader noted that she worked in a neurochemistry lab, and while she was there she had no idea who E.O. Wilson was, ergo, the implication was that he can’t be very prominent in biology. Of course, Wilson is an entomologist, and one of the world’s experts on ants.2 As an organismic biologist it wouldn’t surprise me that people in neurochemistry wouldn’t talk about him. I also wouldn’t expect that R.A. Fisher, Sewall Wright or J.M. Smith would be figures that she was acquainted with, that doesn’t mean that they weren’t prominent (she later notes that Wilson was someone she heard about in graduate school in anthropology, which makes sense if you think about, that is, someone with a training in ethology and ecology might seem more relevant to people who are working in a higher order complexity field. Ontologically anthropology is reducible to physics on some level, but no one is going to chatter much about Edward Witten). The insight here is that biology is a big field with diverse methodologies and literature ghettos.3

This is a serious problem in many contexts. For example, I have heard from people that a “linguist friend” has assured them that the “Chomskyian model” has been overthrown. I don’t have the expertise to judge this assertion. Or, consider our friend Bora Zivkovic who regularly goes around commenting on blogs that “genocentrism” is an old paradigm and that the hot field of inquiry is multi-level selectionism. I happen to think that is a load of crap. But Bora has a lot of cred with many liberal webloggers because he’s a liberal, and well, I’m not. Or consider the appeal to the 1982 Lewontin and Sober paper Artifact, Cause and Genic Selection over at Crooked Timber thread on Evolutionary Psychology.

How to resolve this problem? If I was God I would have the NSF fund regular surveys on “Big Questions” within various subfields among NAS scientists, and whatever equivalents exist in other fields. This would be a good pulse check for those of us who aren’t in field X and so can’t make a gestalt evaluation based on personal review of the literature and knowledge of others who work within that field. Unfortunately, this probably isn’t going to happen anytime soon, so what to do? I think there are two short term strategies: 1) try and find a survey within that field to establish the bounds of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, 2) remember that the fine distinctions of knowledge and expertise that you are familiar within your areas of fluency apply elsewhere. There is a reason there is biochemistry, and organic chemistry and cognitive psychology. These modifiers are essential markers which suggest tightly bound disciplines, and even within them there are narrow specialities, so don’t expect more than undergraduate level of fluency when they venture outside their ghetto.

Addendum: Of course, you could immerse yourself in the literature of a particular field if you wanted to get firsthand knowledge and sample the zeitgeist, but this isn’t a general strategy you can follow because of the finite nature of disposable time for most people.

1 – Not the “whole Bible” as understood in the Christian tradition, but the Pentateuch.

2 – He was also given a professorship at Harvard before James Watson.

3 – I happen to think there is a lot of conve
rgence going on though. A lot of evolutionary biology today uses molecular method.