“Outing” is legitimate when it is done to reveal the true identity of gays and lesbians who work hard to violate the rights of other homosexuals, or in various ways keep them down. Often, they are extremely vicious to homosexuals in order to prove that they themselves are not gay. Rather like Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel are doing. Check HillBuzz’s 6/16/09 post on the Man Country bar and the tall, thin state’s representative with the coffee-colored complexion that used to, pardon the expression, come there.

Revealing the extra-marital heterosexual affair of anyone is not comparable to outing, unless they are constantly preaching against infidelity and fornication. In that case, it’s news.

Cynthia

Though I think one of the rings of hell is reserved for those who invade others’ privacy to “out” them, I think a much hotter one belongs to blackmailers.

If he was being blackmailed, the Senator did the right thing. And even if he wasn’t, ‘fessing up is the right thing, too.

I will have to take this up on my father’s blog. But please go and read the definitions of the terms there.

The bottom line is that there is only ONE explanation of the origin of life that is NOT based on faith, which is that the origin of life is UNKNOWABLE, as my father’s work demonstrates.

Cynthia

There was a Nova episode last year wherein they found that gene activation is regulated by various chemical factors. So that although parents might supply a particular gene to the kid, the environmental factors present at some time or another produced “other stuff” (remember i’m a geek) that silences that gene.

I’m altogether comfy saying a “genome” is a mere pattern (albeit a complex one) of DNA base-pairs. I don’t think this contradicts the Bible or anything. If we took your DNA, wrote down all the base-pairs, then generated a fertilized ovum from that record (what a 3-d printer THAT would take!) the resulting individual would be no different than your identical twin. Am I manifesting that deficiency or perpetrating that torture of facts you have in mind?

When I was a kid I was taught John Conway’s “life” program and wasted several good pieces of graph paper messing with it. This was my first finite-cellular automata. This simple set of rules of filling in cells on graph paper gave rise to some remarkable emergent behavior. So that one could fabricate NAND gates therefrom and (circling around to Alan Turing) to building a Turing machine. I’m convinced that our humanity is an emergent phenomena of various biochemical automata that are programmed via DNA base-pairs.

When Theists and Atheists argue, we often talk past one another. Or quibble over points where we are largely in agreement. I apologize for drifting away from the original topic.

I do not know what you mean by “more-than-genome.” But I DO know that very few people really have a grasp of the definition of genome and I suspect they make up things to fill in their own deficiency or to torture the facts to match their ideology — this is true both in science and from the religious angle.

Cynthia

The news of the Mexico City flu outbreak, suspected to be a H1N1 variant, got me reading an old NYT article about the 1918 influenza outbreak. In it I read of some genetic jiggery-pokery that might just provide that mechanism that’s needed to overcome irreducible complexity arguments. (Notwithstanding your father’s arguments that I’ve not yet perused.)

You also need to consider epi-genetics. Sometimes in identical twins one gets sick and the other doesn’t. And also they’ve seen a famine in one generation will cause maladies in the next generation. These phenomena point to more-than-genome. But I digress…

The answer to the problem Behe raises is on my father’s blog, http://www.hubertpyockey.com. Briefly, the genome — which is the non-material information recorded digitally in DNA — is what answers objections of gaps and missing links and the belief that an Intelligent Designer is required to build anything. There have been no gaps in the genome from the origin of life to now and there won’t be any until life is extinct. The origin of life is an axiom of biology, but after that, the genome has been running the show.

You might be interested in my father’s book, which is advertised on this blog. Thank you for your remarks on Turing and his contributions to the origin of the modern computer.

Cynthia

Turing’s biggest contribution were his designs for the Bombes that were special purpose devices to run through hundreds of Enigma keys mechanically. The US designs coming out of NCR in Dayton were better. There is plenty of credit to go around for the invention of the digital computer. Where Turing had a long-term impact was in the Theory of Computing.

I never knew about “irreducible complexity” coming from Turing, but it is not surprising. He’d think like that.

I’ve read Michael Behe’s book “Darwin’s Black Box” (parts of it at least) and I didn’t find him particularly faux-scientist-ish or true believer-ish. A lot of my Creationist friends don’t like Behe for not being enough of a true believer. I dislike the tendency of Creationists to be more interested in winning arguments than figuring out what happened, and I don’t find Behe guilty of that.

The problem Behe raises is that Evolution needs a mechanism to swap in and out larger micro-biological subassemblies than will fit into random mutations. This is consistent with the theories of “punctuated equilibrium” which seem to fit the fossil record that seems to be lacking a few missing links (Given N distinct species, you need a missing link between each transitional form. I’d like to see a few more of those transitional forms dug out of the fossil record. Punctuated equilibrium supposes non-Darwinian “jump” discontinuities in speciation. (Please don’t take this as a brief for Creationism since this paragraph has discussed post-Darwinian theories that my Creationist friends find equally abhorrent.)