NEW Sugar Free Life

PZ Myers has an interesting look at the work SynBio. They are trying to create life in the lab.

For theistic scientist like Francis Collins, it is a waste. Leon Kass thinks they lack an understanding of life, living it. The Pope thinks it is flummery...Rich.

Weiss is right: no magic, no vitalism, no ghosts puttering about in the cytoplasm. I highlighted that one sentence because it's so absurd: we don't deal in proofs, for one thing, but if there's anything we can be certain of, it's that cells are biochemical machines, tiny reaction chambers burbling away and churning through metabolic processes. If Kass and Collins really are clinging to uncertainty about that — and I'm inclined to expect that it's actually the reporter imputing those ideas to them — then they'd have to be bigger knuckleheads than I imagined. I'm unclear what they expect will happen when investigators assemble the machinery of the cell — that it will sit there inert until infused with the sap from lignum vitae, or that it will need to be kick-started by a blessing from the local priest? Piffle. It's physics and chemistry. Get the recipe right, and that's all that matters.

Francis Collins is a brilliant scientist. But when his theology gets involved, when the converasation turns to a question of LIFE, or the place of Humanity...he goes fuzzy. That is the trouble with dealing with many theistic evolution supporters. Want to claim that evolution was a rock started down a hill by a deity? Fine, that is your fantasy. But then he will harp on the special magic that God put in us and no other animal. How we have morality embedded in us. How we are special, per the bible. What does this have to do with science? How is this supported in anthropology, sociology, or biology? Simple. It ain't. It is just his personal wish. So his disdain of the chances of whipping up a new batch of life falls more in his theological standing, than his scientific. That is sad. And the burden of dealing with theistically minded scientists and thinkers.

It is like dealing with a pothead. All they want to talk about is what if their were dragons living in the clouds...And how cool that is.


Best line:

The Newsweek cover story is on recent efforts to create life in the laboratory, and of course they call this "playing God". Haven't they got the message yet? "Playing God" is where you do absolutely nothing, take credit for other entities' work, and don't even exist — scientists don't aspire to such a useless status.