Science, Religion and Research

Recently, there was a post on Slashdot on Writing Genetic Code. Apparently a research group has taken a shot at "coding" an artifical organism. Really cool. And guess who's heading off the project? Craig Venter. Even cooler :-)

For people who may not be familiar with him, Craig Venter founded The Institute for Genomic Research, or TIGR during the mad rush to sequence the human genome. While the Human Genome Project swung ahead, Venter developed a new shotgunning method to complete the sequencing even quicker. NIH wasn't impressed; they denied him and his group funding. However, Venter duped them all when his group sequenced the genome quicker and cheaper than the Human Genome Project. This had a large deal to do with skipping over the physical map creation step, needed in the BAC-to-BAC sequencing method (used by the Human Genome Project), and the use of software.

I take my hat off to you, Dr. Venter! I wish you and your group the best of luck! Maybe his group will succeed where others have failed.

Some slashdotters took the news fairly well (Soviet jokes aside); however, the discussion predictably started becoming one about religion. On previous stories like this one, atheists crowed at the project, calling it a "smoking gun" against those who favor the theory of intelligent design. The intelligent design crowd retorted (essentially reversing the direction of the gun) that the project only supports the theory of intelligent design. And the squabbling and squawking continued.

Just as a personal opinion, can't people just respect other people's choice of religions and beliefs? Is it necessary to forcibly impose one's own belief system on others? It's one thing to express an opinion, but the things some people do are ridiculous. Fundies are pretty bad (Hi Mr. Falwell!), but atheists can be just as bad. Some of them are really hilarious ("I hate you and you don't exist!"). How do you hate something you don't believe exists? Idiots. Hey, I respect the beliefs of my atheists friends (and they respect my Christian ones), but these smacktards walking around thinking that anyone who believes in God lacks intelligence need to seriously grow up. It seems that such people are atheist because it's what's "in" in rebel fashion now. Sinfest did a nice piece on this.

I honestly hope that one day that people will come to realize or accept that Science is not necessarily the antithesis of God. The answer to such a complex question such as the origin of life is rarely housed in any extremist wing. Like Stephen Crane once wrote:

"When the prophet, a complacent fat man,
Arrived at the mountain-top,
He cried: "Woe to my knowledge!
I intended to see good white lands
And bad black lands,
But the scene is grey."

Until then, I get to hear the fundies and the atheists of fucktardia duke it out on Slashdot and other online news sources. *sigh*.

In other news, I've started working on my protein folding research project again. The coding is going fairly slow, but I think that's mainly a motivation issue. I guess that's because I'm on winter break. Oh well. Adding a bit of discipline to my schedule should break me of that. I can't wait to get the GA done. Oh! And after that, I can start work again on my avian flu project. Muahahahaha.