I thought it was the coffee, or maybe the Scottish buttheadedness. But no: it's a real live syndrome. Note that this newly-described malady, SIWOTI syndrome, sounds a bit like 'snotty' or 'so what-ee', so please be careful not to offend sufferers by mispronouncing the name, or by oversimplifying the affliction with crude cartoons. Via Pharyngula, a silly little blog written by one of the syndrome's most severely-affected victims.

Quiz 2. (Directions, and rationale, can be found in a previous post.) Ready? Which organism has the larger genome? This one? Or this one? 1 2 3 Which of these organisms displays the greatest "degree of advancement"? Which would require the most "information" to build and maintain? What predictions would design theorists such as William Dembski and Hugh Ross offer us in this exercise? Think, people.

First, answers to the quiz in last week's sampler.

It's Opening Day, and it mustn't pass without mention here at QoD, especially since probability, randomness and the supernatural are such central topics around here. Manny connects, game 2 in Japan. Image from Boston Globe online. I've already confessed that Stephen Jay Gould is one of my favorite authors, and some of his essays I mark for repeat visits.

Shall we play a game? Recall Hugh Ross' fictional tale about the "team of physicists" that remade molecular genetics. Ross claimed, falsely, that: The biological truth is the opposite: amount of DNA, "junk" or otherwise, is so uncorrelated with other aspects of biology that the situation was termed a paradox when it was first uncovered. Well...let's see the paradox in living color.

Howard Van Till is one of my heroes. It's been a month and a half since his address to the Grand Dialogue, and I still think about it, even though the ideas were all familiar to me. I think this is due partly to the fact that the excellent talk displayed Howard's disarming warmth and generosity, and partly to the fact that he was already one of my heroes.

Last Friday I mentioned a dispute surrounding the comments of some of the advocates of "framing" in science communications. The claim was that the engagement of pseudoscience – or what I would call folk science – is unwise, at least because the attention "enables" the purveyors of such swill.

First day of spring, 2008. Right. PZ Myers blogged about this interesting new report: examination of the genes for yolk proteins and milk proteins reveals a clear story of the evolution of proteins that nourish embryos and young in vertebrate animals. Pseudogenes figure prominently, and the explanation makes no sense without them. The article (in PLoS Biology) was accompanied by a nice lay summary, but PZ's post is very good too.

Months ago, I was worrying about how to characterize creationist statements that are untrue or misleading. The claims in question are not merely false (mistakes of various kinds can generate falsehood) and are not statements of opinion with which I disagree. They are claims that are demonstrably false but have been asserted by people who are certain (or likely) to know this. In other words, they bear the marks of duplicity.

The sun came out this week and the temperature soared to almost 50. In Phoenix, such a temperature is called 'cold'; here, it inspired us to have a cookout, though it didn't happen because the snow and ice on the deck precluded access to the blessed Weber kettle. But tomorrow, we're there. And I've been back on my bike this week, dodging cell-phone-wielding buffoons driving alone in SUVs.

Sorry I'm late; busy week of grant-writing and deadline-beating, then sleep-compensating and dust-clearing. And I did get the Reasons To Believe posts done. Allan Harvey is a chemical engineer (Ph.D.) who regularly posts to the ASA listserv, and he has prepared some highly recommended materials on "Science and Nature in Christian Perspective" that he has used in adult education in his church in Boulder, Colorado.