Well, I guess I should start with some contrition. I have gotten cheap laughs referring to Richard Dawkins as an idiot, such that students of mine have twice referred to him simply as 'The Idiot,' knowing they'd be perfectly well understood.

Well, first of all, I wanted to get "My kingdom for a horse" into the title, but I couldn't think of anything that made any sense. The title instead comes from this nifty exchange, which I found by searching for the relevant term in the Oxford Shakespeare: Horse evolution has been ricocheting through the blogosphere recently, because the author of Laelaps (who claims to be an individual human being;

Souls will come up regularly in this blog, for lots of reasons. For one, disembodied spirits (wandering souls, I presume) are everywhere in Shakespeare, and his very conception of death seems to be the separation of the soul from the body. I can't very well bring up Shakespeare without conjuring ghosts or visions thereof.

The jaw-dropping diversity of life begs for explanation, but at the same time it defies description, so much so that it has inspired hyperbole, even hyperbole of the finest variety.

If you are a professional scientist, then perhaps you felt like I did when you went to your first scientific meeting. My first meeting was a meeting of the Society of Toxicology, but the one I really remember was the 1988 Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. It was a watershed in my life; there in Toronto I was Seduced By The Dark Side and elected to pursue a Ph.D. and a career in academic science.

It’s easy to think of a genome as a collection of genes, perhaps because so many of the metaphors used to explain genes and genomes (blueprint, book of life, Rosetta Stone) can give one the impression that everything in a genome is useful or functional. But genomes are, in fact, packed with debris.

What is the evidence for common descent? To even ask the question, it seems to me, is to suppose that common descent is a proposal, or a hypothesis, and that a certain body of evidence supports the proposal. And that, of course, is quite true: common descent is a scientific theory, and a certain body of evidence supports that theory.

Well, it's August 3, 2007, and I'm setting up my blog. It's called Quintessence of Dust, and it will deal with issues of science and Christian faith, focusing on genetics, development, evolution, neuroscience and topics related. I'll regularly address intelligent design and creationism, among other scientific issues that attract the attention of evangelical Christians. My main theme will be scientific explanation.