Here at Calvin we used to have a super-cool club called SNUH, which sought to discuss and enjoy The Simpsons. I was a guest speaker there twice, but their biggest catch by far was Prof. Tony Campolo, who came to Calvin three years ago, specifically in response to an invitation from the wacky SNUH.

Junk DNA is still a-happening. Ryan Gregory's blog Genomicron is the place to learn about it. He's especially adept at driving trucks through the gaps in ID claims about non-coding DNA. My gestating posts on the subject [sigh] will focus more on Reasons To Believe. Watch for a quote from Obi-Wan! So here are some things I've been munching on this week.

I don't know if Les Misérables will ever come to Grand Rapids, and all we got from U2 was a lecture by Bono. But, in two weeks, Quintessence of Dust will host Tangled Bank, and that'll have to do in the meantime. Tangled Bank is an excellent old science/medicine blog carnival, and the 6 February edition will be #98. The current edition just went up at The Inoculated Mind. It's a blog I've visited occasionally;

A long and fascinating piece in Sunday's Chicago Tribune Magazine ("The New Theology" by Jeremy Manier) explores some interesting results of the collision of faith and evolution in the lives of some famous people.

Well, I still haven't gotten to my "junk DNA" posts, which is a shame since the topic has been pretty hot in the blogosphere lately. The term ("junk DNA") is confusing in itself, which creates cover for propagandists, but there are some actual disagreements among the real scientists. The discussion among various bloggers is largely technical in nature, but the rancor is oh-so-bloggy.

I've explained before that I'm busy as an experimental scientist (on sabbatical) who does marriage and parenting as well, so I just can't get to all the blog posts I want to write. (Not to mention the ones I want to read.) And some tidbits and links wouldn't warrant an opus in any case.

Watching lay Christians discuss evolution in the public arena is very frustrating for me. As I've stressed repeatedly here, evolutionary biology is some of the most fascinating and dynamic science to be found.

I'll soon post the first in a series of articles that will explain why I believe that Christians are unwise to turn to Reasons To Believe (RTB) or to other proponents of "intelligent design" for competent Christian commentary on evolutionary biology. I think it's important for Christians to reject folk science and the lack of integrity its presence implies, and my goal in creating Quintessence of Dust is to help Christians understand biology.

I've gotten some more feedback on one of my Journal Club posts, from Sean Carroll and Chris Hittinger, the authors of the Nature paper on gene duplication that was the focus of one of my recent reviews of an article from the recent scientific literature. Chris identified some minor imperfections, and I've revised the original post in response to his comments. This got me thinking.

"Junk DNA" is a very popular subject among anti-evolution commentators. At the Discovery Institute (DI) and Reasons To Believe (RTB), as well as other creationist outlets, you can find ample discussion of "junk DNA" and why it matters to Christians who don't like evolution.

Recently I made a few comments on Greg Laden's Blog over at ScienceBlogs, in which I expressed some, um, concern regarding an aroma of ugly anti-Christian thuggery. The context was a silly (and banal) article on the "War on Christmas," which is some idiotic dustup in the so-called Culture Wars. I've bashed Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion repeatedly on this blog. I'll probably do it again.