A marvel of evolution: the dactyl club of stomatopods

June 16, 2012 • 9:51 am

Stomatopods, also known as “mantis shrimp,” are an order of marine crustaceans. They’re a nasty piece of work; as Wikipedia notes:

Called “sea locusts” by ancient Assyrians, “prawn killers” in Australia and now sometimes referred to as “thumb splitters” – because of the animal’s ability to inflict painful gashes if handled incautiously[4 – mantis shrimp sport powerful claws that they use to attack and kill prey by spearing, stunning or dismemberment. Although it happens rarely, some larger species of mantis shrimp are capable of breaking through aquarium glass with a single strike from this weapon. . .

Around 400 species of mantis shrimp have currently been described worldwide; all living species are in the suborder Unipeltata. They are commonly separated into two distinct groups determined by the manner of claws they possess:

  • Spearers are armed with spiny appendages topped with barbed tips, used to stab and snag prey.
  • Smashers, on the other hand, possess a much more developed club and a more rudimentary spear (which is nevertheless quite sharp and still used in fights between their own kind); the club is used to bludgeon and smash their meals apart. The inner aspect of the dactyl (the terminal portion of the appendage) can also possess a sharp edge, with which the animal can cut prey while it swims.

Both types strike by rapidly unfolding and swinging their raptorial claws at the prey, and are capable of inflicting serious damage on victims significantly greater in size than themselves. In smashers, these two weapons are employed with blinding quickness, with an acceleration of 10,400 g (102,000 m/s2 or 335,000 ft/s2) and speeds of 23 m/s from a standing start, about the acceleration of a .22 calibre bullet. Because they strike so rapidly, they generate cavitation bubbles between the appendage and the striking surface. The collapse of these cavitation bubbles produces measurable forces on their prey in addition to the instantaneous forces of 1,500 newtons that are caused by the impact of the appendage against the striking surface, which means that the prey is hit twice by a single strike; first by the claw and then by the collapsing cavitation bubbles that immediately follow. Even if the initial strike misses the prey, the resulting shock wave can be enough to kill or stun the prey.

The snap can also produce sonoluminescence from the collapsing bubble. This will produce a very small amount of light and high temperatures in the range of several thousand kelvins within the collapsing bubble, although both the light and high temperatures are too weak and short-lived to be detected without advanced scientific equipment. The light emission and temperature increase probably have no biological significance but are rather side-effects of the rapid snapping motion. Pistol shrimp produce this effect in a very similar manner.

Smashers use this ability to attack snails, crabs, molluscs and rock oysters; their blunt clubs enabling them to crack the shells of their prey into pieces. Spearers, on the other hand, prefer the meat of softer animals, like fish, which their barbed claws can more easily slice and snag.

Here’s a spearer:

Squilla mantis

And here’s a smasher.  Check out those second pair of appendages, known as “dactyl clubs”:

Odontodactylus scyllarus

Here’s a spearer in action:

I’m particularly interested in the smashers, since the way they get food is stunning. Here (via Faye Flam’s website, Planet of the Apes, which alerted me to this new research), is a video of a mantis shrimp busting open a clam.  If you’re not amazed at how evolution could produce such a weapon, you are jaded!

How can they do this repeatedly without damaging their “clubs”? Granted, they grow new ones each year when they molt, but they have to do these strikes thousands of times per year. A new paper in Science by James Weaver et al. (reference below, see also the Science perspective on it by K. Elizabeth Tanner, “Small but extremely tough“) did microstructural analysis of the club and found that it has several unique features to protect it.  The paper is extremely technical and difficult to read, so I’ll quickly summarize what they found.  The club consists of three sections:

  • The striking surface is made of hydroxyapatite, an extremely tough mineral made of calcium and phosphorus.  This is very rare in the exoskeletons of marine invertebrates, which are usually made of calcium carbonate.  Hydroxyapatite is a component of teeth and bones in vertebrates.
  • Behind the striking surface are layers of “chitosan,” a polysaccharide (sugarlike molecule). This not only helps deflect some of the striking energy back to the surface, but also prevents the inevitable cracks from growing (as Tanner says, “any crack is forced to continually change direcction, retarding crack growth.
  • Finally, the second layer is wrapped on the outside by a layer of chitin, which keeps prevents the club from disintegrating during its strikes

Not much more need be said except to marvel again at what natural selection can produce. The force of the animal’s blow is more than 1000 times its own weight; that’s the equivalent of a boxer landing a 100-ton punch!  Remember that all this evolved out of some simple, primal replicator through a blind and naturalistic process of gene sorting.

The research was partially funded by the U.S. Air Force, for it could have implications for designing not only aircraft frames but body armor for soldiers.

p.s. Be sure to check out Faye’s discussion of the physics of Ray Bradbury’s story “A sound of thunder.” You know the one: a hunter goes back to the past to kill a dinosaur that would already have been doomed, steps off the track, crushes a butterfly, and, in coming back to the present, finds that that one butterfly’s death dramatically changed the world.  The discussion of why time has a direction is nice, but what particularly struck me was Bradbury’s convergent discovery of LOLspeak.  When the hunter comes back to his present, he finds that one of the things that’s changed is language.  The sign that was in English before he went back to the past now reads:

SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST. YU NAIM THE ANIMALL. WEE TAEK YU THAIR.YU SHOOT ITT.

__________

Weaver, J. C., G. W. Milliron, A. Miserez, K. Evans-Lutterodt, S. Herrera, I. Gallana, W. J. Mershon, B. Swanson, P. Zavattieri, E. DiMasi, and D. Kisailus.  2012.  The stomatopod dactyl club: a formidable damage-tolerant biological hammer. Science 336:1275-1280.

Michael Ruse: Heaven and miracles are perfectly consistent with science

June 16, 2012 • 5:46 am

There is a group of Sophisticated Philosophers who, though a nonbelievers themselves, feel compelled to occasionally don the mantle of Sophisticated Theologian© and help the faithful find ways to comport their religion with modern science.  Two specimens are Michael Ruse and Elliott Sober. We’ve previously discussed how Sober finds God-guided mutations logically compatible with evolution, and I’ve reviewed in another place Michael Ruse’s previous attempt to comport science with Christianity: his book Can a Darwinian be a Christian? (The answer, of course, is “certainly!”)

I’m not sure why atheist/agnostic philosophers want to spend their time harmonizing science with the very religious beliefs they reject.  Sober, for example, doesn’t believe in God-guided mutations, but goes around telling the faithful that God could help Darwin along by occasionally tweaking the DNA.  And Ruse is a nonbeliever as well. I’m not a psychologist, so I won’t suggest the motivations for this, but none of them seem savory to me.  I could talk about “belief in belief,” or early religious belief that, once rejected, still lingers, but who knows?

So today I’ll inflict on you yet another attempt at accommodation by Michael Ruse; it comes from his latest book, Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2010). It’s a strange book: most of it is about the history of science and philosophy, with the usual potted discussions of Hume, Kant, Aristotle, Descartes, and so on, but in the end he tackles the question of whether the main tenets of Christianity can live in harmony with science. His foregone conclusion: “Certainly!”.

Ruse sees four defining characteristics of Christianity that can be examined in light of science (quoted from p. 182):

  1. There is a God who is creator, “maker of heaven and earth”.
  2. We humans have duties, moral tasks hear on earth in the execution of which we are going to be judged. Hence, God stands behind morality.
  3. Jesus Christ came to earth and suffered because we humans are special, we are worth the effort by God. . . We have souls.
  4. There is the promise of “life everlasting”. . . we can go to heaven, whatever that means.

He then spends the rest of the book showing how all of this is logically compatible with science. No, he doesn’t give any evidence—that’s not his tactic.  He wants to show that science “can’t lay a finger” on any of these claims. His thesis (p. 183) is this: “The Christian’s claims are not refuted by modern science—or indeed threatened or made less probable by modern science.”

To give an idea of how his argument works, let’s look at his discussion of the afterlife on pp. 226-227 of the book. Bear with me, even if you feel a rising nausea:

There are many more details and issues that could be raised here. We might discuss the nature of hell, or the possibility of God extending his mercy and eternal life to all humans and not to just a select few, or the prospects of salvation for children and others (including those born before Jesus or those born in lands unaware of the Christian message). But, whatever the relative importance of these and like issues, for our purposes enough of the basic Christian picture of future things and hopes has now been presented. Remember, the question is not whether we ought to accept it. Rather, the question is whether someone who accepts modern science has any good reason to reject it purely on the grounds of science. Of course the scientist might well want to deny the possibility of life after death, whether as a disembodied mind or as a resurrected body.  The question is whether one can do this on the grounds of science.  If the claim were being made that, say, somewhere else in the universe we shall find Saint Paul and Julius Caesar and Napoleon and Charles Darwin—as minds alone or with bodies also—then as a scientist one might be skeptical.  But this is not the claim.  It is rather that there is another dimension of existence where resurrected bodies exist—or minds, if that is all. It is the place of the spiritual body.  As such, I doubt that science can lay a finger on the idea. The scientist may not much care for the religious claims—the philosopher Bernard Williams (1973) once wrote an article on “the tedium of immortality”—but he or she is not able to reject them on the grounds that they go against scientific understanding.

Indeed, science can’t prove that there’s no heaven, but of course we’re not in the business of proving anything. Rather, science is in the business of concocting models that best represent the universe we see.  We can’t disprove some other plane of existence, but neither can we disprove that there are invisible unicorns that influence our destiny, or that we are merely the reincarnations of beings that existed in previous ages.

The question is not whether some logical possibility can be disproven, but this:  what grounds do we have to believe that we live on after death?  If we can’t find any, why should we believe it, much less condition our entire lives on that premise?

And on what grounds should a scientist be skeptical that his soul might commune with that of Charles Darwin (a consummation devoutly to be wished!), but yet have nothing to say about whether other resurrected bodies or minds might exist in some celestial territory?

And the idea of an afterlife does go against scientific understanding for at least one big reason: our understanding of the universe does not require—or even suggest—the existence of such a thing. One could find other reasons why the afterlife “goes against scientific understanding.”  As best we know, our personalities and our memories—everything that constitutes who we are as people, spiritual or material—reside in our bodies and brains, which vanish completely when we die.  All those memories we have are coded in our neurons, which rot away soon after death.  Further, the claims of “near death experiences,” in which people begin their trip to the celestial realm of souls but are rudely  interrupted in transit, have been debunked.  As Christopher Hitchens’s famous claim goes, “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”

Now Ruse would probably reply that religious claims don’t require scientific evidence—that they are based on faith, revelation, and teachings of the church.  But we have no confidence that those give us any reliable information about “realities” like heaven or an afterlife, if for no other reason than that different faiths give different answers. Many Jews don’t accept an afterlife, many Hindus believe not in a celestial realm of souls but in reincarnation, and Buddhists don’t have a heaven at all.

What about miracles?  Don’t those violate the scientific claim that there are unbroken regularities (“laws” if you will) in the physical universe? Ruse says, well, yes, miracles like the Resurrection might be straight-out violations of physical law but that “Christian miracles are not trying to do the work of science at all. They are about something entirely different, and they are simply laid across the world of science.” (p. 207).  Laid across? They either comport with what we know about science or they don’t.  There is no “laying across” science.  There may be philosophy going on here, but if so it is so subtle that I don’t understand it.

But Ruse offers another explanation of miracles—that they aren’t supernatural at all but merely natural occurrences that had a powerful effect.  He says this about the Resurrection, for instance, claiming that maybe Jesus really did rot away, and that the “miracle” was not that he was raised from the dead but that his disciples were heartened rather than downtrodden by his death, and went forth to preach the gospel—an example of what Ruse called “group psychology.”

These apologetics are at their most amusing when Ruse proffers the faithful an explanation of how Jesus’s conversion of water into wine might have not been a “real” miracle after all (pp. 205-206):

First, in the spirit of Augustine, one argues that miracles do not necessarily involve a breaking of natural law. It is more a matter of meaning than of peculiar happenings. . . When Jesus turned the water into wine and when he fed the five thousand, it is much more probable that people were really moved by his presence and preaching to do that which they would not have done otherwise. The host at the wedding had not meant to bring out his good wine, and then, shamed by Jesus, he did just that. The multitude had no intention of sharing and then, moved by Jesus, they did give to those who had little or none. In fact, a case might be made for saying that this puts Jesus into a better light than if he actually were changing water into wine and multiplying loaves and fishes. To think literally is to change Jesus into some kind of fancy caterer.

Yes, “OMG, Jesus is here! I’d better break out the Chateau Lafitte ’32!”  This is not philosophy, but the most laughable form of apologetics—theology turning scientific necessities into spiritual virtues. This resembles what theologians did when confronted with the ineluctable fact of evolution: they just claimed that it was, upon judicious reflection, better for God to have created through a “self-sustaining process” rather than ex nihilo.

I guess Ruse sees himself as a theologian as well as a philosopher, but I fail to understand why he produces this kind of intellectual pablum.  If he wishes to bring together science and faith, his avowed aim, does he really think that Christians will buy this? Does he not see that his solution waters down religion so much that it becomes a kind of spiritual homeopathy, impotent to cure the longings of the faithful?

Well, maybe lots of religious people will be relieved to know that Jesus wasn’t a fancy caterer, but I don’t believe it.

Caturday felid: yet another klepto-cat, Denis from Luton

June 16, 2012 • 4:07 am

In February of last year I presented the story of Dusty, a cat burglar from California with an uncontrollable penchant for stealing from other people’s houses.  I thought his behavior was unique, but it has just turned up across the Atlantic—in Luton! The video below shows a black-and-white moggie named Denis Newman who can’t keep his paws off of other people’s stuff.

The alert sleuths on the BBC’s One Show, aided with a GPS device and a camera affixed to Denis’s collar, documents many acts feline purloinage, and in the act also maps out the cat’s territory.

Perhaps to atone for his mideeds, Denis is now an official sponsor for Homeless Cat Rescue of Bedfordshire, and you can donate or buy Dennis tee-shirts to help abandoned cats find homes.

Inevitably, Denis has a Facebook page.

h/t: Michael

Cat walks down fridge

June 15, 2012 • 12:58 pm
It’s Friday, and we all deserve felids after a hard week.  Here are two from YouTube, showing cat acrobatics of a kind unknown to me.
Our cat Piggy doing her daily routine of walking down the fridge

Our cat Piggy walking down the fridge but pausing half way. She must have super grippy paws! She performs her fridge walk on a daily basis although I have no idea how she first figured it out. She is seven years old but still acts like a kitten. There is never a dull moment with Piggy in the house!

Fulsome accommodationism at a pro-science site

June 15, 2012 • 8:36 am

A while back I wrote a piece about how a decent pro-evolution site at the University of California at Berkeley, “Understanding Evolution,” was marred by its pro-accommodationism stance, and was funded by the National Science Foundation.  To me that bordered on state endorsement of religion, because asserting the compatibility of science and religion is a particular theological stance.

Alert reader Peter, though, just informed me of a similar site, also hosted by Berkeley, called “Understanding Science.” As with the evolution site, it looks like a good resource for teachers; there are sections about how science works, the nature of evidence, and so forth.  But it’s also marred by its accommodationism, which is not a small part of the site.

Here’s one:

Misunderstandings of the limits of science

  • MISCONCEPTION: Science contradicts the existence of God.  
  • CORRECTION: Because of some vocal individuals (both inside and outside of science) stridently declaring their beliefs, it’s easy to get the impression that science and religion are at war. In fact, people of many different faiths and levels of scientific expertise see no contradiction at all between science and religion. Because science deals only with natural phenomena and explanations, it cannot support or contradict the existence of supernatural entities — like God. To learn more, visit our side trip Science and religion: Reconcilable differences.

The facts: many people, and not just scientists, do see a contradiction between science and religion.  Look at these data from a recent Pew survey (click to enlarge):

And a further correction to the correction: science can either support and contradict the existence of supernatural entities: all we need to do is test for the effect that those entities are claimed to have on the world. We can look, for instance, at the efficacy of prayer or the ability of rain dances to bring precipitation.  Why do accommodationists continue to ignore that and assert that science can’t “test” the supernatural?  We can’t test deism, but we can test theism. We have, and it failed.

Here’s another misconceived misconception from the Berkeley site:

  • MISCONCEPTION: Scientists are atheists
  • CORRECTION: This is far from true. A 2005 survey of scientists at top research universities found that more than 48% had a religious affiliation and that more than 75% believed that religions convey important truths.1 Some scientists are not religious, but many others subscribe to a specific faith and/or believe in higher powers. Science itself is a secular pursuit, but welcomes participants from all religious faiths. To learn more, visit our side trip Science and religion: Reconcilable differences.1Ecklund, E.H., and C.P. Scheitle. 2007. Religion among academic scientists: Distinctions, disciplines, and demographics. Social Problems 54(2):289-307.

1Ecklund, E.H., and C.P. Scheitle. 2007. Religion among academic scientists: Distinctions, disciplines, and demographics. Social Problems 54(2):289-30

The facts: scientists are far more atheistic than regular Americans.  As Jason Rosenhouse pointed out on EvolutionBlog about Ecklund’s conclusions:

Asked about their beliefs in God, 34% [of scientists] chose “I don’t believe in God,” while 30% chose, “I do not know if there is a God, and there is no way to find out.” That’s 64% who are atheist or agnostic, as compared to just 6% of the general public.

An additional 8% opted for, “I believe in a higher power, but it is not God.” That makes 72% of scientists who are explicitly non-theistic in their religious views (compared to 16% of the public generally.) Pretty stark.

From the other side, it is just 9% of scientists (compared to 63% of the public), who chose, “I have no doubts about God’s existence.” An additional 14% of scientists chose, “I have some doubts, but I believe in God.” Thus, it is just 25% of scientists who will confidently assert their belief in God (80% of the general public.)

For completeness, the final option was “I believe in God sometimes.” That was chosen by 5% of scientists and 4% of the public. Make of it what you will.

Now explain to me, please, how anyone can look at that data and write this:

As we journey from the personal to the public religious lives of scientists, we will meet the nearly 50 percent of elite scientists like Margaret who are religious in a traditional sense…. (p. 6)

And, finally, this:

Science and religion: reconcilable differences:

With the loud protests of a small number of religious groups over teaching scientific concepts like evolution and the Big Bang in public schools, and the equally loud proclamations of a few scientists with personal, anti-religious philosophies, it can sometimes seem as though scienceand religion are at war. News outlets offer plenty of reports of school board meetings, congressional sessions, and Sunday sermons in which scientists and religious leaders launch attacks at one another. But just how representative are such conflicts? Not very. The attention given to such clashes glosses over the far more numerous cases in which science and religion harmoniously, and even synergistically, coexist.

One person can be both religious and scientific.
In fact, people of many different faiths and levels of scientific expertise see no contradiction at all between science and religion. Many simply acknowledge that the two institutions deal with different realms of human experience. Science investigates the natural world, while religion deals with the spiritual and supernatural — hence, the two can be complementary. Many religious organizations have issued statements declaring that there need not be any conflict between religious faith and the scientific perspective on evolution.1

And there’s even a photo of a very accommodationist Francis Collins:

Note that this site is supported by the National Science Foundation, a government agency, although there’s a disclaimer which says, correctly, that “Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).”  Nevertheless, expressing a compatibility between science and faith is a theological view, and I don’t think the government should be in the business of espousing particular brands of theology.

h/t: Peter

Wallenda walks Niagara Falls on a tightrope; hopes to bring people to God

June 15, 2012 • 7:55 am

Today’s the day that Nik Wallenda of the famous “Flying Wallenda” family will walk across Niagara Falls on a tightrope.  He needed a special exemption from the state legislature to do this, since it’s normally forbidden. As the New York Times reports:

In some ways, Mr. Wallenda’s walk is more audacious than those of his 19th-century predecessors. His rope has been set right above the falls, which throw off enough spray to drench those on the shoreline. By comparison, walkers like Jean Francois Gravelet, better known as “the Great Blondin,” walked across a tamer part of the gorge.

From the Boston Herald:

“It’s happening. This is going to be the biggest event on the planet!” said Jim Diodati, mayor of Niagara Falls, Ontario. Such hyperbole has fueled Wallenda mania, bringing flashing highway signs warning of Wallenda-related traffic jams and crowds gawking at cranes holding Wallenda’s 2-inch-wide cable taut over the roiling blue water.

Stadium-style lights were focused on the cable, which will sway several inches back and forth in the wind and bounce up and down. Midway through the 40-minute walk, Wallenda is expected to be wrapped in a bone-chilling fog far harsher than the soaking mist that showers visitors to the Falls.

The walk should take about 40 minutes.

But unlike his predecessors, some seen in the video below, Wallenda isn’t in much danger, for he’ll be wearing safety equipment (he damn well should—he’s got three young children).

Along the falls, there was much discussion of the safety harness that ABC, which is televising the walk Friday night, has insisted Mr. Wallenda wear. The Disney Corporation, which owns ABC, does not want a man to fall to his death on live television.

Here’s a brief video history of Niagara Falls daredevils:

But for me, the whole stunt was spoiled by Wallenda’s insistence that he’s doing God’s will:

Ruse: New Atheists treat Darwinism as a “secular religion”

June 15, 2012 • 4:18 am

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael Ruse discusses Robert Wright’s Atlantic piece that blamed New Atheists for creationism. Surprisingly, Ruse’s piece, “Are the New Atheists responsible for the creationist menace?“, is not 100% bad: he doesn’t buy Wright’s off-the-wall thesis that there was once a nonaggression pact between churches and evolution to not attack each other, and Ruse holds mainline churches more responsible than atheists for the incursion of creationism in schools. (Duh!) But the piece is spoiled by Ruse’s curious idea that because Darwinism has become a “secular religion,” and for some folks is connected with atheism, the courts will either ban the teaching of evolution in schools as a violation of the First Amendment, or allow creationism in:

Having said that, I do think that Wright has something of a point. I too worry that polarizing things does lead to a religion-or-science-and-take-no-hostages kind of thinking. And whatever the Constitution may say and whatever previous interpretations may have been, I fear that the present Supreme Court might take this as an excuse – if indeed they even look for excuses – to allow some form of biblical literalism into biology classes. The fact is that the New Atheists do tend to treat Darwinism as a form of secular religion – complete with Darwin Day (Darwin’s birthday) as their festival of celebration rather than Christmas or Easter. And I worry that some wily lawyer is going to take advantage of this. Accommodationist folk like me can help map out a middle ground that respects and observes the separation of Church and State. Evolution in the classrooms; God in church.

Well, he can worry if he wants, but there’s no evidence to support his angst. Where are the data showing that New Atheists have turned people away from evolution?  And the incompatibility between many aspects of science and faith does lead many to a religion-or-science kind of thinking, but nobody, least of all me, teaches that in the classroom.  And remember who started that: the faithful who insisted that evolution was incompatible with their faith.

But the stuff about treating Darwinism as a secular religion is offal.  It’s based purely on the fact that many of us see Darwin as a kind of scientific hero. Many physicists hold Einstein in similar regard. Does that make physics a secular religion?  At least we know that Einstein and Darwin existed, unlike the father-figure of conventional faith.  Nor do we see Darwin or Einstein as having supernatural powers or a postmortem ability to personally (as opposed to scientifically) influence the world. Indeed, all of us know that their science was sometimes flawed.  Darwin’s genetics was wonky; Einstein couldn’t accept pure indeterminism. Try finding a religious person who sees any flaws in God.

And what do we do on Darwin Day?  We don’t shout hosannas to Darwin, or beg for his mercy, pray to him, or spend all of our time propitiating him. We give talks on evolution—in other words, we spread science and tell people the truth.  All of this is the exact opposite of religion.

Ruse keeps raising the alarum that if we don’t make nice with religion, and if atheistic scientists don’t shut up, the Supreme Court of the U.S. will ban evolution from public schools as a form of faith.  But that will never fly, because it’s a science, supported by evidence.  I doubt that even our hyper-conservative Court would ban evolution from schools or put creationism in, if for no other reason than they’d look even more stupid than they do now.

As for Ruse patting himself on the back for his “accommodationism,” as if only people of that stripe can effect the separation of church and state in America, he’s dead wrong.  Show me ONE New Atheist who doesn’t agree with him about “Evolution in the classrooms; God in church.” All of us are at least on that side, and secular/atheist organizations like the Freedom from Religion foundation have been far more effective than Ruse in enforcing that separation.

Finally, as always, Ruse must always drag in how poorly treated he’s been, both in the past:

Naturally enough the New Atheists don’t much like [Wright’s] hypothesis. Jerry Coyne, over at Why Evolution is True, expectedly has gone ballistic. Using terms usually reserved for me, we learn that Wright’s thinking is “madness.” He is “dumb.” And: “As always on this topic, Wright is “talking out of his nether parts.”

and in the future:

Undoubtedly this post is going to bring down the usual opprobrium from the faithful [he means the New Atheists here], but before I vanish beneath the avalanche of scorn and sarcasm, let me say that in major respects I fault the mainline churches far more than the New Atheists.

Ruse could improve his pieces, at least marginally, if he wasn’t always so butthurt.  Really, does he expect us to praise him for such blather?  He needs to learn to keep his wounded ego out of his posts; it only makes him look weak and vindictive.