has anyone this famous ever been director?

Is Collins good news for us folk in the HBD universe who do not want more politically correct restrictions placed over population genetics research?

Collins is a classic bureaucrat. He was also rumored during the 80's and 90's to hire young women and to promote those who gave good blow-jobs, literally.

He was also rumored during the 80's and 90's to hire young women and to promote those who gave good blow-jobs, literally.

If the girls who gave bad blow jobs are still looking for work, I'm hiring.

Collins believes in "theistic evolution". And not just as a vague generality, but as something he lectures on. So it's hard for a lot of biologists to take him seriously, despite his accomplishments (and those are significant -- he is/was a research stud).

exactly. see the biologos foundation, established by Collins. The answers to the questions at the bottom of the page are the sort of thing that make people a little uncomfortable.

eg.
Question 18: At what point in the evolutionary process did humans attain the “Image of God”? This is on par with "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

or
Question 22: Did evolution have to result in human beings? See the long, rambling way of saying "yes", when the answer, by all reasonable evolutionary arguments, is "no, of course not". and really, the question is ill-posed.

that said, Collins has done great work in disease genetics, and has been at the helm of a number of hugely successful projects while at NHGRI. So a "reasonable choice". my guess is that a bit of money will go towards establishing a large, prospective study of disease and physiology including genetics and as many environmental variables that people can think to analyse. This would be a fantastic resource for all sorts of questions.

I kind of admire Collins' going against the grain with this stuff. Contrarian traits seem very valuable in science.

I suppose it's easier for me to sympathize, since I don't feel totally convinced of the materiality of the mind/qualia as usually understood today. I know that I suffer from an incredibly detailed ignorance of physics, and yet I am still dumb and obnoxious enough to ask: is there some reason to be totally sure that some future discovery won't blow away or transcend materialism, or monist causality, in some way we can't currently imagine? At least under limited conditions -- kind of like how relativity pretty much hangs back when only "normal" velocities are considered? If this thought is a stupidity, I am ready to be corrected.

Consider how relativity kneecapped absolute space and time. If that doesn't sound so radical, think historically, and realize that absolute space and time was the only kind of space and time they had back then. And what about the way quantum physics suddenly showed that commonsense "objects" with "positions" don't exist.

How will today's doctrines look in the future if something like this happens to some of our concepts, and how should our worldviews cope with such a possibility? Come, join me momentarily on the steep and slippery slopes of skepticism -- you can always go back, I presume (but I won't claim to be absolutely certain).

I admit it, it's not hard to imagine how spiritual and religious feelings and dispositions might have evolved darwinianly. My already-modest hopes regarding the "transcendental" dwindled even further when I read about and contemplated various fitness-enhancing effects these hopes might quite plausibly have. So who knows: chilly, mechanical materialism may work its magic on me yet. If I die, and then never again experience any phenomena or awareness for all eternity, at that point I will gladly and humbly acknowledge that all you hard-core materialists were right the whole time.

On this skeptical point of view, BioLogos' philosophy does not strike me as hopelessly retrograde or insane. It's still theoretically possible today to assert knowledge and not assert that that knowledge comes from science (though I do believe our common or political decisions must acknowledge scientific knowledge far above any other kind). From what little I read, BioLogos doesn't claim to actually be science proper, or to revise any actual scientific observations; nor does it claim to be any kind of hard-nosed empiricist philosophy. It's merely a very speculative personal philosophy or worldview that I don't happen to believe is likely at all to be true. Not my cup of tea as a work of fiction, either; I would sooner use it to cure insomnia than to wake up in the morning. Its aims are synthesis, accommodation, and systematic consistency, ergo it does not exactly exude honesty, ergo my eyes glaze over; but to each his own.

Many here might at least agree with BioLogos that Gould's "two magisteria" rings hollow. For that, and for not denying any repeatable observations (which are the soul of science even more than any theory), let me solemnly accord them two stars out of five.