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Jesus Goes to BethesdaJust how religious is Obama's nominee for director of the NIH?

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Chris Wilson is an associate editor at Slate in Washington, D.C. Follow him on Twitter.
Photograph of Francis S. Collins by Alex Wong/Getty Images.
COMMENTS

Wasn't the Genome project completed earlier because Craig Venter was threatening to beat them to the tape?

-- pramesh
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That was definitely a factor, but competition alone wasn't going to get the job done. I recommend Cracking the Genome by Kevin Davies if anyone is looking for a good, readable history of the HGP and the private counterpart.

-- Chris Wilson
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Collins is a very smart man, evidently a sincere Christian, and would undoubtedly be great for the job. But he fundamentally misunderstands Intelligent Design.

Why? Well, he dismissed it as misguided, and then in the very same article cites the arbitrary constants in the universe that are "just so" to make life possible as evidence of God - which is as fine an example of Intelligent Design as you can find.

Collins is an ID'er. He just prefers to use a different word for it.

-- the true conservative
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That's a great point. I do think, however, that the Goldilocks Enigma is a somewhat different case because none of the competing theories are currently any more testable than God is. The multiverse theory may be more scientifically compelling, but is boasts just as little evidence (as far as I know). I've also heard some wild quantum explanations about how the universe exists in a superposition that collapses into an observable state with the "just right" constants when we observe it, a la Schrodinger's Cat.

-- Chris Wilson
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