The second most striking thing about Einstein’s religious beliefs is that he really, really did not want to be pinned down.

 ”There are people who say there is no God,” he told a friend. “But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views.”

The words that he uses to describe his beliefs are almost exactly the same words that I would choose for my own (he probably copied me)

 ”Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.”

“Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.”

“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.”

and yet he was adamant that he is not an atheist.

“The fanatical atheists,” he wrote in a letter, “are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who–in their grudge against traditional religion as the ‘opium of the masses’– cannot hear the music of the spheres.”

He must have known Bertrand Russell. And he must have known that Russell heard the music of the spheres. The only rational explanation is that he had his own private definition of atheist.

 ”What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos,”

The most striking thing is that everyone wants to claim that Einstein’s beliefs are just like their own.

What would happen if the one of the best musicians in the world were to play anonymously as a busker?

Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, was asked the same question. What did he think would occur, hypothetically, if one of the world’s great violinists had performed incognito before a traveling rush-hour audience of 1,000-odd people?

“Let’s assume,” Slatkin said, “that he is not recognized and just taken for granted as a street musician . . . Still, I don’t think that if he’s really good, he’s going to go unnoticed. He’d get a larger audience in Europe . . . but, okay, out of 1,000 people, my guess is there might be 35 or 40 who will recognize the quality for what it is. Maybe 75 to 100 will stop and spend some time listening.”

The Washington Post wanted to know. You should too.

Scott Adams got a record number of comments today on his moral dilemma:

Let’s say you’re the butler to a billionaire who lives alone. The billionaire dies in his sleep. You know he owns a large piece of jewelry that no one else has seen, and you have access to it.

If you steal the piece of jewelry, sell it, and give the money to an African charity, you can feed an entire village for a year. The village would otherwise starve. If you don’t steal the jewelry, it will go to his surviving family who has so much money they won’t care about it.

Obviously it is illegal to steal the jewelry and feed the starving village in Africa. But do you have a moral obligation to commit the crime for the greater good?

But they were all wrong.

I hope my commenters do better.

When the chimpanzee genome was published a couple of years ago we got a fascinating insight into how similar we are to our closest relative. But, when scientists found genes that differed only slightly between humans and chimpanzee it raised the mystery of who had the original and who had the mutation. Until now.

 The way through this impasse is to compare chimpanzees and humans to a third species–ideally another primate. But it was not until today that scientists had a third primate genome to study. Now they have all the DNA from a macaque.

I happen to be re-reading Dawkin’s The Ancestor’s Tale at the moment so I know that we split from our chimpanzee cousins about 5 or 6 million years ago and that we apes split from the monkeys about 25 million years ago. That’s why I found this so fascinating…

Some people carry versions of genes (known as alleles) that either cause diseases or predispose them to getting sick. When scientists studied the chimpanzee genome, they discovered that chimpanzees carry the human disease allele, without suffering the human disease. The macaque genome team expanded this search, looking for matches in chimp and macaque genomes to every known human disease allele. They discovered 229 cases in which the disease allele turns out to be the ancestral version.

There have been a bunch of papers published recently about the macaque genome and its differences from ours. Whenever papers like this are published you can always read a paragraph about it in The Economist or Time or maybe even a whole article in The New York Times. But the best place by far is The Loom by Carl Zimmer. Go read it now.
About 9 months ago, I subscribed to about 30 science blogs but, one by one, I dropped them. The Loom is one of only two science blogs that I still read regularly and it’s always good.