Francis Collins, author of "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief," was on The Colbert Report last night. The director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, Collins considers DNA "the language of God," the means He used

He was profiled in the LA Times a while back. There was a debate of sorts between Collins and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins in a recent issue of Time. It was an interesting read. I'm going to read Collins' book. I certainly don't have all the answers, and I'm sure he doesn't either...but I'm interested in ways to synthesize what we observe in the world with with we observe in the Word.

Here are the video clips from Colbert:

From the LA Times article:

He believes in evolution and in the resurrection. He wears a silver ring with a raised cross and works at a dining-room table painted with the double-helix of DNA...

Collins considers evolution irrefutable; he has no doubt that all life emerged from a common ancestor over millions of years. But he began to ask himself whether God could have set this amazing process in motion...

...perhaps evolution is a logical, even elegant, way to populate the planet. Maybe God intended mutations in DNA over the millennia to lead to the emergence of Homo sapiens. Once man arrived, maybe God set him apart from the other creatures by endowing him with knowledge of right and wrong, a sense of altruism and a yearning for spiritual nourishment....

Polls have found that 40% of scientists believe, as Collins does, in a God who actively communicates with man. Among elite biologists, however, the figure is much lower, about 5%...

On Monday Elliot lost his first tooth. It fell down the drain, so Lisa joked that he started a new tradition.

A couple photos:

Via Today's Papers, an article of the same title by Robin Shulman in The Washington Post reports on this ironically funny/sad situation:

It was an ethics exam in a journalism class, and someone may have cheated.

Ironic? Yes. Unfortunate? Certainly. But what made the incident particularly notable was where and when it took place: at Columbia University, one of the premier journalism schools in the country, at a time when media ethics are much in question.

On Friday, Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism convened a meeting to discuss misconduct in the final exam for the required ethics course "Critical Issues in Journalism."

But the school was so wary of making specific accusations that, afterward, it was not even clear what misconduct had taken place.

From the December 5, 2006, installment of The Writer's Almanac, a poem of the same title by Joyce Sutphen:

Things You Didn't Put On Your Resumé

How often you got up in the middle of the night
when one of your children had a bad dream,

and sometimes you woke because you thought
you heard a cry but they were all sleeping,

so you stood in the moonlight just listening
to their breathing, and you didn't mention

that you were an expert at putting toothpaste
on tiny toothbrushes and bending down to wiggle

the toothbrush ten times on each tooth while
you sang the words to songs from Annie, and

who would suspect that you know the fingerings
to the songs in the first four books of the Suzuki

Violin Method and that you can do the voices
of Pooh and Piglet especially well, though

your absolute favorite thing to read out loud is
Bedtime for Frances and that you picked

up your way of reading it from Glynnis Johns,
and it is, now that you think of it, rather impressive

that you read all of Narnia and all of the Ring Trilogy
(and others too many to mention here) to them

before they went to bed and on way out to
Yellowstone, which is another thing you don't put

on the resumé: how you took them to the ocean
and the mountains and brought them safely home.

On Saturday we went on a hike through Barstow Woods. Here are some photos and a video:

More photos here.