There is an incredibly smart lecturer in our department (there are, indeed, several such; I’m concentrating on but one of them) who nonetheless managed to say in a lab-meeting
“… these four-helix bundles are designed to bind substrate …”
I have no reason to believe that the chap is a closet IDer, but please, won’t someone think of the children?
Are you denying His Noodly Goodness?
There is a long history of anthropomorphizing molecular interactions in scientific narrative, usually to make the story more engaging. Personally I think it’s harmless, as long as everyone knows what is meant.
Naw. I prefer to say we’re doomed, DOOMED in my best Hugo Weaving voice.
Oh this drives me crazy. It’s just laziness. It’s all well and good between scientists, but then by the time you start talking to lay people it’s become a habit.
As I’ve said elsewhere – you need to know your audience. I think compartmentalization is fine, and I think amongst colleagues, you should be able to relax.
Hugo Weaving? He only does trilogies, you know.
Wait till the guys over at The Discovery Institute hear about this! Whoa!
Other than them (and seriously including them), however, I think the intructor communicated well by his use of the English language. (This, as long as he never says, “Oh my God” when taken by a result.)
It’s a fairly common lexical device that children as well as lab associates would recognize the meaning of upon hearing, so no need to worry about the audience. But, sometimes I think the English language was designed to create debates for being taken too literally.
When we use “design” like this, it is to create a wonderment about what the actual mechanisms were or are. That associate of yours was made to lecture.
Yours,
Rus
I take your side on this one. It is dangerous diction. Whilst I agree that one should be able to relax among colleagues, (hmm, maybe I don’t truly agree with that – backstabbers!) there are still malleable minds in a lab meeting. Bad habits seem natural when embodied by incredibly smart lecturers.
However, since language is a flexible tool, perhaps the solution is to stretch the definition of the word ‘designed’ to embrace the processes of trial and error that yield desirable end results such as a substrate binding site or Hugo Weaving, thus simply eliminating the dependence upon a ‘designer’?