Devolution isn’t a thing

Devo

Yesterday I volunteered as a Meeting Mentor at the AbSciCon meeting. It’s not a big commitment; essentially all you have to do is hang out with a high school student for half a day, going to talks and enjoying the meeting as you normally would.

During a break, I was chatting with my mentee about Betül Kaçar’s research, and he surprised me by pointing out that (as he put it), “Devolution isn’t a thing.” The student I was paired with is interested in physics and space exploration, but his comment showed an insight that not even all professional biologists really own. From what I’ve seen, it’s an insight that very few creationists own.

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AbSciCon 2017 day 1

AbSciCon logo

Yesterday was the first day of AbSciCon 2017 in Mesa, Arizona.

Phoenix is not my favorite town; it’s got all the brutal heat (and then some) that Tucson gets, without a tenth of Tucson’s charm. That said, it’s been fairly pleasant so far, only getting into the 80’s yesterday. The hotel restaurant is pretty lame, but there is decent food about a ten-minute walk away.

Yesterday started with a bizarre plenary talk about planetary protection. This is a big deal in the astrobiology community, the concern that sending probes to potentially habitable worlds such as Europa and Enceladus could contaminate them with Earth life. It’s also a harder problem to solve than it sounds like, partly because advanced electronics of the sort that are likely to run a probe don’t get along well with the things we typically use to sterilize equipment: bleach, extreme heat, radiation, and the like. The talk used a real-time interactive system, allowing the speaker to ask a question and display the results on the screen in real time. Multiple choice questions displayed as bar graphs, fill-in-the-blanks as word clouds, both changing from second to second as new answers came in.

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Another failed prediction

Poison the well much?

In a post that calls participants in the March for Science “spoiled brats,” “full-time complainers,” and “crybullies,” David Klinghoffer stopped just short of predicting that the March would become a riot:

The March for Science website includes a “Statement on Peaceful Assembly and Nonviolence,” …Why the need for a statement that you don’t “condone violence” if you’re not concerned that participants in your event will get violent?…

The crybullies, as [Daniel Greenfield] calls them, specialize in anger. Like small children throwing fits, they are liable to lash out physically, as recent incidents on college campuses have shown.

If violence occurs on April 22 on the National Mall, or hundreds of satellite protests elsewhere, that’s where it will come from.

I witnessed the rage myself, and it wasn’t pretty. [Warning: this gets pretty graphic below the fold]

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