I’m a scientist!

I figured I’ve been blogging long enough with vague references to lab work and research and biology conferences that I should actually tell you guys what my research is. I’m not going to go super in depth for two reasons: one, if you’re not a biologist, you probably wouldn’t know what the heck I was talking about, and two, we’re still trying to publish my work, so I don’t want to give it all away before it’s officially out there.

So before I get into specifics, let me give you a little background information about what I do.

My official job title is not “Undergraduate Slave Technician” but a Forestry & Natural Resources Signature Area Fellow in Ecological Genetics (phew, try saying that three times fast). That’s really just a fancy way of saying I get paid slightly more because FNR had a special fund for smarty pants undergraduates doing more than one year of lab work. I’m actually a student of the Biology Department, which is in the College of Science, while FNR is part of the College of Agriculture. The only difference? Ag gets better funding at Purdue. Genetics is genetics no matter what department you’re in.

The laboratory I work in is pretty diverse as far as projects go. Most of our research is on ecological genetics and using genetics to answer questions about conservation. While a lot of labs have only one or two study organisms, we basically have everything. Birds (a ton of species from Hispanola, Eastern Imperial Eagles from Kazakhstan), amphibians (from Tiger Salamanders to whatever we find squished on the road), fish (Lake Sturgeon, my favorite sexually ambiguous fish), and mammals (hurray for Kangaroo Rats!). And our actual research is just as diverse: investigating long term population histories, genetic diversity and the effects of human structures, noninvasive ways to monitor population densities, discovering the genetic mechanisms for sex determination, the genetic basis for mate choice, dispersal…we’ve basically done it all.

When I started research, I have to admit that I really didn’t see the point of conservation projects. I didn’t know much about the fragile nature of ecosystems or why we need to protect our wealth of resources on earth, even at the very least for selfish reasons. After working in the lab for a while, I have a new appreciation for conservation. Personally, it’s not the kind of research I want to be doing – I’m still a bit of a cynic about conservation, and I’m not passionate enough to devote my life to it. My cynicism doesn’t make my the best spokeswoman for it, either. But regardless, I do appreciate the work done much more than I did before, and I’m glad I got what’s going to be a diverse lab experience before I go devoting my life to human genetics or something (or who knows what).

This is post 20 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

Married to a porn star? You're fired

A town manager in Florida was fired for his connections to porn – not making his own, but being married to someone who did.

Wait, what?

“Scott, who married Anabela in October, was fired at an emergency meeting Tuesday after the mayor and council members learned the nature of her employment. Scott, the town manager for 15 months, was unanimously voted out, terminated with six months pay.

The firing came after Anabela, who goes by the stage name Jazella Moore, was recognized by an editor of an online adult entertainment publication after a photo of the couple on the Fourth of July parade was published in the local paper.

Fort Myers Beach Mayor Larry Kiker said, “Our issue is the situation town was put in in terms of how effective we can govern and whether or not it this was going to serve as a distraction for that, and we felt like it would.””

It would be wrong for a town council to fire someone because they had been in porn, but it sadly wouldn’t surprise me. America has such Puritan values when it comes to sex, especially using sex to make money. But firing someone for being married to a porn star? Does any connection to porn automatically make someone unfit to perform his or her job? What if it had been Scott’s sister; would he still be to blame?

If this is really all there is to the story, I hope someone offers this man a job.

This is post 19 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

Married to a porn star? You’re fired

A town manager in Florida was fired for his connections to porn – not making his own, but being married to someone who did.

Wait, what?

“Scott, who married Anabela in October, was fired at an emergency meeting Tuesday after the mayor and council members learned the nature of her employment. Scott, the town manager for 15 months, was unanimously voted out, terminated with six months pay.

The firing came after Anabela, who goes by the stage name Jazella Moore, was recognized by an editor of an online adult entertainment publication after a photo of the couple on the Fourth of July parade was published in the local paper.

Fort Myers Beach Mayor Larry Kiker said, “Our issue is the situation town was put in in terms of how effective we can govern and whether or not it this was going to serve as a distraction for that, and we felt like it would.””

It would be wrong for a town council to fire someone because they had been in porn, but it sadly wouldn’t surprise me. America has such Puritan values when it comes to sex, especially using sex to make money. But firing someone for being married to a porn star? Does any connection to porn automatically make someone unfit to perform his or her job? What if it had been Scott’s sister; would he still be to blame?

If this is really all there is to the story, I hope someone offers this man a job.

This is post 19 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

Hooray lab work

*Minor Harry Potter 6th movie spoilers bellow*

Thanks Mark and Vanessa for standing in for me with a couple nice posts. I don’t thank you, however, for playing Rock Band in the other room while I must continue typing away. Sadness. I had to run to work for a bit to see if my DNA extractions were finished (they weren’t, sigh). No PCR dance was done, but the night is young and I haven’t yet reached my maximum caffeination level.

And if you want to know what working in the lab is like… For those of you who have seen the sixth movie, you know the first potion classroom scene? Where Hermione’s hair comically gets frizzier and frizzier from the fumes and stress (until it’s the level of frizziness it’s supposed to be according to the books)? Yeah, that pretty much happens to me all the time.

…Real post next update, sorry.

This is post 18 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

Rational people acting irrationally

Us nonbelievers claim to be highly rational and logical…but, well, let’s admit it. Sometimes we do some pretty silly, irrational things. For example, the thing that made me make this post:This is my closet right now. Notice how the clothes hamper is on top of the giant pile of dirty laundry, rather than filled with it. Can I explain how the hell this happened? …No.

I know I have other things I’m irrational about, and they bug me even more because I can recognize that I’m being irrational. If you’ve spent enough time around in my real life, you know I’m stubborn. I mean, really stubborn, to the point where I’ll start irrationally defending my position and refuse to back down. It’s weird because I know I’m doing it, yet I can’t seem to stop myself.

I also have irrational body image issues, but I’m pretty sure that’s 95% of females out there. I was a chubby, overly tall, awkward little kid who got teased a lot about her weight – and that’s stuck with me, even though I’m not overweight at all now. Rational Jen can step back and see someone attractive in the mirror, but there are times when I just do not feel cute. This usually manifests when I need to go clothes shopping. I have a hell of a time finding stuff that fits because I’m not 5 feet tall and don’t have A cups, and it drives me crazy. I know I’m skinnier than the average American woman, and I really love my boobs, but American fashion is enough to drive me into irrational “you’re such a fatty” mode.*

What irrational things do you?

This is post 17 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

A Catholic Atheist

Hi everyone! My name is Vanessa and this is my first blog post that will be read by people other than my close friends. Hooray!

When asked to guest post, my first thought was to divulge all of Jen’s dirty secrets, as I had been her roommate a couple years ago (and incidentally will be again in a few days). Unfortunately, I couldn’t really think of a whole lot to share (though she does get quite a collection of dirty socks under her desk). So instead, I am going to share my atheist conversion story.

I grew up Catholic. My parents are Catholic and we went to church every weekend. I went to Sunday School (though it was never on Sundays) from 1st through 11th grade.I was baptized, confirmed, reconciled, and had my first Eucharist (eating the bread and drinking the wine, for you non-Catholics) all before I was 9 years old.When I was young, I was all into this. I mean, what else was I supposed to think? My parents told me this was the truth and I had no reason to believe that they were wrong.

It was probably around 7th or 8th grade, when I started taking serious science classes, that I began to question my beliefs. In high school, I became a critical thinker and started analyzing religion.Most of it didn’t make any sense to me. But I wanted it to be true, so I tried to hold on. That didn’t last long, however, because by 11th grade, I had given up on trying to make sense of religion. I remember watching the deleted scenes of Donnie Darko in which Donnie is talking to his therapist. She described an agnostic as “One who is skeptical about the existence of God but does not profess true atheism.” I decided that described me. That same year in English class, one of our spelling test words (yes, I actually had spelling/definition tests in 11th grade) was agnostic. The definition our teacher gave was “someone who doesn’t care whether God exists or not.” I was offended by that. I cared very deeply, because I was still trying to work out which side of the fence I was actually on. Incidentally, this was the same teacher that canceled our school’s annual Haunted House because it promoted demons and Satan and the like.

When I got to college, I was still pretty firm in my agnosticism. I made friends with a bunch of other agnostics and some atheists. Being around them and not being forced to go to church every day, I realized that the more I thought about it, the more ridiculous the idea of a god seemed to me. So by the beginning of my second year at college, I began defining myself as an atheist.

That is where I stand currently, and I am proud of it. However, I can’t bring myself to tell my parents or the rest of my family. I feel like it would greatly disappoint them. I feel like they would think they failed somehow in raising me. One day I hope to come out to them, but until then I’ll just continue with my secret life.

This is post 16 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

A Jewish Atheist

Hey everybody, I’m doing a guest post or two while Jen goes and does some sciencey thing. Perhaps PCR?

Unlike Jennifer, I was born into a family with very specific, if not particularly stringent, religious beliefs. I was born into an incredibly Jewish family complete with a grandmother who escaped the Nazis. While we didn’t spend a lot of time going to synagogue during the year, we celebrated each holiday with gusto and nominally kept kosher (while we didn’t go out of our way to find explicitly kosher food or have separate sets of dishes, we didn’t mix milk and meat together or eat specifically unkosher food (pork, shellfish, et. al.) as a rule.

Being the bright young mind I was, I tried to absorb everything I could…I started reading at 3, I owned a set of Childcraft encyclopedias. By the age of ten I knew more about biology and astronomy than people who graduated high school.

Religion, to me, was just another subject of knowledge…granted, one with a slightly more all-encompassing /something/ to it. By the time I was of Bar Mitzvah age, I knew more about MY religion than some of the older people in our synagogue. I was not only learning the requisite readings and prayers for my Bar Mitzvah, but I was studying, wholeheartedly, to be the Chazzan for the Musaf service on Saturdays.

However, throughout my time becoming more and more involved in Judaism, I began to hit more and more snags. I remember many situations in which many of the standard beliefs of Judaism began to conflict with what I knew about the world.

At Hebrew school one day, our teacher (the rabbi’s wife at the time) was teaching us about some of the old stories. She told us that, according to the Torah, the world was created in 7 days. I raised my hand.
“That’s symbolic, right?”
“No, Mark. That’s really how it happened.”
“Huh. Kay.”

On Rosh Ha Shana (The Jewish New Year) the leader of the kid’s service mentioned the world being 5759 years old. At the time, I thought he was joking. Sure, the jewish calendar was calculated from a different starting point…but that doesn’t mean that’s when Jews thought the universe had REALLY started…right? Uhh…Right guys?

As I got older, it was becoming infinitely obvious that Judaism did not have all of the answers…however, for the most part, I wouldn’t bother it and it wouldn’t bother me. I stopped going to synagogue, where I had been faithfully going every week with the excuse that I had a lot to do on Saturdays…school, music, and continued on with my life…still Jewish. Eventually I would be convinced to try a cheeseburger…and then bacon (actual, delicious pig bacon…) and then lobster and eventually I came to college. It wasn’t until I put a word and some actual thought behind it that I really discovered I was an atheist as opposed to simply a Jew who didn’t…er…DO anything.

Even through my atheism, there are still parts of my Judaism I have yet to, and probably never will, give up.

I will always have Passover, Hannukka, and a few other holidays even if I have to focus more on the humanistic aspects. The music I remember from my studies will always remain a part of me. I have no intention of giving up my Judaism…regardless of WHAT I believe.

This is post 15 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

Where the magic happens

Blogathon put up a challenge to post your workspace and blog about it to get sponsored, so here’s my beautiful (aka cluttered desk):
If you can’t read my white board calendar, it says August. Yes, of 2008. I don’t exactly keep it updated now that I got Sunbird. Also, wood paneling. I never said I lived in a trendy apartment. It’s honestly the one thing I don’t like about the place.

Let’s look a bit closer:
The paper pile! Topped off with a photo of a kangaroo rat that was the final slide to my power point presentation, and a comic I’m going to draw later. Phone, growing money pile, Sims 3 crack, Advil (going to need that later), handy dandy calculator, and my savior for the night: Pepsi.Bars of soap, so I can always stay clean! …Actually they’re just extras from hiking in Alaska. Drawing tablet will get some use later. I like my peg board – a combination of family photos, postcards, and liberal propaganda.

It’s like I Spy! …Except not as exciting. Sorry guys, did you expect me to just keep my porn stash lying around on my desk or something?

This is post 14 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

Scientists and Atheism

Jon: Of the New Atheists, most are scientists (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Myers). Is this trend meaningful? Does it simply signify that more scientists are coming out, or that scientists nowadays consider religion objectionable on scientific grounds? How can (should) non-scientists get in on this?

There are plenty of people who claim that this trend isn’t meaningful, that science and religion are compatible. However, I’m with Dawkins and PZ in thinking science and religion are not compatible (which I sort of touched on in Defeating Creationism). The trend we see isn’t just from atheist scientists coming out of the closet, but the fact that scientists are more likely to be atheists. An often quoted 1998 correspondence in Nature cited that about 72.2% of the members of the National Academy of Science did not believe in God, and 20.8% expressed doubt or agnosticism. That’s pretty significant when you consider that only 16.1% of Americans list themselves as “unaffiliated,” and only a fraction of that group explicitly call themselves atheists or agnostics.

Why do I think so many scientists are nonbelievers? Two things. One, the very basic necessity for understanding science is critical thinking. You need be able to observe things, test hypotheses, analyze your results, and draw conclusions in an unbiased manner. The scientific method inherently contradicts the “religious method”: take a dogma that someone else tells you, make observations, come to conclusions that conform to your preexisting dogma. Where would we be if the answer was just “God did it?” We still think that the world was flat, that Zeus is throwing thunderbolts, that life was created in an instance rather than over millions of years … whoops, people do still believe that last one.

And that leads to point number two. Science provides alternative, rational, tested explanations for things rather that supernatural explanations. As less and less is explained by religion and more and more is explained by science, people begin to wonder, “Well if that was wrong, what about everything else?” Science may not be able to explain everything, now or ever, but it certainly has a good track record. I know this point was particularly important for my atheism. I originally couldn’t wrap my head around how so much diversity of life could occur through natural means until I really sat down and tried to learn evolution. Once I did, I had my reasonable explanation. I didn’t need an unreasonable, supernatural one anymore.

This doesn’t mean non scientists are going to be left out of the loop – scientists are just getting a head start because this kind of thinking and knowledge is required of us. But as our society becomes more and more invested in science and technology, even non scientists will be expected to have a better grasp of science. And even if science isn’t for you, that doesn’t mean you can’t think rationally. I know liberal arts majors who are more logical than some of my fellow biologists. Heck, I almost majored in Fine Art, and look at me.

This is post 13 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.

Biggest Dick Moves in the History of Science

Sorry guys, this one is just a hilarious link, but that’s because my next post needs more time to actually be thought provoking…or at least make sense. So here you go: The 6 Biggest Dick Moves in the History of Science.

It features the Little Albert Experiment, so you know it has to be good.
I think I would fear that Santa mask too.

This is post 12 of 49 of Blogathon. Pledge a donation to the Secular Student Alliance here.