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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AbSciCon registration is open

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Registration for the 2017 Astrobiology Science Conference is now open. The meeting will be in Mesa, Arizona April 24–28. You can save 50 bucks by registering before March 28th: $395 for students and $550 for everyone else. That’s a bit pricier than in the past, but there are travel grants available for students (the deadline for those has passed, though).

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Proxima b is a challenge to materialism, according to David Klinghoffer

David Klinghoffer, a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, thinks the discovery of a relatively close, relatively Earth-like planet presents a challenge not only to evolutionary theory (Klinghoffer thinks every new discovery presents a challenge to evolutionary theory), but to any materialist worldview (“Put Up or Shut Up for Evolution? Nearest ‘Habitable’ Planet Found Orbiting Proxima Centauri“):

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In which I agree with Uncommon Descent

BizarroWorld

We’re both fans of Betul Kacar‘s research (see “AbSciCon day 3: the tape of life“). I know why I like it, but I can’t quite figure out why they do. Dr. Kacar’s research combines molecular paleontology with experimental evolution, inserting ancient versions of genes into modern bacteria and observing how they evolve in response. I’ve puzzled over Uncommon Descent’s fondness for Dr. Kacar’s research before (“Evolution is evidence against evolution (?)“), and I’m afraid their new post on the topic (“Roll dice twice, see what turns up“) doesn’t really clear things up.

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