Even their engineers don’t get it

ID advocates are prone to brag about their self-professed expertise, which all too often relies on some respectable knowledge of engineering or other fields irrelevant to biology. DaveScot, the raving mad anti-scientist at Uncommon Descent, is a perfect example…but even in their own domains of knowledge they too often prove to be incompetent. Case in point: their blog has somehow become delisted from Google, and now DaveScot is flailing about, trying to find someone to blame. His answer? Wesley Elsberry did it. It’s all because other sites mirror their content, which he thinks Google finds offensive.

[Read more…]

Palaeos reborn!

First I reported that Palaeos was lost, and then that it might be found, but now it looks like we can safely say it is being reborn. The old version of Palaeos has been at least partially restored, but the really important news is that a Palaeos wiki has been set up and people are working on reassembling old content and creating new information in a much more flexible format. If you’ve got some phylogenetic or palaeontological expertise, you might want to consider joining the Palaeos team and helping out with this big project.

Be proud…you’re a biology teacher!

This is what I like to see: high school science teachers blogging. Particularly when, in this new blog, Beautiful Biology, the teacher stands up for good science.

That’s exactly how it should work. Biology teachers should teach evolution unapologetically, and when clueless parents protest, they should be politely told that they are wrong. Repeat that every day in every school district, and creationism will slink back into the shadows.

Free the Tripoli Six!

These six medical professionals:

Ashraf al-Hajuj
Valya Chervenyashka
Snezhana Dimitrova
Nasya Nenova
Valentina Siropulo
Kristiyana Valtcheva

were working at the al-Fateh Children’s Hospital in Banghazi, Libya in the late 1990s. A year later, about 400 children were diagnosed with HIV; the doctors and nurses were accused of conspiring with Israel and the USA to intentionally infect children with the disease, and were thrown into jail.

Five years later — five years spent in a Libyan jail, where they were tortured with electric shocks and beatings, and two of the nurses were raped! — defenders were able to show that the children were largely victims of HIV exposure prior to the arrival of the accused, and that the real culprit was a policy of poorly trained staff, unsterilized equipment, and generally shoddy hygiene. It didn’t matter; they were convicted in a sham trial, and sentenced to death by firing squad.

They appealed (wouldn’t you?) and are now being retried. Prospects look bleak. Libyans celebrated joyfully when the initial verdict was cast down, and Mouammar Gaddafi…well, let’s just say that having a megalomaniacal dictator running the country in which the trial takes place does not encourage much hope for a merciful intervention. The Libyans are now demanding $5.5 billion in compensation if they are to release the prisoners. This is nothing but a showy and high-priced extortion plot.

Declan Butler has put out a call for more awareness and more vocal protest of the plight of the Tripoli Six, and Nature has published a strongly worded editorial.

…scientists should lend their full support to the call by Lawyers without Borders — a volunteer organization that last year helped win the freedom of Amina Lawal, who had been sentenced to death in Nigeria for having a child outside marriage — that Libya’s courts should order a fully independent, international scientific assessment of how the children were contaminated.

I agree. The prisoners should be immediately released, and if Gaddafi is actually interested in correcting the tragic problems that led to the infection of 426 children with HIV and hepatitis, he’d be better off eschewing this disgraceful scapegoating and instead encouraging a deeper and more honest investigation into the tragedy—something that might help correct problems in Libyan hospitals and avert future adversity.

3.3 million years old, 3 years old

Say hello to Selam, or DIK-1-1, a new and very well preserved member of the family discovered in Dikika, Ethiopia. She belongs to the species Australopithicus afarensis and is being called Lucy’s little sister.

i-e45e827a198c79097f0d6b1fbf5950ec-selam.jpg

She was only a toddler when she died about 3.3 million years ago, and from the teeth the authors estimate that she was about 3 years old. Most of the skeleton is intact, but doesn’t seem to have yet been fully extracted from the matrix.

Some of the surprises: the hyoid bone is chimpanzee-like, and implies chimp-like vocalization abilities. She had a long way to go before she could have a conversation. The fingers are long and curved, and the scapula is more gorilla-like than ours; there is a suggestion of better arboreal ability than we have.

Alemseged Z, Spoor F, Kimbel WH, Bobe R, Geraads D, Reed D, Wynn JG (2006) A juvenile early hominin skeleton from Dikika, Ethiopia. Nature 443:296-301.

It sure ain’t the Lorax or the Grinch

Whoa…faux-Seussian poetry, fairly nice animation, all in the service of a dumb, dead idea: The Watchmaker. It’s a rather elaborate setup for Paley’s watchmaker argument that starts with an imaginary animated analogy of glass and metal condensing to spontaneously form a watch, and then compares the absurdity of that argument with cells, which contain “assembly lines, robots, electrical cable”, and argues that it’s silly to claim that cells could just happen from dirt and warm water…as if anyone has argued such a thing.

Isn’t it enough to simply point out that watches need watchmakers because they don’t reproduce? Rabbits don’t need rabbitmakers (other than other rabbits), so the analogy fails just by contradiction with common experience.

One enlightening and informative aspect of the exercise is that it does go on about the debunked watchmaker argument, and also associates itself with Intelligent Design—the Discovery Institute is recommended on the page—but it is screamingly evangelical and religious.

Kids 4 Truth International is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that exists to inspire and equip God’s people to reach boys and girls worldwide with the memorable, creative, leading-edge teaching of God-focused truth.

Great science there, isn’t it? It’s more propaganda for creationism aimed directly at children. If there were a god and heaven, I would hope that lying to impressionable kids would be one of his most smite-worthy sins.

If it’s Tuesday, it must be NY

Wheee, I’m going to zip into New York again next week. I’m flying in on Monday to talk at the Inspiration Festival on Tuesday. I’m on the Seed slate with:

Chris Mooney – Washington Correspondent, Seed Magazine
Lisa Randall – Professor of Physics, Harvard University
Natalie Jeremijenko – Design Engineer / Technoartist, Yale University
PZ Myers – Associate Professor of Biology, University of Minnesota
Randy Olson – Lecturer
Jonah Lehrer – Editor-at-Large, Seed magazine
Pardis Sabeti – Researcher, Broad Institute / Lead Singer, Thousand Days

And here’s my job, in one very short talk:

From Galileo to da Vinci, and, from Einstein to Lichtenstein, such paradoxical contemporaries of their respective ages defy opposition in principal by the very existence of their creative nature. When modern Science and Culture collide, what can we learn about ourselves and the way we see the world? A look at 10 trends set to reveal the future of the future.

I’ll have to leave before the session is over to catch my flight home, but it looks like a good line-up and I wish I could hear it all. I’ll be talking about developmental biology and what it says about us, and I don’t think any of the others will be competing with me on that subject, at least.

Ugh

You may have noticed that the site has been down for a while. We were hit with a combination of problems.

First, we have been plagued by this idiot script-kiddie, the registrant for usuc.us:

(Information erased: a call to the person to which the domain is registered reveals he has no idea what is going on. Does anybody know how to inform the domain name registry that it is registered under a false name and get it deleted?)

He has been running a bot that injects some javascript into a search string that redirects the scienceblogs main page to google, since the main page rather foolishly embeds the top search strings into the html. We’ve known about this for a few days.

Second, the sciencebloggers’ complaints about this have been effectively ignored by the management here (and I think many of us are getting more pissed about this neglect of an obvious problem than anything else.) Several of us have been running a rather kludgy and ugly workaround, inserting code on our pages that secretly runs searches, too, to displace Mr Sullivan’s hack from the list of top searches. This has caused performance problems—we’ve basically been trying to out-thrash the bot to keep it from taking over the main page. A more elegant way to fix this would have been to patch up the search display on the main page, but we don’t have access to that.

Third, in the midst of all the overwork to which we were subjecting MT and the server, MT ate a large chunk of the Pharyngula template code. Poof, my page disappeared. At least that absence reduced the server load so everyone else’s pages were running a little better.

Anyway, the bottom line is that right now the scienceblogs main page will occasionally whisk you off to google, the Pharyngula index page is a corrupt and broken shambles, and server performance seems to be up and down.