Grimpoteuthis is a cephalopod so cute, now it’s being compared to Pikachu. That’s harsh. Being plump and adorable is a good way to get kicked out of the savage monster club.
I know. I’ve been there.
Way back in the early 19th century, Geoffroy St. Hilaire argued for a radical idea, that vertebrates and most invertebrates were inverted copies of each other. Vertebrates have a dorsal nerve cord and ventral heart, while an insect has a ventral nerve cord and dorsal heart. Could it be that there was a common plan, and that one difference is simply that one is upside down relative to the other? It was an interesting idea, but it didn’t hold up at the time; critics could just enumerate the multitude of differences observable between arthropods and vertebrates and drown out an apparent similarity in a flood of documented differences. Picking out a few superficial similarities and proposing that something just looks like it ought to be so is not a persuasive argument in science.
Something has changed in the almost 200 years since Geoffroy made his suggestion, though: there has been a new flood of molecular data that shows that Geoffroy was right. We’re finding that all animals seem to use the same early molecular signals to define the orientation of the body axis, and that the dorsal-ventral axis is defined by a molecule in the Bmp (Bone Morphogenetic Protein) family. In vertebrates, Bmp is high in concentration along the ventral side of the embryo, opposite the developing nervous system. In arthropods, Bmp (the homolog in insects is called decapentaplegic, or dpp) is high on the dorsal side, which is still opposite the nervous system. At this point, the question of whether the dorsal-ventral axis of the vertebrate and invertebrate body plans have a common origin and whether one is inverted relative to the other has been settled, and the answer is yes.
Tomorrow is 5 May, and I mentioned in my
review of A Brief History of Disbelief that this excellent documentary on atheism/agnosticism was supposed to be aired on PBS stations all across the country around this time. It’s been hard to track down, though; I’ve looked in my local TV listings, and there’s no mention. Readers have contacted their stations directly, and some have reported back that they will be seeing it, while others have found that their stations are not carrying it. It’s very confusing.
Well, a reader found a grid listing all of the airdates and stations that will be showing A Brief History of Disbelief. If you’re in San Diego or Philadelphia, it’s well covered; otherwise, it’s scattered very sparsely on the map. It is not being shown in Minnesota.
Larry Moran has already mentioned this recent article in Cell on this strange new fad of science blogging. He was interviewed along with many others of us, including me. I don’t know about this bit:
The rock star of scientist bloggers is Paul Myers, an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, who writes Pharyngula. With about 20,000 visitors per day, Pharyngula is currently the most popular science blog according to Technorati. Myers started writing about 4 years ago. “It was a casual decision. One summer I had some free time and started typing away. And people started coming to the site,” he recalls. “I thought that I would stop in a month or so but I didn’t. I find it useful for communicating with other scientists and the community.” Myers not only writes about his brand of science, developmental biology, but often discusses politics and religion. “The blog would not be as popular if it was only about science,” he says. “I am popularizing science using political issues as a hook.”
This just isn’t good enough. I need to know which rock star. The Roger Waters of the blogosphere would be cool. David Bowie would be nifty, too, although I’m not thin enough. The Keith Richards of science blogging would be troubling … but if I’m the Ozzie, I’m hanging it up.
If they’re going to be that uninformed about the perilous sea beasts they encounter, they deserve to spend eternity in Davy Jones’ Locker, mastering monstrous taxonomy.
I don’t want to talk about it — I despise the whole field — but everyone is emailing me about it, and I was even talking to my mother on the phone tonight and she asked me about it (I said I wouldn’t watch those weasels unless they were in a crotch-kicking contest). I’ll let this thread open up for a free-for-all discussion of the cacophony.
All I’ve heard so far is that a) they avoided talking about Bush, preferring to measure themselves against Reagan (Reagan was almost as great an incompetent as the current resident, so they’re obviously aiming low), and b) when they were asked about evolution, a goodly subset of them were so stupid that they said they didn’t believe it. Too bad this debate wasn’t merged with that quiz show, so some stern harridan could have announced, “You are the weakest link!” and pulled a lever that would have catapulted them into a shark tank or something entertaining.
So who are the Republican anti-science goons? Huckabee, Brownback, and … ?
Watch the response at Crooks and Liars. The foolish three are Huckabee, Brownback, and Tancredo.
The gang at the NCSE have put together Padian’s testimony at the Dover trial with the slides he used. You may have already read the transcript, but with the figures added it acquires a whole new dimension — it’s basically a wonderfully done primer in the basics of macroevolutionary biology. Next time some creationist tries to simper at you that he accepts microevolution, but that there’s no evidence for macroevolution and he refuses to believe it, point him at this page. It’s aimed not at scientists, but at the judges and lawyers at a trial, so it’s eminently comprehensible to any intelligent layman … and it crushes the bogus rejection of macroevolution that they are so fond of using.
And who can blame them? Technorati, if you’re unfamiliar with it, is one of those services that watches activity on the web, and then puts up metrics and ranks and scores, and tries to distill the flux into something simpler and more comprehensible, which often reduces to telling you how many people are trying to find pictures of a naked Paris Hilton. When the mob votes, it always seems to lead to the lowest common denominator. The We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party is trying to subvert all that with a campaign to push the WAAGNFNP into the upper ranks of Technorati’s odd WTF category. A “WTF” is a user-written blurb that tries to identify a hot topic and explain something about it—any member of Technorati can write a blurb, and also vote for it, and the WTF page is another ranked list of these popular blurbs. Get in there and rock the system!
There are no Pharyngula blurbs, sad to say, and even sadder, I used to be on their Top 100 Favorited Blogs, and I’ve slipped off the list lately. Don’t forget, new people, you can click here to increase my Technorati favorited rank.
I tried to help out the “Darwin is Dead” carnival by promoting it, but to no avail—one of the most patently absurd anti-evolution efforts has apparently met its demise. I’m not sure how anyone could tell, though—it was pretty much brain-dead on arrival.
