Sad news: Stanley Miller died on Sunday. If you don’t know who he was, go read this interview.
(via Evolucionarios)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Sad news: Stanley Miller died on Sunday. If you don’t know who he was, go read this interview.
(via Evolucionarios)
Oh, dear. John West of the Disco Institute is in a furious snit because, after refusing to grant tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez, Iowa State University did promote Hector Avalos, of the Religious Studies department, to full professor. You can just tell that West is spitting mad that Iowa would dare to keep Avalos around, and thinks it a grave injustice that one scholar would be accepted, while their pet astronomer gets the axe. So now they’re going to do a hatchet job on Avalos.
Here are three animals. If you had to classify them on the basis of this superficial glimpse, which two would you guess were most closely related to each other, and which one would be most distant from the others?
On the left is a urochordate, an ascidian, a sessile, filter-feeding blob that is anchored to rocks or pilings and sucks in sea water to extract microorganismal meals. In the middle is a cephalochordate, Amphioxus, also a filter feeder, but capable of free swimming. On the right are some fish larvae. All are members of the chordata, the deuterostomes with notochords. If you’d asked me some years ago, I would have said it’s obvious: vertebrates must be more closely related to the cephalochordates—they have such similar post-cranial anatomies—while the urochordates are the weirdos, the most distant cousins of the group. Recent developments in molecular phylogenies, though, strongly suggest that appearances are deceiving and we vertebrates are more closely related to the urochordates than to the cephalochordates, implying that some interesting evolutionary phenomena must have been going on in the urochordates. We’d expect to see some conservation of developmental mechanisms because of their common ancestry, but the radical reorganization of their morphology suggests that there ought also be some significant divergence at a deep level. That makes the urochordates a particularly interesting group to examine.
I wish I could have been there—Kristine Harley was in the Galapagos and got to break the news to Richard Dawkins that Jerry Falwell had died. It’s hilarious.
It’s also true that Kristine is not a very nice girl. She’s probably a witch.
As if you need any more motivation to contribute to the Creation Museum carnival, it turns out that these kinds of criticisms rankle Ken Ham. DefCon blog issued a press release accusing them of peddling lies, and Ham fired back with an indignant “Well! I never!” response. The funniest bit is where he tries to defend creationism by claiming that many famous scientists were creationists—and some of them were even contemporaries of Darwin. Then he lists a whole gang of famous scientists who mostly preceded Darwin, and were in disciplines in which they never had to consider biological evolution. It’s the usual deception these guys pull.
So contribute to the Creation Museum carnival! Make Ken Ham twitch and cry!
Hey, gang…it seems that highlighting that pointless petition to Free Kent Hovind has stirred up some enmity. The organizer of the petition has noticed us. Apparently, Satan’s clever scheme to destroy goodness in the world involves getting a bunch of internet nerds to wiggle their fingers and type their names into a text box.
Blaspheming Heathens challenge us to a duel!
The Devil himself is inspiring non-believers to destroy our efforts.
I apologize for the vandalism that occured on the petition this morning. It appears our petition and prayers have driven another brigade of Satan’s army into quite a fury:
Then my post is quoted (it wasn’t exactly “furious,” though, since I said justice shouldn’t be determined with a popularity contest). I will agree with this poor fellow—don’t deface the foolish petition. There’s no point, anyway, since the organizer will just delete your funny signatures.
That’s OUR petition they’re trying to destroy. I just cannot understand how those heathens can live with themselves.
Let’s give ’em our best prayer-circle inclusion and let them know that Dr. Hovind has the support he needs in the midst of this devil’s playground on the internet.
I didn’t really think of it as a duel, but OK, en garde. Unleash Satan’s Brigade, and give ’em hell! The “Jail Kent Hovind” petition has 235 signatures, the “Free Kent Hovind” petition has 45. Let’s steamroller ’em. No cheating, either—legitimate, unique signatures only, please.
Let’s also be nice and encourage them to pray real hard.
That simple and charming organization, The Friends of Charles Darwin, has just signed their thousandth member. Good for them, but still, that’s pathetic — I hope it takes less than a decade to sign up another thousand. Go ahead and join if you haven’t already, it’s painless, I promise.
In California, the state’s spending on prisons is about to exceed their spending on universities. They’re about to spend $7.4 billion on new facilities, with an operating budget over $10 billion.
I wonder how much of that budget is consumed in ridiculous efforts to punish non-violent drug users, or in the zealous application of three strikes laws?
So there I am, reading an amusing couple of local comics mocking the conservative media, and my name comes up. And my picture.
I must protest, it’s totally inaccurate. I would never get such a soul-satisfying introduction, and if I were on TV, I’d be sure to wear my best eyepatch, the one with the gold filigree.
John McKay of archy has noted that Ken Ham’s fabulously low-rent sideshow attraction of pseudoscience (AKA his Creation “Science” “Museum”) opens next week, and has asked if there is going to be any coordinated response in the blogosphere — some kind of mini-carnival or something. I say, why not? Let’s!
It’s short notice, but I’ll organize it, and you all just have to contribute to it. The museum’s opening day is 28 May, so we should aim to have a one-stop page full of links to commentary the day before, on 27 May. If you’ve written something recently, or would like to put something together this week, on anything to do with Ham’s folly — everything from outright mockery to serious critical dissections of claims from Answers in Genesis is fair game — send it to me by Saturday and I’ll put up a media-ready digest of reactions on Sunday. We should aim on making it easy for people searching for the term “creation museum” to find the criticism.
