Congratulations to skippy the bush kangaroo on reaching his 5th blogiversary!
In his honor, I’ll have to put on my Skippy the Bush Kangaroo t-shirt when I get home.
Uh-oh. The creationists are going to love Darwin’s skull-topped walking stick — it’s wicked.
I think I love it, too. Where can I get an imitation?
We now have a draft of the sea anemone genome, and it is revealing tantalizing details of metazoan evolution. The subject is the starlet anemone, Nematostella vectensis, a beautiful little animal that is also an up-and-coming star of developmental biology research.
A most important reason for this work is that the anemone Nematostella is a distant relative of many of the animals that have already been sequenced, and so provides an essential perspective on the evolutionary changes that we observe in those other organisms. Comparison of its genome with that of other metazoans is helping us decipher the likely genetic organization of the last common ancestor of all animals.
Honestly, it’s unusual for biologists to be the target of hate — except when they work on cute furry animals — so the news that religious kooks are slipping threatening notes into evolutionary biology labs isn’t too specifically worrying.
University of Colorado police are investigating a series of threatening messages and documents e-mailed to and slipped under the door of evolutionary biology labs on the Boulder campus.
The messages included the name of a religious-themed group and addressed the debate between evolution and creationism, CU police Cmdr. Brad Wiesley said. Wiesley would not identify the group named because police are still investigating.
“There were no overt threats to anybody specifically by name,” Wiesley said. “It basically said anybody who doesn’t believe in our religious belief is wrong and should be taken care of.”
The first threat was e-mailed to the labs – part of CU’s ecology and evolutionary biology department housed in the Ramaley Biology building – on Friday. Wiesley said Monday that morning staff members found envelopes with the threatening documents slipped under the lab doors.
There’s no cause for panic, for sure, and it’s just something to keep an eye on. It’s probably just a deranged individual, but if it’s the start of a more actively hostile trend, that’s something else.
The terrible thing about going on vacation is that you fall behind on everything, including your reading, and when you get back you have to struggle to catch up. When I got back on Sunday I found three books waiting in my mailbox, and of course I’d missed a whole week of the journals, so I’ve been reading, reading, reading every day. I’ve decided I can never go on vacation again.
No, not really! But I do have a backlog to clear, and just this morning I had a chance to sit down and read through that wonderful new paper on the sea anemone genome. I’m going to get that assimilated and I should hope I can whip out a summary by early this afternoon. And then there are these other great stories piled up in my office, on my coffee table, on the ottoman, on the arms of my easy chair … ask my wife, she’ll tell you I’m mired in a mess of papers.
Anyway, it takes a while to get back into the rhythm. Don’t worry, though, good stuff is coming.
I got a request from Alonzo Fyfe for any written material to counter Intelligent Design creationism that is geared for the younger set, 12-14 years old. I figure there are enough people reading this that some might have suggestions.
Along the same lines, I’ve long thought that a collection of little pamphlets written for people with short attention spans and no background would be useful tools for both promoting biology and atheism — anyone heard of such things? Or are we all long-winded, pretentious babblers?
I’ve also always wondered if those creationists who deny the power of chance think that victory or defeat in the church bingo games are predestined.
Now their insane denial of the legitimacy of modern psychiatry leads to an insane woman butchering her family. It’s appalling: the parents were scientologists who refused to give anti-psychotic drugs to their daughter, and the end result is that they and another daughter are slaughtered.
This is where delusional, irrational, wishful thinking leads you — to a rejection of reality that has the potential to crash in on you in lethal ways.
David Ng is asking if biologists have physics envy, which is both a common and a peculiar question (short answer: no, physicists should have biology envy). Then he follows up with a few brief questions to determine if scientists are actually pining away, wishing they’d gone into some different field … and here are my answers.
1. What’s your current scientific specialty?
Developmental biology.
2. Were you originally pursuing a different academic course? If so, what was it?
I started my undergraduate career with a general interest in marine biology, but quickly focused on neurobiology and development as more interesting problems (but not more interesting environments or organisms!) I went into graduate school thinking neuroscience was the bee’s knees, but again shifted focus to more development — starting from a developmental perspective was the practical way to approach the complexity of the nervous system. Now I also think it is the practical way to approach the complexity of metazoan evolution. Actually, I’m with D’Arcy Thompson that “everything is the way it is because it got that way” and that development is the lens we should use to examine everything. The process is all.
3. Do you happen to wish you were involved in another scientific field? If so, what one?
Yes, all of them.
Well, all of the biological disciplines, anyway. The problem is that I tend to think of mathematics, physics, and chemistry as subsets of biology, so they all tend to get sucked into my domain of desired knowledge.
On the other hand, maybe my answer should be “no.” My interests are my interests, and I’m currently free to pursue them exactly as I will, so I can’t quite imagine changing who I am. If I were to switch to another scientific field it would only be because I saw it as a useful tool to better understand the process of development.
Go ahead, everyone, answer the questions yourselves. If you aren’t a scientist, you can still always answer questions 2 and 3 (hint: the correct answer to #3 will always be some variant of evo-devo. Different answers will be marked down accordingly.)
He doesn’t ask the obvious question — “do you believe in evolution?” — even once! I guess when you interview the serious candidates, you don’t need to ask the stupid baby questions.
It’s not a bad interview; Edwards says all the pro-science and pro-education stuff, favoring increased investment in public education, respect for the Office of Science and Technology Policy, strict standards to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, increased funding for NIH, etc., but I confess to being suspicious and not at all won over. That’s what you’d expect a candidate to say in an interview with a science blogger. I like science! I like education! We’ll do more of it if I’m president! Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of details on how he’s going to do it, and where he does sketch out specific ideas, like his free tuition for one year to all college students, he doesn’t spell out how he’s going to pay for it, or what part of government gets cut to compensate.
I note he also doesn’t commit on certain contentious issues. He deplores the Bush treatment of stem cell research, but doesn’t come right out and say he’ll endorse the use of human embryos in research.
He also supports one major boondoggle: ethanol. It’s a farm subsidy, not an answer to our energy problems.
