Play whack-a-mole with Lee Siegel

You have to read this essay to believe it: Militant atheists are wrong. It’s a collection of what I call indignant pieties — “how dare atheists challenge my precious faith!” — and it’s also distilled, concentrated, essence of stupid, painful to read and even more agonizing to have to waste time arguing against. But then, it’s by Lee Siegel. Lee Siegel. There’s a man who has a lot of courage, exposing himself on the internet again. Siegel is the amazing hypocrite who denounced the ethics of the blogosphere, and then cobbled up a sock puppet ( remember “Sprezzatura”?) who went trolling around the blogosphere singing the praises of Lee Siegel. Fortunately, I don’t have to suffer over his nonsense too much — Melissa takes a bullet for the rest of us, stuffs Siegel’s brain in the toilet bowl, and flushes.

I do want to touch on one bizarre claim he makes while swirling down the drain, though.

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Cephalopod Awareness Day Alert #1

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Here’s the first volley of cephalopod recognition posts I’ve received. Do send me more, and I’ll put them up later. Do me a favor and put “Cephalopod Awareness” in your subject line so I can sort them out more easily.

Tom DeRosa in Morris

As promised, I attended Tom DeRosa’s creationism talk this evening, and as expected, it wasn’t very informative but it was mildly entertaining. He’s a good, enthusiastic speaker — he’s just unbelievably wrong. We might have a recording later on; Skatje was taping it, but it was just with our little home digital video recorder, and we don’t have any idea what the quality will be like, yet. I’m letting her handle the A/V stuff on this one.

Anyway, it wasn’t quite what I expected. I was thinking it might be based on his recent book, Evolution’s Fatal Fruit, which blames every social ill of the last 150 years on wicked ol’ Darwinism. It was altogether different: he gave a talk on “God’s Amazing Animals,” which was far, far fluffier and harder to grapple with.

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Student Post: More on Gender Dominance–An Evolutionary Psychological Approach

I have some thoughts on the topic of male and female dominance brought up by Blue_Expo.

In fact, it was the topic of a paper for my Evolution of Human Aggression class…

Females are under some different sexual selection pressures than males stemming from the fact that they are the limited sex. They can only produce a finite number of offspring and are heavily invested in their progeny. Perhaps this is the basis for the female dominance social hierarchies observed in bonobos (Parish et al., 1994) and hyenas (Jenks, 1995). In both these systems, offspring inherit their mother’s rank and a mother is willing to engage in physical combat or establish social coalitions designed to elevate their offspring in rank. Because rank determined ability to procure resources, survive and reproduce, and females had high parental investment, there was sufficient evolutionary pressure for females to evolve the capacity to establish dominance even over males on their offsprings’ behalf.

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The Empire is well pleased

You may have heard about the 21-foot long half-scale model of the X-Wing that was built to actually fly, using solid fuel rockets. It was launched yesterday. The results were caught on video, and it is spectacular. There were lots of kids watching this thing, the announcer does the countdown, it lifts off on beautiful columns of flame and smoke, gets about 50 feet in the air … and did the announcer just say “Holy shit!” over the loudspeakers?

The kids are thrilled. We shall enlist them in the Empire’s legions.

I am not defending creationism, I’m defending academic freedom

Moi? Mentioned in the Waco Tribune? Defending a creationist? I knew that remark would come back to bite me. At least the author misspelled my name, so my shame won’t spread too far (except, unfortunately, that I seem to be more widely cited as “Meyers” than “Myers”). Anyway, it’s a letter by Robert Marks’ lawyer, complaining about Baylor’s decision to shut down Marks’ “evolutionary informatics” web page, and I’m mentioned as supporting him.

In Minnesota, where I live, a well-known biologist and faithful believer in evolution, Professor P.Z. Meyers, has followed what Baylor has done and called for it to reverse itself.

Meyers loathes ID and its proponents and blogs about it, frequently with exceptional humor. It is more than telling — shameful, perhaps? — that Meyers, a self-identified atheist, sees something amiss here that those in power at Baylor cannot or will not.

Yeah, I’m afraid it’s true (except the “faithful believer” part). As long as Robert Marks plainly labels his creationist web pages as unendorsed by Baylor, as long as his remarks are plainly associated with his personal views, not the university’s, they ought to be tolerated. And laughed at, but that goes without saying. That’s the price of academic freedom, that we have to allow the free expression of ideas that we don’t like.

I also sympathize a little bit with Baylor. They’ve got this persistent, obnoxious leech named Dembski who keeps trying to cling to the university, and I can understand how they might get a little overzealous in trying to excise him. It looks to me like they have gotten carried away, though.

Of course, I also experience a little inappropriate glee at the situation. What’s the lesson universities are going to learn from this? If you hire a creationist, you hire a lawsuit-happy twit who is going to embarrass you repeatedly and is going to get crazy crackpot lunacy associated with your academic mission. It doesn’t matter how good he is at his specific discipline, the creationism is going to poison everything.

For another example of embarrassing associations, remember Dembski’s ‘notpology’ to Baylor? Throw away any pretense of apology, Bill. His latest entry was a link to a hideous parody site by one Galapagos Finch (the site seems to consist only of very bad Photoshop jobs where faces are distorted into ugly unrecognizability) expressing resentment that poor Robert Marks was being martyred. That one was very quickly ripped down and tossed into the UD memory hole, but you can still find it preserved in its shameful putrescence at At the Bathroom Wall.

I’m sure hiring committees around the country will take notice of the Dembski style of collegiality.

Evo-devo of mammalian molars

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

I’ve written a long introduction to the work I’m about to describe, but here’s the short summary: the parts of organisms are interlinked by what has historically been called laws of correlation, which are basically sets of rules that define the relationship between different characters. An individual attribute is not independent of all others: vary one feature, and as Darwin said, “other modifications, often of the most unexpected nature, will ensue”.

Now here’s a beautiful example: the regulation of the growth of mammalian molars. Teeth have long been a useful tool in systematics—especially in mammals, they are diverse, they have important functional roles, and they preserve well. They also show distinct morphological patterns, with incisors, canines, premolars, and molars arranged along the jaw, and species-specific variations within each of those tooth types. Here, for example, is the lower jaw of a fox. Look at the different kinds of teeth, and in particular, look at the differences within just the molars.

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This example — the lower teeth of a grey fox — shows the three-molar dental phenotype typical of placentals.

Note that in this animal, there are three molars (the usual number for most mammals, although there are exceptions), and that the frontmost molar, M1, is the largest, M2 is the second largest, and M3, the backmost molar, is the smallest. This won’t always be the case! Some mammals have a larger M3, and others may have three molars of roughly equal size. What rules regulate the relative size of the various molars, and are there any consistent rules that operate across different species?

To answer those questions, we need to look at how the molars develop, which is exactly what Kavanagh et al. have done.

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