The latest NOM ad

The National Organization for Marriage, that ridiculous group that came up with the ad that was so ripe for mockery, has a new one. It features little kids acting all confused that someone could have two daddies, or that god might have created Anna and Eve. And of course, it has a new slogan that will have you laughing: “Our kids will be taught a new way of thinking”. Oh noes…we can’t have our children learning anything new!

These guys are so inept, it’s got me wondering whose side they’re really on.

Oh, and for any kids who are actually confused, here’s how to tell who your parents are. They’re the people who love you and take care of you and worry about you all the time. That’s all that is important. Their anatomy? Not so important.

The things you learn from Whirled Nut Daily

I never sign up for these things, but apparently many people think it’s hilarious to give crazy right wing sites my email address, so part of my daily flood of email is crap from places like WorldNetDaily. Most of it just gets a filter entry and I never see it again, but I have a soft spot for WND — it’s barking mad, full of the craziest deluded wackos with this strange sense that, since the Bush years, they represent the mainstream. I learn the wildest stuff from their mail.

Did you know that the Girl Scouts are out to turn your daughters into lesbians? It must be true, since WND says it is.

But here’s a perfect example of the strangely twisted minds behind WND. In one section, the author is complaining about one of the books the Girl Scouts use, called Girltopia.

In the next age group, for teens in the ninth and tenth grades, girls are taught about wage disparities between the sexes, and a lack of assets and senior management positions held by women.

“Girltopia” poses the questions, “When women don’t earn enough, what happens to their children?” and “How could everyone help create a Girltopia?”

Asked what the purpose of including a message of inequality served in the Girl Scout curriculum, Tompkins explained:

It’s to show girls what’s going on in the country and have them be part of the dialogue. A lot of girls just aren’t aware of what’s going on. I think that specific topic might be new this year, but in the broader scheme of things, it’s not that new. I’m sure it’s something that came up in the 1920s as well. Girls Scouting has been around since before women had the right to vote, so I’m sure these discussions were always part of this.

The text praises Renaissance author Sir Thomas More for his book “Utopia,” Mary Cavendish for her book “A New World: The Blazing World” about a utopian kingdom and 24-year Executive Director of Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood and feminist author Sheri S. Tepper for her novel, “The Gate to Women’s Country.”

“Girltopia” encourages girls to “let songs inspire you,” and as some examples, it provides lyrics to songs such as “Independent Women, part 1” by Destiny’s Child; “Hammer and a Nail” by the Indigo Girls – an “out” lesbian rock band; and “Imagine” by John Lennon. The curriculum also asks girls to create an avatar “to represent the ideal you in Girltopia” and features “Wild Geese,” a short poem by lesbian poet Mary Oliver.

I read that and was thinking that, hey, I’d like to read that — and those sound like strong, positive messages to send out to girls. Be aware of the real problems you face, but stand up for what is right. Good stuff.

 

And then I read WND’s assessment of the book…and it’s exactly what makes these rascals such a bizarro mirror of the real world.

“This book was so depressing that I don’t know what I would have done as a teen reading it,” Garibay said. “The sense of hopelessness abounds in ‘Girltopia.’ The positivity, the enthusiasm and the vigor of youth is completely destroyed by data found to further the Girl Scout USA’s feminist agenda. It plants seeds of despair and hopelessness in today’s girls.”

I don’t quite see it. All I learn from WND is that conservatives are obsessed with lesbians, and somehow equate them with despair.

I get email — from Peter Heck

Yesterday, I tore into a reeking pile of creationist bogosity by Peter Heck. This morning, he sends me email.

Dr. Myers,

Someone sent me a nasty email that included a link to your blog. I found it a pretty thorough shallacking! Not that I’m opposed to that. If I put arguments out in front of people, I have no problem when they’re hacked up by the experts. I actually sent the column to three biologists I know and trust before it was published. They don’t agree with my views on some of these issues, but I knew they would challenge my science. They all recommended I take out the first paragraph or make it less condescending. But then folks like you might not have read it! But what each of them said in response to the article was that my conclusion was not scientifically flawed: that Britt’s suggestion that swine flu proved the Darwinian model of macro-evolution was incorrect. I’d be interested to know if you disagree. Thanks for your time and for taking an interest in my article,

Peter

This is a rather disingenuous reply; he wasn’t just shellacked, he was exposed as a dishonest fraud who knew nothing at all about the subject he was critiquing. I didn’t just criticize a few niggling errors in his article, I ripped it apart from stem to stern and pointed out that he was ignorant and unscholarly…and now he comes back and offers the feeble excuse that he had three biologists look it over? Who were these biologists, and why didn’t they point out that the article was nothing but a crudely hacked together raft of creationist fallacies?

Now he also tries to salvage something by claiming that he was still correctly rebutting “Britt’s suggestion that swine flu proved the Darwinian model of macro-evolution was incorrect”. Go ahead, read Britt’s article (note also that Heck’s article did not include a link to the source); you won’t find him claiming proof of anything, nor will you find him discussing macro- vs. microevolution. He straightforwardly and entirely correctly describes viral evolution as a very real phenomenon with real-world consequences.

Here’s part of Heck’s flogging of a straw man.

In a recent article for Live Science magazine that attempts to prove Darwin by using the swine flu of all things, author Robert Roy Britt sneers, “Anyone who thinks evolution is for the birds should not be afraid of swine flu…if there’s no such thing as evolution, then there’s no such thing as a new strain of swine flu infecting people.” His supposedly witty remarks were meant to mock creationists, castigating their “junk science.”

But the intellectual dishonesty inherent in Britt’s statement is almost as obvious as his failed attempt at humor. Britt is using a common ploy of Darwinists: confuse people into believing that their utterly unsubstantiated speculation of species-to-species macro-evolution is synonymous with the universally accepted scientific fact of adaptation and development within a species (sometimes called micro-evolution).

Britt described an actual fact: viruses evolve. This isn’t just short-term physiological adaptation, but the acquisition of new properties by recombination and mutation that produces novel strains, strains which then succeed or fail (from the virus’s perspective) by how well they thrive and spread in their hosts. He consulted two competent experts, who he named in the article, and linked to other articles that summarized some of the general points he was making.

The only intellectual dishonesty was Heck’s, in claiming that an article about viral evolution was claiming proof of the evolution of frogs, lizards, or whales.

But if he wants to get into the argument about, for instance, whale evolution, I’d be happy to carve him to bits. The whole creationist version of the micro/macro evolution distinction is complete nonsense. Scientists do make the distinction, usually reserving macroevolution for the larger scale accumulation of change over time that produces new species or lineages, but they don’t argue that one is unsupported speculation.

What you have to understand is that the concept of macroevolution came first, although it wasn’t called that; it was just called evolution or transformation theory, among other things (“evolution” was a term that actually became popular relatively late). Darwin himself examined biology largely on a grand scale, looking at biogeography and populations and fossils, and making an argument on the basis of what we would now call macroevolutionary phenomena for changes in form of species over geological time. He wasn’t alone, either; many other authors preceded him in seeing that the evidence supported a history of evolutionary change. What made Darwin particularly persuasive, though, is that he coupled the evidence of changing species to a hypothetical mechanism, natural selection. He didn’t have the tools or the details to work out how heritable change was accomplished, however; that took the discovery of genetics and molecular biology to allow us to see how this ‘microevolution’ actually worked.

When creationists argue that they believe in microevolution, but that macroevolution is dubious, they’ve got it backwards. Large scale historical change was confirmed and thoroughly documented in the 19th century! Darwin was a bridge, who explained how small scale, natural processes could produce the known variation between species, and the triumph of 20th century biology was to confirm and expand upon our understanding of how those changes occurred. Neither macro nor micro evolution are speculative. Neither one is lacking in evidence.

Heck was merely flaunting the tedious ignorance of creationists, which is no longer ever surprising. He was also making a dishonest pretense to knowledge, which is also not surprising, and is one reason to never, ever trust anyone who claims to be a creationist — it’s a synonym for lying, stupid fraud. I don’t even trust his letter. Does anyone really believe that he will regard the series of arguments he made in his article as “hacked up”? I would bet that he’ll be thumping the same old lies again next time he preaches in front of his fellow phonies.

I’d also still like to know who his biology consultants were. I’m sure they’ll remain anonymous and mysterious, lest we discover that they are yet another batch of creationists with a collection of pretend knowledge and made-up “facts”.

I’m going to CONvergence!

On July 2-5, right nearby in Minneapolis, we’re having a SF con, CONvergence. One of the great things all the cool cons are doing nowadays is having a skeptics’ track, and this one is no exception. We’ve got skepchicks (they’re everywhere!) and me on various panels, so you locals ought to show up.

Unfortunately, they shifted the dates a little bit (actually, they expanded it to a four day event), and it now overlaps horribly with my trip to the Nobel conference in Lindau, so I have to miss the first part…but I’ll be there for the last half, all exhausted and jet-lagged, so you’ll be able to push me around entertainingly.

I have no idea what this thread is about anymore, reloaded

I’m slamming the door shut on yet another thread that will not die, which was in turn the progeny of another enduring thread — as you might guess, this one was fueled by a thickheaded creationist’s refusal to acknowledge the evidence. Alan Clarke, if you start regurgitating creationist BS here again, I will shut you down. Otherwise, if necessary, converse here.

How to build a dinosaur

I’ve been reading a new book by Jack Horner and James Gorman, How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn’t Have to Be Forever(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and I was pleasantly surprised. It’s a book that gives a taste of the joys of geology and paleontology, talks at some length about a recent scientific controversy, acknowledges the importance of evo-devo, and will easily tap into the vast mad scientist market.

It is a little scattered, in that it seems to be the loosely assembled concatenation of a couple of books, but that’s part of the appeal; read the chapters like you would a collection of short stories, and you’ll get into the groove.

The first part is about Horner’s life in Montana, the Hell Creek formation, and dinosaur collecting. Hand this to any kid and get him hooked on paleontology for life; I recall reading every book I could get my hands on that talked about Roy Chapman Andrews as a young’un, and it permanently twisted me…in a good way. This will have the same effect, and many people will think about heading out to Garfield County for a little dusty adventure. I know I am — all that stands in my way is South Dakota.

A good chunk of the book is about molecules and how they show the relatedness of dinosaurs to birds, and to the work of Horner’s former student, Mary Schweitzer, who discovered soft tissue in T. rex bones. Horner presents a good overview of the subject, but is also appropriately cautious. You’ll get a good feel for the difficulty of finding this material, and for interpreting it; he clearly believes that these are scraps of real T. rex tissue, but how intact it is, what kinds of changes have occurred in it, and how much information will be extractable from these rare bits of preserved collagen (or whatever) is left an open question.

Finally, the subject of the title…Horner was an advisor to the Jurassic Park movies, and right away he dismisses the idea of extracting 65 million year old DNA in enough quantity to reconstitute a dinosaur as clearly nothing but a fantasy. That’s simply not how it can be done. But he does have a grand, long-term plan for recreating a dinosaur.

What is it? Why, it’s developmental biology, of course. Development is the answer to everything.

Here’s his vision, and I found it believable and captivating: start with a modern dinosaur, a chicken, figure out the developmental pathways that make it different from an ancient dinosaur, and tweak them back to the ancestral condition. For instance, birds have lost the long bony tail of their ancestors, reducing it to a little stump called a pygostyle. In the embryo, they start to make a long tail, but then developmental switches put a kink in it and reduce it to a stub. If we could only figure out what specific molecules are signaling the tissue to take this modern reducing path and switch them off, then maybe we could produce a generation of chickens with the long noble tails of a velociraptor.

My first thought was skepticism — it can’t be that easy. There may be a simple network of genes that regulate this one early decision to form a pygostyle from a tail, but there have been tens of millions of years of adaptation by other genes to the modern condition; we’re dealing with a large network of interlinked genes here, and unraveling one step in development doesn’t mean that subsequent steps are still competent to respond in the ancient pattern. But then, thinking about it a little more, one of the properties of the genome is its plasticity and ability to respond in a coherent, integrated way to changes in one part of a gene network. That capacity might mean you could reconstitute a tail.

And then, once you’ve got a tailed chicken, you could work on adding teeth to the jaws. And foreclaws. And while you’re at it, find the little genomic slider that controls body size, and turn it up to 11. What he’s proposing is a step-by-step analysis of chicken-vs.-dinosaur decisions in the developmental pathways, and inserting intentional atavisms into them. This is all incredibly ambitious, and it might not work…but the only way to find out is try. I like that in a scientist. Turning a chicken into a T. rex is a true Mad Scientist project, and one that I must applaud.

One reservation I have about this section of the book is that too much time is spent dwelling over ethical concerns. Need I mention that real Mad Scientists do not fret over the footling trivia of the Institutional Review Board? These are chicken embryos, animals that your average member of the taxpaying public finds so inconsequential that they will pay to have them homogenized into spongy-textured slabs of yellow protein to be slapped onto their McMuffin. Please, people, get some perspective.

As for respecting the chickens themselves, what can be grander and more respectful than this project? I would whisper to my chickens, “With these experiments, I will take your children’s children’s children, and give them great ripping claws like scythes, and razor-sharp serrate fangs like daggers, and I will turn them into multi-story towers of muscle and bone that will be able to trample KFC restaurants as if they were matchboxes.” And their eyes would light up with a feral gleam of primeval ambition, and they would offer me their ovaries willingly. I’d be doing the chickens a favor. Maybe some chicken farmers would have cause to be fearful, but I wouldn’t be working on their embryos, so let them tremble.

Oh, all right. Horner is taking the responsible path and putting some serious thought into the ethics of this kind of experiment, which is the right thing to do. It’s also the kind of project that will generate serious and useful information about developmental networks, even if it fails in its ultimate aim.

But I have a dream, too. Of a day when biotechnology is ubiquitous, and middle-class kids everywhere will have a cheap DNA sequencer and synthesizer in their garages, and a freezer with handy vectors and enzymes for directed insertional mutagenesis. And one day, Mom will come home with a box of fresh guaranteed organic free range chicken eggs, and Junior’s eyes will glitter with a germ of a cunning plan, fed by a little book he found in the library…and 30-foot-tall fanged chickens will triumphantly stride the cul-de-sacs of suburbia, and the roar of the dinosaur will be heard once again.

Danger, aquarists, danger!

I’m sure this happens all the time.

A 2cm long fish apparently found it’s way into the penis of a 14-year-old boy from India in a bizarre medical case.

The patient was admitted to hospital with complaints of pain, dribbling urine and acute urinary retention spanning a 24-hour period. According to the boy, the fish slipped into his penis while he was cleaning his aquarium at home.

This is precisely why, when I’m cleaning the bank of tanks in my lab, I make sure to keep my pants on.

(via Rev. BigDumbChimp, who always finds stories like this.)