Argument from ignorance, ignorance the size of Alaska

She has so much of it to spread around, too. Sarah Palin’s memoir reveals her unsurprising opinion about evolution.

Elsewhere in this volume, she talks about creationism, saying she “didn’t believe in the theory that human beings — thinking, loving beings — originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea” or from “monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees.” In everything that happens to her, from meeting Todd to her selection by Mr. McCain for the Republican ticket, she sees the hand of God: “My life is in His hands. I encourage readers to do what I did many years ago, invite Him in to take over.”

Unfortunately, about half the American electorate will think what she wrote is just ducky. Those words won’t dissuade very many voters at all, so don’t make the mistake of thinking this revelation will somehow cripple her campaign to become president of the US.

Oh, yeah…that debate

For those who were wondering, it’s still happening. 7:30pm tonight, at the North Star Ballroom in the St Paul Student Center, 2017 Buford Ave. S. The topic is “Should Intelligent Design be Taught in the Schools?”. I’ll be there. It’s going to be recorded. I’ll probably be available for conversation afterwards, briefly…I still have to drive all the way back to Morris tonight.

The infamous Skatje will also be in attendance.

As others see us

I found this comment, left on the blog of the negligible Bryan Appleyard, to be immensely entertaining. It’s the combination of hyperbole, unintentional irony, and oblivious incompetence, all spiced with a germ of truth, that makes it amusing.

Myers, like Dawkins when he’s tired and especially the gruesome Dennett, survives entirely on scorn and venom. His response to any challenge is simply to increase the number and volume of schoolyard taunts. These guys are intellectual alchemists who have perfected the art of using invective to turn philistinism into apparent sagacity. The formula goes something like this:

Step 1–Begin by describing a philosophical challenge with a mixture of anger and fatigue, much as you would describe discovering a termite in your house after the extermintor had been through and presumably destroyed them all. The contempt must ooze front and center before you even address the argument so that anyone who might be inclined to take the challenge seriously is forwarned and suitably cowed. Don’t skimp on the insulting adjectives.

Step 2–Deflect the issue from the profoundly philosophical to the mundane by suddenly talking lab gobbledegook about genes, mutations, etc. Use words like phenotype liberally and try to throw in a diagram. Extra points for insisting Darwin himself was well aware of what you are saying and would have agreed with you unreservedly;

Step 3–Insist that any argument that comes within a hundred miles of religion, no matter how ethereal or tentative, leads directly to biblical literalism, perferably as practiced in the American South. Show in one paragraph how it is the root of every atrocity in history, will lead to the end of scientific inquiry and justifies the bombing of innocent villagers by the U.S. Air Force.

Step 4–Bask in the glow of hundreds of one-sentence comments thanking you profusely for your courage and agreeing you have proven there is no need to read what your opponent said to know that the stupid twit isn’t even worth reading.

Step 1 must be a good one, since it’s the tactic the commenter is using. I wonder if he noticed?

Step 2 is my favorite. I like his admission that the “profoundly philosophical,” to his mind, is untainted with mundane reality, and that when talking about explanations for our origins (which is usually what prompts my scornful interventions), genes and mutations are mere “gobbledygook”. I know exactly where he is coming from, then — the land of the ignorant, where people are baffled and resentful of the intrusion of evidence. This must also be why he finds Dennett so gruesome.

Step 3, unfortunately, is way off base. I’m one of those guys who thinks even moderate, liberal theism is wacky in and of itself: I don’t need to tie Karen Armstrong to Ken Ham to make her look absurd. I also think people would commit atrocities without religion prodding them on, too. I don’t believe the South is particularly deserving of scorn; the Grand Old Man of Fundamentalism operated out of Minneapolis, Minnesota, for instance. I never endorse bombing any villages anywhere, sorry. His diatribe would have been improved if he’d left out this one point, which is so baseless it undermines the rest.

Step 4 has a tiny leavening of truth because there are lots of people who find common ground with me and are predisposed to agree with my interpretation of events, and so yes, this blog is a meeting place for mobs of atheists. So? Unfortunately for my ego, a few of the comments will be disagreements, while most are people wrangling with each other; the long threads get that way because I spark something that leads to discussion and argument. I don’t get to accept even all the insults, because I’m mostly irrelevant to the conversation within a few hours of starting it!

But otherwise, I’m afraid people don’t have the luxury of completely bypassing my target’s words. I link back and quote liberally (gosh, there they are, the commenter’s whole screed, right there in my post), and people are always tossing in fresh new absurdities from the source. A perfect example is right there in the post which made Bryan Appleyard indignant: I quoted him at length and rebutted him in detail, and poor Mr Appleyard is simply left mostly speechless, only able to screech that his feelings were hurt at being called a bad writer…and unable to address one whit of the substance of my criticisms.

Our American madrassas

I am impressed with the discipline imposed by the traditional madrassas: students are expected to memorize the Koran, word for word, which requires that they spend day after day reading and reciting. I don’t deny that it’s hard work and is a kind of achievement, but it’s not education — it doesn’t teach people how to think for themselves.

So I find this story about kids memorizing the Bible rather dismaying. These are clearly kids with brains, discipline, and a kind of warped ambition, who have the potential to do interesting things, and our Christian leaders have apparently seen some virtue in the madrassas model, so they’ve got them engaged in the pointless and backwards-looking exercise of Bible drills. It’s such a waste.

At least it’s all-American and thoroughly capitalist. The winner of the Bible bee got $100,000. I only hope he takes the money and uses it to get a good secular education so he can do something productive with his mind.

The UK needs more god-botherers advising the government

That seems to be the idea behind forming a council of key policy advisors, whose qualifications seem to be the fervency of their obeisance to an invisible man in the sky.

The move has been criticised by secularists who warned that it represented a worrying development.

However, Mr Denham argued that Christians and Muslims can contribute significant insights on key issues, such as the economy, parenting and tackling climate change.

Oh, really? How? I suppose tithing and refusing to allow money to be lent at interest are a kind of economic strategy…just not a very productive one. And I don’t quite see the point of consulting with a gang of grisly old virgins on parenting, or asking some bearded imam whose chief talent is the memorization of the Koran about what to do about carbon emissions. I wish Mr Denham had gone on with some specifics that he hopes superstition can address.

He does have a few general platitudes.

“Faith is a strong and powerful source of honesty, solidarity, generosity – the very values which are essential to politics, to our economy and our society.”

Ah, I see. I had no idea how different the government of the UK was from the government of the US. Here, honesty and generosity aren’t exactly common currency in government, or at least are in conflict. I suppose one could argue that Washington has been very generous to defense contractors, but they aren’t very forthright about it. I suppose there are principles of solidarity at work, with our most religious party, the Republicans, being monolithic in their opposition to equality, social support, and science, and Democrats straining to achieve some kind of unity — maybe they’d benefit from religious rigidity, too. I suppose if the UK government did model their political system after the Muslims and Christians, they could end up with a nice, pretty political system like ours, with Republicans and Democrats.

Maybe Denham should look more closely at our system. For instance, maybe he could pop over for the Bold Fresh Tour, and see how a couple of paragons of the idea of using religious principles in government represent honesty, solidarity, and generosity.

A poll on the Catholic opposition to gayness

An interesting twist: this poll is trying to skew the Catholic church’s decision to withhold social services if Washington D.C. supports same sex marriage into a moral issue…with the church taking the high ground!

The D.C. Council is considering a law forbidding discrimination against those in gay marriages. The law would apply to all groups that have contracts with the District, including Catholic Charities, one of the city’s largest social services providers. The Archdiocese of Washington says that because of the Church’s opposition to same-sex marriage, it would have to suspend its social services to the poor, the homeless and others rather than provide employee benefits to same-sex married couples or allow them to adopt.

Should the city require the Church to follow a law it considers immoral?

Yes 18%
No 82%

Why should what the church considers immoral to be a relevant factor? I could consider the wearing of pants to be immoral, or even better, going to church to be immoral…but it doesn’t make it so.

IGERT2009: Sunday morning session

My little laptop is functional again, so at least I’ll be able to blog these Sunday morning IGERT sessions in real-time. I still have to transcribe my notes from yesterday; I’ll plan on getting that done on the plane this afternoon.

Kristi Montooth: Mitochondrial-nuclear epistasis for metabolic fitness in flies

How do physiological systems evolve to maintain metabolic fitness? This is a process that involves interactions between two genomes, the nuclear and mitochondrial. Energy metabolism is important and is the target of mutation, but the same players are found all across the tree of life, suggesting that there is also strong selective pressure to maintain a common system.

Montooth is looking at inducible gene expression: is there an energetic cost to switch genes off and on? She’s using respirometers that can measure the metabolic rate of single flies or larva. Flies are subjected to heat shock, which switches on HSP70. Flies normally have 6 copies of HSP70; they have mutants with 12, and they show a much greater rise in metabolic rate in response to heat shock.

Mitochondria are the source of the energy for this response. Mitochondria also have a high mutation rate and show strong linkage (no sexual recombination to cover for errors that arise). She’s arguing for selection for compensatory evolution in the nuclear genome, and the accumulation of intergenomic epistasis. To dissect the effects of coevolution of mitochondria and nuclear genomes, she transplanted mitochondria from different species into Drosophila melanogaster. These have between 18 and 100 amino acid substitutions from the Dmel sequence.

She plots mitochondrial genome in order of increasing divergence against measured fitness (she used a competition assay that she did not describe in detail). There is no correlation seen at all. Also, high fitness X/mtDNA genotypes in one sex can be low fitness genotypes in the other sex. Interactions between the X and mtDNA can maintain variation in both genomes. All of the fitness effects, with one exception, are subtle.

Some of the transgenomic effects have very strong effects on female fecundity, developmental rates, and locomotion. But adult metabolic rate shows no difference! The idea is that there are lots of homeostatic mechanisms that maintain metabolism very tightly, which then have secondary effects.

Johanna Schmitt: Adaptive evolution of Arabidopsis flowering pathways in different climates

Schmitt does ecological development, looking at the timing of plant development in different environments. How does phenology respond and adapt to climate variation? We expect evolution to adapt to variation in seasonal timing. The signaling pathways in Arabidopsis are well known; they respond to hormones, photoperiod, and ambient temperature by way of a fairly complicated set of pathways she showed us in a slide…sorry, no way I can reproduce it here!

Across its range, it shows a great deal of life history variation; one pattern in the Mediterranean, another in colder northern climes, and yet another in Northern Scandinavia, varying in how much time they spend in vegetative rosettes vs. bolting and flower production. Questions: are there are genetic variants associated with different life history patterns, can they identify the genes, and can they perturb them?

The experiments involved massive plantings in different sites in Europe with different climates, with different mutants. Is natural variation in candidate genes involved in variation in flowering time? They studied FRIGIDA, a gene that effects the vernalization pathway. When you lose FRIGIDA, you should see much more rapid flowering. Loss of function in this gene has evolved multiple times in northwestern Europe. The effect depends on the timing of planting and climate.

The effect of the mutant varies across geography, and they have a photothermal model of flowering time. The plants are tracking light and temperature, and the different mutants are counting up these inputs in slightly different ways. They can use this model to make predictions on the effects of FRIGIDA on flowering time with changes in germination timing, and then test these in the next year with plantings at different times and in their different geographical sites, and the model is working accurately.

They are also plugging in predicted future climate change from NOAA, and asking what we can expect to see 100 years from now; she showed maps of expected flowering times in 2100. They are also making predictions of the expected distributions of FRIGIDA alleles over time, and they hope to do the same for many other alleles in Arabidopsis.

Artyom Kopp: How the fly got its sexy legs – the origin and evolution of Drosophila sex combs

The sex comb is a male specific structure on the front legs which most Drosophila species lack — it’s a fairly recent innovation. How do you evolve a novel structure?

It’s limited to the melanogaster and obscura species groups, with quite a bit of diversity in different species, varying from 2-50 teeth, location, and arrangement. How do you go from sexually monomorphic state of a generically hairy leg to one with a specific bristle arrangement in males? The sex comb in males is homologous to a subset of bristles also found in females; in males, that patch of epidermis rotates 90° and the bristles enlarge. He showed a very pretty developmental series of this epithelium undergoing cell shape changes that move the bristles to a new location. Other species show similar morphological remodeling, but sometimes with some significant differences: D. kikkawai doesn’t do the rotation, but instead the bristle precursors arise in their final position. These modes do not cluster together phylogenetically, so these are examples of convergent evolution, generating similar structures with different mechanisms.

They are taking apart the genetics and regulatory inputs of sex comb development. Basically, it involves just about everything. It seems to arise by an interaction between Hox and sex determination genes. Spatial modulation of Sex combs reduced controls sex comb position. Scr in pupa; stages is only expressed in a limited domain in the leg, and ectopic expression of Scr produces multiple sex combs. Expression is also sexually dimorphic, with no upregulation of Scr in female legs. In D. ficusphila, which has enormous sex combs, Scr levels are elevated yet further to 7 times the levels found in D. willistoni.

The sex determination gene Double sex is also spatially patterned, and is refined and elevated to high levels in the area around the developing sex combs. Ectopic expression of Dsx induces ectopic sex combs.

How can a new developmental pathway evolve? In the ancestral condition, Scr is controlled by spatial cues to produce segmental patterns of bristles; in the sex-comb carrying species, Scr is coupled to Dsx. This explains the spatial pattern of gene expression, but it also needs to acquire new downstream targets to, for instance, regulate epidermal rotations.

Drosophila are old, and many of these species differences are millions of years old. They are now looking at more recently diverged species with differences in sex comb morphology, and are looking for correlations between Scr and species divergence.

And with that, I have to run for the airport shuttle. Good talks, and I unfortunately have to miss Rudy Raff’s wrap-up of the meeting.