It was commencement day here at UMM, and it was a special one for us because Child #3 is now officially Bachelor of Arts #3. Here she tolerates her father and mother for a few more moments before she abandons us forevermore.
And there she is in the midst of all the faculty and 2010 graduates of the computer science discipline at UMM.
Yay, we’re all done! Kids gone, all off on their own trajectories into the future!
Like last time, I expect this news will set off another fusillade of dissenting opinions, but too bad. Extremists have vandalized Lars Vilks home, trying to set it on fire (original article in Swedish here).
In an undoubtably futile attempt to forestall what I expect will be common objections to this story here, I know that there are political ramifications to the cartoons of Mohammed. I know that many of them were motivated by racism and xenophobia. In this instance, though, I don’t care. Vilks drew a sketch. His enemies set his house on fire.
I would encourage Muslims to respond in kind, with their own cartoons lampooning Vilks (it shouldn’t be hard; the article about the arson has a picture of Vilks that looks rather deranged already). But when you respond to an insult to your beliefs with violence and destruction, you have moved beyond the boundaries of civilization, straight into barbarism, and you will get no sympathy from me.
Whoa, dudes. Did you hear about the bats who have oral sex?
Oral sex is widely used in human foreplay, but rarely documented in other animals. Fellatio has been recorded in bonobos Pan paniscus, but even then functions largely as play behaviour among juvenile males. The short-nosed fruit bat Cynopterus sphinx exhibits resource defence polygyny and one sexually active male often roosts with groups of females in tents made from leaves. Female bats often lick their mate’s penis during dorsoventral copulation. The female lowers her head to lick the shaft or the base of the male’s penis but does not lick the glans penis which has already penetrated the vagina. Males never withdrew their penis when it was licked by the mating partner. A positive relationship exists between the length of time that the female licked the male’s penis during copulation and the duration of copulation. Furthermore, mating pairs spent significantly more time in copulation if the female licked her mate’s penis than if fellatio was absent. Males also show postcopulatory genital grooming after intromission. At present, we do not know why genital licking occurs, and we present four non-mutually exclusive hypotheses that may explain the function of fellatio in C. sphinx.
Read that carefully. If it’s a bit difficult to imagine, here’s a video:
Not only do female bats give male bats oral sex, but they do it while they’re having intercourse. The male enters the female from the rear, and the female bends over to lick the shaft of the penis while he’s thrusting in and out. I have never seen that in a porn film. Maybe there is such a thing out there — I can’t claim much knowledge of porn — but this means that animals not only carry out sexually activities condemned by the religious as unnatural, but they do it better than we do.
I have just done something very wicked. I have compared human sexual behavior with that of another animal, describing work published in a serious scientific journal. I could get fired for that! If you were to show this story to co-workers and discuss the implications, you also could get condemned and sanctioned. We’re in trouble now!
You may find that hard to believe, but it’s true in at least one case: Dylan Evans, at University College Cork, in an argument about the uniqueness of human behavior, brought this article up, and his opponent shut him down by crying harassment, triggering an investigation. He was exonerated, but the university president has decided he needs to be sanctioned anyway.
Here’s the story straight from the target.
Dear Colleagues,
The President of University College Cork, Professor Michael Murphy, has imposed harsh sanctions on me for doing nothing more than showing an article from a peer-reviewed scientific article to a colleague.
The article was about fellatio in fruit bats. You can read it online at http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0007595
It was covered extensively in the media, including the Guardian – see http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/nov/10/oral-sex-bats-improbable-research
The colleague to whom I showed the article complained to HR that the article was upsetting. I had been engaged in an ongoing debate with the colleague in question about the relevance of evolutionary biology to human behaviour, and in particular about the dubiousness of many claims for human uniqueness. I showed it the colleague in the context of this discussion, and in the presence of a third person. I also showed the article to over a dozen other colleagues on the same day, none of whom objected.
HR launched a formal investigation. Despite the fact that external investigators concluded that I was not guilty of harassment, Professor Murphy has imposed a two-year period of intensive monitoring and counselling on me, and as a result my application for tenure is likely to be denied.
I am now campaigning to have the sanctions lifted. I would be grateful for your support on this matter. I have created an online petition at:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/freedebate/I’d be grateful if you sign the petition and ask your colleagues to do so. If you also felt like writing directly to the President of UCC, his address is:
Professor Michael Murphy
The President’s Office
University College Cork
Cork
Republic of Ireland.Your support would be greatly appreciated.
Dylan Evans
Oh, well, the article was upsetting. Can’t have that; science articles are supposed to be affirming and soothing, I guess.
If you find the president’s actions unwarranted and ridiculous, sign the petition and write to him. And please, do feel free to discuss bat porn all you want.
Several of the documents in case are now available online.
Once upon a time, there was a bill moving through congress that was a good bill. It increased funding for research, and for science and math education. It had bipartisan support and was sailing through.
There is a villain to this story, though. Some congresscreatures — Republicans, led by a fool from Texas — didn’t like the good little bill. It’s not clear why. Maybe because it was going to cost some money. Maybe just because they don’t like that science and education stuff.
So they hatched a plan, taking advantage of a little rule. They made a motion to recommit, stopping the bill in its tracks by adding a new addition that would require the whole thing to go back to committee. Congress could vote to kill the addition, which would let the bill proceed, or they could vote to for the recommit, throwing the good little bill back.
Now here’s the cunning part: the addition was a completely irrelevant demand, a new requirement that federal employees caught watching porn would not get paid. Congress could vote for better science and education funding and allow porn watching, or they could vote against science and education and against porn. Sneaky. Devious. Evil. Jebus, but I’ve come to despise Republicans.
So what happened? 121 Democrats promptly abandoned the bill and voted against it. Because they’re cowards without a single bone of principle in their flabby, craven bodies. They didn’t want to be seen voting for porn, so they let the Rethuglican ringmaster crack his whip and herd them right where he wanted them to go.
I think I despise them all.
That insane tea-baggin’ Maine GOP convention did something else of interest. Some of the Republican caucuses were held in a local school, including the 8th grade classroom of teacher Paul Clifford. He returned to the classroom after the weekend to discover that the Republicans had indulged themselves in remodeling the classroom.
For seven years, Clifford has had “a collage-type poster depicting the history of the U.S. labor movement” on his classroom door. He uses it “to teach his students how to incorporate collages into their annual project on Norman Rockwell’s historic ‘Four Freedoms’ illustrations.” When Clifford returned to his classroom on Monday, after the GOP caucuses, the poster was gone; in its place was a sticker reading, “Working People Vote Republican.”
Republicans opened a “closed cardboard box they found near Clifford’s desk” and later objected to the fact that it contained copies of the U.S. Constitution donated to the school by the American Civil Liberties Union.
After the caucuses, “rank-and-file Republicans who were upset by what they said they had seen in Clifford’s classroom” began calling the school, objecting to student art they had seen and a sticker on a filing cabinet reading “People for the American Way — Fight the Right.”
Labor is so un-American, Norman Rockwell was an America-hating commie pinko, and kids shouldn’t be exposed to the Constitution, especially if the ACLU likes it.
It’s getting so you can’t tell the patriots from the vandals. And Republicans are clearly the party against intellectualism, education, and diversity.
Only ours are methodologically valid. It’s a common creationist tactic to fling around big numbers to ‘disprove’ evolution: for instance, I’ve had this mysterious Borel’s Law (that anything with odds worse than 1 in 1050 can never happen) thrown in my face many times, followed by the declaration that the odds of the simplest organism forming by chance are 1 in 10340,000,000. It’s complete nonsense, of course — their calculations all ignore the reality of the actual events, assuming that everything must form spontaneously and all at once, which is exactly the opposite of how probability plays a role in evolution. It’s annoying and inane, and the creationists never seem to learn…perhaps because the rubes they pander to are easily dazzled by even bogus mathematics, so they keep doing it.
We’re going to have to start firing back. Doug Theobald, a long-time contributor to Talk.Origins and the Panda’s Thumb, has written a very nice paper testing the likelihood that all life on earth is not related by common descent, and he comes up with some numbers of many digits to support evolutionary theory. Nick Matzke has a summary, and the story has been written up for National Geographic.
Basically, the idea is this: take a small set of known, conserved proteins that are shared in all organisms, not restricting ourselves to one kingdom or one phylum, but grabbing them all. In this paper, that data set consists of 23 proteins from 12 taxa in the Big Three domains: Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya. Then set up many different models to explain the relationships of these species. For instance, you could organize them into the classic single tree, where all are related, or you could model them as three independent origins, for each of Bacteria, Archaea, or Eukarya, or you could postulate other combinations, such as that Bacteria arose independently of Archaea and Eukarya, which share a common ancestor. Finally, you tell your computer to do a lot of statistics on the models, asking how likely it is that two independent groups would each arrive at similar sequences, rating each of the models for parsimony and accuracy against the evidence.
And the winner is…common ancestry, with one branching tree! This is what we expected, of course, and what Theobald has done is to test our assumptions, always a good thing to do.
More complicated permutations of these models were also tried. What if there were a significant amount of horizontal gene transfer? Would that make multiple origins of modern life more likely? He was testing models like the ones below, where the dotted lines represent genes that leap across taxa to confuse the issue.
The answer here is that they don’t. These models can also be evaluated by statistical methods, and the best fit is again the one on the right, with a single ancestral root. People might recall the infamous “Darwin was wrong” cover from New Scientist—well, these results say that New Scientist was wrong, the existence of extensive horizontal gene transfer does not negate the fact of common descent.
So what’s the big number? There are lots of them in the paper, since it evolves many comparisons, but Theobald distills it down to just the odds that bacteria have an independent origin from Archaea and eukaryotes:
But, based on the new analysis, the odds of that are “just astronomically enormous,” he said. “The number’s so big, it’s kind of silly to say it”–1 in 10 to the 2,680th power, or 10 followed by 2,680 zeros.
One in 102680? Hey, aren’t those odds a little worse than Borel’s criterion of one in 1050?
Stay tuned to the Panda’s Thumb. Apparently, once he finishes up the trifling business of wrapping up a semester’s teaching, Theobald will be putting up a synopsis of his own and answering questions online.
Theobald D (2010) A formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry. Nature 465(13):219-222.
Last year, I mocked this extraordinarily stupid joke and the radio host who told it. I guess the radio personality was still feeling the sting — either that, or he wanted the traffic — since he brought it up again today, and also complained about the way I ridiculed the Maine Republican party platform (Remember that one? No gay marriage, global warming is a myth, Austrian economics, immediate arrest of all illegal aliens, etc.?)
So now he wants to know what you think of that teabaggin’ Republican platform. He thinks it is just ducky. Most of his listeners agree. I think he’s about to discover that the rest of the world thinks he’s a lunatic.
Does This Sound Wingnutty To You?
Count me as a wingnut — that all sounds fine by me!
84.34 %
These tea-bagger ideas are crazier than Ron Paul is — and THAT’S pretty crazy!
15.66 %
Yesterday, I mentioned this silly fellow Damon Linker, who complains that the New Atheists aren’t sad enough about their godlessness. This seems to be the new gripe du jour; you can’t be a serious atheist unless you’re all broken up about the absence of god, and unless you tell all the believers how much you appreciate what their superstition brings to the world, and how now you’re going to go home and cry because you have a god-shaped hole in your heart. It’s deeply dishonest and stupid. If anybody tried to pull that nonsense on me in person they’d get a rude response that would reveal that the teddy bear can snarl after all.
Meet Father Barron. I give you fair warning: if you actually watch this video, you may find yourself trying to smash through the glass of your video display to slap the smug prick. The infuriation is compounded by the fact that he’s wearing that pretentious dog collar, which I imagine he thinks gives him a look of authority, but to me is like putting on a big red clown nose. No, that’s not fair; a clown nose wouldn’t be an announcement that one is a pompous fraud.
And there it is again, the crazy complaint that the New Atheists aren’t serious enough, that they’re playing at atheism, because they just don’t express the existential anguish that apostates are expected to feel. Now Camus and Sartre — there are some good atheists; they’re safely dead, so they won’t spit in the eye of a priest, and they appreciated how miserable they were without gods.
Oh, Father Barron, so smug and sure in your phony Catholicism — you must be merely playing at religion, since you aren’t all distressed and weepy over your failure to grasp the power of science and reason and rationalism. How can I take you seriously if you don’t make YouTube videos crying over how sad you are to be trapped in the cloying, smothering dogma of the Catholic church?
And then he gives away his game:
they [the good old atheists] knew that inside us we have a deep desire for fulfillment, truth, goodness, justice…in other words, for God.
Barron is a fool. The equation of fulfillment, truth, goodness, and justice with god is what theists do; atheists haven’t given up on any of those principles, we feel no lack of those important matters to grieve over, we have simply realized that god does not provide fulfillment, truth, goodness, or justice and have sought them out in more practical and real arenas.
And most importantly, we actually respect and take seriously that idea of valuing truth, which is why we reject the superstitions priests offer us. We take it so seriously that we expect to be given reasonable explanations and evidence for fantastic claims, and do not simply accept stories told to us by stuffy old gomers wearing funny collars.
Oh, yes, I know whenever Boing Boing posts something with cephalopods in it — I get a tsunami of email telling me to post it right now. All right, since I’ll get no work done until this is purged…here’s an octopus killing a shark.
