Soon to appear on a thousand herpetologist’s doors

xkcd digs into cladistics.

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Unfortunately, his cladogram is wrong. Mammals should also be a subset of the reptiles, so the herpetologists should be demanding that all other amniotes be absorbed into their more inclusive field of tetrapod biology.

At least, until the ichthyologists show up and point out that we’re all just weird dry land-walking fish.

Just to clear this up, I hope, here’s a modified version of a cladistic diagram to show what herps are:

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So if you want to avoid the sins of polyphyly or paraphyly, you must include birds and mammals in the herps. Of course, the alternative is to not care about the abstractions, and recognize that there are plenty of people already specializing in mammals and birds, so someone has to pay attention to all the otherwise neglected classes.

Nutjobs in Ohio plan to ask invisible blobs of fetal tissue to speak

This is a 5-week-old human fetus.

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It’s an awesomely cool period of development. Organogenesis is well under way, segmentation is completely, limb buds are forming. The heart is beating, which is neat, but then you have to keep in mind that you can tease a heart apart into individual cells in a dish and the cells will throb, so it’s not exactly a magical indicator of sentience. Also, the embryo is only 2-3 millimeters long, which I find to be a highly evocative size: that’s exactly how big my zebrafish embryos are when they have the same level of organization, with segments and organ rudiments and a beating heart.

In Ohio, they are proposing to have these fetuses “testify” in support of an anti-choice bill.

Two fetuses will be presented as witnesses before an Ohio legislative committee that is hearing a bill to outlaw abortions after the first heartbeat can be detected inside a woman’s womb.

The fetuses will appear live and in color before the committee on a video screen projecting ultrasound images taken from their pregnant mothers’ bodies. Janet Folger Porter, head of Faith2Action, an anti-abortion group, said the fetuses will be the youngest witnesses to ever testify when they come in front of the House Health and Aging Committee Wednesday morning.

Oh, really? The legislators might want to read up on first trimester ultrasound, first of all.

Transabdominal ultrasound cannot reliably diagnose pregnancies that are less than 6 weeks gestation. Transvaginal ultrasound, by contrast, can detect pregnancies earlier, at approximately 4½ to 5 weeks gestation. Prompt diagnosis made possible by transvaginal ultrasound can, therefore, result in earlier treatment.

Early ultrasound examinations will primarily detect the presence of the extraembryonic sac, not the embryo itself. It’s too small. Around 5 weeks, you might be able to see a fuzzy small blob with a flutter that is the beating heart, but that’s about it, and you do have to use transvaginal ultrasound to pick it up — that is, you have to insert the ultrasound probe deep into the vagina. That isn’t usually done; any mothers out there will tell you about the gel smeared all over their bellies and the external probe pressed up against them, but the transvaginal examinations are only done if there is suspicion of something going wrong.

So I’ll be very curious to see what these “‘live and in color” images actually look like. I’m already suspicious that they’ll be faked — I can already guarantee you that the color will be entirely false. But maybe someone has a higher resolution ultrasound machine than I’m aware of, which is entirely possible.

But even if they do get a nice image of a curled, fishlike embryo that is maybe a tenth as sharp as the worst images of zebrafish embryos that I see in my low-power dissecting scope, so what? It’s not testifying. It’s twitching. You’d get a more intelligent response if you dragged a cow in front of the committee and asked it to moo against slaughterhouses.

And the bill is ridiculous. They want to prohibit all abortions of embryos that have a detectable heartbeat…but 1) heartbeat isn’t a valid measure of personhood, and 2) pragmatically, it shuts down almost all abortions. The heart starts beating at approximately one month after fertilization; the woman may not have even noticed more than a delayed period at that time, and the early symptoms of some water retention and possibly morning sickness are unreliable. There will be many women who are responsible and want to end a pregnancy as early as possible who will be denied a first trimester abortion because it was too late when they were diagnosed!

Ohioans: bills sponsored by the deranged lunatics really shouldn’t be passed. I’m hoping your lawmakers will realize that during this ginned-up spectacle.

Episode CLXXIX: Everyone must strip to their underwear and dance!

I may need to check myself into a mental hospital, threadlians, because so help me, I like Lady Gaga, even the weird pretentious gynecological bits at the beginning of this video. Maybe especially the freaky alien gynecology.

If you’re not going to dance, I at least hope you’re commenting in your underwear.

(Current totals: 11,956 entries with 1,296,991 comments.)

Do not taunt Anonymous

I agreed with Doctorow that the recent shutdown of the Westboro loons was a stunt by WBC itself. Now Anonymous has spoken out in an interview with Shirley Phelps-Roper denying any involvement. Here’s the hilarious bit, though: midway through the interview, after Phelps-Roper’s prolonged ranting and raving, the Anonymous spokesman calmly announces that they were going to shut down one of her sites, right then and there. And he did.

In the immortal lines of Ash: “Good, bad, I’m the one with the gun.” Do not tease the guys with the high tech weapon when all you’ve got to defend yourself is a loony book of Iron Age dogma.

Where did Cain get his wife?

People keep asking me this question after the creationist event here in town — Mortenson spoke about how creationism is so much more egalitarian than evolution, and how the Bible talks about these wonderful things people did in the book of Genesis, like Cain going out and founding a whole city, by himself! At a time when the world population was 4, however, that doesn’t seem like a great accomplishment. Anyway, some people thought that far, realized that in the creationist conception of an entire world population arising from two people only, there was an obvious problem in the second generation.

Have no fear, the creationists already have an answer, as I explained before. Cain had sex with his sisters. The creationists are even proud of this explanation, and you can buy it on a postcard in their cheesy gift shop, which does make one wonder about their clientele a little bit.

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The exhibit goes on to explain how this was OK, because Adam and Eve were perfect and carried no deleterious alleles that might have caused trouble when homozygous. They also chew us nonbelievers out for finding their stories a bit objectionable.

Since God is the One who defined marriage in the first place, God’s Word is the only standard for defining proper marriage. People who do not accept the Bible as their absolute authority have no basis for condemning someone like Cain marrying his sister.

And people who do not understand population genetics have no basis for arguing that a species can survive a population bottleneck of two.

Oh, yeah, that’s exactly what we need

I predict it will quickly vanish from public attention. The University of Arizona is creating something called the National Institute for Civil Discourse. Just the title makes me want to gag.

Announced just last week by the University of Arizona, the new civility institute will have as honorary chairmen former Presidents Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. Together with the institute’s director, Brint Milward, they will promote compromise among opposing political parties and views and focus on political disagreements “from the grass roots all the way to the top.”

Because, when the country is going down the toilet, the one thing we want to discourage is any troubling of the swirling status quo.

I do like the Bierce quotation: “Politeness, n. The most acceptable hypocrisy.”

Disbelief in gods is only one of the beginnings of reason

But it’s not enough on its own. Case in point: the Raelians have put up a sign in Las Vegas.

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It does have a helpful statement from a Raelian spokesman to help you sort the rationalists from clowns, if the flying saucer in the billboard isn’t enough for you.

If you drive the freeway between Vegas and Los Angeles, you’ll see several signs warning drivers to follow the Bible or else face eternal hell,” he said. “Those signs are designed to make viewers feel fear and guilt. We want to counterbalance that fear by letting them know there is no God or Devil. There’s no need to live in fear. We should enjoy our precious lives to the fullest while of course giving love all around us. Surely that’s a message even Christians recognize as one that Jesus taught. But, whether the source is the Bible, the Koran, or Greek or Roman mythology, all gods are myths, just as there’s no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny etc. What there are, however, are human beings who were advanced scientists who created all forms of life, known as the Elohim. You can read about them in the oldest versions of the Bible, and the oldest versions are always the less polluted versions.

Just the same old ‘magic men in the sky’ dogma. They’re also helpful in telling us how to distinguish Raelians from sensible people.

The God of the Koran is mythical to Christians and the Gods of Hinduism are myths to monotheists,” Roehr said. “Whether he’s a Jew, a Muslim or a Christian, one man’s true religion is always another man’s myth. We Raelians just deny the existence of one more God than they do. Yet there’s a very important difference between most atheists and the Raelians: We’re still Creationists! The Raelian Movement is an atheistic religion that is preparing humanity to welcome back its true creators, the Elohim, without fear or guilt.

Yes, Virginia, atheist creationists do exist. And they’re just as insane as the religious kind.

The mendacity of Terry Mortenson

It’s another frantically busy day, so I don’t have time to give you the full run-down on the misleading nonsense Terry Mortenson from Answers in Genesis gave last night, but I do want to give one example. In one section of his talk, he referenced an article in Scientific American which discussed a hominin find: the specimen called “Lucy’s baby”, the bones of an Australopithicus afarensis, who was 3 years old when she died about 3.3 million years ago. He showed this diagram of the fossil — in orange are the bones actually found, in white are the ones that had to be reconstructed and interpolated from other Afarensis specimens. Mortenson added his own labels on the left, though.

  • shoulder blades like a gorilla

  • inner ear like an African ape

  • long curved finger like a tree dwelling ape

  • voicebox like a chimpanzee

  • brain capacity like a chimpanzee

He pointed out that many of the features described weren’t present in the bones from this specimen, implying that they were just making stuff up. Then what does he say? “Look at that: gorilla, ape, ape, chimp, chimp. They called this a stunning new human fossil, but all the evidence says it’s an ape.” I’m going to hold him to the same standard of scholarship they insist upon in their analysis of the Bible: when the Bible says their tribal god told Noah to bring two of every kind on the Ark, that means he could not have left any of the kinds behind. Mortenson plainly said that all of the evidence in this article says Australopithecus afarensis was an ape. Take a look yourself.

Scholars agree that A. afarensis was a creature that got around capably on two legs. But starting in the 1980s, a debate over whether the species was also adapted for life in the trees emerged. The argument centered on the observation that whereas A. afarensis has clear adaptations to bipedal walking in its lower body, its upper body exhibits a number of primitive traits better suited to an arboreal existence, such as long, curved fingers for grasping tree branches. One camp held that A. afarensis had transitioned fully to terrestrial life, and that the tree-friendly features of the upper body were just evolutionary baggage handed down from an arboreal ancestor. The other side contended that if A. afarensis had retained those traits for hundreds of thousands of years, then tree climbing must have still formed an important part of its locomotor repertoire.

Like adult A. afarensis, the Dikika baby had long, curved fingers. But the fossil also brings new data to the debate in the form of two shoulder blades, or scapulae–bones previously unknown for this species. According to Alemseged, the shoulder blades of the child look most like those of a gorilla. The upward-facing shoulder socket is particularly apelike, contrasting sharply with the laterally facing socket modern humans have. This, Alemseged says, may indicate that the individual was raising its hands above its head–something primates do when they climb.

Further hints of arboreal tendencies reside in the baby’s inner ear. Using computed tomographic imaging, the team was able to glimpse her semicircular canal system, which is important for maintaining balance. The researchers determined that the infant’s semicircular canals resemble those of African apes and another australopithecine, A. africanus. This, they suggest, could indicate that A. afarensis was not as fast and agile on two legs as we modern humans are. It could also mean that A. afarensis was limited in its ability to decouple its head and torso, a feat that is said to play a key role in endurance running in our own species.

Even looking at the simple illustration, you can see evidence that this animal had differences from other apes — look at those femurs! The article also makes it clear that they were using new data from this one specimen in addition to data from other A. afarensis specimens to reconstruct morphology.

It doesn’t say anything about a voicebox (the fossil included a hyoid bone) or cranial capacity; I guess Mortenson’s summary was a composite of multiple sources, which is fine, but it is something which he considers unforgivable if scientists do it.

But this article does plainly state that the fossil “has clear adaptations to bipedal walking in its lower body” — it’s merely highlighting the differences from modern humans because the similarities are well known.

Anyway, now you get the tone of the evening. Mortenson kept bringing up scientific studies in between his bible verses, and in every case he mangled and distorted and lied about them, while the audience tittered at those wicked evilutionists. He also brought up Piltdown man (a hoax that was discredited by scientists) and Nebraska man (a bit of newspaper sensationalism that never made it to the scientific literature), and claimed that every hominin fossil was the product of imagination and fraud.

You don’t believe he could have been so dishonest? We don’t have a recording of last night’s talk, but here’s an audio recording of the very same talk given a few months ago. It really is nearly exactly identical, and if you dare to suffer through it, you too will see what a disreputable fraud the entire Answers in Genesis enterprise is. When I was listening to this guy, I marveled at him — I couldn’t tell whether he was ignorant, incompetent, or a professional con-man. I suspect it was a ripe and pungent combination of all three.