Episode CCXXII: More Symphony of Science

We all know it is auto-tuned, and that many of you hate autotuning, so for those of you who can’t stand the stuff, don’t listen to this, and that way you won’t have to complain to the rest of us. At least this isn’t like those damned chimes going off every 15 minutes in the cemetery down the street all day — I have no control at all over that crap, and I’m going to have to dynamite a set of loudspeakers some day. You just have to refrain from clicking.

(Last edition of TET; Current totals: 12,689 entries with 1,426,885 comments.)

I guess I’ll never get a retail job at Harrods

There goes another dream. The department store has a very strict dress code for its employees.

Full makeup at all time: base, blusher, full eyes (not too heavy), lipstick, lip liner and gloss are worn at all time and maintained discreetly (please take into account the store display lighting which has a ‘washing out’ effect).

I don’t even know how to do that! I could try, I suppose, but my only role models lead me to suspect I couldn’t pull off the ‘discreet’ part.

Oh, wait…only the female employees have to cover up their natural hideousness with artificial cover-ups. I guess we men are just prettier without it, a fact that is confirmed by that sensible, objective source, the Daily Mail:

Women who feel no compunction to improve what nature bestowed upon them are, in my experience, arrogant, lazy or deluded, and frequently all three … Why does a young woman think her desire to show us her open pores and ruddy complexion outweighs the wishes of her employer to present a polished face to the customer?

Now I’m confused — is she suggesting that we make-up-less men lack those open pores and ruddy complexions and other such scars and flaws, or is she just suggesting that men are arrogant, lazy or deluded? Because I don’t even know what “blusher” and “full eyes” are, and I couldn’t tell you the difference between the three things you’re supposed to paint your lips with, so I’m hoping it’s the former.

Man, there’s a lot of bullshit involved in being a Proper Woman, I guess.

Stop me if this sounds familiar

I got an email from someone requesting advice. I can’t imagine how he thought of me when in this situation.

There’s a group of geocentrists — specifically, these guys — who are trying to film a documentary, and they want to interview my advisor, Dragan Huterer. A couple of months ago, they contacted Dragan under false pretenses: they said they were filming a documentary on modern cosmology. They were interested in coming to a conference and interviewing Dragan. We had no reason to suspect anything strange until just before the conference, when one of the people running the film company made some strange remarks about some of Dragan’s previous research, which set off an alarm bell in my head. Unfortunately, by that point, Dragan had already signed a release form granting these people the legal right to film him and to use that footage in a publicly-released documentary. We did manage to stop them from getting the right to film on the UM campus, so they didn’t come to the conference. We didn’t hear from them for six weeks, so we thought they were gone, but now they’re asking if they can come to town simply to film an interview with Dragan.

(Incidentally, we haven’t told them that we know that they’re geocentrists. We only found out that they were geocentrists 36 hours before they were originally scheduled to arrive at the conference, so we had neither the time nor the inclination to get into a confrontation with them. We told them that the chair of the Physics Department wasn’t comfortable with filming the conference, and that they should take the issue up with him.)

Crazy dingbat pseudoscientists trying to film a biased, anti-science documentary by flim-flamming legitimate scientists into sitting for filming? It’s somehow familiar.

As for advice, maybe some of the commenters will have some, but I do have a few suggestions.

A release is not the same as a contract obligating him to perform. It just means they can use any footage they can get, so don’t give them any. Unless there is some kind of contractual requirement that he has signed, he can just tell them to leave him alone. No problem.

Otherwise, and this will come as no surprise from me, go on the offensive. Contact your school and local newspaper, and make it a public joke. Annoy the heck out them, which ought to be easy, because they’re freakin’ geocentrists, crazy people who think the sun and stars and planets all revolve around the Earth. Turn the tables on them if they come to campus and interview them.

And if they do get a documentary made, and if they do use recordings of anyone rational, try to get kicked out of the movie premiere.

It’s Casey Luskin, so what else is new?

Oh, man, Casey Luskin is such an embarrassing spokesperson for the intelligent design creationists — I hope they keep him employed forever. His latest tirade against me is a cacophany of inanity. His primary point is that creationists like Jonathan MacLatchie have forced me to make concessions to creationism when I say that there are differences between vertebrate embryos. It is no concession to anything other than reality: the differences have been known for a long time. My first laboratory experiences as a graduate student were doing work on frog embryos with Phil Grant at the University of Oregon; my second were working with zebrafish embryos with Chuck Kimmel. Guess what: I could tell them apart, easily, as a first year grad student. I can also tell the difference between a zebrafish and medaka embryo! So this is a stupid claim on his part.

Here’s his second major absurdity:

If PZ is correct that evolutionary biology predicts both similarities and differences among embryos, then evolutionary biology makes no predictions and is unfalsifiable regarding the similarities and differences in vertebrate development. According to PZ, evolutionary theory predicts whatever it predicts, conserves whatever it conserves, and modifies whatever it modifies. Some theory.

Look at a cat and a dog. They are different animals; they have different forms and behaviors. However, they also have deep similarities: they are mammalian carnivores, they have the same basic bone structure, they have very similar physiologies. Any theory that purports to explain the existence of these two organisms must account for both the similarities and differences. Evolution would be falsified if it predicted that every organism was exactly the same, or if it predicted that every organism was completely different, because that isn’t what the real world looks like.

Go back to third grade, Casey. You are a very silly, ignorant fellow.

It’s a dog’s life

That last post was just too saccharine, so I have to bring you down. Balance! Balance in all things! So here’s your official downer for the day: a story about greyhound racing.

One thing about greyhounds: They aren’t likely to die of old age. When dogs turn 4 or 5 and are finished racing, she claims, “it’s more cost-efficient for trainers and owners to kill a dog than to house and feed it.”

Pro-racing folks balk at that claim, saying that today, most greyhounds are humanely retired, not killed. But in 2002, Alabama investigators found the bodies of thousands of dead greyhounds on the property of 68-year-old Robert Rhodes, a part-time security guard at a track in Pensacola. Rhodes admitted using a .22 caliber rifle to shoot more than 2,000 dogs from all over Florida during the 20 years he worked at the track. He was paid $10 per dog, which he said covered the cost of digging the holes across his 18-acre property. Investigators called the graveyard “a Dachau for dogs.”

Read the whole thing. Greyhounds are one of the most docile, friendly dog breeds, and they are routinely wrecked in a cruel sport for the jollies of callous gamblers. If dog fighting is a brutal ‘sport’ that is rightfully banned, I don’t understand why this abuse is allowed to persist.

Turnabout is fair play

Phil Senter has published the most deviously underhanded, sneaky, subtle undermining of the creationist position I’ve ever seen, and I applaud him for it. What he did was to take them seriously, something I could never do, and treat their various publications that ape the form of the scientific literature as if they actually were real science papers, and apply their methods consistently to an analysis of taxonomy. So on the one hand, it’s bizarre and disturbing to see the like of Ken Ham, Jerry Bergman, and Henry Morris get actual scientific citations, but on the other hand, seeing their claims refuted using their own touted methods is peculiarly satisfying.

Senter has published a paper in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology that takes their claims at face value and analyzes dinosaur morphology using their own methods. ‘Baraminologists’ have published a set of taxonomic tools that use as input a matrix of morphological characters for an array of animals, and then spits out numbers that tell whether they were similar enough to be related. You can guess what the motivation for that is: they want to claim that Noah didn’t have to carry representatives of every dinosaur species on the Ark, but only representatives of each ‘kind’, which then diversified rapidly after the big boat landed to generate all the different species found in the fossil record.

The problem for them is that Senter found that it works far too well. Using creationist techniques, all of the Dinosauria reduce to…eight kinds. That makes the boat haulage problem relatively even easier.

Here is the summary diagram, illustrating the derived creationist tree of common descent. Oops.

i-cf7aed20267bbf27bd8d0565d5df2681-creationisttree.jpeg
Summary of results of taxon correlation analyses across Dinosauria. Each boxed group of silhouettes indicates a group for which taxon correlation found within-group morphological continuity; for silhouette groups in different boxes, taxon correlation found morphological discontinuity between the groups. Dotted lines represent uncertainty as to whether morphological discontinuity is truly present. On the cladogram, triangles indicate paraphyletic groups.

At first, the results of the taxon correlation analyses appear to imply good news for the creationist world view, on several fronts. First, seven major dinosaurian groups (birdlike coelurosaurs, Tazoudasaurus + Eusauropoda, Stegosauria, Ankylosauridae, Neoceratopsia, Hadrosauridae and basal Hadrosauriformes) are separated from the rest of Dinosauria by morphological gaps (Fig. 15). Creationist inferences that variety within Eusauropoda (Morris, 1999) and Ceratopsidae (Ham, 2009) represent diversification within separately created kinds are congruent with these results. Second, each morphologically continuous group found by taxon correlation includes at least some herbivores. This is congruent with the creationist assertion that all carnivorous animals are descendants of originally herbivorous ancestors (Unfred, 1990; Gish, 1992; Ham, 1998, 2006, 2009; Larsen, 2001; McIntosh & Hodge, 2006). Third, although creationists have answered the problem of room on Noah’s ark for multiple pairs of gigantic dinosaurs by asserting that only about 50 ‘created kinds’ of dinosaurs existed (Ham, 1998, 2001, 2006, 2009; Morris, 1999), the problem is solved even better by the results of this study, in which only eight dinosaur ‘kinds’ are found.

Awww. I guess I’m going to have to become a creationist, now that the evidence shows that dinosaurs are related by common descent…oh, hey, wait. Isn’t that what evolution says? And isn’t that easier to accommodate within the idea that they did this over millions of years, rather than the freakishly unrealistic hyper-speciation within a few thousand years that the creationists insist on?

However, a second look reveals that these results are at odds with the creationist view. Whether there were eight dinosaur ‘kinds’ or 50, the diversity within each ‘kind’ is enormous. Acceptance that such diversity arose by natural means in only a few thousand years therefore stretches the imagination. The largest dinosaurian baramin recovered by this study includes Euparkeria, basal ornithodirans (Silesaurus and Marasuchus), basal saurischians, basal ornithischians, basal sauropodomorphs, basal thyreophorans, nodosaurid ankylosaurs, pachycephalosaurs, basal ceratopsians, basal ornithopods and all but the most birdlike theropods in an unbroken spectrum of morphological continuity. The creationist viewpoint allows for diversification within baramins, but the diversity within this morphologically continuous group is extreme. Also, the inclusion of the Middle Triassic non-dinosaurs Euparkeria and Marasuchus within the group is at odds with the creationist claim that fossil representatives of the predinosaurian, ancestral stock from which dinosaurs arose have never been found (DeYoung, 2000; Ham, 2006; Bergman, 2009).

So, effectively, these results, made using the creationists own tools, demonstrate a genetic relationship between a diverse group of animals that evolution predicted, and confronts young earth creationists with the problem of a kind of frantically prolific speciation that is unimaginably rapid. If species are that fluid and can change that rapidly, their own claims of fixity of species are patently wrong.

The final word:

The results of this study indicate that transitional fossils linking at least four major dinosaurian groups to the rest of Dinosauria are yet to be found. Possibly, some creationist authors will hail this finding as evidence of special creation for those four groups. However, such enthusiasm should be tempered by the finding here that the rest of Dinosauria–including basal members of all major lineages–are joined in a continuous morphological spectrum. This confirms the genetic relatedness of a very broad taxonomic collection of animals, as evolutionary theory predicts, ironically by means of a measure endorsed and used by creation science.

This is so wonderfully, evilly devious. Superficially, it seems to support creationist methods—but what it actually is is a grand reductio ad absurdam. Laugh wickedly at it now, but laugh even harder when you see creationists citing this paper in the future, as you know they will.

Senter P (2011) Using creation science to demonstrate evolution 2: morphological continuity within Dinosauria. J Evol Biol. doi: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2011.02349.x.

Stop Rupert Murdoch now

We already know how unethical and sleazy Murdoch-owned media are — and now, if you’re in the UK, you should be aware that he’s making a grab to take control of an even larger slice of the media pie.

Murdoch already controls more of our media than is legal in many countries – and is notorious for using his power to skew our politics. The official consultation ends this Friday — let’s tell the government we don’t want his media empire to control our largest commercial broadcaster. Send a message now — using your own words to make it stand out — calling on Jeremy Hunt and David Cameron to refuse Murdoch’s BSkyB deal until there’s a full Competition Commission review and a full public inquiry into phone hacking.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation already owns 40% of British newspapers and 40% of BSkyB, the UK’s largest commercial broadcaster. In the US, Australia and elsewhere this degree of media dominance would not be allowed. News Corporation has admitted responsibility for hacking the phones of politicians and celebrities, and now stands accused of listening to messages of a murdered 13 year old girl. But our government wants to give Murdoch power over half of our media, allowing him to then squeeze out his rivals one by one.

There’s much more information here, and also something you can do: a letter-writing campaign has begun to request the British government to block the monopolistic acquisition of the network BSkyB. Contribute!

No comments here, please

I think we’ve reached the saturation point, so comments are closed on this article. However, I do think I need to link to Rebecca Watson’s summary of her recent absurdist travails. Or if you’d rather, try reading Schrödinger’s Rapist and be enlightened.

This time, though, really, go over there if you feel the need to comment.

It is interesting that it is the jerk chauvinist skeptics and atheists who have turned Ms Watson into an angry feminist. It’s all your fault, bozos.

The Bergman live!

If you’re really interested, that Cretinist Jerry Bergman is going to be on some weird “Ask the Expert” show at Creation Conversations, a site I’m going to have to browse more often because it is one of the lamest creationist web sites I’ve seen yet — it’s all young earth creationism presented with the goofiest arguments, like that vestigial snake limbs disprove evolution.

One warning: in order to access everything on the site, they insist that you fill out a little questionnaire with your date of birth, home town, etc., and one of the questions is “Who created the world?” You don’t get to leave it blank; Allah, Jehovah, and No One are not acceptable answers, and it only let me through when I typed “Jesus”. Way to stack your audience with clown clones, guys! Since I was honest with all the other answers, unfortunately, I doubt that they’ll approve my application.

By the way, here’s how they describe Bergman:

Ask the Expert is all new with Jerry Bergman, PhD. He has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology on the college level for over thirty years.

I genuinely pity the students who’ve had him as an instructor. Thirty years of an incompetent dilettante miseducating students…it’s tragic.