Poll on gay marriage—not on our supreme court case, but in New Zealand

Wait, it’s our Supreme Court that is considering arguments on gay marriage. I guess New Zealanders can also consider it an important issue, but why are they getting is so wrong?

Which of the following best fits your view about marriage law?

It should remain only between a man and a woman. 56%
It should be changed to allow it between same sex couples. 39%
I don’t know/I don’t care. 5%

You know, in ten years people are going to be wondering what the heck was wrong with all the people opposing civil rights.

The argument from eyelid development

This is a new one for me. Earlier today I was summoned on Twitter to address an assertion by a creationist, @jarrydtrokis. I was slightly boggled.

He was baffled by eyelid development. It seems he thinks it requires…intelligent design!.

… Here’s one for you to ponder :) Eye lids in the womb… How are they formed? #IntelligentDesign?

Wait, what? What’s mystifying about eyelid formation?

The section of skin in the middle dies… How does it know to do that? And in a perfectly straight line???

Oh. It forms a straight line. Whoa. And he claims to have done research to get the answer.

The research I’ve done shows the scientists are at a loss for an explanation….

Gosh. I can do research, too. It’s easy to explain, with pictures even.

The eyelids separate in a straight seam because of how they got that way. The eyelids form by expansion of two epithelial sheets from above and below that meet in the middle. When you see how the eyelids develop, it’s easy to see how they separate in a straight line later. This is a series of images over the course of about a day in mouse development. In the first, you can see the eye sans eyelid, but ringed by epithelia. In the second, you can see that epithelium growing, expanding in a sheet over the eye. In the third, the sheet is beginning to close in a line over the middle, and in the fourth it has completely closed, but leaving a seam or scar in a straight line across it.

mouse_eyelid_sem

Wait, you say inquisitively, I’d like a closer look at that seam. Can you show me what is going on postnatally, as the eyelids separate? Sure can.

mouse_eyelid_tem

The first panel is 5 days postnatal in the mouse; the eyelids are still fused. But you can see a difference in the histology of the junctional region (J), and a depression at the arrowhead (you can also see the layers of keratin there). There’s something different in this area.

In the second panel, 10 days postnatally, the depression at the junctional region is deepening and you can see a stratum granulosum (SG) at the seam, while you can also see hair follicles (HF) forming in the adjacent portions of the lid.

The third and fourth panels are at 12 days, and now the keratin layers have extended into the depression from both the inside and outside, completing the separation of the two lids.

Now @jarrydtrokis might be tempted to say that Jesus did the separating, but that’s only true if Jesus is a polypeptide called epidermal growth factor, or EGF. EGF is a molecule that triggers growth and differentiation of keratinocytes, and it turns out that if you treat baby mice with EGF it accelerates the rate of eyelid separation.

I’m sorry, @jarrydtrokis, but your argument from ignorance wasn’t very persuasive, and your talents at ‘research’ are rather pathetic, since the paper describing all that was trivial to find. But then, isn’t this always the case with creationists? There are none so blind as those who will not see.



Findlater GS, McDougall RD, Kaufman MH (1993) Eyelid development, fusion and subsequent reopening in the mouse. J Anat. 183(1):121-9.

Gizmodo fails again

There’s a whole lot wrong with this Gizmodo piece on the proposed Palen Solar Electric Generating System. In fact, the fuckup per sentence ratio is higher than in any piece I’ve seen this month outside of Mercola.com. The Solar Energy Zone “Initiative” wasn’t “signed into law” by Obama — it was a record of decision issued by the Interior Department on an agency program as the culmination of an environmental assessment, rather than a bill passed by Congress and sent to the President’s desk. (Which means Obama didn’t sign it and it’s not a law.) Palen will very likely not start construction this year: the California Energy Commission is casting a sober eye at contractor BrightSource’s technology on its proposed Hidden Hills project, which is much closer to approval. The towers at Hidden Hills will be just as tall as those at Palen, if either plant ever gets built, and Hidden Hills will likely go up first, meaning that the Gizmodo headline is wrong.

Like I said: many, many errors. But this one’s the worst, and it’s the very first paragraph:

The US government holds vast tracts of public lands—more than a 654 million acres, in fact—for public use such as national parks as well as for military use like test ranges and proving grounds. But most of the time, much of that land is left to rot when it could be producing clean solar energy for our ever-increasing power needs.

“Left to rot.”

By way of comparison

“Left to rot.”

ashford

“Left to rot.”

marching

What is it with some of these tech writers? Any landscape that doesn’t look like fucking Trantor is useless to them, sounds like.

“Mad Men” isn’t a documentary, is it?

I really don’t get it. Somehow, a pair of ads for Ford were ‘leaked’, and Ford (or rather, the ad agency representing Ford) has hastily apologized.

We deeply regret the publishing of posters that were distasteful and contrary to the standards of professionalism and decency within WPP Group. These were never intended for paid publication and should never have been created, let alone uploaded to the internet. This was the result of individuals acting without proper oversight and appropriate actions have been taken within the agency where they work to deal with the situation.

Here’s one of the ads.

silvio-berlusconi-ford-ad

So the car has a large trunk, and the selling point of the ad is that Silvio Berlusconi can haul around a trio of bound/gagged women in it? WHAT?. They were “never intended for paid publication”…but what were they intended for? I am totally baffled. Was Ford contemplating an ad campaign to market this specific car to bondage fanatics and serial killers?

None of this makes sense. It should have been killed when someone first sketched it out in pencil…yet there they are, two professionally done, well polished images. I’m trying to imagine under what conditions this misbegotten mess would be considered a viable example of a serious campaign to sell a mass-market vehicle, and totally failing.

So…has the agency been dismissed for flaming stupidity and gross incompetence yet?

What I taught today: those oddball critters, the vertebrates

We’ve been talking about flies nonstop for the last month — it’s been nothing but developmental genetics and epistasis and gene regulation in weird ol’ Drosophila — so I’m changing things up a bit, starting today. We talked about vertebrates in a general way, giving an overview of major landmarks in embryology, and a little historical perspective.

We take a very bottom-up approach to studying fly development: typically, fly freaks start with genes, modifying and mutating them and then looking at phenotype. Historically, vertebrate embryology goes the other way, starting with variations in the phenotype and inferring mechanisms (this has been changing for the last decade or two; we often start with a gene, sometimes from a fly, and use that as a probe to hook into the genetic mechanisms driving developmental processes). What that means is the 19th and early 20th century literature on embryology is often comparative morphology, looking at different species or different stages and trying to extract the commonalities or differences, or it’s experimental morphology, making modifications (usually not genetic) to the embryo and asking what happens next. Genes were not hot topics of discussion until the last half of the 20th century, and even then it took a few decades for the tools to percolate into the developmental biologists’ armory.

And much of 19th century embryology went lurching down a dead end. We talked about Haeckel, the grand sidetracker of the age. There was a deep desire to integrate development and evolution, but they lacked the necessary bridge of genetics, so Haeckel borrowed one, his theory of ontogenetic recapitulation. A theory that quickly went down in flames in the scientific community (jebus, Karl Ernst von Baer had eviscerated it 50 years before Haeckel resurrected it). We actually spent a fair amount of class time going over arguments for and against, and modern interpretations of phylotypy — it isn’t recapitulation, it’s convergence on a conserved network of global spatial genes that define the rough outlines of the vertebrate body plan.

Finally, I gave them a whirlwind tour of basic developmental stages of a few common vertebrate models: frog, fish, chick, and mouse. We’re going to talk quite a bit about early axis specification events in vertebrates (next week), and gastrulation (probably the week after), so I had to introduce them to the essential terminology and events. I think they can see the fundamental morphological events now — next, β-catenin and nodal and Nieuwkoop centers and all that fun stuff!

(Today’s slides (pdf))

Frans de Waal disappoints me

It’s just sad. He has a long article in Salon making the same tired complaints every religious dingbat throws around.

Militant atheism has become a religion

Prominent non-believers have become as dogmatic as those they deride — and become rich on the lecture circuit

I know, the title and subtitle were probably written by an editor, but they do actually reflect the content. It’s really nothing but de Waal complaining that atheists are just as dogmatic as religious fundamentalists, and throwing about half-baked theories about why this is so.

Why are the “neo-atheists” of today so obsessed with God’s nonexistence that they go on media rampages, wear T-shirts proclaiming their absence of belief, or call for a militant atheism?

What exactly is a “media rampage”? He doesn’t give any examples, nor can I think of any. Is putting up a billboard a “rampage” now? Perhaps appearing on a talk show and disagreeing with the more numerous and more vocal theists is now rampaging. And what about T-shirts is so shocking? I have T-shirts proclaiming m
affection for squid, Pink Floyd, hot sauce, and various universities. Are they religions now, too?

What does atheism have to offer that’s worth fighting for?

When high-ranking politicians declare that global climate change because the Bible says it can’t happen; when lobbyists are constantly attacking the educational system to eradicate any mention of that faith-defying evolution stuff; when screaming true believers insist that every fertilized egg has a soul and therefore women’s reproductive choices must be blocked…de Waal has to ask?

And then there’s his inane hypothesis.

It [reducing the difference between vocal athiests and quiet ones is an issue of privacy] may one day help to test my thesis that activist atheism reflects trauma. The stricter one’s religious background, the greater the need to go against it and to replace old securities with new ones.

Uh, Dawkins and Hitchens: brought up Anglican. Weak tea right there. Harris: brought up in a secular home with a Jewish mother and Quaker father. I don’t know Dennett’s religious background; there’s no hint of a strict faith upbringing, though. I know I’m not one of the luminaries de Waal is thinking of, but I come from a very liberal Lutheran background…tea not much stronger than good ol’ etiolated Anglicanism.

de Waal: brought up Catholic.

Well, gosh, it sure didn’t take much effort to blow up that dumbass idea.

I will say one thing, though: he doesn’t actual make the claim that atheists are getting rich on the lecture circuit. Maybe the editor who slapped that on there should get fact-checked?

As one of those nasty atheists who does a fair bit of lecture touring, I have to mention that I must be doing it all wrong — all rumors to the contrary, I don’t really make any money doing it, and individual places that give me a bit of an honorarium are actually just subsidizing those places where my expenses put me at a small loss. Some of the big names do better because lecture tours are opportunities to leverage book sales, and having a popular book is a way to justify larger lecture fees…but no, claiming that one gets rich on the lecture circuit is really putting the cart before the horse.

And even those who do well on lecture fees aren’t really getting rich. Frans de Waal should know this, as a popular scientist and author: is he making a fortune on his reputation? Is he doing even a tenth as well as, say, an investment banker? I suspect lecture fees are a comfortable bonus, but not a recipe for great wealth. And shall we accuse him of getting rich off of his apes?

Speaking of terribly rude women…

Now Amina has disappeared.

The 19 year old Tunisian Amina who posted a topless photo of herself with the slogan “my body belongs to me, and is not the source of anyone’s honour” has disappeared. Most likely her family have kidnapped her and taken her to an unknown location, (earlier reports mentioned a psychiatric hospital). What’s clear is that they have removed all forms of communication from her so that she can no longer be reached.

Let’s have a discussion now about how impolitely exposing one’s breasts is a disproportionate response to the dudebros. She should have just had a quiet discussion in private with her imam.