Look at this NASA photo of Pulsar B1509. Yes, it looks like a hand.
It’s beautiful and fascinating.
Now look at the incredibly stupid poll the NY Daily News attached to it.
What do you think is captured on the recently released NASA photograph?
The hand of God 40%
A natural stellar formation 60%
My respect for humanity can only be restored if that 40% is reduced.
Mr B and Miz B sat upon their porch, watching the New Atheist parade go by.
It was quite a large parade, chaotic, disorganized, and enthusiastic, more Mardi Gras than Macy’s. There were clowns and jugglers, serious men with bullhorns making serious speeches, small groups chanting anti-clerical slogans, people just out dancing in the streets, and the occasional well-designed float flaunting an anti-religion or pro-science message. They even had a big red steam-powered Noise Machine. Scarlet A’s were waved on banners and flags and t-shirts. Some participants looked angry, most were just happy to be free and participating, but they were all turning out in large numbers. Huge crowds line the streets as well, watching — many were amused, some were confused, and a few looked aghast, shutting their eyes with their hands over their ears, and some waved their Bibles and roared their disapproval of the spectacle. And often, scattered individuals would leave the crowd of spectators and happily join in the parade.
Mr B and Miz B just sat in their rocking chairs, scowling.
“Well, I never,” said Miz B. “So disrespectful! So loud! What ever do they hope to accomplish with this kind of rude display?”
“I don’t know for sure, since I haven’t read any of this New Atheist nonsense myself,” said Mr B, “but I do know this: they’ve got atheism all wrong, and they’ve got religion all wrong. I’m an atheist, too, you know.”
“Oh, I know that, Mr B. But you’re a good atheist, the kind that respects religion, and would never raise this kind of ruckus.”
“Exactly! These rowdy hooligans and their uppity airs, thinking their ideas are all better than thousands of years of serious theological reasoning…they’re just cocky. Mark my words, atheism will never get anywhere with this kind of attitude.”
“Yes, Mr B. Think how much better this parade would be if Christians and atheists were marching arm in arm, affirming their respect for each other, and if only the atheists would stop crowing about how wrong religion is. It’s offensive, that’s what it is. Why do they have to keep picking on people’s beliefs?”
“I quite agree, Miz B. I’ve long espoused a positive atheism that simply ignores religion, and concentrates on its own private values. Why, in my day, atheists would just sit quietly at home, not making a fuss, living in a solitary state of quiet virtue. And it was good. None of this outrageously flamboyant “coming out” foofaraw. And we got things done! We were so much more atheist than these parvenus! We were thoughtful, and we respected theology!”
“How can they hope to discuss faith seriously if they don’t think it is a good thing, Mr B? How can they possibly win over people if they refuse to accept the ground rules set by religion?”
Miz B rocked in her chair a little more rapidly to demonstrate her willingness to work for the cause. In the distance, a cheer rises up from the crowd as four horsemen trot into view.
Mr B shook his fist. “Look at that! I’m an atheist, too, and I have wisdom to dispense! Why are all those people lining the street, when they could come up to our porch and have a quiet conversation with us? We won’t be rude! We won’t mock Christianity or Islam, we won’t challenge dogma at all! We’ll all get along!”
“I know, Mr B. There is no justice in the world. How about if I invite the vicar over for tea? He’s always so pleasant.”
“Fine idea, Miz B. We always get on so well with the vicars. Quite unlike these nasty little New Atheists.”
The parade, of course, keeps on moving along, and seems to be growing — no end is in sight.
I have been reading the latest sorrowful cluckings from Madeline Bunting and Julian Baggini, I’m afraid, and the image that keeps coming to mind is of two old prunes reassuring each other that their wizened ways are the only path to reason, all the while they sit alone, ignored. It would be amusing if it weren’t also a bit sad and pathetic.
Bunting, as usual, is shrilly defensive — she’s the kind who will, on one hand, claim to be defending Darwin by shielding him from ungodly atheists, while also quoting creationists approvingly. She’s no friend of reason or science, but only pretends to be so as a rhetorical tool to defend her real sacred cow: faith. She’s a bit deranged in that regard.
Baggini, though, is a more interesting case. He really is a serious atheist philosopher, and I think some of his ideas have merit, which makes it a particular shame that he has gone down this crazy road of finding common cause with a cuckoo like Bunting. In particular, my estimation of the fellow plummeted on reading his blanket dismissal of the New Atheism as “destructive”, in which the first thing he admits is that he has read none of the popular works of the movement!
The way he justifies this is to argue that he can judge on the basis of the New Atheism’s effects, which he claims bring atheists like him into disrepute. That is a remarkably insular sort of claim: does he truly believe that before Harris and Dawkins and Dennett and Hitchens wrote their books, we lived in a magical world where atheists were beloved scholars, respected by all, and that serious theologians were dealing only in reason and logic?
He’s entirely wrong. What the New Atheism has brought is more openness, and a surprising amount of atheist pride. Yes, it means we’re louder (Bunting talks of “foghorn voices” as if it were a bad thing), that we have a more diverse body of infidels that has to include many with whom we as individuals may disagree, and it gets more media attention and more popular enthusiasm. Rather than making me feel like I’ve drawn the enmity of the people, I think it’s great, and gives me real hope for the future—we are building a lively community of the godless that’s a bit less bloodless and doesn’t always smell of mothballs.
And guess what? Nothing in the New Atheist movement will prevent Julian Baggini from inviting the vicar over for afternoon tea in his quiet little house. Go ahead, Mr B. Nothing is stopping you from pursuing your goals.
Spring is in the air! Young hearts turn to thoughts of love, and romance flowers everywhere, even in the darkness of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. A young couple there, their union frowned upon by their families, eloped to marry anyway, a gesture I find wonderfully romantic and sweet. I’m a little biased — my own parents were discouraged from marrying by their families, and they too ran off to marry without permission (in liberal Idaho, in their case). I wouldn’t be here without youthful affection and passion!
Alas, no such happy result comes from a region poisoned by fanatical Islam. Mullahs seized the rebellious couple, issued a religious decree, and had them shot on the street in front of a mosque, symbol of their religion of peace.
I think the true symbol of their religion should be a pair of bloody corpses, dreams dead, hopes destroyed, all joy crushed.
Spring will still come and the poppies will blossom, and the air will warm and the sun will shine—but where is the meaning of it all when minds are shackled and love is shunned, when happiness is replaced with regimented dogmatism? A season of rebirth should be accompanied by an expansion of ideas and feelings and human connections, not repression. There can be no springtime for the Taliban, except as a series of dates on a calendar.
Well, almost. A panel of judges has ruled Franken the winner over Coleman, finally, declaring the election fair and complete. That ought to finish it, but Coleman does have the option to appeal…and obnoxious ass that he is, you know he will, futilely dragging out the whole process to his inevitable final defeat.
Oh, wait — I got the headline backwards. The real story is that a mentally disturbed, fanatical Christian/creationist and misogynist, went nuts, killed a young woman on a community college campus, and then killed himself. It’s a tragedy, but not at all exceptional, I’m afraid — the man was delusional and depressed, apparently frustrated that women weren’t obedient to him, and he decided to erupt into hateful violence.
The disturbing twist this time, though, is that the killer was a youtuber — and a big fan of VenomFangX, the infamously vapid creationist. You can see some of his pre-suicidal rants preserved for posterity, and they will make you wonder why he wasn’t getting psychiatric help. And yes, the lunatic does literally accuse atheists of being non-human and evil, but that doesn’t seem to have been the trigger for his break from reality…that seems to have stemmed more from his proprietary feelings towards women.
It’s an article about yet another Christian who was once an atheist, telling us how awful and unfulfilling life was until he found Jebus. The guy is a fool, and just to spice it up, they threw in…a poll! A poll that needs fixing!
Should creationism have a place in the curriculum?
54% are saying yes
46% are saying no
So fix it already. Go ahead and leave a comment there, too, although the comments so far all seem to be going our way anyway.
My first column in the Guardian science blog will be coming out soon, and it’s about a recent discovery that I found very exciting…but that some people may find strange and uninteresting. It’s all about the identification of nodal in snails.
Why should we care? Well, nodal is a rather important — it’s a gene involved in the specification of left/right asymmetry in us chordates. You’re internally asymmetric in some important ways, with, for instance, a heart that is larger on the left than on the right. This is essential for robust physiological function — you’d be dead if you were internally symmetrical. It’s also consistent, with a few rare exceptions, that everyone has a stronger left ventricle than right. The way this is set up is by the activation of the cell signaling gene nodal on one side, the left. Nodal then activates other genes (like Pitx2) farther downstream, that leads to a bias in how development proceeds on the left vs. the right.
In us mammals, the way this asymmetry in gene expression seems to hinge on the way cilia rotate to set up a net leftward flow of extraembryonic fluids. This flow activates sensors on the left rather than the right, that upregulate nodal expression. So nodal is central to differential gene expression on left vs. right sides.
What about snails? Snails are cool because their asymmetries are just hanging out there visibly, easy to see without taking a scalpel to their torsos (there are also internal asymmetries that we’d need to do a dissection to see, but the external markers are easier). The assymetries also appear very early in the embryo, in a process called spiral cleavage, and in the adult, they are obvious in the handedness of shell coiling. We can see shells with either a left-handed or right-handed spiral.
Until now, the only organisms thought to use nodal in setting up left/right asymmetries were us deuterostomes — chordates and echinoderms. In the other big (all right, bigger) branch of the animals, the protostomes, nodal seemed to be lacking. Little jellies, the cnidaria, didn’t have it, and one could argue that with radial symmetry it isn’t useful. The ecdysozoans, animals like insects and crustaceans and nematodes, which do show asymmetries, don’t use nodal for that function. This suggests that maybe nodal was a deuterostome innovation, something that was not used in setting up left and right in the last common ancestor of us animals.
That’s why this is interesting news. If a major protostome group, the lophotrochozoa (which includes the snails) use nodal to set up left and right, that implies that the ecdysozoans are the odd group — they secondarily lost nodal function. That would suggest then that our last common ancestor, a distant pre-Cambrian worm, used this molecule in the same way.
Look in the very early mollusc embryo, and there’s nodal (in red, below) switched on in one or a few cells on one side of the embryo, the right. It’s asymmetrical gene expression!
Seeing it expressed is tantalizing, but the next question is whether it actually does anything in these embryos. The test is to interfere with the nodal-Pitx2 pathway and see if the asymmetry goes away…and it does, in a dramatic way. There is a chemical inhibitor called SB-431542 that disrupts this pathway, and exposing embryos to it does interesting things to the formation of the shell. In the photos below, the animal on the left is a control, and what you’re seeing is a coiled shell (opening to the right). The other two views are of an animal treated with SB-431542…and look! Its shell doesn’t have either a left- or right-handed twist, and instead extends as a straight tube.
What this all means is that we’ve got a slightly better picture of what genes were present in the ancestral bilaterian animal. It probably had both nodal and Pitx2, and used them to build up handedness specializations. Grande and Patel spell this out:
Although Pitx orthologues have also been identified in non-deuterostomes such as Drosophila melanogaster and
Caenorhabditis elegans, in these species Pitx has not been reported in
asymmetrical expression patterns. Our results suggest that asymmetrical expression of Pitx might be an ancestral feature of the bilaterians.
Furthermore, our data suggest that nodal was present in the common
ancestor of all bilaterians and that it too may have been expressed
asymmetrically. Various lines of evidence indicate that the last common ancestor of all snails had a dextral body. If this is true, then our
data would suggest that this animal expressed both nodal and Pitx on
the right side. Combined with the fact that nodal and Pitx are also
expressed on the right side in sea urchins, this raises the possibility
that the bilaterian ancestor had left-right asymmetry controlled by
nodal and Pitx expressed on the right side of the body. Although
independent co-option is always a possibility, the hypotheses we present can be tested by examining nodal and Pitx expression and function in a variety of additional invertebrates.
It’s also, of course, more evidence for the unity of life. We are related to molluscs, and share key genes between us.
Grande C, Patel NH (2009) Nodal signalling is involved in left-right asymmetry in snails. Nature 457(7232):1007-11.
That is the kind of important question we ponder all the time, and in a demonstration of the superiority of empirical data over philosophizing, here is a video to show the answer.
I hated doing this, but it has become necessary. You now have to register with an off-site authentication service in order to leave a comment here. It’s not hard; just follow the links at the Typekey page, and it should sail through and let you comment freely afterwards. (In theory, you should also be able to use OpenID authorization — I’ve toggled it on in the Pharyngula master control panel, let me know if it works).
In other news, you are a cruel bunch, and the overall response to my Pilate-like offer to turn the responsibility of banning Alan Clarke over to you was that most of you declined to shut him down, the reaction that he himself argued would be most civil. He has a temporary reprieve now, although if he keeps whining that goddidit I may smite him anyway. The argument most often given for sparing him is that he is a really good training dummy — he makes truly stupid arguments that inspire informative rebuttals — so I expect you to continue to abuse him in that tradition.
