The Florida Senate Judiciary committee is meeting just a few hours from now to conder the fate of SB2692, the bill that would promote the teaching of creationism in science classes in that state. Call the members of the committee and tell them that you strongly oppose SB2692!
The New York City Skeptics sent me a t-shirt today, and at last I have the candidate I want.
I know, I know, you’re all thinking that there’s one little problem with the guy — he’s British.* I’m sure we can sneak a little amendment through real fast — we’ll tell everyone it’s to let Schwarzenegger run, and do a quick last minute swap.
*He’s also dead, but he’ll still do a better job than the clown in office right now.
By participating in popular entertainment. Richard Dawkins is going to appear on Dr Who!. I know one fan of both who’s going to be pleased.
I hope they also got a guest appearance by Lalla Ward…
The governor of Illinois has been playing some games with state money, shuffling a million dollars to benefit a Baptist church, and an atheist dared to testify to the legislature against this. The response from one legislator was unsurprising: she shrieked at the atheist to get out.
Rep. Monique Davis (D-Chicago) interrupted atheist activist Rob Sherman during his testimony Wednesday afternoon before the House State Government Administration Committee in Springfield and told him, “What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous . . . it’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists!
“This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God,” Davis said. “Get out of that seat . . . You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.”
Disbelief in religion means you have “no right” to speak to members of government? Wow. And note the “D” after her name — she’s a member of the party most (but definitely not all!) American atheists lean towards.
There’s more on this exchange: it looks like Sherman kept his cool, while Davis spewed her hate.
Chicago atheists, you know what to do: next election, campaign against Monique Davis. Get someone who is not a raving nutbag to run. Right now, her district needs to flood her mailbox with letters of protest. You can find her contact information online; let her know that you do not appreciate her efforts to disenfranchise and discriminate against you.
The new generation of creationists has been doing something rather remarkable. Flaming anti-scientific religious nutcases like Wells and Dembski have been diligently going to real universities, not the usual hokey bible colleges, and working hard to get legitimate degrees in actual fields of science and math to get themselves a superficial veneer of credibility. It’s basically nothing but collecting paper credentials, though, since they don’t actually learn anything and never do anything with the knowledge they should have acquired, other than use it to razzle-dazzle the rubes.
One other example is Paul Nelson, and today is the anniversary of an infamous interaction. You see, Nelson likes to flaunt the pretense of being knowledgeable about developmental biology. Several years ago, he invented this mysterious metric called “ontogenetic depth” that he claimed to be measuring, and which he claimed to have used as evidence that the Cambrian fauna did not evolve. He even dragged this nonsense to professional meetings where he was ignored, except by vicious anti-creationists. I harshly criticized the entire vacuous notion. (I also expressed sympathy for the poor graduate student Nelson had lured into this waste of effort…it was Marcus Ross, remember him?)
He said he’d write up a technical summary that would explain exactly what ontogenetic depth was and how it was measured. He gave us a whole series of dates by which he’d have this wonderful summary. Every one of those dates sailed by without a word. And ever since we have commemorated Paul Nelson Day on 7 April, one of the dates in 2004 that he promised us an explanation. Here’s my anniversary timeline from last year.
I was just reminded that last year at this time I announced an anniversary. In March of 2004, I critiqued this mysterious abstraction called “ontogenetic depth” that Paul Nelson, the ID creationist, proposed as a measure of developmental and evolutionary complexity, and that he was using as a pseudoscientific rationale against evolution. Unfortunately, he never explained how “ontogenetic depth” was calculated or how it was measured (perhaps he was inspired by Dembski’s “specified complexity”, another magic number that can be farted out by creationists but cannot be calculated). Nelson responded to my criticisms with a promise.
On 29 March 2004, he promised to post an explanation “tomorrow”.
On 7 April 2004, he told us “tomorrow”.
On 26 April 2004, he told us he was too busy.
On 13 January 2005, he told us to read a paper by R Azevedo instead. I rather doubt that Ricardo supports Intelligent Design creationism, or thinks his work contributes to it.
Ever since, silence.
This year he is apparently off in Brazil, proselytizing his lies and fake science to the people there, so I’m assuming he won’t get around to explaining his magic metric tomorrow, either. Isn’t it amazing how creationists can make stuff up and get a career speaking at exotic places all around the world?
Oh, and get a day named after them! In his honor, we should all make it a point to ask people “How do you know that?” today, and the ones who actually can explain themselves competently will be complimented by being told that they’re no Paul Nelson.
We’ll celebrate it again next year, I’m sure.
One of the serious shortcomings of Intelligent Design is that it does nothing to provide any new or productive insights into the workings of biology. ID proponents seem to be at least vaguely aware of this failure, in that they do frequently claim to be thinking about working on a preliminary, tentative approach towards the beginnings of a potential research program (my paraphrase), but most of the effort has been directed towards political and legal enforcement of their ideas, rather than actually testing those ideas. One advantage of pursuing only legalisms is that they don’t give scientists anything to grapple. Invariably, when ID proponents do dip their toes in the scientific waters, they end up getting eaten by the sharks that lurk there.
One example: Paul Nelson, of the Discovery Institute, has been peddling a peculiar idea he calls “ontogenetic depth” as a scientific concept that emerges from Intelligent Design. To his credit, he has been presenting this idea in legitimate science venues, at the Geological Society of America and Society for Developmental Biology meetings. Note that getting on the program at these meetings is not subject to peer-review, so it is not automatically a recognition of merit that this work has been presented publicly. It is a good sign that Nelson is willing to expose his work to criticism, though.
I’m going to give it some criticism here. “Ontogenetic depth” is a developmental idea, and I’m a developmental biologist. Today I also get to play shark.
[Since I had to fly away early this morning and missed all these talks, I had to rely on regular commenter DanioPhD to fill in the gaps … so here’s her summary:]
This morning’s final series of talks each focused on a different phylum, but the unifying theme was one of bridging the processes of microevolution and macroevolution. The first talk after breakfast (and a long night of Scotch-drinkin’ and story-swappin’ prior to that) was Bernie Degnan of the University of Queensland. He summarized his work on Amphimedon queenslandica, a sponge species developed as a model of a representative primitive metazoan. Sponges diverged from the metazoan lineage ca. 700 MYA and possess the most minimalist metazoan body plan–no nervous system, muscles, nor any discernible tissues in the adult body architecture. Their embryos, however, feature robust anterioposterior patterning, distinct cell types organized into tissues, and cell morphogenesis typical of more complex metazoans. These embryonic characteristics are achieved by a regulatory network of genes, which, while inactive in the adult sponge, strongly support the presence of similar molecules in the ancestral metazoan genome. A few million years after the divergence of porifera, metazoans were able to co-opt these molecular toolkits to build the diverse, molecularly and morphologically distinct tissues common to all bilaterians. PZ has previously written up one such sponge tale here describing the molecular precursors to a nervous system in the sponge genome. Precursors to pretty much every other developmental ‘big gun’, e.g, Hox genes, Pax genes, Wnts, Hedgehog, etc. are also present as a basic prototype, in the Amphimedon genome.
You know, I caught a plane at 5:20am this morning, had a long flight across the country followed by a 3 hour drive to get home, so I’m not exactly feeling pleasantly conducive to continuing the latest sanctimonious whine-fests from some of the people who share a server with me. I have been avoiding the various framing flare-ups around here, despite the fact that everyone of them seems to drag my name into the mix.
We appreciate your concern, it is noted and stupid.
I will defer to Greg and Russell and let them speak for me, since at this point, I really don’t give a damn about the issue. I will say this: if you think your role is to hector me about being someone else, you’re a clueless twit.
I am not Paul Kurtz. I am not Eugenie Scott. I am not Richard Dawkins. I am not your wonderful third grade teacher or the boy scout who helps little old ladies across the street, and I am not Jesus nor am I Satan. I’m me, and no one else, and I expect everyone else to be themselves. I am not practicing “identity politics”, since the only identity I have is my individuality and if there’s anything I want everyone to do it is to be able to be fierce and outspoken and say what they think. Or, as some of you obviously prefer, you can be as tepid and craven and milquetoastish as you want, and you can set your stars on being someone else and inoffensively following the crowd to your heart’s content.
But get over yourselves. That’s not my road, and I’m not following your directions, especially when they’re so goddamned boring and derivative.
It was nothing but gray skies and intermittent rain while I was there. It was so beautiful … it felt like home. It was also good seeing my old mentors from grad school days, Chuck Kimmel and John Postlethwait.
Patrick Phillips played this video on the big screen. In my presence. I thought about hiding under a table.
The wackaloons of the Oregon Right to Life group were meeting in the same hotel with us. They should have snuck into our talks and seen all the pretty embryos we were looking at. Or maybe some of us should have snuck into their sessions, so there’d be at least a few people in the room who know something about embryology.
It was a fairly small meeting, about 100 people. That’s the way I like them — I actually got to meet some new faces.
The most horrifying story: Jerry Coyne mentioned that people had written in to say that Hopi Hoekstra did not deserve tenure after publication of the now infamous Hoekstra and Coyne paper, which was critical of evo-devo. That was unbelievable. I didn’t agree with everything in the paper, but then 1) I don’t agree with everything in any paper, and 2) it was useful, productive criticism.
I really like this IGERT program. Sometimes, the granting agencies get a great idea.
I am very, very tired, but it’s a good tired.
