EXPELLED!

There is a rich, deep kind of irony that must be shared. I’m blogging this from the Apple store in the Mall of America, because I’m too amused to want to wait until I get back to my hotel room.

I went to attend a screening of the creationist propaganda movie, Expelled, a few minutes ago. Well, I tried … but I was Expelled! It was kind of weird — I was standing in line, hadn’t even gotten to the point where I had to sign in and show ID, and a policeman pulled me out of line and told me I could not go in. I asked why, of course, and he said that a producer of the film had specifically instructed him that I was not to be allowed to attend. The officer also told me that if I tried to go in, I would be arrested. I assured him that I wasn’t going to cause any trouble.

I went back to my family and talked with them for a while, and then the officer came back with a theater manager, and I was told that not only wasn’t I allowed in, but I had to leave the premises immediately. Like right that instant.

I complied.

I’m still laughing though. You don’t know how hilarious this is. Not only is it the extreme hypocrisy of being expelled from their Expelled movie, but there’s another layer of amusement. Deep, belly laugh funny. Yeah, I’d be rolling around on the floor right now, if I weren’t so dang dignified.

You see … well, have you ever heard of a sabot? It’s a kind of sleeve or lightweight carrier used to surround a piece of munition fired from a gun. It isn’t the actually load intended to strike the target, but may even be discarded as it leaves the barrel.

I’m a kind of sabot right now.

They singled me out and evicted me, but they didn’t notice my guest. They let him go in escorted by my wife and daughter. I guess they didn’t recognize him. My guest was …

Richard Dawkins.

He’s in the theater right now, watching their movie.

Tell me, are you laughing as hard as I am?

Department of “Duh!”

This is what health departments are reduced to in the face of lunacy. Health officials in the Philippines have issued a warning to people taking part in Easter crucifixion rituals.

The health department has strongly advised penitents to check the condition of the whips they plan to use to lash their backs, the Manila Times newspaper reports.

Real nails are used in the re-enactments
They want people to have what they call “well-maintained” whips.

In the hot and dusty atmosphere, officials warn, using unhygienic whips to make deep cuts in the body could lead to tetanus and other infections.

And they advise that the nails used to fix people to crosses must be properly disinfected first. Often people soak the nails in alcohol throughout the year.

People are flagellating themselves and nailing themselves to sticks in a public spectacle of stupidity, and health officials are warning them to get a tetanus shot? How about “Stop doing that,” instead, or alternatively, “Please use rusty nails and whips clotted with rotting gore so that you’ll die sooner and we won’t have to worry about you idiots anymore”?

The godless are gathering

The family and I are about to head out to the 34th Annual National Conference of American Atheists — maybe we’ll see you there.

If you can’t make it, or you just don’t like mobs of amoral atheists, you can join a few of us squid-lovin’ science-worshipping Pharynguloids on Saturday night (here’s the facebook invitation). People will be meeting at:

Date: Saturday, March 22, 2008
Time: 8:00pm – 11:00pm
Location: The Local
Street: Nicollet Mall and 10th Street
City/Town: Minneapolis, MN

I’m going to try to make it, violating the tradition that these PharynguFests lack me, but I can’t make any promises — I’ve got other meeting stuff scheduled, and I might be late. You don’t need me to drink beer and have fun, anyway!

Eppur si muove!

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

The Harvard multimedia team that put together that pretty video of the Inner Life of the Cell has a whole collection of videos online (including Inner Life with a good narration.) Go watch the one titled F1-F0 ATPase; it’s a beautiful example of a highly efficient molecular motor, and it’s the kind of thing the creationists go ga-ga over. It’s complex, and it does the same rotary motion that the bacterial flagellum does; it has a little turbine in the membrane, a stream of protons drives rotation of an axle, and the movement of that axle drives conformation changes in the surrounding protein that promote the synthesis of ATP. It’s a molecular machine all right. Makes a fellow wonder if possibly it’s “irreducible”, doesn’t it?

Well, it’s not. It can be broken down further and it still retain that rotary motion.

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You can’t wish the conflict away

Uh-oh. Chris Mooney has roused the wrath of both Brian and ERV with his argument that people on the science side should avoid reacting to the anti-science ranters, because we’re just promoting their lies for them.

I sort of agree — it is true that we can’t criticize these loons without simultaneously bringing them to wider attention. But that’s the operational dynamic, and if Chris could come up with a strategy to educate and rebut that doesn’t actually involve mentioning the stupid things people say, I’d like to hear it. I don’t think it exists.

We do have a real problem. Science is providing a perspective that does not support tradition, that often reveals an uncomfortable reality like global warming or our familial relationship with worms, and it’s difficult — there are no simple, intuitive paths to understanding the details of our disciplines. Religion, creationism, climate skeptics, the whole spectrum of ideologies that deny reality are easy: they are selling comfortable lies, the lies your parents and grandparents and whole darn family hold, the lies that make promises that the whole universe likes you personally and will help you out, the lies that require no intellectual engagement to support. You don’t even need to be able to read a bible, as long as you can thump it.

And now we’re supposed to ignore those easy liars, and simply set up our own little science clubhouse, make it look all spiffy and beautiful and lively, and wait for the hoi polloi to rush to join our side. Get real. Reality and hard work vs. wishful thinking and pretty reassurances? Who do you think will win the membership drive?

We must counter the superficial advantages of the anti-science side by directly countering their claims. Look at it this way: if one side is promising a million dollars for free, and my side is promising an opportunity for hard work, I don’t win by announcing that I don’t have a million dollars, but I do have some tools. What I have to do is show that they don’t have a million dollars — I have to go straight for the dishonest advertising practices of my competition and expose them.

This is the flaw in Chris’s proposal. It allows falsehood and error to stand unquestioned. That won’t work. It’s how we got to the situation we’re in today — by allowing generations of people to dwell in their hothouses of dishonesty, never intruding, never confronting. We’re not going to succeed by continuing a policy of neglecting the fraudulent hucksters.

That was also a theme of Nisbet’s awful AAAS panel, an advocacy of cowardice, either avoiding all conflict or trying to coopt the grifter’s ways. That’s a disaster in the making. Those of us who are already on the side of science can see the beauty in the natural world and we can too easily delude ourselves into believing that everyone else will, too … but it’s not true. We are battling people who promise their adherents immortality in paradise, a world of perfect plenty that will never fail, and while there may be horrible diseases out there, they only strike immoral wicked sinners. If there were any truth to those promises, heck, I‘d be joining them.

The conflict is necessary, as is bringing the battle right to them and confronting them with their failures. You don’t persuade people to shun liars by letting the lies pass.

Expelled will have some competition

Prepare yourself for some neutronium-density stupid, and do not watch this video clip if self-confident, blithering idiots make you want to slap someone. It’s the trailer for a new movie, The Moses Code, “the most powerful manifestation tool in the history of the world”.

If you must know but don’t want to be enlightened by a series of pompous twits, this is from some guy who made a movie about “the secret” and now wants to milk money from more suckers. A “manifestation tool” is an entirely imaginary phenomenon in which people just wish for things, and by a nonsensical “Law of Attraction,” it will just appear in their lives.

In this case, it’s New Age inanity wed to Old Age superstition.

I can think of one double-feature, though, that would have the combined power to rip out people’s brains and turn them into mindless zombies.

Reproductive history writ in the genome

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

Fossils are cool, but some of us are interested in processes and structures that don’t fossilize well. For instance, if you want to know more about the evolution of mammalian reproduction, you’d best not pin your hopes on the discovery of a series of fossilized placentas, or fossilized mammary glands … and although a few fossilized invertebrate embryos have been discovered, their preservation relied on conditions not found inside the rotting gut cavity of dead pregnant mammals.

You’d think this would mean we’re right out of luck, but as it turns out, we have a place to turn to, a different kind of fossil. These are fossil genes, relics of our ancient past, and they are found by digging in the debris of our genomes. By comparing the sequences of genes of known function in different lineages, we can get a measure of divergence times … and in the case of some genes which have discrete functions, we can even plot the times of origin or loss of those particular functions in the organism’s history.

Here’s one example. We don’t have any fossilized placentas, but we know that there was an important transition in the mammalian lineage: we had to have shifted from producing eggs in which yolk was the primary source of embryonic nutrition to a state where the embryo acquired its nutrition from a direct interface with maternal circulation, the placenta. We modern mammals don’t need yolk at all … but could there be vestiges of yolk proteins still left buried in our genome? The answer, which you already know since I’m writing this, is yes.

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Even in death, he sets an example for us all

For everyone who complained that I didn’t say anything nice about Arthur C. Clarke in yesterday’s very brief note (I can’t help it, I don’t believe in burying my opinions along with the corpse), here’s some information that made my opinion of Clarke shoot up a couple more notches:

The famed science fiction writer, who once denigrated religion as “a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species,” left written instructions that his funeral be completely secular, according to his aides.

“Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral,” he wrote.

I’d say the same thing about my funeral, with the added stipulation that if anyone tries to preach, at word one I want my friends and family to rise up and carry the jerk bodily out the door, and throw him or her into the street.

Paging Randy Olson

This bad propaganda film for creationism is going to come out soon, so I can sympathize with this call to put together an honest science movie in reply. However, I have huge reservations, particularly with the idea that we need to get people who understand science to write the movie. People who understand science might very well be the worst possible people to write it; the first priority ought to be get people who understand movies to write it. Someone like, for instance, John Rogers or Randy Olson — somebody who knows the movie business and also knows the science.

Then you run into another problem: these guys are professionals. You don’t go up to a pro and tell them that you’ve got a really important idea for a movie, could they please write it for you? For free? And, by the way, we don’t have a budget or any capital lined up, we just think it’s the right thing to do.

I’m afraid the place to start isn’t with soliciting manuscripts from scientists — it ought to be with an idea, something more specific than simply countering some other film that’s going to be a box-office flop, and getting backing so you can do it right, and do it professionally. And that means no amateurs from the ranks of scientists trying to do a job they aren’t trained for.

Can you imagine if Charles Darwin were asked to write the movie of his work? It would be five hours of barnacle anatomy and pigeon breeds.

P.S. I don’t mean to be discouraging, but there really is expertise in the entertainment industry, and it does not help our cause of trying to emphasize the importance of knowledge of science to be so cavalier about other people’s knowledge.