He should study Sun Tzu

How do you know Egnor is crazy as a loon? For one thing (among many), he lashes out at both Orac and me. Triggering a response from one wordy skeptical woo-woo-basher should be enough for any semi-sane kook, but his last little screed tried to trawl both of us up in the flimsy net of his delusions. I already swiped back, but now Orac rips him and Pat Sullivan apart. Dumb move. He really should just try us one at a time — his struggles last a little longer that way.

My man-crush

Phil reveals his man-crushes, and I have to respond in kind. Fortunately, it’s easy. I’ve just seen something that endears one particular gentleman to me…

Michael Moore.

He batters that smug silver-haired rodent, Wolf Blitzer. I wish he’d been given a chance to kick Lou Dobbs’ ass. He rakes the entire American news media over white-hot coals for their continued failures to investigate and report honestly on the war as well as on health care. C’est magnifique.

Common elements of eumetazoan gene organization in an anemone

We now have a draft of the sea anemone genome, and it is revealing tantalizing details of metazoan evolution. The subject is the starlet anemone, Nematostella vectensis, a beautiful little animal that is also an up-and-coming star of developmental biology research.

i-da53b70f97ff878afc87b689369ca148-nematostella.jpg
(click for larger image)
Nematostella development. a. unfertilized egg (~200 micron diameter) with sperm head; b. early cleavage stage; c. blastula; d. gastrula; e. planula; f. juvenile polyp; g. adult stained with DAPI to show nematocysts with a zoom in on the tentacle in the inset; h, i. confocal images of a tentacle bud stage and a gastrula respectively showing nuclei (red) and actin (green); j. a gastrula showing snail mRNA(purple) in the endoderm and forkhead mRNA (red) in the pharynx and endoderm; k. a gastrula showing Anthox8 mRNA expression; l. an adult Nematostella.

A most important reason for this work is that the anemone Nematostella is a distant relative of many of the animals that have already been sequenced, and so provides an essential perspective on the evolutionary changes that we observe in those other organisms. Comparison of its genome with that of other metazoans is helping us decipher the likely genetic organization of the last common ancestor of all animals.

[Read more…]

Vague threats made against Colorado biologists

Honestly, it’s unusual for biologists to be the target of hate — except when they work on cute furry animals — so the news that religious kooks are slipping threatening notes into evolutionary biology labs isn’t too specifically worrying.

University of Colorado police are investigating a series of threatening messages and documents e-mailed to and slipped under the door of evolutionary biology labs on the Boulder campus.

The messages included the name of a religious-themed group and addressed the debate between evolution and creationism, CU police Cmdr. Brad Wiesley said. Wiesley would not identify the group named because police are still investigating.

“There were no overt threats to anybody specifically by name,” Wiesley said. “It basically said anybody who doesn’t believe in our religious belief is wrong and should be taken care of.”

The first threat was e-mailed to the labs – part of CU’s ecology and evolutionary biology department housed in the Ramaley Biology building – on Friday. Wiesley said Monday that morning staff members found envelopes with the threatening documents slipped under the lab doors.

There’s no cause for panic, for sure, and it’s just something to keep an eye on. It’s probably just a deranged individual, but if it’s the start of a more actively hostile trend, that’s something else.

Patience!

The terrible thing about going on vacation is that you fall behind on everything, including your reading, and when you get back you have to struggle to catch up. When I got back on Sunday I found three books waiting in my mailbox, and of course I’d missed a whole week of the journals, so I’ve been reading, reading, reading every day. I’ve decided I can never go on vacation again.

No, not really! But I do have a backlog to clear, and just this morning I had a chance to sit down and read through that wonderful new paper on the sea anemone genome. I’m going to get that assimilated and I should hope I can whip out a summary by early this afternoon. And then there are these other great stories piled up in my office, on my coffee table, on the ottoman, on the arms of my easy chair … ask my wife, she’ll tell you I’m mired in a mess of papers.

Anyway, it takes a while to get back into the rhythm. Don’t worry, though, good stuff is coming.

A request

I got a request from Alonzo Fyfe for any written material to counter Intelligent Design creationism that is geared for the younger set, 12-14 years old. I figure there are enough people reading this that some might have suggestions.

Along the same lines, I’ve long thought that a collection of little pamphlets written for people with short attention spans and no background would be useful tools for both promoting biology and atheism — anyone heard of such things? Or are we all long-winded, pretentious babblers?

Scientology is evil

Now their insane denial of the legitimacy of modern psychiatry leads to an insane woman butchering her family. It’s appalling: the parents were scientologists who refused to give anti-psychotic drugs to their daughter, and the end result is that they and another daughter are slaughtered.

This is where delusional, irrational, wishful thinking leads you — to a rejection of reality that has the potential to crash in on you in lethal ways.