But every day is Doubting Darwin day!

Today is Charles Darwin’s birthday — he’d be 209 years old if he hadn’t kicked the bucket in 1882. It’s a good excuse to find something to celebrate, so go have a cupcake or something. I’m planning to spend the next few days working with people at the Science Museum of Minnesota on a science education project, which sounds appropriately productive and entertaining. But, you know, the best way to celebrate Darwin’s life and research is to ask questions, question everything, and explore new ideas, which is how Mr Darwin would have liked it. Although you shouldn’t do that just one day a year. Every day is a day to learn something new.

I just wish the creationists could do that. Eric Hovind and his merry band of ignoramuses have declared today to be Doubting Darwin Day, unaware that the sentiment is already inherent within the scientific program, and are distributing their 15 questions for evolutionists flyer again. I’ve seen many versions of this kind of thing over the years; they tend to be repetitive and tendentious, and are a combination of a) questions long answered, b) interesting questions they are unaware that people are actively studying, and c) assertions of Christian dogma that we don’t care to address. I’m not going to bother with them (note that I have to get to St Paul today to do a bunch of fun/work), so I’ll just turn it over to Jackson Wheat.

When will the creationists learn that if their questions can be answered by a well-informed undergraduate, maybe they aren’t asking particularly challenging questions?

Theological and biological concerns in the cloning of Jesus

I’m home! I get one day of rest before charging on another venture, but I thought I’d let you know about some Important News. It’s an old story.

A billionaire-funded Christian organization is currently working to clone Jesus Christ after obtaining DNA from the Shroud of Turin and feel confident they will have a Jesus clone in 2016.

Which means, of course, that Jesus would now be in his Terrible Twos. I hope you’re ready for tantrums and loud shouts of “NO!”.

Although, actually, they may have hit a hitch or two. Reviewing their protocol, which is somewhat interesting and makes me wonder why fundamentalists haven’t seized on this idea before to hasten the Second Coming, there are substantial problems.

“The Jesus Has Returned Project is a private organization devoted to bringing about the Second Coming of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, as prophesied in the Bible,” the The Jesus Has Returned Project spokesman said. “Our intention is to clone Jesus, utilizing techniques pioneered at the Genetic Research Group in Switzerland, by taking an incorrupt cell from the Shroud of Turin, extracting its DNA, and inserting into an unfertilized human egg (oocyte), though the now-proven biological process called symbiotic cellular transfer. The fertilized egg, now the zygote of Jesus Christ, will be implanted into the womb of a young virginal woman (who has volunteered of her own accord), who will then bring the baby Jesus to term in a second Virgin Birth.”

Random thoughts:

  • The shroud isn’t going to be a particularly rich source of Jesus cells. It would have had only brief, weak contact with the body, and probably contains far more cells from passing pilgrims and holy men over the centuries. You’re more likely to resurrect some 15th century priest who is not going to be very happy with the high expectations given to him.

  • The shroud isn’t old enough — it’s been dated to the 13th century. You’re not going to find any Jesus cells at all. Although you may extract a few cells from the fraud who manufactured it, in which case the resurrected man, if such traits are at all hereditary, might be very happy to take advantage of your expectations.

  • Haven’t the Shroudians argued that the imprint was produced by a burst of intense energy from the miracle that raised Jesus from the dead? Any cells might have been exposed to all kinds of ionizing radiation. Maybe you’d get Jesus — but it would be mutant Jesus. A tumorous, deformed Jesus. Which would be kind of cool, at least for the atheists.

  • Unfortunately, we do not have a technique for extracting whole human genomes from dead cells and inserting them into enucleate cells. Transferring nuclei is one thing, but this is going to require large scale synthesis and reassembly of over 3 billion nucleotides. We can’t do that yet.

  • I am intrigued by the notion of “incorrupt cells” from Jesus lurking in the Shroud. Does this imply that all of the, for instance, shed skin cells from Jesus were also brought back to life? What about toenail clippings? Does the site of Jesus’ barber shop contain still-living hair and follicle cells creeping about in the dust of the cellar? Are they independent cells still crawling about like amoeboid Jesi?

  • I can see a serious theological issue here, too: 40 days after his resurrection, Jesus ascended into heaven. All of his old cells may have done so as well — we have to imagine that as Jesus rose bodily into the clouds, there was a corresponding ascension of all the flecks of sloughed tissue, the crusty socks, the gunk in the shower drain, sewer sludge in Jerusalem, all the accumulated detritus of his residence on earth. In which case the shroud may well be totally devoid of any shred of Jesus tissue.

  • This, unfortunately, prompts another worry. On arriving bodily in heaven, was Jesus also rejoined by everything that had ever flaked or oozed or squirted or dripped off of his body in life? I’m picturing a man surrounded by several times his body weight in slime, walking about the garden paths of heaven, repelling everyone he encounters.

Sorry, it’s been a long day of travel. I get home and my brain is a bit off-balance and is easily sent scurrying off in weird directions.

A surprising development

A few days ago, I mentioned that Christian Ott, who lost his Caltech position for sexual harassment, had landed a new research position in Finland. We could argue endlessly about whether it’s appropriate for him to return to academia at all, whether there should be a path for rehabilitation, etc., etc., etc., but now it is all moot: the University of Turku has made a surprise announcement.

The University of Turku has decided to terminate the employment contract of Dr Christian Ott on 7 February 2018. Dr Ott’s fixed-term employment relationship of two years as a senior researcher was to start at the beginning of March.

​– I have considered the matter and decided that the employment of Dr Christian Ott to the University of Turku will be cancelled. I came to this conclusion after extensively hearing the science community, says Rector Kalervo Väänänen of the University of Turku.

Well alrighty then. Maybe something really is changing in the world of 2018. Maybe the powers-that-be are finally having to listen.

I hope Ott has some other skills for a backup career. I hear refrigeration repair has excellent job prospects, carpentry is always useful, and that coal mining is making a big comeback.

You guys have no decorum. There’s no level too low to go to.

But Sargon of Akkad has standards! He rants about the alt-right by accusing them of being like “n*ggers”, “f*ggots”, and “k*kes”, and whining that he gets no respect. It’s a spectacular meltdown that couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy.

“Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

One can only hope.

Now if we can just get a few more women and dark-skinned people on the research team

It isn’t at all surprising that ancient Britons were dark skinned — we know the genes behind pigmentation, we have sequenced genomes from skeletons that are thousands of years old, and we know that light skins were the result of a mutation that swept through Europe about 6,000 years ago. So when a reconstruction of Cheddar Man, a 10,000 year old skeleton found in England, is made from the skull plus genomic information, we should expect that he’d be found to have been dark-skinned.

The first modern Britons, who lived about 10,000 years ago, had “dark to black” skin, a groundbreaking DNA analysis of Britain’s oldest complete skeleton has revealed.

The fossil, known as Cheddar Man, was unearthed more than a century ago in Gough’s Cave in Somerset. Intense speculation has built up around Cheddar Man’s origins and appearance because he lived shortly after the first settlers crossed from continental Europe to Britain at the end of the last ice age. People of white British ancestry alive today are descendants of this population.

It was initially assumed that Cheddar Man had pale skin and fair hair, but his DNA paints a different picture, strongly suggesting he had blue eyes, a very dark brown to black complexion and dark curly hair.

The discovery shows that the genes for lighter skin became widespread in European populations far later than originally thought – and that skin colour was not always a proxy for geographic origin in the way it is often seen to be today.

Here’s the reconstruction in a BBC video. Cheddar Man is as we ought to have expected. Actually, the only thing that made me raise my eyebrows is that the research team consists of 6 white men and 1 white woman, kind of like how the SpaceX rocket team was mostly white men, too.

It would be nice if the research effort that is revealing the genetic diversity of our recent ancestors at least reflected a bit of that diversity today.

By the way, the comments on this reconstruction also reveal a tremendous amount of denial from the usual racists who think this is an invention cobbled up by scientists to appease radical leftists. This, also, is not surprising.

I’m skipping class for a few days…what will my poor students do?

I’m flying away to give a talk on Moscow, Idaho this week, and early next week I’m going to be a consultant on an NSF grant awarded to the Science Museum of Minnesota, so I’m missing a few class days soon. Oh, the wailings and lamentations of my students! They howled with grief at missing out on my sparkling presence for any length of time! Or I might have imagined that, but it was pretty vivid.

Fortunately, I found a babysitter. I’m having them attend the 2017 Evolution conference in Portland last June. That’s something technology lets you do nowadays — the Society for the Study of Evolution recorded all the session talks and uploaded them to YouTube, so you can attend, too, sans the hallway schmoozing and the arguments at the bar (we can only hope technology progresses to that point someday). I’m telling them to watch with a critical eye and report back when I get home about which of the subset of talks they enjoyed, and why, and to summarize the questions that were asked and methods that were used.

I remember getting the opportunity to attend Western Nerve Net and Friday Harbor Development meetings when I was a senior in college, and they impressed me greatly…but I was just lucky, getting to tag along with advisors at these events. We couldn’t bring along a whole class to a 3-day meeting back then, but now I can do it virtually, which is pretty cool.

Vegetables will kill you!

A new study, as reported by the Independent, finds that vegetarians are less healthy than meat-eaters.

Vegetarians are less healthy than meat-eaters, a controversial study has concluded, despite drinking less, smoking less and being more physically active than their carnivorous counterparts.

A study conducted by the Medical University of Graz in Austria found that the vegetarian diet, as characterised by a low consumption of saturated fat and cholesterol, due to a higher intake of fruits, vegetables and whole-grain products, appeared to carry elevated risks of cancer, allergies and mental health problems such as depression and anxiety.

It’s a classic example of confusing cause and effect. In other news, people who are sick with chemotherapy treatments are more likely to have cancer — therefore, chemotherapy causes cancer. The statistics can’t lie!

Alternatively, it could be a situation like mine. I was diagnosed with heart disease, so then I reduced consumption of saturated fat and cholesterol, and went with a vegetarian diet to help reduce the damage of a lifetime of indulgence and maybe squeeze out a few more healthy years. I also took up an exercise program. I’m going to have to inform my wife this morning that we’re skipping the gym today because it’s going to shorten my life.

Except — and this is an odd thing — the end of the article that happily mongers fear about vegetarian diets includes a disclaimer from the investigators.

Study coordinator and epidemiologist Nathalie Burkert told The Austrian Times: “We have already distanced ourselves from this claim as it is an incorrect interpretation of our data.

“We did find that vegetarians suffer more from certain conditions like asthma, cancer and mental illnesses than people that eat meat as well, but we cannot say what is the cause and what is the effect.

“There needs to be further study done before this question can be answered.”

Why would you publish a bullshit article that includes a clear statement from the researchers that your interpretation of the work is bullshit? Are readers of this newspaper so reliably stupid that the publishers can trust that they’ll only read the bullshit headline and never get to the disclaimer, which is buried at the very end of the article? As an experiment, I wonder how many people will read only the title of this article, and not get to the substance, which says the exact opposite? If you actually read the whole thing, and decide to comment, be sure to include the word “taradiddle” in your reply. This is a test.