Ominous hallway

This is the second floor office wing of the science building where I work. You may notice how well kept-up it is, the floors clean and shiny — our custodians do an excellent job. But notice the line of ceiling lights marching off into the distance, with their bright reflections in the shiny floor, one aligned with each office door…except one. One office sits in a pool of relative darkness. One where the lights don’t shine, where the resident lurks in perpetual gloom.

Can you guess who dwells there, in room 2390? Who has crouched there in the room haunted by gloaming murk for years?

Hey, my old high school is in the news!

That’s rarely a good thing anymore, and it isn’t good news. Someone went into the girls’ restroom and scrawled hateful graffiti on the walls: swastikas, death threats against Muslims, and of course, the universal shorthand of American assholes everywhere, “MAGA”.

These people are effectively tarring their own slogans by association. I see “Make America Great Again” on a hat, and it’s as bad as if they have a swastika, a Confederate flag, or racial slur proudly displayed on their clothes.

Money laundering, tax evasion and conspiracy against the United States

The first indictments have come down, and the targets are Paul Manafort and his crony, Richard Gates. I suspect it’s the money charges — money laundering and tax evasion — that are really going to hurt Manafort and Gates. If conspiracy and treason could get you in trouble, we’d have to arrest most of the members of the Republican party.

Let’s hope these two are just the start.

Guess who’s going to visit the Ark Park?

Other than hordes of gullible Jesusoids, that is.

It’s…

Yes! The mastermind behind the JFK assassination and father of the Zodiac Killer is going to be roaming about the Big Gay Wooden Boat. I notice they don’t mention when the murderous Christian Dominionist (uh-oh, I sound like Dan Brown) is going to be prowling, so everyone better play it safe and avoid the place for a while. Like forever.

They must be getting desperate when Rafael Cruz is their ‘celebrity’ attendee.

Skepticon 10 is coming up soon

After Mythcon ended, they were deep in the hole, and hadn’t covered the cost of putting on their crappy, divisive, fashy show, despite the fact that attendees had to pay to see it — so they had a fundraiser, and gathered about $12,000 practically overnight, out of the pockets of horrible little internet trolls.

Are you going to let them put us progressives to shame?

Skepticon is having a fundraiser right now. This is a free three-day conference held every year in Springfield, Missouri, with a fabulous roster of speakers, not a single shitlord among them, and with workshops and talks and a prom and a game night and lots of happy, hopeful people. I mentioned that it’s totally free — but someone has to pay for it, so they look to the more affluent members of the community to donate. And right now, all the way through the end of the conference on 12 November, a charitable benefactor is offering matching funds. Donate now and your gift is automatically doubled!

I donated. I’m attending, too. It really is one of the best conferences around — they always get diverse speakers with challenging things to say. It’s less than two weeks away, too!

A little video about sex determination

I read this paper:

Bachtrog D, Mank JE, Peichel CL, Kirkpatrick M, Otto SP, Ashman TL, Hahn MW, Kitano J, Mayrose I, Ming R, Perrin N, Ross L, Valenzuela N, Vamosi JC (2014) Sex determination: why so many ways of doing it? PLoS Biol. 12(7):e1001899.

And now I give you a quick summary of a couple of figures that I know you’ll find useful if you’re teaching genetics.

[Read more…]

The number of posts & comments on Pharyngula has roughly doubled today

It looks like Jason Thibeault has succeeded in bringing all of my old posts and your old comments over from Scienceblogs…just in time before it sinks into the abyss. So we now have 24,205 posts and 1,812,731 comments here on Freethoughtblogs Pharyngula, with archives going all the way back to 2006.

So that’s one bit of good news today.

Jeffrey Tomkins is up to his old dishonest tricks again

Tomkins is a creationist with a little bit of technical knowledge, and his usual game is to focus on one tiny detail of a story to claim an incompatibility with evolution, while ignoring the majority of the information, which is simply screaming in contradiction with him. I’ve dealt with his nonsense before, specifically his claim that human chromosome 2 can’t be the product of a chromosome fusion event because he can’t find perfectly intact telomeres or a complete second centromere in the chromosome. I tried pointing out that we wouldn’t expect an intact fossilized centromere, and that the real evidence lies in the synteny, or the concordant array of genes between chimpanzee and human chromosomes. He’s never acknowledged this. Instead, he just moves on to some other detail.

Larry Moran nails him on a bad pseudoscientific paper about the beta-globin pseudogene, which Tomkins claims is not a pseudogene, because it is functional (not true). It’s a very confused paper, which is typical for Tomkins, and the only place it could have been published is in one of those hothouse fake creationist journals.

Then Moran slams him again for claiming that the GULO pseudogene was independently disabled in multiple primate lineages. It’s got to get tiresome. This is what Tomkins and most creationists do — ignore the consilience of the whole data set to zero in on some tiny, irrelevant point that is incompletely explained. It’s the neglect of the big picture that is so annoying.

Before addressing the specific criticisms in this article it’s important to not lose sight of the bigger issue. Creationists tend to focus on particular examples while ignoring the big picture. In this case, there is abundant evidence of gene duplicationS in all species and there’s abundant evidence that the fate of one duplicated copy of a gene is often to become inactivated rendering it a pseudogene. This has given rise to a robust explanation of multigene families referred to as Birth-and-Death Evolution [The Evolution of Gene Families] [On the evolution of duplicated genes: subfunctionalization vs neofunctionalization]. In order for Young Earth Creationists to mount a serious challenge to evolution they need to provide a better explanation for all this data and they need to provide solid evidence that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old.

I think Larry has him pegged.