Things to do with your weekend

Plan ahead! It’s going to be a fun weekend!

This Thursday, 17 April, get a head start on the weekend with Virtually Speaking on Second Life. I’m being interviewed at 6pm Pacific Time, and this could be spectacularly entertaining: I’m a total newbie at SL, so I’m going to be getting lessons in how to sit down this afternoon, which tells you that there will be opportunities for major klutzy gaffes at this event. I’m afraid I might turn into a giant flying penis sometime mid-interview.

Friday evening at 7:30 pm, we have the UMM Dance Ensemble performance in Edson Auditorium here on campus. Some of my students are performing, so come on by and support interdisciplinary, liberal arts education by cheering on dancing biologists!

There is a major movie premiere this weekend: Zombie Strippers, starring the renowned thespian, Jenna Jameson. Unfortunately, it’s not playing in Morris, and it does look like the very best movie opening this weekend, so I’m afraid this is probably the weekend to skip going to the theaters.

With one special exception! The Morris Theatre, in a special showing, has engaged a one-time 3:00 Saturday matinee showing of the horror classic, Theatre of Blood, starring Vincent Price and Diana Rigg. Come on, people! Classic 70s horror with a master of the genre shown in an actual old-time single screen movie theater? How can you miss this? There’s also going to be a post-movie discussion of Shakespearian themes in the film afterwards, at the Common Cup Coffeehouse. I’m going to be there — it’ll warm me up for the next event of the evening.

At 8:00 Saturday, in the Science Auditorium on campus, I’m debating Angus Menuge on “Does neuroscience leave room for God”. It may be a bit of a let down after Theatre of Blood — there will probably be no beheadings, sword fights, or eviscerations — but we could have a feisty argument.

I know, Morris is a long ways from everything, but it’s going to be the happening place on the whole planet for a few days. If anyone feels like making the long trip out, send me email, and I can give you directions.

Optical Allusions

Jay Hosler has a new book out, Optical Allusions(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). If you’re familiar with his other books, Clan Apis(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) and The Sandwalk Adventures(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), you know what to expect: a comic book that takes its science seriously. Hosler has a fabulous knack for building serious content into a light and humorous medium, just the kind of approach we need to get wider distribution of science into the culture.

This one has a strange premise. Wrinkles the Wonder Brain is an animated, naked brain working for the Graeae Sisters, and he loses the one eye they share between them — so he has to go on a quest to recover it. I know, it sounds like a stretch, but it works in a weird sort of way, and once you start rolling with it, you’ll find it works. Using that scenario to frame a series of encounters, Wrinkles meets Charles Darwin and learns how evolution could produce something as complex as an eye; talks about the sub-optimal design of retinal circuitry with a cow superhero; discovers sexual dimorphism with a crew of stalk-eyed pirates; learns about development of the eye from cavefish and a cyclops; chats with Mr Sun about the physics of radiation; there are even zombie G proteins and were-opsins in a lesson about shape changing. This stuff is seriously weird, and kids ought to eat it up.

It isn’t all comic art, either. Each chapter is interleaved with a text section discussing the details — you can read the whole thing through, skipping the text (like I did…), and then go back and get more depth and directions for future reading in the science. This is a truly seditious strategy. Suck ’em in with the entertainment value, and then hand ’em enough substance that they might just start thinking like scientists.

It’s all good stuff, too. A colleague and I have been considering offering an interdisciplinary honors course in physics and biology with the theme of the eye, specifically for non-science majors, and this book has me thinking it might make for a good text. It’ll grab the English and art majors, and provide a gateway for some serious discussions that will satisfy us science geeks. I recommend it for you, too — if you have kids, you should grab all of Hosler’s books. Even if you don’t have kids, you’ll learn a lot.

Jay Hosler also explains the intent of the project, and you can read an excerpt.

In which I agree with the Jehovah’s Witnesses…for different reasons

Usually, when I read one of these common stories about people denying themselves reasonable medical care for religious reasons (such as the Jehovah Witness’s proscription against blood transfusions, or the Christian Scientist’s insane denial of illness altogether), I find myself siding with the doctor trying to overcome their foolishness, rather than the deluded theists. This one is an exception.

To make it short, a Jehovah’s Witness couple are expecting twins; one of the twins has a circulation defect that prevents pulmonary circulation, meaning it would suffocate to death as soon as it was born and needed to breathe air; they refuse any surgery to correct the problem; doctor gets a court order, operates at birth against the parent’s wishes, and saves the infant.

I think the doctor was way out of line. This is a case in which the parents were fully aware of the situation and knew that the fetus would die at birth, and elected (for screwy reasons, admittedly) to not pursue extraordinary measures to save its life. They had not deluded themselves into believing medical intervention was unnecessary and that magic would heal the child, they had resigned themselves to its death. And until the child has enough self-awareness to actually want to live, I think that is a decision parents have to be allowed to make. If they want that particular baby, they should be allowed to elect to have major surgery, but if they don’t, they should be permitted to allow its condition to run its course, unless the outcome is likely to be survival with serious damage.

The cost of these medical interventions can be prohibitive, and it can be entirely reasonable to decide not to invest money and time into a fetus who has neither autonomy nor unique qualities, nor an individual personality to which the parents have attached their affection. Let them die. Let the parents decide, not a doctor.

The article cites a particularly horrendous case.

In 1990, for example, a woman named Karla Miller went into premature labor at 23 weeks of gestation in Houston. Because a child born that early has a 75 percent chance of death or severe disability, the husband chose not to sign a consent form that would allow resuscitation. But the neonatologist resuscitated the girl, who grew up severely retarded, legally blind, and quadriplegic. The parents sued the hospital for ignoring their wishes, but in 2000 the Texas Supreme Court ruled for the hospital. George Annas, a medical ethicist at Boston University, later attacked the decision in the New England Journal of Medicine, since “the court implies that life is always preferable to death for a newborn . . . no matter how unlikely their survival is without severe disabilities.”

I wonder if that neonatologist has since taken responsibility for the round-the-clock care and various expenses and stresses of that kind of affliction?

One month of stonewalling

In early February, a number of bloggers brought to your attention a peculiar paper on mitochondrial proteomics, a paper which was obviously odd on even casual inspection, containing grandiose claims of a theoretical revolution that were entirely unsupported and ludicrous assertions of evidence for God in the genome. Deeper examination revealed that much of the paper had also been plagiarized from various sources. To the credit of the journal, the paper was quickly retracted one month ago today; however, the retraction was entirely based on the plagiarism, and none of the other failings of the paper were addressed, nor were any of the patent errors in the review process at the journal Proteomics discussed. This is strange, especially in light of the fact that the Warda/Han paper was the most accessed article in the journal. This is not an issue that should be swept under the rug!

Today, several of us — Steven Salzberg, Lars Juhl Jensen, and Attila Csordas — are repeating our call for an explanation of the events that led to the leakage of such an egregiously ridiculous paper into print. Bad papers are a dime-a-dozen, and we aren’t so much concerned with the detailed discussion of the flaws in this one paper as we are with seeing the integrity of the peer-review process maintained, or better, improved. The Warda/Han paper had obvious red flags that marked it as potentially problematic in the title, the abstract, and scattered throughout the body, and it’s hard to imagine how any reviewer or editor could have let them simply slip by without comment, yet that is exactly what seems to have happened.

We want to know how this paper slipped through the cracks, because we want to know how large the cracks in the peer review process at Proteomics are. It’s a journal with a good reputation, and we are not presuming that there was any wrong-doing or systematic failure of peer review there, but we do think that a lack of transparency is of concern: there is no assumption of a crime, but the ongoing cover-up is grounds for suspicion. Let’s see some self-criticism from the journal editor, and an open discussion of steps being taken to prevent such errors from occurring again.

Alternatively, if the journal wants to outsource its quality control to a mob of bloggers, that works, too … but we tend to be less formal and much more brutally and publicly critical than an in-house process might be, and we’re also going to be less well-informed than the actual principals in the review process. Better explanations are in order. Let’s see representatives of the journal provide them.

Big Science

What’s that? Some of you are unfamiliar with the phrase “Big Science,” so freely tossed about by creationists like Ben Stein? Here’s what it means:

Coo coo it’s cold outside.
Coo coo it’s cold outside.
Ooo coo coo.
Don’t forget your mittens.
Hey Pal!
How do I get to town from here?
And he said “Well just take a right where they’re going to build that new shopping mall, go straight past where they’re going to put in the freeway, take a left at what’s going to be the new sports center, and keep going until you hit the place where they’re thinking of building that drive-in bank.
You can’t miss it.”
And I said “This must be the place.”
Ooo coo coo.
Golden cities.
Golden towns.
Golden cities.
Golden towns.
And long cars in long lines and great big signs and they all say “Hallelujah.
Yodellayheehoo.
Every man for himself.”
Ooo coo coo.
Golden cities.
Golden towns.
Thanks for the ride.
Big Science.
Hallelujah.
Big Science.
Yodellayheehoo.
You know.
I think we should put some mountains here. Otherwise, what are all the characters going to fall off of?
And what about stairs?
Yodellayheehoo.
Ooo coo coo.
Here’s a man who lives a life of danger. Everywhere he goes he
stays – a stranger.
Howdy stranger.
Mind if I smoke?
And he said “Every man, every man for himself. Every man, every man for himself.
All in favor say aye.”
Big Science.
Hallelujah.
Big Science.
Yodellayheehoo.
Hey Professor!
Could you turn out the lights?
Let’s roll the film.
Big Science.
Hallelujah.
Every man, every man for himself.
Big Science.
Hallelujah.
Yodellayheehoo.

I hope that clears everything up.

Why do newspapers continue to publish Discovery Institute press releases?

A reader brought to my attention this outrageously dishonest mangling of a quote by that creationist, Casey Luskin. He writes:

In January, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences weighed in on this debate, declaring that “[t]here is no scientific controversy about the basic facts of evolution,”1 because neo-Darwinism is “so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter“2 it. As an undergraduate and graduate student taking multiple courses covering evolutionary biology at the University of California San Diego, that is what I was told as well. My science courses rarely, if ever, allowed students to seriously entertain the possibility that Darwin’s theory might be fundamentally flawed.

First rule of reading creationist literature: never trust an ellipsis. They always leave something significant out to change the meaning. Second rule of reading creationist literature: if they don’t use an ellipsis, they’re still going to distort a quote. Basically, you can’t trust anything these guys say. Luskin is claiming to be quoting something from the National Academy of Sciences booklet, Science, Evolution, and Creationism. How honest is his scholarship?

The first part of the quote is from page 52, near the end of the book. Here it is in context:

1There is no scientific controversy about the basic facts of evolution. In this sense the intelligent design movement’s call to “teach the controversy” is unwarranted. Of course, there remain many interesting questions about evolution, such as the evolutionary origin of sex or different mechanisms of speciation, and discussion of these questions is fully warranted in science classes.

Where do you think we’ll find the second half of his quote? Page 53, maybe? Page 54? No. You’ll have to thumb backwards through the book, to a place near the beginning: page 16.

2Many scientific theories are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them substantially. For example, no new evidence will demonstrate that the Earth does not orbit around the Sun (heliocentric theory), or that living things are not made of cells (cell theory), that matter is not composed of atoms, or that the surface of the Earth is not divided into solid plates that have moved over geological timescales (the theory of plate tectonics).

So what Casey Luskin has done is to flip through the book and manufacture quotes by splicing together clauses from scattered sentences. Students who tried to pull this kind of unethical crap in a term paper would get an automatic “F” from me…yet Luskin reportedly has a law degree.

Aren’t journalists supposed to have some kind of ethical standards about this sort of thing? Do they simply suspend any regard for reasonable journalistic values when some right-wing think-tank like the Discovery Institute mails in some PR pablum?

Roland Emmerich: the upscale Uwe Boll

I’ve been seeing all the ads for this new movie, 10,000 BC, but I haven’t even been tempted to want to think about going to see it. Come on, people: One Million Years B.C., while even more grossly inaccurate, at least had Raquel Welch in that adorable bikini, and Quest for Fire had the invention of the missionary position. This movie has nothing but nicely modeled woolly mammoths, and I don’t see any teenagers stampeding the head shops for that poster to hang on their bedroom walls.

Anyway, here’s a review of the latest dreck from Emmerich. That’s as close as I’m getting to it.

The story that will not die

Good morning, anti-censorship intellectuals! Remember that story from January about Abunga Books, the online bookstore whose sole unique feature is that it claims to “empower decency” by enabling prudes to vote to censor their offerings? Now it has made ABC News. It’s amazing how much press this thing has received — I’m beginning to suspect there is some marketing genius behind the store who knows how to whip up a media frenzy.

They’ve got a couple of quotes from me and from the founder of Abunga, Lee Martin.

“Anything that irritates the right, they want off,” Myers told ABCNEWS.com “They can have a limited selection of books and select whatever political perspective they want. But [Abunga] is cloaking itself in democracy, and instead of being open-minded, they are being narrow-minded. It’s hypocrisy.”

Boy, I got that one exactly right. You should read how Martin defends himself against that charge.

In response, Myers’ readers mass e-mailed the company and logged on to Abunga.com to ban a number of religious books themselves, including the Bible.

“What they didn’t realize is that we control inventory from our members, and it’s pretty easy to see the difference of customers who are blocking ‘The Golden Compass’ and the Bible,” Martin said.

Martin insists his company has no agenda. “If you look at the books, we have a complete rainbow range of books, and we give to non-Christian ministries.”

(By the way, you’ll have a hard time finding a non-Christian ministry in their list of charities. They’ve got a few good secular groups in there, like regional hospitals and the March of Dimes, but it’s mostly a collection of openly evangelical organizations. I guess if you do stuff that actually works, like giving medicine, that counts as “non-Christian” to these guys.)

So they don’t have an agenda, and they’re just letting their customers control the inventory, but they can tell the difference between the ‘good’ customers who want to block The Golden Compass, and the wicked, nasty bad customers who want to block the Bible. We are all equal, except some of us are more equal than others.

Like I said, Abunga can have whatever bias they want, and they clearly want to be a right wing Christian bookstore. I don’t mind that at all, although they certainly wouldn’t be getting my business. My objection is that they want to pretend that they’re taking the high road and calling their bias “democracy,” when it clearly is not, and it is definitely not a noble enterprise — these are guys with yet another scheme to pander to right-wing ignorance and make money from it.

Of course, that’s my disagreement with their practices. The ABC News article takes a different approach that might be more effective in alienating their prospective clientele, by listing a selection of naughty books that are still easily available at Abunga. They’ve got a censorship filter, but it’s a mighty leaky one.