Both wrong

South Carolina State Sen. Mike Fair is doing his usual creationist thing and trying to block the teaching of evolution in public schools. He’s wrong. He’s an idiot. But then I read the clause in the state science standards that he’s opposing.

Conceptual Understanding: Biological evolution occurs primarily when natural selection acts on the genetic variation in a population and changes the distribution of traits in that population over multiple generations.

Performance Indicators: Students who can demonstrate this understanding can:

Analyze and interpret data, using the principles of natural selection, to make predictions about the long term biological changes that occur within two populations of the same species that become geographically isolated from one another.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Fair’s argument is that this is Darwinism, and Darwinism must be opposed. My argument is that this is wrong because it equates evolution and natural selection, and even makes a factually incorrect assertion, that evolution is primarily a consequence of natural selection.

What’s a guy supposed to do when both sides of the debate have screwed up so thoroughly? Fair is more wrong, but I’m not in favor of teaching kids false versions of biology, either.

Demonstrate calmly for pro-science

Brianne writes fairly frequently about her experiences as a clinic escort, dealing with shrieking fanatics who stand on sidewalks harassing people going into family planning clinics. They’re hideous and awful and have lost all sense of perspective and humanity, and they’re also remarkably ineffective…unless, of course, their goals are to make other people miserable and to expose their own obsessive inhumanity.

They have a lot in common with another group, animal rights protesters. Sanctimonious assholes, all of them. They’re all over UCLA, and they’re busy protesting researchers’ homes, at least when they’re not too busy planting bombs around the neighborhood or setting cars on fire or vandalizing people’s property.

Look at that person comparing animal experimentation to the Holocaust; it makes me wonder, do they intend to elevated monkeys to the status of Jews, or are they simply equating Jews and monkeys? Can we please not trivialize the murder of humans by pretending it has the same moral equivalency as biomedical research?

I think they, like clinic protesters, have forgotten the difference between expressing an idea/protesting against another idea, and harassment. They also lose all right to put themselves on the side of right in the Holocaust comparison when they say things like this, about UCLA researcher David Jentsch:

And later, the leader of the group whispers to the reporter:

“Wasn’t Jentsch’s car burned or something?” Then, above the din of chants, she adds, “I don’t know how to put this—I only wish he were in it.”

How can they compare researchers to Mengele when this is what they advocate?

I’ll be watching that asshole; I don’t want that piece of garbage and his family living in this neighborhood. He ought to be experimented on.

This weekend, there will be a counter-protest on the UCLA campus. If you value scientific research, you should go. If you believe in ethical research conduct and think these bloody-minded lunatics are actively undermining the responsible monitoring of research, you should go. If you’re just a decent human being who has had enough of idiot fanaticism, you should go.

They’re meeting at 10:15am on 15 February at the Franz Hall lobby on the UCLA campus. Go there, be civil and intelligent, and show people how ideas should be argued — don’t set any cars on fire, don’t harass your opponents’ children, don’t destroy their homes. Not that I’d expect anything less than rational behavior from the science side.

Fixes in the works

I am getting many complaints about recent changes. In response to the DDOS attack (Jason has all the details), there have been some new problems caused by the repairs: RSS is down, and there are apparently some slightly annoying javascript additions. We have Top Men working behind the scenes, it looks like we might be getting a security company to tighten us up, and also, coming down the track is a complete redesign of the site. Patience.

Years ago when I was running this place off my own server, one of the reasons I happily leapt aboard the Scienceblogs ship was that they’d take care of all the techy fol-de-rol needed to keep it running. Now that I’m on a different network, I’m constantly grateful that we have people like Ed to handle management, and Jason to futz with the guts, and another person lurking in the black bowels of the machine who I will not name, all juggling all the balls all at once.

Add “flaming death” to “environmental degradation”

I’m just curious — did anyone else hear about the big pipeline explosion near Winnipeg? I’m sure that if you lived in southern Manitoba, where thousands were without heat for their homes in January, knew all about it. But I didn’t see much in the news about this terrifying event.

gaslineexplosion

There may be a reason for that. Pipeline explosions aren’t that unusual or newsworthy, I guess.

Carl Weimer, executive director of Pipeline Safety Trust, a non-profit watchdog organization, says that, on average, there is “a significant incident — somewhere — about every other day. And someone ends up in the hospital or dead about every nine or ten days.” This begs the question: are pipelines carrying shale gas different in their explosive potential than other pipelines?

“There isn’t any database that allows you to get at that,” says Richard Kuprewicz, a pipeline safety expert and consultant of 40 years’ experience. “If it’s a steel pipeline and it has enough gas in it under enough pressure, it can leak or rupture.” Many pipelines, says Kuprewicz, aren’t bound by any safety regulations, and even when they are, enforcement can often be lax. Where regulations exist, he continues, corporate compliance is uneven. “Some companies comply with and exceed regulations, others don’t.  If I want to find out about what’s going on, I may [have to] get additional information via subpoena.”

The United States has gone fracking mad — Obama even made a point of mentioning that we’ve become a net oil exporter in his state of the union address, without bothering to say how that happened — but we ought to be concerned. It’s easy to ignore the fact that parts of North Dakota and Canada are being shredded and poisoned and torn apart because nobody lives there (well, nearly: low population density rural areas are fair game for exploitation, because biomes don’t sue), but then they run poorly regulated and maintained pipelines straight to our homes.

Another thing that raises my hackles: they’ve taken to naming these pipelines with words to inspire reverence among the rubes. “Keystone” is sort of neutral, but the article above talks about one called “Constitution”. Are you against the Constitution? What kind of ‘Murican are you? I expect any day now to discover a pipeline proposal called “God & Family” or, let’s go straight to the heart of the matter, the “Jesus Loves America and Hates Terrorists Pipeline”.