Neil deGrasse Tyson on ID

Since Nick Matzke has become a fanboy, and Larry Moran has never heard of him, I thought I’d mention that I’ve liked Neil deGrasse Tyson’s column (titled “Universe”) in Natural History for a long time. It is generally on astronomy/astrophysics/cosmology, so it’s far afield from my usual comfort zone, but I don’t mind stretching my brain now and then. I’ve put a few excerpts from one column below the fold here that I thought was particularly good, from the November 2005 issue. It’s titled “The perimeter of ignorance”, and subtitled “a boundary where scientists face a choice: invoke a deity or continue the quest for knowledge.”

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Lobster vs. Sea Hare

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Ah, Aplysia. Also known as the sea hare, Aplysia is a common preparation used in neurobiology labs; it’s a good sized beastie with the interesting defense mechanism of spewing out clouds of mucusy slime and purple ink when agitated. I well remember coming into the physiology lab in the morning to find a big bucket full of squirming muscular slugs in a pool of vivid purple goo. And then I’d reach in to grab one, and they were all velvety soft and undulating and engulfing my whole arm in this thick, slick, wet, slippery knot of rippling smooth muscle…

Ahem. Well. Let me compose myself for a moment. I will say that I always thought handling Aplysia is an amazingly sensuous experience.

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What’s up, NSTA?

This is a troubling development, and perhaps some members of the National Science Teachers Association in the readership here know something about it. They seem to be in the pocket of the oil industry.

In tomorrow’s Washington Post, global warming activist Laurie David writes about her effort to donate 50,000 free DVD copies of An Inconvenient Truth (which she co-produced) to the National Science Teachers Association. The Association refused to accept the DVDs:

In their e-mail rejection, they expressed concern that other “special interests” might ask to distribute materials, too; they said they didn’t want to offer “political” endorsement of the film; and they saw “little, if any, benefit to NSTA or its members” in accepting the free DVDs. …

[T]here was one more curious argument in the e-mail: Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place “unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters.”

As it turns out, those supporters already include “special interests,” including Exxon-Mobil, Shell Oil, and the American Petroleum Institute, which have given millions in funding to the NSTA.

This is not merely an attempt to avoid entanglement in a “controversial” (not that global warming is actually controversial among scientists), since the article mentions that the NSTA has distributed PR for the oil companies. I like the NSTA and I read their newsletter…but this sounds like they’ve been bought and paid for by Exxon-Mobil, and it casts an unfortunate shadow on their reputation. Can we please have a science advocacy group we can trust?

I like the way Sara Robinson’s mind works.

Memo to the Christian Coalition: The NSTA is for sale. For a mere million bucks a year, I’ll bet you could get them on board with Intelligent Design, too.

Memo to parents: It might be time to find out if your kids’ science teachers are members of this group, and have a word with them about it. If you — or the teachers — want to complain directly to the NSTA, the complaint form is here. They need to hear from everyone who still thinks that scientific truth shouldn’t be auctioned off to the highest donor.

The Cambrian as an evolutionary exemplar

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I’ve been reading Valentine’s On the Origin of Phyla(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) lately, and I have to tell you, it’s a hard slog. This is one of those extremely information-dense science texts that rather gracelessly hammers you with the data and difficult concepts on page after page. I am convinced that James W. Valentine is ten times smarter than I am and knows ten thousand times as much, and it’s a struggle to squeeze that volume of knowledge into my miniscule brain pan.

One thing I would like to greatly condense and simplify is his discussion of the Cambrian ‘explosion’. Misinterpretation of the Cambrian is one of the many prongs of the creationist assault on science; both old school Biblical creationists and the new stealth creationists of the ID movement have seized upon it as evidence of an abrupt creation—that a Designer poofed the precursors to all modern forms into existence suddenly, and without precursors, and that this observation contradicts evolutionary theory.

It doesn’t. Valentine has an excellent diagram that shows how wrong the creationists are.

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MADS boxes, flower development, and evolution

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I’ve been writing a fair amount about early pattern formation in animals lately, so to do penance for my zoocentric bias, I thought I’d say a little bit about homeotic genes in plants. Homeotic genes are genes that, when mutated, can transform one body part into another—probably the best known example is antennapedia in Drosophila, which turns the fly’s antenna into a leg.

Plants also have homeotic genes, and here is a little review of flower anatomy to remind everyone of what ‘body parts’ we’re going to be talking about. The problem I’ll be pursuing is how four different, broadly defined regions of the flower develop, and what that tells us about their evolution.

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Bowling for Science

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On Tuesday, I’ll be in the Twin Cities to pick up #2 Son for Thanksgiving break, and as long as I’m there, I’ve been invited to join in the fun of this month’s Cafe Scientifique: it’s the Physics of Bowling, to be held at Bryant Lake Bowl in Minneapolis. This has the potential to be very interesting, since they’re pitting the best of BRB bowling team against…scientists. They promise that there will be science-based bowling tips, so maybe there’s hope. (Anyone else remember Egghead Jr., the smart chicken in the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons who excelled at sports by scrawling formulas to calculate what he’d do next? I don’t think that works in the real world, but we’ll see.)

To entice people to show up, this could be dramatic entertainment. I am a very bad bowler. There is a chance of pratfalls. There could be injury and death and destruction, and blood on the floor. I could fall over, burst into flames, and explode. At the very least, you’ll get to watch a geek do a spastic dance and throw a heavy ball somewhere. You don’t want to miss this!

(Unfortunately, if the organizers read this they may decide that somebody else might be preferred to bowl—liability issues, you know. Having all the spectators laid out prostrate with laughter could be risky.)

Peep and the Big Wide World

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A reader conspires to make me feel old—I don’t have any little kids running around in my house anymore, so I’ve completely missed this new cartoon, Peep and the Big Wide World. It’s a science program for pre-schoolers! They’ve got sample videos online, and a list of science-related books. It looks like they do exactly the right thing, encouraging kids to observe and experiment and most importantly, ask questions.

Darn kids. Why’d they have to grow up and stop being my excuse to sit down and watch morning cartoons?

The sea urchin genome

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Oh happy day, the Sea Urchin Genome Project has reached fruition with the publication of the full sequence in last week’s issue of Science. This news has been all over the web, I know, so I’m late in getting my two cents in, but hey, I had a busy weekend, and and I had to spend a fair amount of time actually reading the papers. They didn’t just publish one mega-paper, but they had a whole section on Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, with a genomics mega-paper and articles on ecology and paleogenomics and the immune system and the transcriptome, and even a big poster of highlights of sea urchin research (but strangely, very little on echinoderm development). It was a good soaking in echinodermiana.

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Larry Moran has a blog

Check out the Sandwalk: Strolling with a skeptical biochemist. I’m dismayed that it’s been up for a whole week before I noticed.

I’ve already learned something important: Tim Horton is the god-equivalent in Canada. If coffee and donuts inspire similar levels of sexual obsession and freaky legislation in Canada as does religion in the USA, I don’t think I want to hear about it. Too, too kinky.