Over at the Panda’s Thumb, there is a sharp rebuttal of the creationists’ complaint about junk DNA. Read it, it’s useful. It leads to a bothersome and more general point, though.
Collins has another published interview in Salon. It’s sad, actually—in every new interview, he says pretty much the same thing, but he digs himself in a little deeper. I ordered his book the other day, and now I’m beginning to regret it; it’s beginning to sound like trite Christian apologetics with no depth, no self-reflection, no insight…just compound anecdotes intended to rationalize a conclusion he has arrived at with no evidence. It’s distressingly anti-scientific.
For instance, we get an expansion of his hiking anecdote:
Let’s start the week with another open thread, and a few carnivals.
Lots of sources are telling me about Pat Robertson’s sudden acceptance of the fact of global warming. I’m sorry, but it’s no cause for rejoicing. He accepts it for the wrong reasons.
This week the heat index, the perceived temperature based on both air temperatures and humidity, reached 115 Fahrenheit in some regions of the U.S. East Coast. The 76-year-old Robertson told viewers that was “the most convincing evidence I’ve seen on global warming in a long time.”
If there’s one broad, overall message I wish everyone would get from this blog and from my teaching, it’s that science isn’t about getting the right answers—it’s about how you arrive at your answers, by verifiable, testable, repeatable methods and logic and good evidence. Deciding that global warming occurs because you’re having a hot, sticky, uncomfortable summer: bad and unscientific. Deciding that global warming occurs because the climate research community has evaluated multiple lines of evidence and documented an anomalous pattern: smart.
I’m sorry, Jake, but while getting the religious right on the side of conservation is a good thing, doing so on the say-so of an incompetent authority like Pat Robertson who uses an anecdote about the weather to justify it is a bad thing. What are we going to do if Colorado has a blizzard in January, and James Dobson uses that to argue that an Ice Age is on the way? Or if Jerry Falwell has a bout of incontinence, so he prophesies great floods?
Often, as I’ve looked at my embryonic zebrafish, I’ve noticed their prominent median fins. You can see them in this image, although it really doesn’t do them justice—they’re thin, membranous folds that make the tail paddle-shaped.
These midline fins are everywhere in fish—lampreys have them, sharks have them, teleosts have them, and we’ve got traces of them in the fossil record. Midline fins are more common and more primitive, yet usually its the paired fins, the pelvic and pectoral fins, that get all the attention, because they are cousins to our paired limbs…and of course, we completely lack any midline fins. A story is beginning to emerge, though, that shows that midline fin development and evolution is a wonderful example of a general principle: modularity and the reuse of hierarchies of genes.
Phil Plait is trying hard to depress us with the most horrific youtube video ever. Watch it and realize that the universe does not love us, we are incredibly fragile, and there are cosmic forces out there that with a little bad luck, could turn us into cinders in an instant.
Hmmm, I guess I can be depressing, too.
If you’re at work, I hope you have headphones; if you don’t, check in once you get home. Here are a couple of audio recordings of good science.
One entry in the carnival roundup for today:
Otherwise, I’m running about in Minneapolis, paying another visit to the airport and going to a meeting at UMTC, so talk among yourselves. I’ll be back later.
You may recall that Martin Brazeau was going to spend July doing fieldwork—well, he’s back, and is going to be telling us about his exciting month in a Canadian cow pasture, if ever you wanted to hear a first-hand account of paleontological research.
The carnivals du jour:
Again, this is also an open thread. I got a comment on the last one that more open threads are needed. Is that true? I don’t need to go to Atrios-level open-threadery, of course, but if you’d like these a little more often, let me know.
