Why should Catholicism be a prerequisite for speaking science?

I just received my copy of the latest Seed, and although I feel a bit reluctant to say it because it may be interpreted as sucking up to the corporate masters who provide my bandwidth, it really is a very good science magazine—I’d be subscribing even if they weren’t sending it to me for free. Take a browse through it sometime, there’s a lot of the content available online.

Anyway, of course the first thing I turn to in the magazine is Chris Mooney’s article on Learning to speak science. It’s good and has some productive suggestions, and I agree with Mooney on 90% of what he says in it, but…

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Tyrone Hayes at UMM

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Last week, the opening convocation for Black History Month was given by Tyrone Hayes of UC Berkeley. I was impressed: he’s exceptionally personable, and despite the poor organization of his visit (UMM’s fault, entirely) and having to drive for hours through a small blizzard to get here from the airport, he was gracious and fun to talk with. He gave a phenomenally well-organized, lucid talk which managed to describe all the basics of his research in terms a lay audience, most of whom were not science majors of any kind, could comprehend. And as I learned, most of his work is done by undergraduates—he has an enviable research program fueled by entry level students working towards a bachelor’s degree. I am humbled.

I have to say that if you get an opportunity to hear Hayes speak, jump at it. It’s a model of good educational rhetoric. And hey, if you’re on a seminar committee somewhere, look into inviting him out…it will be worth your while.

The subject of his talk was atrazine. Atrazine is a heavily used pesticide in the United States—we hose our cornfields with the stuff around here, using it to control weeds and boost the productivity of our acreage by 1.2%. That may not sound like much, but over the entire midwest, that adds up to really big money, money that flows into the coffers of its manufacturer, Syngenta. Syngenta is a Swiss company, and interestingly, atrazine is banned in Europe. In the US, we’re allowed to have up to 3 parts per billion in our drinking water, and Syngenta initially commissioned Hayes to research possible deleterious effects of atrazine.

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More politicization of science

There are more stories out there about the corruption of science by Republicans. The National Park Service and Department of the Interior are messed up, with the Park Service rewriting documents to be “anti-environmental, pro-privatization and corporate use of the parks,” and the Interior simply making up nonsense about sage grouse.
Then we’ve got NCI fudging evidence to falsely support the claims of the anti-abortion lobby.

Bush has a lot of nerve claiming to be pro-science. He’s pro-Big Bidness, but he can’t even get that right—he’s willing to promote fake science to get a short-term advantage for business interests, but I should think any good capitalist would know that operating under a flawed representation of reality is going to lead to failure in the long run.

Darwin Day approaches

It’s almost Darwin Day!

I just learned that Cornell is going all out: 5 days of events celebrating Darwin’s birthday, on February 9-13. That’s darned good.

The University of Minnesota Twin Cities is doing something slightly smaller in scale on Friday, 10 February, in an afternoon event sponsored by the Campus Atheists and Secular Humanists. I don’t have all the details yet, other than the rather important fact (to me, at least) that I’m one of the speakers. I’m planning to talk on “What Darwin Didn’t Know,” giving a brief overview of some examples of the kind of evidence uncovered in the last 25 years that has greatly strengthened evolutionary theory. I’ll put up a schedule here as I learn more.

We aren’t having a specific Darwin Day event here at UMM…well, other than the traditional cake and ice cream I’m planning to have with the family on that Sunday. However, the Cafe Scientifique Morris for February is going to be me, talking about evolution and creationism. That’s also imprecisely scheduled at this point—we’re going to try out a new venue, I hope, and one of the things I have to do this week is run around and work that out.

I know, I know—Darwin Day is over a week away, and you just can’t wait. If you’re in the Twin Cities, here’s something to whet your whistle: a talk tonight on creationism.

7:00 pm – James Curtsinger – Ten things to know about creationism
James Curtsinger will give a presentation on “Ten Things to Know about Creationism”.

From the presentation: Creationists fall into young-earth and old-earth camps. The former include biblical literalists who believe that the geologic column was formed by a Noachian Flood. Their “scientific creationism” suffered major setbacks in the 1980’s. “Intelligent design”, conceived as a movement in the 1990’s, is smarter, better educated, old-earth creationism. I.D. has popular support, but is soundly rejected by professionals, and was embarrassed in the recent Dover trial. The important battleground for these issues is the public high school science classroom. Surveys show that 20% of MN public high school science teachers teach creationism. Evangelical atheists worsen the general problem. Universities house technical and scientific expertise, but do not generally cultivate the kind of outreach needed to address this issue.
Coffman Student Union Room 323

I’d love to attend myself, but I’m feeling that exhausted sensation that comes from the first few frantic weeks of classes, and I don’t think I can push another long drive to Minneapolis on my workload right now. If any of my readers go—send me a report! It sounds fun!

President panders to anti-manimal lobby! Dr Moreau flees country in rage!

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I didn’t listen to the State of the Union Address last night, preferring to maintain my equanimity by attending a talk on quantum physics, but I knew I could trust my readers to email me with choice weird science bits. I’m getting a lot of “WTF?” email about this statement from Bush:

Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research, human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling or patenting human embryos.

It’s pure political calculus. He throws away the mad scientist and pig-man vote, and wins the religious ignoramus vote…and we know which one has the majority here.

But guess what? Creating chimeras is legitimate and useful scientific research; it’s really happening. Of course, it isn’t with the intent of creating monstrous half-animal/half-human slaves or something evil like that, and scientists are well aware (or should be well aware) of the ethical concerns, and it’s the topic of ongoing debate. Let’s consider one recent example of such an experiment.

Down syndrome is a very common genetic disorder caused by the presence of an extra chromosome 21. That kind of genetic insult causes a constellation of problems: mild to moderate mental retardation, heart defects, and weakened immune systems, and various superficial abnormalities. It’s also a viable defect, and produces walking, talking, interacting human beings who are loved by their friends and families, who would really like to be able to do something about those lifespan-reducing health problems. We would love to have an animal model of Down syndrome, so that, for example, we could figure out exactly what gene overdose is causing the immune system problems or the heart defects, and develop better treatments for them.

So what scientists have been doing is inserting human genes into mice, to produce similar genetic overdoses in their development. As I reported before, there have been partial insertions, but now a team of researchers has inserted a complete human chromosome 21 into mouse embryonic stem cells, and from those generated a line of aneuploid mice that have many of the symptoms of Down syndrome, including the heart defects. They also have problems in spatial learning and memory that have been traced back to defects in long-term potentiation in the central nervous system.

These mice are a tool to help us understand a debilitating human problem.

George W. Bush would like to make them illegal.

He’s trusting that everyone will think he is banning monstrous crimes against nature, but what he’s really doing is targeting the weak and the ill, blocking useful avenues of research that are specifically designed to help us understand human afflictions. His message isn’t “We aren’t going to let the mad scientists make monsters!”, it’s “We aren’t going to let the doctors help those ‘retards.'”

Once again, the ignorance and the bigotry of the religious right wins out over reason and humanitarianism. I think I know who the real pig-men are.

O’Doherty A, Ruf S, Mulligan C, Hildreth V, Errington ML, Cooke S, Sesay A, Modino S, Vanes L, Hernandez D, Linehan JM, Sharpe PT, Brandner S, Bliss TV, Henderson DJ, Nizetic D, Tybulewicz VL, Fisher EM. (2005) An aneuploid mouse strain carrying human chromosome 21 with Down syndrome phenotypes. Science 309(5743):2033-7.

I know this irritates my critics…

…but my university actually supports me. There’s a profile of yours truly that’s part of a random rotating collection of links on UMM’s main page (if you don’t see it there, reload the page; it’ll appear eventually.)

I am aware that I am slightly harsher and more radical than many of my colleagues on some issues (others have their own domains of expertise and radicalism), but one of the great things about UMM is that even if they don’t explicitly endorse all of my opinions—and that acknowledgment on the main page is not an admission that this university is a hotbed of militant atheist evilutionists—they are appreciative of the diversity of ideas that make up a great university.