I am feeling a growing sense of incredulity as I read the latest babble from Susan Mazur. She was the one who reported on this upcoming meeting at Altenberg with an excess of hyperbole and a truly misleading inflation of the importance of that event. It sounds interesting in that a small group of respectable, credible scientists are gathering (along with a few who would most charitably be called crackpots), but it’s not that unusual — meetings happen all the time, the people participating in this event go to meetings all the time, and it’s simply different but routine.

I get the impression that Mazur is journalist with no sense of proportion and a rather distressing lack of skepticism. This meeting will not revolutionize science. If we’re lucky, a few good ideas will emerge from it. More likely, some people will have a good time, they’ll learn a few things, and they’ll fly back to work and we won’t hear about it ever again.

Mazur desperately needs a tranquilizer, because she has struck again with another exceptionally silly article on this non-story, Theory of Form to Evolution Center Stage. It’s a disjointed mess, this amazingly rambling collection of credulous nonsense that mixes up entirely reasonable statements from some participants with flakiness from a few notorious weirdos, with no sense that she’s even trying to distinguish the two.

I’m not even going to try to wade into the chaos. Let’s just bring up a few points that involve me.

University of Torono biochemist Larry Moran, who runs a popular website called Sandwalk, which considers itself the rival to SEED blogger PZ Myers’ Pharyngula, asked me: “Why was Doug Futuyma not invited?”

Larry is my rival? That isn’t how it works — this is not a zero-sum game. There is no competition. It’s rather symptomatic of Mazur’s whole approach that everything is viewed as a conflict between everything else.

And this is just funny:

Pivar is the independent scientist whose work has been skewered on the blogosphere for not being a complete theory of evolution.

No, no, no — wrong on every count. Pivar is a wealthy art collector who makes millions selling septic tanks — he is not a scientist. Nobody (well, other than creationists, that is) argues against theories because they’re incomplete; every theory is incomplete. I don’t even know what a complete theory would look like. No, Pivar got mocked because his theory is divorced from reality, built on fantasies instead of evidence. So far, the only person who seems to take Pivar at all seriously is Mazur.

Pivar says he has in fact taken the advice of NASA minerologist Robert Hazen and early on approached mainstream evo publishers. He has been repeatedly rejected he says, but continues to fight on, making the point that he’s the only one with a model.

Pivar recently offered a research grant to Massimo Pigliucci and his lab to study his Engines of Evolution book, following an exchange of emails with Pigliucci over several months.

Pigliucci said he considered the gesture “bribery” and refused the offer, adding that he does not share Pivar’s enthusiasm about his theory of form.

That’s putting mildly, I suspect.

Mazur gets even wackier and more dishonest in this article: Richard Dawkins Renounces Darwinism As Religion And Embraces Form. I hear Dawkins has also stopped beating his wife. Anyway, all she got him to say is that there’s good stuff in developmental biology that complements evolutionary biology, and from that obvious and sensible conclusion she spins a bizarre thesis that he has somehow been converted from a religious view.

Spare me. I often gripe about bad journalism, but this is some of the worst … and I fear that she might actually be on the same side of the political fence as I am. Beware the left-leaning incompetents — they have the potential to be as awful as the incompetents on the right.

People patent the strangest things … like this Jesus doll.

The doll is provided with electrically conductive nails which when inserted through apertures in the hands of the doll, mount the doll to a provided cross and close an electrical circuit which illuminates the cross.

Cool. I’ll go one better. Let’s add another circuit in the side of the doll, with a little spear…and when you pierce his side, his eyes blink and his head spins around and pops off. It would be only slightly more tacky.

What is it with this anti-beard sentiment? Here’s an article that wonders why so many scientists have beards, with several amusing stories.

But anti-beard arguments also ran rife in pre-Victorian times: Beards trapped food and the stuff you spewed out when you sneezed. At a stretch, they could even go as far as to catch fire and trap vermin, some argued. This all came to a head in 1907, with a rather remarkable experiment. A French scientist took one bearded and one clean shaven man from the streets of Paris and asked each of them to kiss a woman, whose lips were previously swabbed with antiseptic. After each smooth, her lips were swabbed and the the cultures were smeared on agar. The hairy kiss, it turned out, was by far the more microbial-ly diverse.

That anecdote answers the question right there. Overgrown nerds experience very little risk of ever having to kiss French women on the streets of Paris, so there is very little selection against beard growth. Hey, if I had some likelihood of sweeping strange women into my arms, I might shave, too … and brush my teeth more than once a week, and take a shower more often than once a month, habits atypical of us hairy, dirty, microbe-rich men.

(via Pure Pedantry)

Somebody please restore my faith in humanity and reassure me that Christvertising is satire.

A Catholic bishop (of a weird breakaway sect, admittedly) has endorsed the

Protocols of the Elders of Zion and declared that Jews are conspiring to rule the world

.

Obviously, the man must be an evolutionist. Only through Darwin can one become a hateful racist.^*

^*Necessary disclaimer: obviously, I’m saying this with a sarcastic sneer.

For those of you who don’t follow the comments…you might want to try and read this one. I don’t quite know what it’s about, my eyes glazed over.

Just so you know what kind of evil person I am, I actually contemplated disemvoweling that magnum opus before mentioning it. Just the thought of hundreds of people struggling to interpolate the vowels in a long gibbering screed brought a wicked smirk to my face.

There’s going to be a meeting this summer in Altenberg of a small subset of evolutionary biologists to discuss the next step in the evolution of evolutionary biology, which this article describes as a “Woodstock of evolution”, populated with scientific “rock stars”. All I can say is “bleh.” This meeting sounds like it will be wonderfully entertaining, but get real: it will not settle or even define much of anything. These are interesting times in biology, with a lot of argument at a high level about levels of selection and evo-devo and modes of speciation and self-organisation and etc., etc., etc. (and I have to rush to say that these debates have nothing to do with creationism, although the creationists love to pretend that the scientific arguments are related to their flat-earth philosophy). However, the actual state of the theory will be determined by the working scientists who produce useful results, not by theorizing at a mansion in Vienna. Expect emergence from a practical perspective, not rock-stars issuing edicts.

Larry Moran appreciates the article because the author reached out to scientists who are not attending the meeting, like Richard Lewontin — and that’s another problem with puffing up the importance of Altenberg. Not only is it a small meeting that can’t be representative of the breadth of thought in the world of evolutionary biology, but it leaves out people like Lewontin? What insane world would consider the future of modern biology without consideration of the perspectives of Lewontin? So I’ll agree with Larry that far, kudos to the writer for trying. Otherwise, though, I find much that is objectionable in the story.

[Read more…]

Hackers have replaced the Irish Catholic page with a cute video and a link to the Irish Atheists page. I really should scold such deplorable virtual vandalism, but, well, instead I grabbed a quick screen capture before it gets taken down.

I thought the video was pretty funny, too, mocking the silly costumery of the Catholic hierarchy. Alright, hackers, you were naughty, don’t do it again … but you did make me laugh.

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Good news — it’s not a hack at all. Those clever Irish atheists merely beat the Irish Catholics to their domain name…so it should be up indefinitely.

As you all know, the position of President of the World is traditionally determined by a vote on facebook. In the last millennium, the title was awarded to the Papacy, and we are all aware of what an awful cock-up that was — it was also a rigged vote, since the only computer with facebook access was kept in the Vatican. This millennium, it’s a race between Facebook PZ and Facebook Phil, and of course Phil has already mobilized his evil hordes. Being a much nicer guy — the kind of beneficent tyrant you would want to dominate you — I haven’t been pushing for this one, but think that perhaps the decent thing to do is compromise. So I have a few suggestions.

We could simply divide this by the electorate. Everyone who lives on earth should vote for me, while all the space-based citizens can vote for Phil. Or perhaps all sentient biological organisms should vote for me, while any of you inorganic creatures reading this can vote for Phil.

Or we could divvy up the spoils. I get planet Earth and all the residents thereon, while Phil gets outer space, and has dominion over all vacuums. That sounds fair and gracious to me. After all, this is the World presidency, not the Offworld presidency.

Alternatively, if Phil is unwilling to consider my generous offer, we could just crush him and take it all. That might be simplest.