Another reason you shouldn’t attend a religiously-affiliated university

Universities are supposed to be places where students are free to think and argue…but too often, if a student says something that contradicts the religious dogma of the institution, it’s an excuse to be censored. Here’s an example: a Mormon student at BYU wrote a letter for the school newspaper criticizing the LDS position on gay rights while still supporting Mormonism as a religious belief.

It is time for LDS supporters of Prop 8 to be honest about their reasons for supporting the amendment. It’s not about adoption rights, or the first amendment, or tradition. These arguments were not found worthy of the standards for finding facts set up by our judicial system. The real reason is that a man who most of us believe is a prophet of God told us to support the amendment. [This is a privately held religious belief that we are using to support legislation that takes away a right from a minority group. If our government were to enact legislation based solely on such beliefs, it would set a dangerous precedent, possibly even more so than allowing a homosexual to marry the person he or she loves.] We must be honest about our motivation, and consider what it means to the delicate balance between our relationship with God and with His children here on earth. Maybe then we will stop thoughtlessly spouting arguments that are offensive to gays and lesbians and indefensible to those not of our faith.

It got pulled. Why? I don’t know. It’s still crazy pro-mormon gushy baloney, but it is simply saying that everyone should be honest about their motivations.

Oh, wait. I forgot. Honesty is one of those sins in these goofy cults.

Hitchens sets an example for us all

So I’m having a few niggling little health problems, but all is well and getting better; meanwhile, Christopher Hitchens mentions this:

“Well, I’m dying, since you asked,” Hitchens replied. “So are you, but I’m doing it faster and in more rich and fecund detail.”

And what does he do? He gallops off to Birmingham to debate that supercilious pompous nitwit, David Berlinski. And by all accounts, whips him into slime. I am extremely impressed with Hitchens right now.

I’m not at all impressed with Berlinski, but then I never have been. He dredged up the rotting corpse of Hitler to claim he was under the spell of Darwin!

When Berlinski linked Nazism and Darwinism while connecting atheism with violent government regimes of the 20th Century, Hitchens bristled and went on the attack in his next turn at the podium.

Connecting Nazism with Darwinism “is a filthy slander,” Hitchens said. “Darwinism was derided in Germany.”

Hitchens said Adolf Hitler claimed in “Mein Kampf” that he was doing God’s work with his policies against the Jews and that the first Nazi treaty was with the Vatican.

“To say that there is something fascistic about my beliefs, I won’t hear said, and you shouldn’t believe,” Hitchens said to the audience, almost thundering despite his diminished voice.

Good grief, please. Hitler was a nominal Catholic with an extremist pseudo-scientific philosophy that excluded Darwin and evolution, and found justification in religious dogma. It’s absolutely nuts that people still play this game of blaming Darwin for the Nazis; there’s just no historical reason to do so. Why not settle on that mass murdering tyrant, Stalin, instead? He was no friend of Darwin, either, but at least he was openly atheist, so they’d at least have a tiny pinch of logic (but not much of one) in correlating atheism and tyranny. At least, pointing at one godless anti-Darwinian and blaming all his crimes on godless evolution is marginally more sensible than pointing at a god-walloping anti-Darwinian and blaming all of his sins on godless evolution.

Another bizarre bit from the story is this little anecdote from Taunton, the organizer of the debate:

Taunton said he drove Hitchens to Birmingham this week from the Washington, D.C., area, and had Hitchens read aloud the prologue of the Gospel of John, which they then discussed.

Hitchens referred to that in the debate, saying that if Taunton found out Jesus did not exist, it would ruin his life.

Taunton responded at the end of the debate. “It would ruin my life,” he said. “It would suggest this life is a sham.”

Hitchens shook his head. “Don’t give up so easily,” he said.

Exasperating nonsense. It ruins your life to believe that an old book of fables is all that gives it meaning. What would be a sham is the wasted investment in promoting lies; that isn’t corrected by insisting on continuing to live on falsehoods.

Episode CII: The Food Pr0n thread

You know, I’m supposed to watch my diet now. I took my son to lunch the other day and he ordered and ate an entire chicken-fried steak sandwich with a giant platter of french fries right in front of me, which was incredibly cruel…but I was strong, and didn’t even steal a single fry from his plate. Then I thought that the person in the everlasting gob-unstopping thread was being similarly cruel when she posted this bacon porn video:

But she wasn’t! I found myself completely uninterested in ever eating bacon again after watching that! Some of you may not want to watch it, then — it’s a bit like hosing holy water onto the attendees at a vampire convention.

(Current totals: 10,959 entries with 1,115,683 comments.)

The Irish Genome

What a curious paper — it’s fine research, and it’s a useful dollop of data, but it’s simultaneously so 21st century and on the edge of being completely trivial. It’s like a tiny shard of the future whipping by on its way to quaintness.

Researchers have for the first time sequenced the genome of an Irishman, a fellow confirmed to be the product of at least 3 generations of fully Irish ancestors.

It’s a good piece of work, another piece in the puzzle of human genomics, but it’s also a little bit odd. I’m always excited to see another organism’s genome sequenced, the first marsupial, the first sea anemone, the first avian, etc., and it’s also become a bit commonplace (oh, another bacterium sequenced…); it’s just weird to see “Irish” announced as a new novel addition to the ranks of sequenced organisms, as if it were Capitella or something. Cool, but a little jarring.

It’s also a genre with limited prospects. If you’re busy sequencing the first Armenian or the first New Guinean or the first Luxembourger, work fast — I can’t quite imagine that most will warrant a publication, except as a formality, as I imagine this paper is. We’re entering the era of personalized genomics, when anyone will be able to get their sequence done for under a thousand dollars. I don’t imagine that a paper titled “Sequencing and analysis of PZ Myers’ human genome” will get published in Nature. But if anyone wants to try, I’ll gladly send them a few cells and my permission.

Anyway, the paper got the sequence of this Irish fella. They identified many unique single nucleotide polymorphisms that may be useful molecular markers of Irish ancestry; a few of the new alleles seem to be associated with diseases like inflammatory bowel and chronic liver problems. They identified a few genes bearing the signature of positive selection. Here are their conclusions:

The first Irish human genome sequence provides insight into the population structure of this branch of the European lineage which has a distinct ancestry from other published genomes. At 11 fold genome coverage approximately 99.3% of the reference genome was covered and more than 3 million SNPs were detected, of which 13% were novel and may include specific markers of Irish ancestry. We provide a novel technique for SNP calling in human genome sequence using haplotype data and validate the imputation of Irish haplotypes using data from the current Human Genome Diversity Panel (HGDP-CEPH). Our analysis has implications for future re-sequencing studies and suggests that relatively low levels of genome coverage, such as that being used by the 1000 genomes project, should provide relatively accurate genotyping data. Using novel variants identified within the study, which are in linkage disequilibrium with already known disease associated SNPs, we illustrate how these novel variants may point towards potential causative risk factors for important diseases. Comparisons with other sequenced human genomes allowed us to address positive selection in the human lineage and to examine the relative contributions of gene function and gene duplication events. Our findings point towards the possible primacy of recent duplication events over gene function as indicative of a genes likelihood of being under positive selection. Overall we demonstrate the utility of generating targeted whole genome sequence data in helping to address general questions of human biology as well as providing data to answer more lineage-restricted questions.

Hey, it’s data. But I think it will be made much more interesting when it acquires more context. One Irish genome doesn’t give us much information on Irish variation. It’s information to complement the 1000 Genomes Project (the Irish study is not part of that bigger project), which intends to take a nice snapshot of human genetic diversity by sampling 100 individuals from each of 10 distinct populations. Then the hard part comes: comparing and analyzing everything.

Oh, and the digging out from all the ethnic jokes that will appear in the comments.

Tong P, Prendergast JGD, Lohan AL, Farrington SM, Cronin S, Friel N, Bradley DG, Hardiman O, Evans A, Wilson JF and Loftus BJ (2010) Sequencing and analysis of an Irish human genome. Genome Biology (in press)

15 minutes…

I’m about to enter a classroom for the first time in over a year. I feel a strange dread that I’ve forgotten how to teach.

OK, I’m back. I survived. No students passed out. I think it was OK, although it was made more difficult by the fact that it involved a transition from one instructor to another.

Now to do it again this afternoon.

The sexist brain

It looks like I have to add another book to my currently neglected reading list. In an interview, Cordelia Fine, author of a new book, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), has a few provocative things to say about gender stereotypes and the flimsy neuroscience used to justify them.

So women aren’t really more receptive than men to other people’s emotions?

There is a very common social perception that women are better at understanding other people’s thoughts and feelings. When you look at one of the most realistic tests of mind reading, you find that men and women are just as good at getting what their interaction partners were thinking and feeling. It even surprised the researchers. They went on to discover that once you make gender salient when you test these abilities [like having subjects check a box with their sex before a test], you have this self-fulfilling effect.

The idea that women are better at mind reading might be true in the sense that our environments often remind women they should be good at it and remind men they should be bad at it. But that doesn’t mean that men are worse at this kind of ability.

…

But it seems like a Catch-22: Women who pursue careers in math are being handicapped by the fact that there are so few women pursuing careers in math.

Gender equality is increasing in pretty much all domains, and the psychological effects of that can only be beneficial. The real issue is when people in the popular media say things like, “Male brains are just better at this kind of stuff, and women’s brains are better at that kind of stuff.” When we say to women, “Look, men are better at math, but it’s because they work harder,” you don’t see the same harmful effects. But if you say, “Men are better at math genetically,” then you do. These stem from the implicit assumption that the gender stereotypes are based on hard-wired truths.

Here we have a brain, receptive and plastic and sensitive to learning, constantly rewiring itself, with a core of common, human traits hardwired into it, and over here we have scientists who have been the recipient of years of training, often brought up in a culture that fosters an interest in science and math…and somehow, many of these scientists are resistant to the idea that the brain is easily skewed in different directions by the social environment. I don’t get it. I was brought up as a boy, and I know that throughout my childhood I was constantly being hammered by male-affirmative messages and biases, and I think it’s obvious that girls were also hit with lots of their gender-specific cultural influences. Yet somehow we’re supposed to believe that the differences between men and women are largely set by our biology? That women aren’t as good at math because hormones wire up their brain in a different way than the brains of men, and it’s not because our plastic brains receive different environmental signals?

Fine appeals to my biases about the importance of environmental influences, I’ll admit; the interview is a bit thin on the details. But I’ll definitely have to read her book.

Psychic destruction in Belize

Two children are missing in Belize, and no one knows what happened to them. So a helpful ‘psychic’ declared that they had been fed to the crocodiles in a nearby sanctuary. The results were predictable.

Reports are that the mob shot and killed some of the 17 crocs held in captivity at the sanctuary. Also destroyed were the Rose’s two story home that included a laboratory and nursery for baby crocs. One baby American Crocodile was to be flown to Chicago to the Wildlife Discovery Center in Lake Forest, Ill. USA for the first ever animal exchange program between Belize and the USA. Over $2,500 in vet supplies that were recently donated for a new humane society that Cherie, along with other locals were working on in Punta Gorda were also lost. “This one wrongful incident has effected and hurt many innocent people and animals,” added Cherie.

The sanctuary looks like it was an amazing setup: all power was provided by solar and wind, they offered educational programs, they were training students, and they were also supporting local eco-tourism. And of course their primary mission was protecting endangered reptiles.

Now it’s all destroyed by the lies of one ignorant fraud, whipping up a mob into a ridiculous frenzy. Even now the people who ran the sanctuary can’t come back — they’ve been threatened with death.

Ignorance isn’t just a passive failure. Ignorance topples and destroys the great things people build up.

The organizers are asking for donations — they’re hoping to rebuild.

International wiring account number for donations
Belize Bank # 630-1-1-10130
Account# Vince & Cherie Rose Fire Victim Account

They aren’t just racist

Here’s a little chat with the president of the Montana tea party, Tim Ravndal:

Dennis Scranton: “I think fruits are decorative. Hang up where they can be seen and appreciated. Call Wyoming for display instructions.”

Tim Ravndal: “@Kieth, OOPS I forgot this aint(sic) America no more! @ Dennis, Where can I get that Wyoming printed instruction manual?”

Ravndal has since been ousted. Don’t joke about murdering gays where the liberals might notice!

Because when I think ‘peaceful protest’, I think ‘missiles’

What are they thinking? The protesters complaining about that violent, militant religion of Islam building a mosque/community center in New York are now towing about a pair of deactivated missiles at their rallies. I guess Christians are trying to send a message that they’re friendly and non-threatening.

i-b93c0d17e30998b465a912d929c2d986-missile.jpeg

I’ve been doing it wrong for so many years. When I was protesting the Iraq war, maybe it would have been a more effective demonstration if we’d rented a tank and put a sign on it, “Honk if you hate war”. When we protested that biological warfare work going on at the Dugway Proving Grounds, maybe we should have put talcum powder in envelopes and mailed them to the local newspapers. It’s so much more reassuring to the other side when you couch your message of respectful coexistence in military gear.

The guy who donated the missiles to the protest has a poll. He’s just clueless on so many levels.

Do you want the Mosque @ Ground Zero?

Sure, why not 66%
Hell no! 34%