Republicans vandalize classrooms — literally

That insane tea-baggin’ Maine GOP convention did something else of interest. Some of the Republican caucuses were held in a local school, including the 8th grade classroom of teacher Paul Clifford. He returned to the classroom after the weekend to discover that the Republicans had indulged themselves in remodeling the classroom.

  • For seven years, Clifford has had “a collage-type poster depicting the history of the U.S. labor movement” on his classroom door. He uses it “to teach his students how to incorporate collages into their annual project on Norman Rockwell’s historic ‘Four Freedoms’ illustrations.” When Clifford returned to his classroom on Monday, after the GOP caucuses, the poster was gone; in its place was a sticker reading, “Working People Vote Republican.”

  • Republicans opened a “closed cardboard box they found near Clifford’s desk” and later objected to the fact that it contained copies of the U.S. Constitution donated to the school by the American Civil Liberties Union.

  • After the caucuses, “rank-and-file Republicans who were upset by what they said they had seen in Clifford’s classroom” began calling the school, objecting to student art they had seen and a sticker on a filing cabinet reading “People for the American Way — Fight the Right.”

Labor is so un-American, Norman Rockwell was an America-hating commie pinko, and kids shouldn’t be exposed to the Constitution, especially if the ACLU likes it.

It’s getting so you can’t tell the patriots from the vandals. And Republicans are clearly the party against intellectualism, education, and diversity.

Now we’ve got some big numbers to throw around, too

i-e88a953e59c2ce6c5e2ac4568c7f0c36-rb.png

Only ours are methodologically valid. It’s a common creationist tactic to fling around big numbers to ‘disprove’ evolution: for instance, I’ve had this mysterious Borel’s Law (that anything with odds worse than 1 in 1050 can never happen) thrown in my face many times, followed by the declaration that the odds of the simplest organism forming by chance are 1 in 10340,000,000. It’s complete nonsense, of course — their calculations all ignore the reality of the actual events, assuming that everything must form spontaneously and all at once, which is exactly the opposite of how probability plays a role in evolution. It’s annoying and inane, and the creationists never seem to learn…perhaps because the rubes they pander to are easily dazzled by even bogus mathematics, so they keep doing it.

We’re going to have to start firing back. Doug Theobald, a long-time contributor to Talk.Origins and the Panda’s Thumb, has written a very nice paper testing the likelihood that all life on earth is not related by common descent, and he comes up with some numbers of many digits to support evolutionary theory. Nick Matzke has a summary, and the story has been written up for National Geographic.

Basically, the idea is this: take a small set of known, conserved proteins that are shared in all organisms, not restricting ourselves to one kingdom or one phylum, but grabbing them all. In this paper, that data set consists of 23 proteins from 12 taxa in the Big Three domains: Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya. Then set up many different models to explain the relationships of these species. For instance, you could organize them into the classic single tree, where all are related, or you could model them as three independent origins, for each of Bacteria, Archaea, or Eukarya, or you could postulate other combinations, such as that Bacteria arose independently of Archaea and Eukarya, which share a common ancestor. Finally, you tell your computer to do a lot of statistics on the models, asking how likely it is that two independent groups would each arrive at similar sequences, rating each of the models for parsimony and accuracy against the evidence.

And the winner is…common ancestry, with one branching tree! This is what we expected, of course, and what Theobald has done is to test our assumptions, always a good thing to do.

More complicated permutations of these models were also tried. What if there were a significant amount of horizontal gene transfer? Would that make multiple origins of modern life more likely? He was testing models like the ones below, where the dotted lines represent genes that leap across taxa to confuse the issue.

i-d060a3501eaef6f6686404d4ac24ba00-origin_models.jpeg

The answer here is that they don’t. These models can also be evaluated by statistical methods, and the best fit is again the one on the right, with a single ancestral root. People might recall the infamous “Darwin was wrong” cover from New Scientist—well, these results say that New Scientist was wrong, the existence of extensive horizontal gene transfer does not negate the fact of common descent.

So what’s the big number? There are lots of them in the paper, since it evolves many comparisons, but Theobald distills it down to just the odds that bacteria have an independent origin from Archaea and eukaryotes:

But, based on the new analysis, the odds of that are “just astronomically enormous,” he said. “The number’s so big, it’s kind of silly to say it”–1 in 10 to the 2,680th power, or 10 followed by 2,680 zeros.

One in 102680? Hey, aren’t those odds a little worse than Borel’s criterion of one in 1050?

Stay tuned to the Panda’s Thumb. Apparently, once he finishes up the trifling business of wrapping up a semester’s teaching, Theobald will be putting up a synopsis of his own and answering questions online.

Theobald D (2010) A formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry. Nature 465(13):219-222.

Wingnutty poll

Last year, I mocked this extraordinarily stupid joke and the radio host who told it. I guess the radio personality was still feeling the sting — either that, or he wanted the traffic — since he brought it up again today, and also complained about the way I ridiculed the Maine Republican party platform (Remember that one? No gay marriage, global warming is a myth, Austrian economics, immediate arrest of all illegal aliens, etc.?)

So now he wants to know what you think of that teabaggin’ Republican platform. He thinks it is just ducky. Most of his listeners agree. I think he’s about to discover that the rest of the world thinks he’s a lunatic.

Does This Sound Wingnutty To You?

Count me as a wingnut — that all sounds fine by me!
84.34 %
These tea-bagger ideas are crazier than Ron Paul is — and THAT’S pretty crazy!
15.66 %

Letting go of gods is a reason for joy…like being free of prison

Yesterday, I mentioned this silly fellow Damon Linker, who complains that the New Atheists aren’t sad enough about their godlessness. This seems to be the new gripe du jour; you can’t be a serious atheist unless you’re all broken up about the absence of god, and unless you tell all the believers how much you appreciate what their superstition brings to the world, and how now you’re going to go home and cry because you have a god-shaped hole in your heart. It’s deeply dishonest and stupid. If anybody tried to pull that nonsense on me in person they’d get a rude response that would reveal that the teddy bear can snarl after all.

Meet Father Barron. I give you fair warning: if you actually watch this video, you may find yourself trying to smash through the glass of your video display to slap the smug prick. The infuriation is compounded by the fact that he’s wearing that pretentious dog collar, which I imagine he thinks gives him a look of authority, but to me is like putting on a big red clown nose. No, that’s not fair; a clown nose wouldn’t be an announcement that one is a pompous fraud.

And there it is again, the crazy complaint that the New Atheists aren’t serious enough, that they’re playing at atheism, because they just don’t express the existential anguish that apostates are expected to feel. Now Camus and Sartre — there are some good atheists; they’re safely dead, so they won’t spit in the eye of a priest, and they appreciated how miserable they were without gods.

Oh, Father Barron, so smug and sure in your phony Catholicism — you must be merely playing at religion, since you aren’t all distressed and weepy over your failure to grasp the power of science and reason and rationalism. How can I take you seriously if you don’t make YouTube videos crying over how sad you are to be trapped in the cloying, smothering dogma of the Catholic church?

And then he gives away his game:

they [the good old atheists] knew that inside us we have a deep desire for fulfillment, truth, goodness, justice…in other words, for God.

Barron is a fool. The equation of fulfillment, truth, goodness, and justice with god is what theists do; atheists haven’t given up on any of those principles, we feel no lack of those important matters to grieve over, we have simply realized that god does not provide fulfillment, truth, goodness, or justice and have sought them out in more practical and real arenas.

And most importantly, we actually respect and take seriously that idea of valuing truth, which is why we reject the superstitions priests offer us. We take it so seriously that we expect to be given reasonable explanations and evidence for fantastic claims, and do not simply accept stories told to us by stuffy old gomers wearing funny collars.

Climate denialists should fear this fellow

If you’ve been following the climate change ‘debate’ at all, you should be aware of the excellent YouTube channel, Climate Denial Crock of the Week, which always has excellent take-downs of the denialists, professionally made and always devastating. Here’s one example:

The author is in a competition for a $5,000 grant. All you have do is register at that link and vote — let’s promote good science presented well!

Happy news

Some of you know one of our regular commenters here…and she has some good news to share.

Hail the happy Happy Beltane season!

Naughty Marvin

&

Patricia, OM

Are pleased to announce

their engagement.

A Lughnasadh Wedding is planned

at Trout Lake Abbey, Trout Lake, Washington.

I even know where that is! Very pretty country thereabouts. Congratulations to all!

I’m sorry, Toronto. Nobody deserves Deepak.

Look who’s coming to the Royal Ontario Museum: Deepak Chopra. What were they thinking when they invited that pompous fraud to speak?

World renowned teacher, author and philosopher Deepak Chopra presents his latest concepts in the field of mind-body medicine bridging the technological miracles of the West with the wisdom of the East. He will show you how your highest vision of yourself can be turned into physical reality and discuss how you can become a living cell within the body of a living universe. You don’t join the cosmic dance – you become the dance. Deepak will address the deeper meaning of our existence including: What is our true nature? What is the meaning and purpose of our existence? How can I transform myself? How can I make a better world? Deepak explains how the greatest spiritual secrets are tied up in this simple answer: You can’t change the body without changing the self, and you can’t change the self without bringing in the soul. He explains, “It’s all one process, and it begins with knowing that your body exists to mirror who you are and who you want to be.”

Deepak Chopra is the author of more than 56 books translated into over 35 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers in both the fiction and non-fiction categories. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, Adjunct Professor at Kellogg School of Management and Senior Scientist with The Gallup Organization. Time magazine heralds Deepak Chopra as one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century and credits him as “the poet-prophet of alternative medicine.” For more information visit: www.deepakchopra.com

Location: Convocation Hall, 31 King’s College Circle, University of Toronto

Cost: Price: Ground VIP: $175, Rise Area: $89, 1st Balcony: $69, 2nd Balcony: $49, Behind Stage: $25

There isn’t one thing in that block of fluff that interests me in the slightest — it’s all noise by a charlatan. But oh, man, look what he’s charging! If anyone goes or has an opportunity to work backstage at the hall, please take a photo of the “Ground VIP” section: if I were in Toronto, I’d want to know who the chief airheads in the region were, and that’s a fine starting point.