Get cracking, SCarolina!

You’ve got another of those wretched “academic (non)-freedom” bills in your state. They’re like lice, crawling out everywhere.

Senate Bill 1386, introduced in the South Carolina Senate on May 15, 2008, and referred to the Senate Committee on Education, is the newest so-called “academic freedom” bill aimed at undermining the teaching of evolution, joining similar bills currently under consideration in Louisiana, Michigan, and Missouri. Similar bills in Florida and Alabama died when the legislative session in those states ended. The South Carolina bill contends that “[t]he teaching of biological and chemical evolution can cause controversy, and some teachers may be uncertain of administrative expectations concerning the presentation of material on these scientific topics” and that “public school educators must be supported in finding effective ways to present controversial science curriculum and must be permitted to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review the scientific strengths and weaknesses of theories of biological and chemical evolution in an objective manner.”

We are such bad boys

I wish I hadn’t missed this when it come out a few years ago. A professor of sociology and comparative religion asked why women were more religious than men, and he ruled out socialization and cultural differences somehow, to come to a surprising conclusion.

“We looked for an obvious simple explanation, but nothing worked except physiology,” said Stark. “People studying crime also have looked at socialization and they can’t find a reason that explains the gender difference except a physiological one. Not being religious is similar to any other shortsighted, risky and impulsive behavior that some men – primarily young males – engage in, such as assault, robbery, burglary, murder and rape.”

Did this guy just compare atheism to murder and rape?

So not believing in Jesus is just like sticking a knife in someone?

Don’t cross me, man. I’m dangerous.

I hear wedding bells…

Good news for fairness, justice and equality: California has made gay marriage legal. It’s a small triumph for civil rights.

Now to celebrate, I don’t expect you all to run out and marry a same-sex partner — I think my wife would object, and I’m really not in the market — but wouldn’t you know it? The media is responding to this news with…stupid internet polls! How else can they possibly trivialize an important court decision, after all?

The LA Times is asking, “Did the California Supreme Court make the correct decision today?” (as if, perhaps, enough internet geeks squawk they will change their minds). MSNBC asks, “What do you think about the court decision in California that allows same-sex couples to marry?” — strangely, one of the possible answers to that one is “Don’t think so,” which doesn’t make much sense. It’s also currently leading.

I’m sure you gay readers can think of a more suitable way to celebrate this little bit of recognition, but the rest of us can settle for poking at a radio button on the internet. Do so gaily, OK?

And if you want to do something more substantive, promote equal rights legislation in your state, so that all 50 states someday offer this basic privilege to everyone.

The subtly different squid eye

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

By now, everyone must be familiar with the inside out organization of the cephalopod eye relative to ours: they have photoreceptors that face towards the light, while we have photoreceptors that are facing away from the light. There are other important differences, though, some of which came out in a recent Nature podcast with Adam Rutherford (which you can listen to here), which was prompted by a recent publication on the structure of squid rhodopsin.

[Read more…]

Cruel nature

If you should ever find yourself in my neighborhood, and were to walk up to my door, I have to warn you: the welcome mat is splattered with blood stains. I didn’t do it! No Jehovah’s Witnesses are missing from the region! (They never come to my door anymore, anyway.)

We got an unpleasant surprise this morning in that the nest of baby bunnies outside our door was raided, probably by one of the local cats, and the whole family was butchered and laid out on our doorstep. And these bunnies were at that cute stage with fur and big eyes…or at least, they would have been cute if they’d all had heads and their viscera wasn’t splayed out everywhere and they weren’t lying cold and limp in a pool of blood.

I do have to wonder why, though, whenever there’s a scattering of corpses around the house, my family looks to me and expects me to do the clean up.

Madness? This is America!

Today is this semester’s last final exam, and this is the last big push of the semester, so I’m going to be mired in work for most of the day…but once I level the administrative mountain, I’ve got some new squid science to share. Until then, you’ll just have to chew over some of the usual American lunacy for a while.

  • Obama is gearing up to drape himself with Christian trappings. This will not make me happy. I’m planning to vote for him, but if he turns into yet another Christianist airhead, I will not be campaigning for him.

  • The reason Obama can’t lose my vote but can lose my enthusiasm is that the Republicans are just plain evil. Rumsfeld was saying the country needed another terrorist attack to keep the Democrats out of office? What a monster.

  • David Brooks thinks “science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other”, and that the future belongs to a fusion of science and Buddhism. David Brooks knows nothing of science. How did this twit get a gig at the NY Times?

  • UC Berkeley is going to court this week over their Understanding Evolution web site (that’s an excellent resource, by the way, especially if you’re just trying to get up to speed on the science). At issue is the fact that the site dares to point out that some religions contradict the evidence, and other religions try to avoid conflict with science; that is interpreted to be a sectarian endorsement of certain religions over others. This is where separation of church and state becomes insane: when you are not allowed to point out obvious idiocies because they are protected religious beliefs. Here’s the offending section: I think it’s pretty namby-pamby and bends over backwards to give deference to superstitious nonsense, but some people are apparently irate over a simple, accurate truth statement: “some religious beliefs explicitly contradict science”. They do, but a university isn’t allowed to say so?

Now I unplug myself from the intertubes for a few hours and focus, focus, focus on a pile of stuff most of you will never see.

Seattle awaits

I just got a copy of the promotional flyer for my Seattle visit, so here it is.

PZ Myers: On Science, Blogs, and Intelligent Debates

Paul “PZ” Myers is persona non grata at the Discovery Institute. He was recently booted out of a screening of the film “Expelled”–an irony certainly not lost on him. And now the evolutionary biologist and rabble-rouser blogger is coming to Seattle for one night only. He’ll be talking about the evolution of creationism and other oxymoronic topics with the same zeal and wit that have made him one of the fittest survivors on the science blog circuit.

Join the Northwest Science Writers Association and the Forum on Science Ethics and Policy for a conversation with PZ Myers. He’ll answer your questions and take us inside his popular blog, Pharyngula. He’s been called a “godless liberal” and his blog posts have been described as “random biological ejaculations.” And that’s just what he says. Others have attacked him for his stout devotion to evolution and probably for being funnier than those he offends.

NSWA and FoSEP present…
PZ Myers: On Science, Blogs, and Intelligent Debates
Pacific Science Center, Laser Dome
Monday, June 2, 2008
7 – 9 p.m.
FREE to the public

Tell your friends. Bring your questions.

Whoa. There’s an expectation that I’ll be funny? Uh-oh. The pressure is on.

At least those expectations are offset by the fact that I’m going to be speaking in a laser dome, which is very cool. I hope I have full access to all of the controls; hecklers beware, you could be reduced to a small heap of smoking ash.

Michael Medved says something dumb

Did someone declare this National Flaming Racist Idiot week, and I just didn’t notice until now? You have got to read Michael Medved’s latest foray into pseudoscience: he has declared American superiority to be genetic, encoded in our good old American DNA. Because our ancestors were immigrants, who were risk-takers, who were selected for their energy and aggressiveness. Oh, except for those who are descended from slaves.

The idea of a distinctive, unifying, risk-taking American DNA might also help to explain our most persistent and painful racial divide – between the progeny of every immigrant nationality that chose to come here, and the one significant group that exercised no choice in making their journey to the U.S. Nothing in the horrific ordeal of African slaves, seized from their homes against their will, reflected a genetic predisposition to risk-taking, or any sort of self-selection based on personality traits.

But, he hastens to add, modern African-American genetics have been leavened with the genes of recent, self-selected immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa, so their unfortunate stay-at-home genes have a “less decisive influence”.

As is usual for Medved, a dullard incapable of any kind of thought beyond the superficial, he doesn’t think his thesis through. Wouldn’t this imply that Moslem immigrants to Europe, with their risk-taking willingness to move to new environments, are their true hope for the future? That the old blue-bloods of this country are less fit than, say, the Nisei? And if the descendants of African slaves are not successful go-getters because their arrival was coerced, what about the immigrants who were fleeing religious persecution, or all the Americans who are descended from indentured servants? Are there no successful entrepreneurs in Europe or Asia or Africa? Should we give extra bonus points to the descendants of nomadic tribes of warriors, like the Germans? It’s a very peculiarly narrow view of a kind of simplistic genetic determinism that ignores the complexities and the varieties of ways people got here to promote a ridiculous premise.

And it just gets sillier.

Senators Obama, Clinton and other leaders who seek to enlarge the scope of government face more formidable obstacles than they realize. Their desire to impose a European-style welfare state and a command-and-control economy not only contradicts our proudest political and economic traditions, but the new revelations about American DNA suggest that such ill-starred schemes may go against our very nature.

Uh, what? Republican policies are now part of our genetic nature, and the Democrats will be defeated by our capitalist genes?

This is Michael Medved of the Discovery Institute, an organization that has recently been raving about the evils of eugenics and the soulless Darwinian view of nature. Yet here he is, spouting off the kind of smug, invalid, pseudo-biological jingo that belongs in the Gilded Age and would be comfortable in the mouth of a robber baron trying to justify a war in Latin America. It’s nothing but handwaving rationalizations for an intrinsic superiority to our tribe, with a complete absence of evidence.