The moon is going away!

What a perfect situation: it’s bitterly cold outside, but the moon happens to be in the sky right outside my front window, so I can see it from the comfort of my living room. It’s half gone right now!

Now the moon has gone dark and red! Surely these are evil portents. What god should I worship to bring it back? Who should I sacrifice?

I’d take a picture, but the moon is high in the sky at an angle that would make it difficult to photograph through my window … and I really don’t want to go outside. Fortunately, Lindsey Bradsher sent me a picture she just took.

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Two tales of whale evolution

A reader sent me two links to video clips. The contrast is fascinating.

Here’s the first. It’s a nice illustration of the evidence behind our understanding of the evolution of whales, all in 7 minutes.

Now watch a creationist explain whale evolution.

Ouch. He complains that those wicked scientists are trying to turn the bible into a great big joke…but I think this clown does an even better job of that. Try counting the misconceptions — he goes on and on with this story about an animal crawling out of the primordial ooze onto the land and not liking it, and then wishing it could go back into the ocean, where it sucks in its hindlimbs and turns into a whale…and then he calls that story stupid and ridiculous. Guess what: it is! Of course, this ignorant nitwit is the person who made up the story, and it has nothing at all to do with what the evidence actually says.

This is what we have to deal with: morons who think their caricatures are evidence, and this bozo is probably voting for school board members based on how closely they approximate his level of idiocy.

15 misconceptions about evolution

Take a look at this excellent list of evolution misconceptions. The entries are very brief, but mostly correct and very common: in particular, #12, “Natural selection involves organisms ‘trying’ to adapt” is one of the most common mistakes in creationist thinking — they completely miss one of the most important insights that Darwin had.

But I have to nitpick a little bit. #6, “The theory is flawed,” gives the wrong answer — it basically tries to argue that the theory of evolution is not flawed. Of course it is! If it were perfect and complete we’d be done with it, and it wouldn’t be a particularly active field of research. The “flaws” that creationists typically bring up aren’t flaws in the theory at all, but flaws in the creationists’ understanding of the science, but let’s be careful to avoid giving the impression of perfection.

#15 is also a pet peeve: “Evolution is a theory about the origin of life” is presented as false. It is not. I know many people like to recite the mantra that “abiogenesis is not evolution,” but it’s a cop-out. Evolution is about a plurality of natural mechanisms that generate diversity. It includes molecular biases towards certain solutions and chance events that set up potential change as well as selection that refines existing variation. Abiogenesis research proposes similar principles that led to early chemical evolution. Tossing that work into a special-case ghetto that exempts you from explaining it is cheating, and ignores the fact that life is chemistry. That creationists don’t understand that either is not a reason for us to avoid it.

#13, “Evolution means that life changed ‘by chance’,” also ducks the issue more than it should. As it says, natural selection is not random — but there’s more to evolution than natural selection. It’s a bit like ducking the question by redefining the terms. Much of our makeup is entirely by accident, and evolution is a story of filtered accidents. Creationists don’t like that — one of their central assumptions is that everything is purposeful — but don’t pander to their beliefs. Go for the gusto and ask them what their god was thinking when he loaded up your genome with the molecular equivalent of styrofoam packing peanuts, or when he ‘accidentally’ scrambled the sequence of our enzyme for synthesizing vitamin C.

Doomed from the start

Oxford University is getting $4 million from — who else? — the Templeton Foundation to study “why mankind embraces god”. I hope that what I’m seeing is mere journalistic sloppy truncation, but knowing the Templeton Foundation and the usual crap I read from theologians, I fear that this does reflect their starting premise:

He [Roger Trigg, director of the program] said anthropological and philosophical research suggests that faith in God is a universal human impulse found in most cultures around the world, even though it has been waning in Britain and western Europe.

“One implication that comes from this is that religion is the default position, and atheism is perhaps more in need of explanation,” he said.

“Universal human impulse,” my left butt cheek. There are a lot of us who find ourselves quite content once we’ve shed religious indoctrination, and feel not one iota of desire to participate in supernatural foolishness. We happen to be human; there hasn’t been a wave of X-Man-style mutations sweeping the globe, transforming a subset of the human race into trans-human beings with the super-power of being able to see through lies. “Faith in God” is also a peculiarly Abrahamic view of religion — I’m surprised that any anthropologists behind this scheme haven’t been jumping up and down, trying to explain that there are many cultures in this world other than the Islamo-Judea-Christian axis of monotheistic intolerance, and the concept of a domineering paternalistic sky daddy is not universal.

There are human universals. We are curious or concerned about the world around us; we look for causal explanations for events; we like explanatory narratives that link sequences of events together; we tend to anthropomorphize and project our motivations and our expectation of agency on objects in our environment. That’s human nature, and religion isn’t at all intrinsic to it. Far from being the default, religion is a pathologic parasite that rides along on those human desires by promoting the illusion of agency as an all-encompassing explanation for everything, and by providing a framework for story-telling. Basically, it’s a nice collection of lies that makes for a self-serving story — it’s the original Mary Sue. Religion is like badly written fan fiction (in the case of the Abrahamic religions, in the fantasy/horror genre), and is no more an intrinsic component of human nature than is Star Trek slash, although it certainly is a warped reflection of human tendencies.

Maybe someone ought to stop and think that any universal explanation of human nature must include both theists and atheists, rather than treating the latter as a mere exception to be disregarded. Maybe they ought to notice that one good reason for rising godlessness is that entirely secular explanations succeed in providing a satisfying causal narrative, and have the added virtue that they’re actually true. Science works, quite unlike prayer.

Starting with the assumption that “religion,” that chaotic potpourri of diverse false starts in comprehending the universe, is a natural element of humanity and that it is the default position, whatever that is, was probably a necessary bit of pandering to milk money out of that blithely ideological promoter of happy lies called the Templeton Foundation, but it sounds to me like a proposal to build a research program on a false foundation. Maybe they’ll surprise me (and horrify Templeton), but I don’t expect anything but useless noise from such a proposal.

Maybe they should just give me the $4 million. It would help me get this damn book done.

We’re having a lunar eclipse tonight!

Check out Phil for the details. For us Minnesotans, the events start around 8pm, should reach totality around 9, and should be over around 11.

Here’s the good news: we’re supposed to have clear skies!

And now the bad news: it’s about -27°F outside right now, and while we’re supposed to warm up a little today, it’s still going to be about -15°F tonight. Don’t let your eyeballs freeze while you’re doing your moongazing.

They call this honor?

What should me make of this ugly story from Turkey?

A high school senior and an elementary school student were attacked in the Mediterranean town of Mersin with strong acid spray. In two separate incidents within the same hour both girls were approached from behind by a group of young men who commented on the length of their skirts and told them it was too short. The girls were sprayed with acidic substance that burnt and melted their stockings and caused deep lacerations on the back of their legs. The girls were treated in the hospital. The police is searching for the culprits that are believed to be the same ones, in both incidents.

According to media reports, uncovered women in Mersin, who wear shorter length skirts, are in fear of similar attacks.

I understand this kind of thing is done to ‘protect’ the honor of women with a religious justification, but does anyone ever ask where the honor is in a group of men coming up behind young girls and scarring them with acid? Shouldn’t there be some kind of deep cultural shame that their young men are being indoctrinated into growing up as bullying cowards?

Bad science fair projects

This gallery of science fair projects is partly funny, partly cringe-worthy, and partly petty and annoying. Some of the projects are weird, but some of the entries are simply mocking the appearance of the kids … and as a former high school nerd myself, I rather resent that.

But yeah, “Crystal Meth: Friend or Foe” is amusing — I just wish we know something about their experimental protocol.

Beelzebufo: best frog name ever

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

It means “devil toad,” and it was a 10 pound monster that lived 70 million years ago, in what is now Madagascar. It’s huge, and judging by its living cousins, was a voracious predator. If it were alive today, it would probably be eating your cats and puppies.

In other words, this was an awesome toad, and I wish I had one for a pet.

Here’s what it looks like, with some very large extant toads for comparison.

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Beelzebufo ampinga, Late Cretaceous of Madagascar. (A) Skull
reconstruction showing parts preserved (white areas, Left) and distribution of
pit-and-ridge ornament (stippling, Right). (B) Skeletal reconstruction and
inferred body outline of average-sized (skull width, 200 mm; SVL, 425 mm)
adult female B. ampinga based mainly on Lepidobatrachus asper. White
areas indicate parts represented by fossil specimens. For size comparison,
dorsal view silhouettes of Ceratophrys aurita (the largest extant ceratophryine) (C), and Mantidactylus guttulatus (the largest extant Malagasy frog) (D),
are shown. cp, crista parotica; fm, foramen magnum; frp, frontoparietal; mx,
maxilla; n, nasal; pmx, premaxilla; qj, quadratojugal; qu, quadrate; sq, squamosal. (Scale bars: 50 mm.)
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There are some biogeographical puzzles associated with this beast. It’s found in Madagascar, but it’s closest extant relatives are South American…and since frogs and toads do a poor job of crossing salt water, that implies the existence of land bridges between those continents around the Cretaceous. It’s not a major puzzle, though, although some of the news reports I’ve seen play up the concern, as if it were a significant controversy. As the authors explain,

We suggest that extant ceratophryines are remnants
of a Gondwanan hyloid clade that once ranged from at least
South America to Indo-Madagascar. Whether this clade was
more broadly distributed and on which Gondwanan landmass it
originated cannot be determined on current evidence. However,
as the Late Cretaceous fauna of the Maevarano Fm,
including its ceratophryine anuran, bears little resemblance to
that of modern Madagascar, major biotic changes clearly occurred on the island in the intervening period. When and how the ancestors of the endemic mantellid and microhylid anurans arrived on Madagascar remains controversial,
but there is general agreement that these frogs did not diversify
significantly until the Paleogene. Their radiation
has been linked, at least in part, to the expansion of rainforests,
but may also have been facilitated by the extinction of archaic
faunal elements, including ceratophryines.

It was a diverse, widespread group once upon a time, and it’s not at all challenging to report that the continents have shifted in 70 million years. It’s just very cool that anurans achieved the status of charismatic megafauna*, once upon a time.

*For a generous definition of “mega”.

Evans SE, Jones MEH, Krause DW (2008) A giant frog with South American affinities from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA 105(8):2951-2956.