Here’s An Open Letter to Barack Obama that urges him to support a basic progressive agenda — sign it if you’re sympathetic with its goals.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Here’s An Open Letter to Barack Obama that urges him to support a basic progressive agenda — sign it if you’re sympathetic with its goals.
It’s on the internets. The opening is something that I can’t imagine flying by on American television: he simply says that evolution is a vastly superior explanation to anything religion has ever provided.
For those of you who liked yesterday’s little poem, here’s a somewhat rowdier piece that I was sent.
DNA (to the tune of TNT by ACDC)
Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi!
See me divide up in your nucleus on your micro-screen
I’m all of you that you can get
If you know what I mean
Proteins to the left of me, lipids to the right
Aint got no oxy, but I got moxy
Don’t you start a fight“Cus I’m DNA
I’m Dynamite
(DNA) I’m wound up tight
(DNA) I have secrets to tell
(DNA) I’m in your cells!!!!I’m Adenine! Guanine! Cytosine!
And Thymine man!
Nitrogen bases, a phosphate group
Understand?
G binds to C
A binds to T
A double helix plan
I run your life!
I control your cells!
So don’t you mess me around!Cus I’m DNA!
I’m dynamite
(DNA) And I’m wound up tight!
(DNA) I have secrets to tell
(DNA)I’m in your cells!
It’s too bad we can’t get Bon Scott to sing it for us, but a Brian Johnson version would be great. Somebody send the new lyrics to the band.
Peter Wood has an interesting commentary in the Chronicle today. At least, it starts out well, but by the end it turns into a bit of a train wreck. The good part is a discussion of a growing deficiency in science and math training in the US. The usual ignorant reaction to this problem is to flog the students and demand more drill-and-practice in the classroom, more testing, incentives and punishments for the schools … the familiar Republican litany of No Child Left Behind, which treats the problem as a superficial one that can be corrected with more multiple-choice tests, or by marshaling market forces to make that engineering job in adulthood more attractive to 8 year olds. That’s not the answer.
I’ll be on the air on radio station WDAY out of Fargo in a few minutes. After yesterday’s exhibition, I expect plenty of phone calls, so don’t let me down. Give me good, short, sharp questions, too!
Today’s target is the website for the credulous Australian TV program, The One, which claims to be searching for someone with magical mind powers. The poll asks, “Are you a believer or a sceptic?”
70% of Australian voters in this poll are currently calling themselves believers. Let’s embarrass them with a worldwide showing of skeptics. (This might be a tough one: I suspect many more people watch TV than will read this post.)
I actually watched the entire appalling 10 minutes of this ghastly creationist video by Dr Ron Carlson, Learn How Evolution is Largely Based on the Silly Assumption of a Dead Lawyer. The whole thing is built around a completely false claim, that fossils are dated only from the geological strata, and that the strata are dated by the fossils found in them. He repeats his lie many times in this short video, and each time wanted to stand up and shout at him. Anyone with even a casual knowledge of dating techniques knows that while index fossils give you a quick and fairly reliable estimate of age, other techniques, such as radiometric dating, are used to verify ages.
That’s typical for creationists. Even worse to me is the ahistorical lie in the title. Guess who the “Dead Lawyer” is?
That’s right, this clown has simply misrepresented the most eminent geologist of the 19th century, and derogated his life’s work to a mere “silly assumption”. Lyell initially trained as a lawyer, but began his career as a geologist in his early 20s, and by the time he was 30 he was a full-time geologist at a time when there was little institutional support for the discipline. Since Dr Ron Carlson, before he was 2, wore diapers, by the same reasoning we can now address him as “Diaper Wearer Ron Carlson”. As for the claim that Lyell was an atheist who invented uniformitarianism to prop up the theory of evolution…absolute nonsense. Lyell was not an atheist at all, came up with his ideas long before Darwin, and at first equivocated and then offered only tentative support to the idea of the modification of species.
As for Dr Ron Carlson, to whose name the title “Dr” seems surgically grafted, I haven’t been able to find out what his degree might be in, or where he got it from. Somehow, I don’t think it was in geology.
I think McCain is in big trouble when Paris Hilton runs intellectual circles around him.
Last week, we watched Evolve: Eyes on the History Channel; tonight, shall we watch the next episode, Evolve: Guts, together? Tune in shortly!
A disgusting beginning: competitive eaters? Bleh. It’s a basic introduction to mammalian digestive physiology — I can tell we’re going to get lots of Big Vertebrate biology again.
They show a cool machine called Cloaca that simulates human digestion, with vats containing chemicals to act as the various chambers. They don’t bother to explain why this machine was built, but it is kind of weirdly interesting.
Once again, they openly say that the complexity of the digestive system evolved — that’s rather refreshing.
Yay! They go back to microorganisms 700 million years ago…for 30 seconds. Then we move on to Ediacaran organisms. The evidence shows that they weren’t photosynthetic, but were some kind of animal that had to have fed somehow, and probably were passive absorbers of drifting nutrients. They suggest that they were replaced by Cambrian organisms that had guts.
Jellyfish just have a sac, not a tube. Cambrian creatures had a more elaborate feeding system, allowing for sophisticated mobile predators, and we see an arms race. Nice animations of Anomalocaris all over the place!
Zip to the modern day: submersibles discover exotic deep sea worms that live on dead whale bones. They have no mouth or gut, so how do they eat bone? They were drilling in and bringing bacteria with them that broke down the bone, and then the worms absorbed the bacteria.
Hey, they mention bacteria, and talk about how digestive enzymes secreted by bacteria are predecessors, and are necessary for the extraction of food in our own guts.
They also mention fish and specialization of regions in the gut tube! More fish, please! But no, we’re going to go straight to tetrapods now, and the promise before the break is dinosaurs. Oh, well.
I’m really pining for more about the actual evolution of guts — and something about development. How can they talk about epithelial tubes without talking about development? Jumping to dinosaurs skips all the interesting stuff. Guts are done by the time you’ve got dinosaurs.
OK, dinosaurs. Yeah, yeah. They discuss gizzard stones and the relationship of dinosaurs to birds. Were dinosaurs warm-blooded? Their digestion was less croc-like and more bird like, determined by analyzing dinosaur coprolites, including T. rex droppings, which contain fragments of fossilized bone. They contain large quantities of bone, which suggests a croc-like eating pattern. But they also contains fragments of fossilized muscle tissue, which suggests that food passed through rapidly, like a bird. So it was a glutton that also had to eat frequently.
The K/T event meant that these big consumers all starved to death. The lead-in to the next section is all about snakes and mammals.
Snakes! Theyre going to talk about the evolution of feeding strategies (why not use cichlids, though? They’d be better). Oh…because you can show movies of snakes swallowing mice whole.
Nifty x-rays of poor mice dissolving in a snake’s gut.
Discussion of the ability of the snake to shut down its gut between meals. Microvilli lining the intestine actually contract while fasting, and increase in length when feeding.
20 million years ago, there was a widespread increase in grasslands that represented a new opportunity … but was hard to eat because much of it was bound up in cellulose. Ruminants evolved fermentation chambers. They show a surgically fistulated cow that allows researchers to get their hands right into a gut. They use bacteria to help break down tough plant material.
These adaptations promote the growth of herbivores…which leads to the evolution of predators.
Now it’s on to humans, of course. They suggest that maybe the key innovation in our ancestors wasn’t our brain, but guts: big-toothed, small-brained apes evolved into small-toothed, big-brained humans. A switch in diet to more meat, and the use of tools to ‘pre-digest’ food allowed us to have smaller guts. Cooking was another huge change that greatly improved the quality of the diet.
They measure the energy required by snakes to digest raw vs. cooked meat. Cooking reduces the cost of digestion by 12.5%. Human guts evolved to be more efficient, liberating more energy for the evolution of the brain.
OK, much like last week’s episode, this show’s strengths are also its weaknesses. The emphasis on charismatic megafauna may be great for catching the attention of casual viewers, but it leaves out all the important events in the evolution of these structures, and ends up emphasizing late refinements and details. Somehow, we need to get a documentary that brings up more molecules and development and the all-important teeny-tiny creatures, where the major innovations first appeared.
But still, I’m most impressed to see a television show that unapologetically discusses evolution as the only credible explanation for the appearance of these features.
