Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Here is an important suggestion, if ever you should find yourself living in rural Minnesota.
Always roll up your car windows at night.
Wait, you say — that seems unnecessary. This is a trusting part of the world, where petty crime is rare, and people leave houses and cars unlocked all the time. Why not leave the windows down so that the interior is cooled by soft breezes in the summer months?
There are two reasons. Remember them.
You never know when a rainstorm might flare up, soaking your car seats. This is a fairly minor concern, however.
Open cars are giant insect traps. You have not experienced Minnesota until you’ve entered your car to discover it is full of enraged, starving, confused, and frantic mosquitos. This is particularly disastrous if it has rained and your cupholders are pools of water, because now they are also horny and want a blood meal so they can lay eggs in your car interior.
That is all.
A certain Brown University biology graduate has taken an unfortunate step, one that we asked him to avoid. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana has signed a pro-creationism bill into law, all to pander to evangelical protestant hicks. We know this is a guy with national aspirations, so he’s taking a big gamble that we aren’t going to swing back towards a more sensible secularism, since the only people who could vote for him now are fundagelical god-wallopers who don’t understand science. That may be a fairly big voting base, but I’m hoping that it’s shrinking. Either Bobby Jindal is toast… or we all are.
One bizarre item in that story is that the reporter contacted the Discovery Institute, who quickly disavowed any association with the bill, saying that they did not “directly” support it and that they certainly wouldn’t support any attempt to insert religion into the schools. Like everything that comes out of the DI, they are lying reflexively. Barbara Forrest has an excellent overview of the context and history of the bill — the bill has the DI’s frantic, fervid paws all over it.
I do think we need to call this the Bogalusa Bill, after the district that the sponsor, Ben Nevers (a creationist and a democrat, for shame!), comes from. It’s a name that just trips off the tongue, like a happy fusion of “bogus” and “loser”, said with a lovely New Orleans drawl.
I need to get a cool hat like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Margaret Downey if I want to be one of the Cool Kids.
You have an opportunity to participate in an Atheist Coming Out Party. You should! It’ll be fun! Atheists always throw the best parties and have the best and smartest conversations!
The paleontologists are going too far. This is getting ridiculous. They keep digging up these collections of bones that illuminate tetrapod origins, and they keep making finer and finer distinctions. On one earlier side we have a bunch of tetrapod-like fish — Tiktaalik and Panderichthys, for instance — and on the later side we have fish-like tetrapods, such as Acanthostega and Ichthyostega. Now they’re talking about shades of fishiness or tetrapodiness within those groups! You’d almost think they were documenting a pattern of gradual evolutionary change.
The latest addition is a description of Ventastega curonica, a creature that falls within the domain of the fish-like tetrapods, but is a bit fishier than other forms, so it actually bridges the gap between something like Tiktaalik and Acanthostega. We look forward to the imminent discovery of yet more fossils that bridge the gap between Ventastega and Tiktaalik, and between Ventastega and Acanthostega, and all the intermediates between them.
You may have heard that Expelled opened in Canada this week…but it’s not off to a soaring start. The first reviews are coming in, and I am encouraged by the opening line of this one: “I found this film so distasteful I hestitate to dignify it with even a thumbnail review.”
Also noteworthy: the reviewer interviewed the awful Ben Stein about it.
I interviewed Ben Stein for a Newsmaker item in this week’s Maclean’s, and he did acknowledge the debt his film owes to Michael Moore. “We were greatly influenced by him,” he said. “He showed you can make a documentary on a political subject and make money.” But Stein couldn’t really elaborate on how Moore’s influence was applied. After all, he reminded me, unlike Moore he was just the host, not the filmmaker. Besides, he’s never seen more than two minutes of a MIchael Moore film. “It makes me sick just to look at him,” he said. “He’s physically revolting. He so angry. I like to look at people who have sweet, nice faces.” Stein–whose face is familiar from his roles as a teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Wonder Years–immodestly included himself in that sweet, nice camp.
He did, however, concede with a sigh that Expelled is a whole lot less successful than Moore’s films, “so whatever secret he has, we haven’t learned it.”
No kidding.
Wait—Ben Stein, a guy with the face of a mackerel and the emotional range of a dead one, finds Moore physically revolting? He isn’t one of the beautiful people (and neither am I), so judging his work by how he looks…well, Stein should not go there.
Nice admission at the end, though.
(via Canadian Cynic)
There’s more at Straight.com and The Coast. It’s getting panned all over. Again.
Eric Hovind is continuing his father’s tradition of utterly inane arguments against evolution. In this case, it’s a video of Hovind and two of his bland buddies sitting around talking about…cephalopods. Oh, it is painful to witness.
They show excerpts of some perfectly lovely videos of cuttlefish swimming about, exercising their camouflage, and they talk about its specialized defenses and sophisticated behavior. In classic creationist form, they watch all this beauty and throw up their hands in surrender, and exclaim that they don’t see how this could have evolved, and ask, “How does evolution explain that?”
I would turn that question around: “How does creationism explain that?” And I’m sorry, “God did it” is not an explanation. It says nothing about the processes used to create the cuttlefish’s capabilities, and it does nothing to explain limitations — why can’t the cuttlefish fly? Why doesn’t it have three eyes? Why does it use similar genes to our own? You can’t just posit an omnipotent creator who can create anything without also having an explanation for the constraints on his creations.
At one point, they are talking about the mechanisms the animals use to camouflage themselves, and they express dumbfounded ignorance about how they do that (and babble incorrectly about some of the details — they do not see everything in shades of green). Did Eric Hovind’s two researchers ever think to look up the science? Roger Hanlon has been doing some marvelous work on cephalopod behavior and camouflage; I have no idea what Hanlon’s religious beliefs are, and it doesn’t matter, but he clearly sees these as natural phenomena generated by natural processes.
We do have explanations of cephalopod evolution. I don’t expect Hovind and cronies are at all aware of them. In fact, in this interview Hovind reveals a common and significant misconception about how evolution works. He speculates that an evolutionary explanation would be that “…one of them decided while he was sittin’ there getting munched on, hey, I need to evolve a defense mechanism to overcome this…”.
I hear this all the time. The only way they can imagine evolution working is by an act of will, that every adaptation must be a product of an individual organism doing something special and directed towards acquiring that ability. They miss the key insight Darwin had.
No, one of them getting munched on did not decide anything, and the action was done: it was being eaten. It would not reproduce. The properties of that specific individual would have a diminished influence on the next generation. It was the other cephalopods that were not being eaten who would propagate, and it would be their genes that would continue on.
The idea is right there in their very own scenario, and they lack the intelligence to grasp it. They keep talking about features of the animals that help them survive better, and they are blind to the fact that survival is the key. It’s depressing to see such hopeless ignorance in these three, each reinforcing the other, when the answers to the questions they ask are in books anyone can get.
This is an amphioxus, a cephalochordate or lancelet. It’s been stained to increase contrast; in life, they are pale, almost transparent.
It looks rather fish-like, or rather, much like a larval fish, with it’s repeated blocks of muscle arranged along a stream-lined form, and a notochord, or elastic rod that forms a central axis for efficient lateral motion of the tail…and it has a true tail that extends beyond the anus. Look closely at the front end, though: this is no vertebrate.
It’s not much of a head. The notochord extends all the way to the front of the animal (in us vertebrates, it only reaches up as far as the base of the hindbrain); there’s no obvious brain, only the continuation of the spinal cord; there isn’t even a face, just an open hole fringed with tentacles. This animal collects small microorganisms in coastal waters, gulping them down and passing them back to the gill slits, which aren’t actually part of gills, but are components of a branchial net that allows water to filter through while trapping food particles. It’s a good living — they lounge about in large numbers on tropical beaches, sucking down liquids and any passing food, much like American tourists.
These animals have fascinated biologists for well over a century. They seem so primitive, with a mixture of features that are clearly similar to those of modern vertebrates, yet at the same time lacking significant elements. Could they be relics of the ancestral chordate condition? A new paper is out that discusses in detail the structure of the amphioxus genome, which reveals unifying elements that tell us much about the last common ancestor of all chordates.
