So I missed the Atheist Alliance convention. I’m still going to make it to the Freedom From Religion Foundation convention in Madison on 12-14 October. Who else will be joining me there?
Jonah unkindly mentions that California will spend three times as much operating its prisons than running the UC system. Doesn’t that reassure you so much about America’s priorities?
Hello again! It’s been a little while since my last post and I need to post for this week or I’ll be docked points from Dr. Myers. I’ve been a little bit behind on things as I’ve been preparing for my upcoming senior seminar, but I did have time to check out at least one cool article I found on different energy systems used while running.
I had a race today and I noticed that every time I do an 8k (5 miles), about three miles in I hit a wall of fatigue. I get dizzy, it’s hard to focus on the guy in front of me, driving my knee up feels next to impossible, and the only thing I care about is eventually getting to the finish line. I know that much of this is probably because I’ve depleted a good portion of my glycogen stores and have worn out my muscles fairly well. But how does this tie in with my nervous system?
According to the article, a good portion of my glycogen stores are found in my liver. If too much of the glycogen is used hypoglycaemia can occur resulting in brain damage. Other bodily harm such as myocardial ischaemia, heat stroke, and severe ATP depletion from my muscles can occur too if my body is allowed to be pushed far enough.
Luckily for me, my muscles have a built in negative feedback to stop me from killing myself out there. My muscles somehow know to send a signal up to the brain for a release of serotonin and inhibition of dopamine secretion, which results in a further lack of ability to move, which results in a slower time, which puts Morris on the backburner in terms of our men’s cross country team. I’m still wondering though, how do my muscles know when to signal my brain to cut back on the neurotransmitters? And how much does mentality (a positive attitude towards the race, or the expectation of a good run) play a role in the regulation of my muscles (do I release more ACh and endorphins by simply having a good attitude, or is the causality the other way around?)? Either way, if you haven’t moved in a while, get out and enjoy this great October weather while it lasts. Or you can check out this pretty funny link of a band I found on youtube.
John Dennehy’s citation classic this week is The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme, by Gould and Lewontin. It’s one of my favorite papers of all time — if you haven’t read it, you should do so now. It contains a set of ideas that are essential to understanding evo-devo.
Gould always struck me as a closet developmental biologist — he should have studied it more!
A certain evil old (and now deceased) affliction on the world is being considered for canonization, and they’re tallying up miracles, an absurd activity in itself. One of the “miracles” they’re weighing is that of a man whose kidney stone cleared up after visiting a children’s home founded by Mother Teresa…an awfully tenuous connection, if you ask me, and a rather trivial event. Time magazine starts to agree:
At first glance the elimination of a mineral deposit may seem too insignificant to merit sainthood.
But then of course they go on to make excuses for it. They should have stopped there.
It is insignificant. The connection is thin. The whole premise of sainthood is supernatural silliness. It’s just one big charade.
Consider St. Antonio de Sant’Anna Galvao, whom Pope Benedict XVI canonized last December. Galvao, who died in 1822 (he was on the slow track) was a Franciscan monk in Sao Paolo who distributed “pills” that were actually folded bits of rice paper bearing the prayer: “After birth, the Virgin remained intact. Mother of God, intercede on our behalf.” Believers swallowed them for various ailments. After Galvao’s death nuns in his monastery took up the pill production. According to England’s Daily Telegraph, as his cause for sainthood began picking up steam, they were up to 10,000 pills a day. The Telegraph reported that the local hierarchy opposed the practice, and a senior archbishop commented that it “foster[s] suspicion.” However, the Vatican was apparently satisfied.
Laugh long and hard at the Catholic church. They have a process for posthumously rewarding charlatans for successful chicanery.
Cuvier, and his British counterpart, Richard Owen, had an argument against evolution that you don’t hear very often anymore. Cuvier called it the laws of correlation, and it was the idea that organisms were fixed and integrated wholes in which every character had a predetermined value set by all the other characters present.
In a word, the form of the tooth involves that of the condyle; that of the shoulder-blade; that of the claws: just as the equation of a curve involves all its properties. And just as by taking each property separately, and making it the base of a separate equation, we should obtain both the ordinary equation and all other properties whatsoever which it possesses; so, in the same way, the claw, the scapula, the condyle, the femur, and all the other bones taken separately, will give the tooth, or one another; and by commencing with any one, he who had a rational conception of the laws of the organic economy, could reconstruct the whole animal.
Cuvier famously (and incorrectly) argued that he could derive the whole of the form of an animal from a single part, and that this unity of form meant that species were necessarily fixed. An organism was like a complex, multi-part equation that used only a single variable: you plugged a parameter like ‘ocelot’ into the Great Formula, and all the parts and pieces emerged without fail; plug in a different parameter, say ‘elephant’, and all the attributes of an elephant would be expressed. By looking at one element, such as the foot, you could determine whether you were looking at an elephant or an ocelot, and thereby derive the rest of the animal.
Oh, no! I just found out that Monday, the 8th of October, the tenth month, will be International Cephalopod Awareness Day, as also discussed on TONMO. I have so little time to prepare! Everyone else get kraken, too, and remember to send me links to your cephalopodic celebrations in cyberspace on Monday.
Josh talks about the difference between teaching about ID and teaching ID. There is a huge difference that the Discovery Institute does not seem to understand.
I am opposed to teaching Intelligent Design in the classroom. It’s an absurd idea that is unsupported by any evidence — it has not earned a place in the curriculum as a legitimate scientific hypothesis. The propaganda novels that the DI has tried to peddle in the past, Of Pandas and People and their new one, Explore Evolution, do not belong in the classroom. They are badly written, and incompetently push completely false ideas as valid. They should be rejected on their low merit.
On the other hand, I do teach about ID … in fact, this next week is the week I’ve set aside to specifically address creationism in my introductory biology course. I’ve prepared them with some of the history of evolution, and maybe a little bit more of the evidence for the idea than was easily digestible, and now I’m going to cover the fallacies of interpretation of the theory, which will include social Darwinism as well as creationism. Students are bombarded with these bad ideas, and I don’t think we can afford to pretend they don’t exist — we have to confront them head-on.
The strategy I’m using is to ask the students themselves what arguments they’ve heard against evolution. They wrote some lists down this week, and this weekend I’m putting together a lecture where I specifically take these misconceptions and answer them. It was rather fun reading their lists: the arguments are very familiar, everything from “if evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?” to “there are no transitional fossils” to “organisms are too complex to have evolved.”
I also encouraged the students to go to our local creationist tent revival meeting, which was very conveniently timed. We’ll also be discussing how to refute his arguments in class next week.
That’s teaching about creationism. I’m all for it. It’s how we prepare students to criticize lies after they leave the classroom.
Hoo boy. It’s scandal time in Evangelica again. Richard Roberts, son of the infamous Oral, and his wife Lindsay, seem to have been skimming the cream off their university budget (and in her case, perhaps, off young male students).
Richard Roberts is accused of illegal involvement in a local political campaign and lavish spending at donors’ expense, including numerous home remodeling projects, use of the university jet for his daughter’s senior trip to the Bahamas, and a red Mercedes convertible and a Lexus SUV for his wife, Lindsay.
She is accused of dropping tens of thousands of dollars on clothes, awarding nonacademic scholarships to friends of her children and sending scores of text messages on university-issued cell phones to people described in the lawsuit as “underage males.”
Roberts’ defense? God is now giving him legal advice.
In his weekly chapel address today, Mr. Roberts said God had spoken to him this morning and advised him to respond to the lawsuit. “Here’s what he told me to say to you,” Mr. Roberts told the students and professors gathered at the service, according to the Associated Press. “‘We live in a litigious society. Anyone can get mad and file a lawsuit against another person whether they have a legitimate case or not.’
“‘This lawsuit … is not about wrongful termination,’” Mr. Roberts said God added. “‘It is about intimidation, blackmail, and extortion,’” he said, according to the wire service.
I don’t know, I’m a little disappointed. The Great Lord of All the Universe has been awfully quiet for a long, long time, and now he breaks his silence to tell the world that there is an excess of lawsuits, and defend a sybaritic pair of spoiled, overprivileged con artists? Doesn’t he have more important things to do? How come he never gives us any useful insights?
Adult neurogenesis
The creation of new neurons, known as neurogenesis, is an important process. It is by this process that the brain forms, and most of it occurs during pre-natal development. An early theory proposed by neuroanatomists that has recently been refuted by experimental evidence is that adult neurogenesis does not occur. In adult neurogenesis, it has been observed that most of the new neurons die shortly after their formation, while only a few become integrated into the functioning structure of the brain. So what is the significance of adult neurogenesis?
While the functioning of this process is not known, it has been speculated that it is important for memory and learning processes, and is linked to stress. Stress causes a lot of people a lot of harm, and has been linked to many disorders, such as depression. Depression is a condition that is regulated by antidepressants. Know what other activity is regulated by the activity of antidepressants? You guessed it, NEUROGENESIS! A recent study showed that the brain responds to stress-relieving situations, such as those that build learning and memory, with increased neurogenesis. Stressful situations, such as those that induce physiological or psychological stress, are marked by decreased neurogenesis. A decrease in neurogenesis has been indicated to be a key factor in the progression of depression.
