Those prissy Aussies

I don’t usually think of Australians as particularly prudish — brash and outspoken are more common stereotypes — so this story about the Anglican Church Grammar School banning gay partners at their dances seems a little out of character. I know we’ve got some Australian commenters, so I expect they’ll correct my misunderstanding and explain that their compatriots are all fussy little schoolmarms who faint at the slightest whiff of ribaldry.

Anyway, the headmaster tries hard to justify the decision. There are “protocols and decorums,” he says. Another school follows suit; they want to maintain “gender balance” (that one’s easy: invite lesbians as well as gay boys!)

They haven’t yet brought out the most powerful excuse. These are all boys schools, and as everyone knows, there is never any homosexual activity among randy young teenagers cooped up in a school in which no members of the opposite sex are ever allowed to be present.

Expelled Exposed goes live!

Don’t just link to the Expelled Exposed web site, read it! A whole bunch of new content has gone live, including this video of Chris Comer.

One of the more effective parts is the truth behind Expelled, which goes one by one through the cases of “expelled” creationists, and shows that they weren’t — the quality of a good persecution has gone down considerably since the days of Romans with lions, I guess.

Bloggers, you have a job to do

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We need to get the NCSE’s counter-site to the hideous little propaganda film, Expelled, to rank higher in the search engines. The way to do this is for lots and lots of you to link to the Expelled Exposed site with the word Expelled. It’s not hard: just copy this code into a blog post.

<a href="http://expelledexposed.com/"><i>Expelled</i></a>

Whenever you write about the movie, use that link. Do it a bunch of times, if you want. It’s more effective if many people use the same link every time, though, than for one person to be repetitive.

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God hates Porsches

A doddering old fool who shouldn’t have been driving in the first place cruised into a car dealership in his cheap little Ford Fiesta, and managed to demolish two Porsches outside the showroom. Total damage: £60,000.

So what does the senile twit say afterwards? You guessed it:

It was a miracle I got out alive and I put it down to the power of prayer and God looking after me.

Why was he praying to wreak havoc on expensive German cars?

We’re getting blamed for everything

Would you believe that atheists are to blame for the Westboro Baptist Church?

They can’t be real Christians. They must be part of an atheist cabal.

Their goal? To undermine churches. To give religion a black eye. To plant in the minds of the young a twisted and evil view of Christianity.

Somebody needs to be introduced to Poe’s Law. Besides, everyone knows that crazy religion can’t be blamed on the godless … it’s actually a conspiracy by squirrels.

A neurological mechanism for Fragile-X disease

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research
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I’m busy preparing my lecture for genetics this morning, in which I’m going to be talking about some chromosomal disorders … and I noticed that this summary of Fragile-X syndrome that was on the old site hadn’t made it over here yet. A lot of the science stuff here actually gets used in my lectures, so they represent a kind of scattered online notes, so I figured I’d better put this one where I can find it.

I haven’t even finished grading the last of the developmental biology papers, and already my brain is swiveling towards the genetics literature, as I get in the right frame of mind to teach our core genetics course in the spring. And, lo, here is a new paper in PNAS that addresses details of a topic I bring up every time.

There are a surprising number of heritable diseases that share a couple of common traits: they are neurodegenerative, causing progressive loss of neural control, and they also exhibit a phenomenon called genetic anticipation—they tend to get worse, with earlier onset and more severe affects with each generation. Some of these diseases may be rather obscure, for instance
Haw-River Syndrome (AKA Dentatorubral-pallidoluysian atrophy),
Friedreich Ataxia,
Machado-Joseph Disease, or
X-linked Spinal and Bulbar Atrophy Disease (AKA Kennedy Disease), but others you’ve probably heard of, like
Myotonic dystrophy and
Huntington Disease. These are dreadful diseases that are variable in their pattern of appearance, and have terrible symptoms, like loss of motor control, chorea, seizures, dementia, and eventually, death.

[Read more…]

Optical Allusions

Jay Hosler has a new book out, Optical Allusions(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). If you’re familiar with his other books, Clan Apis(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) and The Sandwalk Adventures(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), you know what to expect: a comic book that takes its science seriously. Hosler has a fabulous knack for building serious content into a light and humorous medium, just the kind of approach we need to get wider distribution of science into the culture.

This one has a strange premise. Wrinkles the Wonder Brain is an animated, naked brain working for the Graeae Sisters, and he loses the one eye they share between them — so he has to go on a quest to recover it. I know, it sounds like a stretch, but it works in a weird sort of way, and once you start rolling with it, you’ll find it works. Using that scenario to frame a series of encounters, Wrinkles meets Charles Darwin and learns how evolution could produce something as complex as an eye; talks about the sub-optimal design of retinal circuitry with a cow superhero; discovers sexual dimorphism with a crew of stalk-eyed pirates; learns about development of the eye from cavefish and a cyclops; chats with Mr Sun about the physics of radiation; there are even zombie G proteins and were-opsins in a lesson about shape changing. This stuff is seriously weird, and kids ought to eat it up.

It isn’t all comic art, either. Each chapter is interleaved with a text section discussing the details — you can read the whole thing through, skipping the text (like I did…), and then go back and get more depth and directions for future reading in the science. This is a truly seditious strategy. Suck ’em in with the entertainment value, and then hand ’em enough substance that they might just start thinking like scientists.

It’s all good stuff, too. A colleague and I have been considering offering an interdisciplinary honors course in physics and biology with the theme of the eye, specifically for non-science majors, and this book has me thinking it might make for a good text. It’ll grab the English and art majors, and provide a gateway for some serious discussions that will satisfy us science geeks. I recommend it for you, too — if you have kids, you should grab all of Hosler’s books. Even if you don’t have kids, you’ll learn a lot.

Jay Hosler also explains the intent of the project, and you can read an excerpt.

Topical humor

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We’re going to be seeing more humor like this in the next few weeks, I suppose. I like the tag line: Because Ben Stein is just as qualified to make software as he is to talk about evolutionary biology.

And if you’re confused about what this “evolutionary biology” thing might be, here’s a picture of Stein’s understanding of the subject.

If that’s too much for you, just seek solace by reciting a prayer from the Book of Bon Jovi, Chapter Wanted Dead or Alive. (via some other Canadian.)