Dragooned and disgusted

You know, I caught a plane at 5:20am this morning, had a long flight across the country followed by a 3 hour drive to get home, so I’m not exactly feeling pleasantly conducive to continuing the latest sanctimonious whine-fests from some of the people who share a server with me. I have been avoiding the various framing flare-ups around here, despite the fact that everyone of them seems to drag my name into the mix.

We appreciate your concern, it is noted and stupid.

I will defer to Greg and Russell and let them speak for me, since at this point, I really don’t give a damn about the issue. I will say this: if you think your role is to hector me about being someone else, you’re a clueless twit.

I am not Paul Kurtz. I am not Eugenie Scott. I am not Richard Dawkins. I am not your wonderful third grade teacher or the boy scout who helps little old ladies across the street, and I am not Jesus nor am I Satan. I’m me, and no one else, and I expect everyone else to be themselves. I am not practicing “identity politics”, since the only identity I have is my individuality and if there’s anything I want everyone to do it is to be able to be fierce and outspoken and say what they think. Or, as some of you obviously prefer, you can be as tepid and craven and milquetoastish as you want, and you can set your stars on being someone else and inoffensively following the crowd to your heart’s content.

But get over yourselves. That’s not my road, and I’m not following your directions, especially when they’re so goddamned boring and derivative.

A few random thoughts as I head back home

  • It was nothing but gray skies and intermittent rain while I was there. It was so beautiful … it felt like home. It was also good seeing my old mentors from grad school days, Chuck Kimmel and John Postlethwait.

  • Patrick Phillips played this video on the big screen. In my presence. I thought about hiding under a table.

  • The wackaloons of the Oregon Right to Life group were meeting in the same hotel with us. They should have snuck into our talks and seen all the pretty embryos we were looking at. Or maybe some of us should have snuck into their sessions, so there’d be at least a few people in the room who know something about embryology.

  • It was a fairly small meeting, about 100 people. That’s the way I like them — I actually got to meet some new faces.

  • The most horrifying story: Jerry Coyne mentioned that people had written in to say that Hopi Hoekstra did not deserve tenure after publication of the now infamous Hoekstra and Coyne paper, which was critical of evo-devo. That was unbelievable. I didn’t agree with everything in the paper, but then 1) I don’t agree with everything in any paper, and 2) it was useful, productive criticism.

  • I really like this IGERT program. Sometimes, the granting agencies get a great idea.

  • I am very, very tired, but it’s a good tired.

The afternoon session at the Oregon evo-devo symposium

I’m going to get off a quick summary of this afternoon’s talks, then I have to run down to the poster session to find out what the grad students have been doing. Are we having fun yet? I’m going to collapse in bed tonight, and then unfortunately I have to catch an early flight back home, so I’m going to miss a lot of cool stuff tomorrow.

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The morning session at the Oregon evo-devo symposium

My brain is most wonderfully agitated, which is the good thing about going to these meetings. Scientists are perverse information junkies who love to get jarred by new ideas and strong arguments, and meetings like this are intense and challenging. I’ve only got a little time here before the next session, so let me rip through a short summary of my morning.

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Coyne and Wray at the Oregon symposium on evo-devo

So here I am at the IGERT Symposium on Evolution, Development, and Genomics, having a grand time, even if I did get called out in the very first talk. There were two keynote talks delivered this evening, both of which I was anticipating very much, and which represented the really good side of science: two differing points of view wrestling with each other for consensus and for testable, discriminating differences. They also had dueling t-shirts.

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Attempted suppression of Seidel

The Sykes family has my sympathy — they have an autistic child, and that has to be difficult. My sympathy is limited, however, by the fact that are lashing out seeking to blame someone, have bought into the thimerosal hysteria, have hired a bottom-feeding shyster to sue various pharmaceutical companies, and said unethical ambulance-chaser is now using the power of the subpoena to harrass and intimidate bloggers who aren’t at all involved in the case, but have simply written about the absence of a thimerosal-autism link.

They have subpoenaed Kathleen Seidel of the Neurodiversity blog for, well, just about anything they can think of. She isn’t involved in the trial otherwise; she is a knowledgeable person with no special inside information on either the Sykes or the drug company, but has only written critically about the case as an outsider. For that, her reward is that a lawyer with a history of attempts to use bad science in legal cases wants to silence her.

There’s more on the case at Pure Pedantry and Overlawyered.