It’s all connected

Huckabee may not stand a chance of winning a presidential nomination, but he can still make his pernicious influence felt.

Next year the Texas State Board of Education will be writing the science curriculum standards for Texas public schoolchildren, and Huckabee may bring enough conservative fundamentalist voters to the polls on March 4 to swing the balance of power on the board to the supporters of creationism. “If Huckabee marshals the religious right in Texas, particularly in North Texas, it has profound implications for the state board,” says Kathy Miller, executive director of the Texas Freedom Network (TFN), an Austin-based advocacy group whose stated goal is to “counter the religious right” in public policy issues, particularly education.

Not mentioned in the article is a potential counterbalance: a lot of moderates and liberals are strongly motivated in this election cycle to boot the bozos out. At least in Minnesota we saw a tremendous surge in DFL participation in the caucuses — there are a few sensible moderates and liberals left in Texas, right? And 100% of you are going to get out and vote, right? You’d better. Complacency is not allowed.

Wells says something stupid again

My animus for Jonathan Wells knows no bounds — he’s an appalling fraud who doesn’t understand the science he criticizes. Case in point: he recently smugly asserted that a recent study to characterize the molecular changes involved in the evolution of one kind of antibiotic resistance involved no necessary consideration of evolution at all. Well, yeah…like the modern concept of “door” requires no knowledge of carpentry or locksmithing for Wells to manage to open one, so Wells could blithely suggest we replace all the carpenters with Unification Church theologians and there would be no change in his daily interactions with doors. So sorry, Mr Wells: that you’re too stupid to see how the concept of evolution might guide research into the evolution of antibiotic resistance doesn’t mean the researchers are.

It helps me maintain my equanimity that Ian Musgrave has already ripped Wells a new one over his amazing demonstration of inanity.

Here’s a wonderful addition: the principal investigator of the paper in question has commented.

As principal investigator of the study under discussion, I’d like to strongly support the view advocated this page. In fact, I was completely amazed to see how our work has been misrepresented by M. Wells.

Actually, we did indeed use darwinian evolution within this work (something unusual in structural biology). In order to obtain an enzyme with increased stability (a critical point for structural studies), we used selective pressure to obtain mutants of the enzyme. We selected for bateria with increased aminiglycoside resistance, by plating them on antibiotic containing medium. It turned out that some bacteria evolved such stabler enzymes variants which made this whole study possible !

Finally, I would not consider myself as a chemist, I got my PhD in molecular microbiology. It seems that M. Wells finds it easier to portray us as non-biologists, and hence implicitly as non-evolutionists

Ow. That has to sting, if anything could ever penetrate the oblivious stupor that fogs Wells’ brain.

The choanoflagellate genome and metazoan evolution

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

What are the key innovations that led to the evolution of multicellularity, and what were their precursors in the single-celled microbial life that existed before the metazoa? We can hypothesize at least two distinct kinds of features that had to have preceded true multicellularity.

  • The obvious feature is that cells must stick together; specific adhesion molecules must be present that link cells together, that aren’t generically sticky and bind the organism to everything. So we need molecules that link cell to cell. Another feature of multicellular animals is that they secrete extracellular matrix, a feltwork of molecules outside the cells to which they can also adhere.

  • A feature that distinguishes true multicellular animals from colonial organisms is division of labor — cells within the organism specialize and follow different functional roles. This requires cell signaling, in which information beyond simple stickiness is communicated to cells, and signal transduction mechanisms which translate the signals into different patterns of gene activity.

These are features that evolved over 600 million years ago, and we need to use a comparative approach to figure out how they arose. One strategy is to pursue breadth, cast the net wide, and examine divergent forms, for instance by
comparing multicellular plants and animals. This approach leads to an understanding of universal properties, of how general programs of multicellular development work. Another is to go deep and examine closer relatives to find the step by step details of our specific lineage, and that’s exactly what is being done in a new analysis of the choanoflagellate genome.

[Read more…]

Bad hackers! Bad, bad!

Hackers have replaced the Irish Catholic page with a cute video and a link to the Irish Atheists page. I really should scold such deplorable virtual vandalism, but, well, instead I grabbed a quick screen capture before it gets taken down.

i-b44a39bae2e360d336912d6ede5b393c-catholic_hack.jpg

I thought the video was pretty funny, too, mocking the silly costumery of the Catholic hierarchy. Alright, hackers, you were naughty, don’t do it again … but you did make me laugh.

Good news — it’s not a hack at all. Those clever Irish atheists merely beat the Irish Catholics to their domain name…so it should be up indefinitely.

Willfully obtuse

The principal of a high school in Texas (where else?) is censoring the school’s yearbook.

Senior Megan Estes, editor in chief of The Elk, said the point of the article, featuring two seniors who also are teen mothers, was to show fellow students how the girls are coping with motherhood and how their lives have changed. Estes said the principal told her he felt the article “glamorized” the teen mothers’ mistakes.

Principal Paul Cash said the topic of the article conflicts with the school’s abstinence-based curriculum. He also said he does not think the community would want that topic covered in the yearbook.

I think reality conflicts with the school’s abstinence-based curriculum. I wonder if he’s got an answer for that?

Probably something like “close your eyes real hard.”

Complexity isn’t magic

You should read John Allen Paulos’s latest column on complexity — it’s a central concept in the various debates that go on around here, and no one on the other side evinces any sign of actually understanding the subject. It’s always “complexity implies design” this, and “complexity only arises by intent” that. I’ll also second his recommendation of Stuart Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) — it’s a very good book full of interesting ideas and empirical demonstrations of order arising out of randomness.

Another reason to read the column: the ABC news site gets a more diverse mix of commenters than we do here, and if you want to get a wider sample of the American mindset, they’re much more representative. And far more terrifying.