I hear wedding bells…

Good news for fairness, justice and equality: California has made gay marriage legal. It’s a small triumph for civil rights.

Now to celebrate, I don’t expect you all to run out and marry a same-sex partner — I think my wife would object, and I’m really not in the market — but wouldn’t you know it? The media is responding to this news with…stupid internet polls! How else can they possibly trivialize an important court decision, after all?

The LA Times is asking, “Did the California Supreme Court make the correct decision today?” (as if, perhaps, enough internet geeks squawk they will change their minds). MSNBC asks, “What do you think about the court decision in California that allows same-sex couples to marry?” — strangely, one of the possible answers to that one is “Don’t think so,” which doesn’t make much sense. It’s also currently leading.

I’m sure you gay readers can think of a more suitable way to celebrate this little bit of recognition, but the rest of us can settle for poking at a radio button on the internet. Do so gaily, OK?

And if you want to do something more substantive, promote equal rights legislation in your state, so that all 50 states someday offer this basic privilege to everyone.

The subtly different squid eye

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

By now, everyone must be familiar with the inside out organization of the cephalopod eye relative to ours: they have photoreceptors that face towards the light, while we have photoreceptors that are facing away from the light. There are other important differences, though, some of which came out in a recent Nature podcast with Adam Rutherford (which you can listen to here), which was prompted by a recent publication on the structure of squid rhodopsin.

[Read more…]

Cruel nature

If you should ever find yourself in my neighborhood, and were to walk up to my door, I have to warn you: the welcome mat is splattered with blood stains. I didn’t do it! No Jehovah’s Witnesses are missing from the region! (They never come to my door anymore, anyway.)

We got an unpleasant surprise this morning in that the nest of baby bunnies outside our door was raided, probably by one of the local cats, and the whole family was butchered and laid out on our doorstep. And these bunnies were at that cute stage with fur and big eyes…or at least, they would have been cute if they’d all had heads and their viscera wasn’t splayed out everywhere and they weren’t lying cold and limp in a pool of blood.

I do have to wonder why, though, whenever there’s a scattering of corpses around the house, my family looks to me and expects me to do the clean up.

Madness? This is America!

Today is this semester’s last final exam, and this is the last big push of the semester, so I’m going to be mired in work for most of the day…but once I level the administrative mountain, I’ve got some new squid science to share. Until then, you’ll just have to chew over some of the usual American lunacy for a while.

  • Obama is gearing up to drape himself with Christian trappings. This will not make me happy. I’m planning to vote for him, but if he turns into yet another Christianist airhead, I will not be campaigning for him.

  • The reason Obama can’t lose my vote but can lose my enthusiasm is that the Republicans are just plain evil. Rumsfeld was saying the country needed another terrorist attack to keep the Democrats out of office? What a monster.

  • David Brooks thinks “science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other”, and that the future belongs to a fusion of science and Buddhism. David Brooks knows nothing of science. How did this twit get a gig at the NY Times?

  • UC Berkeley is going to court this week over their Understanding Evolution web site (that’s an excellent resource, by the way, especially if you’re just trying to get up to speed on the science). At issue is the fact that the site dares to point out that some religions contradict the evidence, and other religions try to avoid conflict with science; that is interpreted to be a sectarian endorsement of certain religions over others. This is where separation of church and state becomes insane: when you are not allowed to point out obvious idiocies because they are protected religious beliefs. Here’s the offending section: I think it’s pretty namby-pamby and bends over backwards to give deference to superstitious nonsense, but some people are apparently irate over a simple, accurate truth statement: “some religious beliefs explicitly contradict science”. They do, but a university isn’t allowed to say so?

Now I unplug myself from the intertubes for a few hours and focus, focus, focus on a pile of stuff most of you will never see.

Seattle awaits

I just got a copy of the promotional flyer for my Seattle visit, so here it is.

PZ Myers: On Science, Blogs, and Intelligent Debates

Paul “PZ” Myers is persona non grata at the Discovery Institute. He was recently booted out of a screening of the film “Expelled”–an irony certainly not lost on him. And now the evolutionary biologist and rabble-rouser blogger is coming to Seattle for one night only. He’ll be talking about the evolution of creationism and other oxymoronic topics with the same zeal and wit that have made him one of the fittest survivors on the science blog circuit.

Join the Northwest Science Writers Association and the Forum on Science Ethics and Policy for a conversation with PZ Myers. He’ll answer your questions and take us inside his popular blog, Pharyngula. He’s been called a “godless liberal” and his blog posts have been described as “random biological ejaculations.” And that’s just what he says. Others have attacked him for his stout devotion to evolution and probably for being funnier than those he offends.

NSWA and FoSEP present…
PZ Myers: On Science, Blogs, and Intelligent Debates
Pacific Science Center, Laser Dome
Monday, June 2, 2008
7 – 9 p.m.
FREE to the public

Tell your friends. Bring your questions.

Whoa. There’s an expectation that I’ll be funny? Uh-oh. The pressure is on.

At least those expectations are offset by the fact that I’m going to be speaking in a laser dome, which is very cool. I hope I have full access to all of the controls; hecklers beware, you could be reduced to a small heap of smoking ash.

Michael Medved says something dumb

Did someone declare this National Flaming Racist Idiot week, and I just didn’t notice until now? You have got to read Michael Medved’s latest foray into pseudoscience: he has declared American superiority to be genetic, encoded in our good old American DNA. Because our ancestors were immigrants, who were risk-takers, who were selected for their energy and aggressiveness. Oh, except for those who are descended from slaves.

The idea of a distinctive, unifying, risk-taking American DNA might also help to explain our most persistent and painful racial divide – between the progeny of every immigrant nationality that chose to come here, and the one significant group that exercised no choice in making their journey to the U.S. Nothing in the horrific ordeal of African slaves, seized from their homes against their will, reflected a genetic predisposition to risk-taking, or any sort of self-selection based on personality traits.

But, he hastens to add, modern African-American genetics have been leavened with the genes of recent, self-selected immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa, so their unfortunate stay-at-home genes have a “less decisive influence”.

As is usual for Medved, a dullard incapable of any kind of thought beyond the superficial, he doesn’t think his thesis through. Wouldn’t this imply that Moslem immigrants to Europe, with their risk-taking willingness to move to new environments, are their true hope for the future? That the old blue-bloods of this country are less fit than, say, the Nisei? And if the descendants of African slaves are not successful go-getters because their arrival was coerced, what about the immigrants who were fleeing religious persecution, or all the Americans who are descended from indentured servants? Are there no successful entrepreneurs in Europe or Asia or Africa? Should we give extra bonus points to the descendants of nomadic tribes of warriors, like the Germans? It’s a very peculiarly narrow view of a kind of simplistic genetic determinism that ignores the complexities and the varieties of ways people got here to promote a ridiculous premise.

And it just gets sillier.

Senators Obama, Clinton and other leaders who seek to enlarge the scope of government face more formidable obstacles than they realize. Their desire to impose a European-style welfare state and a command-and-control economy not only contradicts our proudest political and economic traditions, but the new revelations about American DNA suggest that such ill-starred schemes may go against our very nature.

Uh, what? Republican policies are now part of our genetic nature, and the Democrats will be defeated by our capitalist genes?

This is Michael Medved of the Discovery Institute, an organization that has recently been raving about the evils of eugenics and the soulless Darwinian view of nature. Yet here he is, spouting off the kind of smug, invalid, pseudo-biological jingo that belongs in the Gilded Age and would be comfortable in the mouth of a robber baron trying to justify a war in Latin America. It’s nothing but handwaving rationalizations for an intrinsic superiority to our tribe, with a complete absence of evidence.

They just don’t get it

A major court decision in Vermont slammed the Catholic church there.

A Burlington jury issued a landmark verdict against the state’s Roman Catholic diocese Tuesday, ordering it to pay $8.7 million in damages to a former Burlington altar boy fondled multiple times by a priest the church knew was a child molester.

It’s a harsh penalty, but warranted by the way the church turned a blind eye to outrageously criminal behavior. I’d like to say that they’ll learn a lesson from it, but the comments from Catholic officials suggest that no, they won’t.

A grim Bishop Salvatore Matano, who attended the six-day trial, said in a brief, separate interview that the size of the verdict could pose serious problems for the diocese. He called the looming predicament a “sad and tragic moment in our history.”

Wrong! The sad and tragic moment occurred in 1972, when they hired the child molesting priest while fully knowledgeable about his prior history. The legal damages aren’t the problem, it’s what these people did to children.

“I have to look very seriously at what this verdict means as it impacts on our services and the activities of the diocese,” Matano said. “I have to be very conscious that the verdict as it stands will have a very serious impact on a rural diocese; a small, rural diocese.”

The diocese? What about the people? Where was your concern for the diocese when the church set a child predator loose upon them?

“I do not want in any way to inflict any suffering or any pain upon the faithful in this diocese because of what happened in the past,” Matano said. “That is certainly not appropriate, and I am conscious of the universal needs of the diocese.”

Oh, well then…it all happened in the past. No worries about the now, then. I’m sure there aren’t any child abusing priests any more, and the victim in this case…why, surely, he’s over it now.

Diocesan lawyer Tom McCormick said he was taken aback by the jury’s decision and would likely appeal.

“Clearly, in hindsight we should have, could have looked at things differently,” McCormick said. “We expected that a Vermont jury would not unleash a number of this sort for behavior that took place 35 years ago.”

These evil clowns in their funny suits are clearly out of touch. When you’ve defined yourself as a moral authority (often, the sole moral authority) you don’t get to back away from the consequences of your actions because time has passed or because the consequences are severe. Perhaps they ought to look at this expression of tangible outrage by a community as a not-so-subtle signal that they have not and are not supporting the actual behaviors that community considers important, and regards as part of the church’s trust.

Personally, I think bankrupting the gilded monstrosity of Catholicism is an eminently desirable goal in itself.

Mike Norman is a piker

That guy, Mike Norman, with the t-shirts implying Obama is a monkey is selling them for $15 apiece. Doron Braunshtein is also selling an anti-Obama t-shirt…for $250. This one isn’t as overtly racist — it just says “JEWS AGAINST OBAMA” — but it’s also not worth the money, and Braunshtein’s attitudes, revealed in the story, are rather bigoted themselves. Proud Jews shouldn’t vote for someone with the middle name “Hussein”?

Shouldn’t the creationists be tittering at the Vatican now?

There was a brief flurry of surprise a while back that Richard Dawkins acknowledged the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and that it was even possible that aliens might have visited Earth — for some reason, creationists thought this was hilarious, although it’s actually a very clear element of scientific thought. We can admit a possibility — Dawkins even admitted the possiblity of a god in The God Delusion — but that does not imply that we think there is evidence for such a thing, and evidence is a necessary prerequisite for an idea to enter the purview of science. It was a little strange to see giddy creationists pointing out a commonplace statement, as if it somehow revealed a confusion in Dawkins’ mind, when it really just exposed the ignorance in their own.

Well, I expect a repeat performance now. A Vatican astronomer said intelligent beings could exist in outer space, and that this does not contradict their religion. To which I can only say, sure, big whoop, not a big deal — it’s just speculation.

Of course, being a Vatican astronomer, he’s got to go on and assert that these beings were created by God, and might be free of original sin, yadda yadda yadda. It’s pretty much all vapor, but I still expect a good creationist howl of protest.