On the non-necessity of evolving large brains:
It requires big brains and they in turn demand lots of protein, which, outside modern yuppie societies, generally means meat. As the late evolutionary paleontologist Jack Sepkoski used to say: “I see intelligence as just one of a variety of adaptations among tetrapods for survival. Running fast in a herd while being as dumb as shit, I think, is a very good adaptation for survival.”
(from a review of an interesting book.)
I like Greg Laden’s taxonomy of Horwitzian Academic “Freedom” bills:
“Academic Freedom” bills seem to come in two flavors: Those that protect students from the possibility of learning certain things, and those that protect subversive teachers from getting in trouble for being bad teachers.
I’m late to the party again; only because Hilzoy mentioned it did I see this hilariously inane article by Michael Medved. I don’t know what Medved’s qualifications are; he seems to be the Clever Hans of the Right Wing chattering classes, the guy who doesn’t actually have a functioning mind but is good at stringing random words together. So now he has written an article claiming that it is perfectly reasonable for Americans to discriminate against atheists in politics, specifically that they should resist the possibility of an atheist as president.
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.
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.
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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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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?
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.
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.
