Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This letter to the New Zealand Herald was written to protest a claim that NZ was a “Christian nation”. It’s got a nice twist to it.
If my resistance to deem New Zealand to be a Christian nation makes me a traitor, as Brian Tamaki suggests, take me to the Tower, or the New Zealand equivalent, for it would be greatly preferable to living in such a country.
You might think, then, that I am one of the 48.8 per cent of non-Christian New Zealanders.
I am not. I am an Anglican priest serving an Auckland church. And no, I’m not Bishop Richard Randerson under a nom de plume.
As an immigrant from America I know what it means to live in a Christian nation. That’s why I left. New Zealand’s respect for human rights is why I chose to live here as a permanent resident.
Read the rest. You can tell he was more than a little disgusted with America’s Christian hypocrisy. As a confirmation, you can also listen to this NPR panel debate
that concluded that the US was “too damn religious”.
Take a look at this interesting discussion of a recent PLoS article in which publications in medical journals are reluctant to use the word “evolution”:
According to a report released last week in PLoS Biology, when medical journals publish studies about things like antibiotic resistance, they avoid using the “E-word.” Instead, antimicrobial resistance is (euphemistically, I suppose) said to “emerge,” “arise,” or “spread” rather than “evolve.”
This decision has consequences, too—popular press descriptions of the work then tend to avoid using the word “evolution”, too. This is exactly the kind of run-around that allows kooks like Phil Skell to claim that modern biology doesn’t actually need evolution (although, truth be told, Skell is so looney that he claims papers on evolutionary biology that use observations of fossils or gene frequencies don’t really need evolutionary theory).
Of course, what this is all about is really just to have an opportunity to tweak the noses of the good doctors here at Scienceblogs, like Orac and Revere and Charles and Craig—what’s wrong with these M.D.s? Are they poorly educated, cowardly, or do the granting agencies or journal publishers actually pressure them to avoid ‘controversial’ words?
There is some degree of seriousness to the question. This habit has effects; what can we do to correct it?
A reader pointed me to this German documentary (with English subtitles) on evolution and creationism—it has a nice 10 minute primer on mechanisms and evidence for evolution (with evo-devo, especially of fruit flies and zebrafish, prominently mentioned, appropriately enough for the country of Christiane Nusslein-Volhard).
There’s also a segment on creationism that is a bit lacking in nuance—they are all lumped together as young earth creationists—which is the kind of opening creationists use to disavow association with those other kooks, while glossing over the foolishness they do believe. Never mind the theological hairsplitting, though, YECs and IDist are fundamentally identical in their rejection of science for dogma.
Aside from that, it’s a simple introduction to evolution that emphasizes the molecular evidence (yay!), has eye-catching graphics and animations, and scathingly dismisses creationism and the general descent into mystical thinking. Do any of my German readers know of this fellow? Was this broadcast on German television?
The article about gastrulation from the other day was dreadfully vertebrate-centric, so let me correct that with a little addendum that mentions a few invertebrate patterns of gastrulation—and you’ll see that the story hasn’t changed.
Remember, this is the definition of gastrulation that I explained with some vertebrate examples:
The process in animal embryos in which endoderm and mesoderm move from the outer surface of the embryo to the inside, where they give rise to internal organs.
I described frogs and birds and mammals the other day, so lets take a look at sea urchins and fruit flies.
We have to follow where the evidence leads us, and we finally find an important function for the adult appendix: as a reserve ammunition pouch.
Though it may look vaguely like a hand grenade, the solid white structure in the X-ray is actually someone’s appendix, visible only because it is full of shotgun pellets — so full, in fact, that it is stretched to about three times its normal size.
The patient, a 73-year-old Inuit woman at Norton Sound Regional Hospital in Nome, had probably been swallowing the pellets inadvertently for decades, in the meat of ducks and geese shot by local hunters.
So if you’re ever stranded in the Great White North, short of ammo for your shotgun, find an Inuit with bad teeth and do an emergency appendectomy. I expect to see this turn up as a plot point in a Michael Crichton novel any day now.
At least, I hope so. The “conservapedia” is supposed to be an alternative to Wikipedia that removes the biases—although one would think the creators would be clever enough to realize that even the name announces that Conservapedia is planning to openly embrace a particular political bias. Unfortunately, that bias seems to be more towards stupidity than anything else.
I’m sure some of you will soon be bragging about how your Squid Quotient is higher than mine.
Your Squid Quotient = 158.25
Interpreting your results: An average Squid Quotient is around 100. A SQ of 100 means you have a normal affinity for squid. A SQ above 100 means you have an attraction or fondness for squid. Below 100 means that you should probably stay away from the deep ocean.
The great unanswered question: How many condoms can you put on a penis at once? These people make a gallant effort to discover the answer, but are stymied when they run out of condoms…after slipping 625 of them on.
Then, unfortunately, there’s the step where they use a hacksaw to remove them…
(via ZayZayEm)
SWAT teams training for drug raids casually shoot target dogs, so guess what they do on the real raids? Fascist scumbags. In anything other than a police state, you’d expect the law enforcers to be held to the highest possible standards of conduct; in the US, the police with the biggest guns are unrestrained by ordinary decency. Slaughtering family pets is what I’d expect of a psychopath.
(via Jim Lippard)
