Well, finally…a certain evil monkey quite playing around to bring us Tangled Bank #74, in which he says cruel things about me. You’ll want to read it just to see how he crushed my delicate feelings.
We have a fine, meaty collection of carnivals today, and a couple of requests for submissions.
Scientiæ Carnival #1 (this is a new carnival for women in science, technology, engineering, and math)
This weekend is your last chance to send in submissions for the Circus of the Spineless.
I’m also hosting Encephalon on 12 March. If you’ve got brains on the brain, send me links.
We may also have a special event planned for 12 March here on Pharyngula…stay tuned.
Halkieriids are Cambrian animals that looked like slugs in scale mail; often when they died their scales, called sclerites, dissociated and scattered, and their sclerites represent a significant component of the small shelly fauna of the early Cambrian. They typically had their front and back ends capped with shells that resembled those we see in bivalve brachiopods. Wiwaxiids were also sluglike, but sported very prominent, long sclerites, and lacked the anterior and posterior shells; their exact position in the evolutionary tree has bounced about quite a bit, but some argument has made that they belong in the annelid ancestry, and that their sclerites are homologous to the bristly setae of worms. One simplistic picture of their relationship to modern forms was that the halkieriids expanded their shells and shed their scales to become molluscs, while the wiwaxiids minimized their armor to emphasize flexibility and became more wormlike. (Note that that is a very crude summary; relationships of these Cambrian groups to modern clades are extremely contentious. There’s a more accurate description of the relationships below.)
Now a new fossil has been found, Orthozanclus reburrus that unites the two into a larger clade, the halwaxiids. Like the halkieriids, it has an anterior shell (but not a posterior one), and like the wiwaxiids, it has long spiky sclerites. In some ways, this simplifies the relationships; it unites some problematic organisms into a single branch on the tree. The question now becomes where that branch is located—whether the halwaxiids belong in a separate phylum that split off from the lophophorate family tree after the molluscs, or whether the halwaxiids are a sister group to the molluscs.
The IDists love to quote me, because I am rather militant in my opposition to their lies. They are particularly fond of one particular quote* that they’ve even used in their fund-raising literature. They think it’s damning; some of my fellow anti-creationists swoon and protest when they hear the words, but they tend to be faint-hearted anyway. But here’s what’s really amusing.
What kind of wimps are they out there at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities branch? They canceled classes! Just because of a major snowstorm!
We’ll have to see what happens—it’s on the way to the western campus (us) and should hit this evening. I’d also like to know why winter has dawdled about getting here until March and now is trying to give us a whole season’s worth of snow in two weeks.
We do seem to have a bunch of lushes, although that Mooney fellow seems to favor fluids that have only a passing acquaintance with beer—but I shouldn’t knock it, maybe that’s how he maintains his boyish, youthful appearance. Jennifer Ouellette gives us a more detailed summary of what goes on in the bottle, appropriately enough for a site called Cocktail Party Physics.
Chris also mentions an interestingly named wine called Evolution—I’ll have to see if the local liquor store stocks it. I’m also going to hunt down Dave Puskala, who is rumored to possess a legendary homebrew called “Angry Evolutionist”, which sounds exactly like the kind of beer I should be drinking regularly. I hope it’s potent and has a sharp bite to it.
Robert M. Sapolsky is one of my favorite science writers — if you haven’t read Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human Predicament(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), A Primate’s Memoir(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), or Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), I suggest you get off your butt right now and visit your library or bookstore. He’s a primatologist who studies the endocrinology and behavior of baboons, but he always presents his work in terms of the human condition. We aren’t so different, we primates.
If you don’t feel like getting up right this instant, though, at least click on this link to his speech to the Freedom From Religion Foundation. You’ll get a taste of that Sapolsky humanism that will get you wanting more, and he also has an interesting message: that religion is a kind of controlled psychosis.
It’s also a message that I’m surprised is not getting targeted by the creationists more. They are so hung up on godless evilutionism that they mostly don’t seem to realized that there is another, equally ferocious wolf coming up their flank, the neurosciences. Evolution is shredding their preconceptions about history and their origins, but neuroscience is going to rip out a different, but even more central concept: the soul. Minds are the products of electrochemical and molecular/physiological activity, not spirits or souls or extradimensional magical forces — brains are meat and thoughts are the product of ions and small molecules bubbling about in coordinated patterns. That doesn’t demean us and I think it makes us just as interesting and wonderful, but it is another case where the religious guesswork is proving wrong.
This one has been around for almost a year now, but if you’re getting tired of Conservapedia, take a stroll through the CreationWiki. It doesn’t generally have that tone of having been written by a gang of third-graders, but there’s plenty of stupid on display.
(via Unscrewing The Inscrutable)
