The etiquette of squid-eating

Tantalizing news: somewhere out there in the wide, wide world is a video of a pilot whale eating a large squid.

“We looked hard and saw a tentacle of a squid hanging from its mouth and there were other pieces of squid stuck to the whale’s body. It made a number of brusque movements on its side in the water to free the tentacle to eat it — and there we were filming and photographing it all.”

If you follow TONMO you already know it’s probably not a giant squid, as the article breathlessly reports, but it’s still going to be interesting because whales that feed on squid do have a problem: the tentacles are clingy and in many of the large species are equipped with sharp hooks — and they writhe and grip even when the animal is dead. How whales manage a struggling meal is going to be something of interest.

Arrr, I nail a virtual doubloon to the mast of the good ship Pharyngula—first matey to spot the whale and his prey gets it.

Wisconsin’s turn!

Oh, no. Another one. Yet another kook is inspired by Ken Ham’s example and plans to open a “museum” … in the Wisconsin Dells. The Dells, if you don’t know it, is a family resort area, rather cheesy (ha! In Wisconsin! I made a funny), and crammed with waterparks and waterskiing shows and carnival rides and bowling alleys and little stage shows—a creationist “museum” will fit right in.

The guy who has collected a hodge-podge of creationist exhibits, Bill Mielke, exhibits the typical rhetorical coherence of his breed.

“What we’re doing is those that say it’s scientific, is to say it’s not religion against science, but religion against ‘junk science,'” he said. “There is no transitional life forms and there’s no evidence.”

Um, OK. Whatever he just said.

Anyway, this joker has already rented out space in the Waupaca High School (to which we all have to say, “wtf??!?”), and has been exhibiting his trash for some time. Now he wants to put it on display in a dedicated space at a resort, not far from the lovely university town of Madison, Wisconsin. Bleh. All I can say is that, if he does this … ROAD TRIP! Let’s catch the lunacy before it folds into bankruptcy.

(Hat tip to Beautiful Biology)

Does the DUP also believe in leprechauns?

How do the Irish keep track of them all? They have more than two political parties, and yet they only have two middle fingers to raise up and wave at them. All I can say, though, is that if I were living in Northern Ireland, I wouldn’t be voting for the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which narrows the field a little. Look at the tripe they’re pushing on the schools now:

A DUP proposal that Lisburn Council should write to local secondary and grammar schools encouraging them to teach alternative theories to evolution is set to face stiff opposition when it is debated next week.

That sure sounds familiar: “alternative theories” is one of the mantras of the Discovery Institute, which then conveniently neglects to mention that none of the lies they’re peddling rises to the level of legitimacy of a theory. The DUP has an up-and-coming young wanker named Paul Givan to babble yet more familiar old nonsense.

The Corporate Services Committee agreed to a proposal by the DUP’s Paul Givan that they should contact all second level schools in the Lisburn City Council area “encouraging them to teach alternative theories to evolution as the origins of the earth, such as Creation and Intelligent Design.”

Mr Givan said: “I have never believed in the theory of evolution and, like many people, believe in the teaching of creation. I believe science points to creation but our schools are teaching a very narrow remit and many exclude alternative theories to evolution. I have asked the Council to write to local schools encouraging them to give equality of treatment to other theories of the origins of life and how the earth came into existence.”

Mr Givan believes science points to creation, yet his qualifications list only his degrees in Business Studies and, of course, his hobby of lying to children at a Sunday School. Perhaps that’s where he learned all of his science?

While the Irish newspapers might poke fun at our creationist idiots (deservedly, too), at least now we can poke back at Ireland’s own creationism problem, with representation in Northern Ireland’s largest political party.

If ID was …

This game looks like it is way too much fun.

IF ID WAS MEDICINE

I could tell you you were sick, because you *look* sick. We’d have some fantastic metric for sickness that no-one has ever used and our “sick or healthy” filter would just be a concept…. that didn’t work. I could maybe tell you you were sick, because you look sick but could make no comment about the disease causing the sickness, how it makes you sick or how to cure you. Real medicine would be a dogmatic religious belief, though.

Everyone can play! Pick your own analogy!

Discussion of the History of Neurobiology

In PZ’s class we’re reading and discussing Soul Made Flesh by Carl Zimmer. This non-fiction book follows the journey that neurobiology has made throughout its history. The details of this history that most prominently catch my attention are the logic, methods, and observations upon which early discoveries were built.

Plato got the ball rolling with his theory that the body consists of three souls. The human soul resides in the head where it can sense surroundings and and divinely reason about their meaning. The vegetative soul resides in the abdomen where it initiates growth, lustful desires, and so forth; and the vital soul resides in the heart where it radiates love and compassion. (Zimmer, 2004) Plato’s theory of souls was based primarily on thought and reason but is well considered and worthy of being scribed into one of the first pages of history.

Aristotle (Plato’s student) dissected a vast array of animals, most likely seeing the importance of taking it apart to see what’s inside in understanding how they work. If I myself were, for example, asked to draw a diagram of the inner workings of a wrist watch, I would fail miserably. A few centuries after the time of Plato, Galen gained a further understanding of anatomy by studying the massive wounds sustained by gladiators. The works of Aristotle and Galen remained the dominant teachings for well over a thousand years.

Gradually, around the 17th century, new ideologies began to refute the traditional teachings on human anatomy and the mind. Descartes published Discourse on Method which presented philosophical arguments about thought and human existence. William Harvey introduced the controversial idea that blood circulates through vessels. Thomas Willis, Robert Boyle, and other members of the Oxford Circle began laying the foundations of modern neurobiology by carrying out progressive experiments that no one had ever thought of before. (Zimmer, 2004)

How exciting it must have been to watch, first hand, the beginnings of this intricate science unfold. I sometimes think about what sort of contribution, if any at all, I could have made if I could somehow have been a student at Oxford hundreds of years ago, bringing with me my limited sophomore understanding of chemistry and biology. I’m excited to continue reading Soul Made Flesh to see where history goes from here. If you haven’t read this book, it provides an excellently thorough account of neurobiology from the very beginning. I will be sure revisit this subject as I continue to read and as we continue to discuss it in class.

References:

Zimmer, Carl. 2004. Soul Made Flesh. Free Press, New York, NY.

That’s easy to say in San Francisco

Mark Morford has an exceptionally optimistic — dare I say, “triumphal” — article on the collapse of the religious right today. People are reacting (in the right way, so far) to the tremendous damage the Bush presidency has done to our prestige, our security, our economy, our rights, and the legacy we’ll leave to our children, and every reasonable person that Morford knows is reveling in the growing political morbidity of the Republican party. And it was all so inevitable.

[Read more…]

Logodaedalic Gregory

T. Ryan Gregory is turning into quite the coiner of useful terms. The latest: Dog’s Ass Plots. It refers specifically to charts that try to make a case for the evolution of complexity by selectively encoding their creator’s assumptions about the topic, and especially by oversimplifying the data in a way that skews their interpretation.

I suspect DAPs are a problem in other fields as well, though.