Whoa, this one is a doozy. I dare you — I double-dog dare you — to stay awake through the whole thing.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Whoa, this one is a doozy. I dare you — I double-dog dare you — to stay awake through the whole thing.
Last chance at escapism before the school year starts: Skatje, her friend Nathan, and I are heading off to the Minnesota Renaissance festival today. I don’t know about this; hanging out with a gang of people pretending it’s the 13th century is a bit too much like meeting up with creationists.
I’ve heard of Hirschsprung’s Disease as an academically interesting instance of a developmental failure of nerve migration, but you really must read about the human cost of the disease — innocent little babies (and their parents) should never have to suffer this much. Chris Chatham is spreading the word about an expensive nutritional product, Omegaven, that has the potential to alleviate one symptom — liver failure due to the need for sustained IV feeding — and the idea is to encourage clinical testing so the treatment can be more widely used and supported by insurance companies. Let’s raise the profile of this work and try to get some media attention; reducing the need for infant liver transplants sounds like a worthy cause.
You may have noticed (how could you avoid it?) all the information about Seed’s new contest: if you’re commenting with a valid email address, you’re in the drawing. The prize is a 5-day trip to a great science city (there’s a poll to determine which one) — this is good, because even if some wacky creationist or HIV denialist or demented Republican wins, their reward will be some intense exposure to real science. I tell you, the brains behind this outfit are cunning and nefarious in their machinations. (If you are one of those deluded individuals who doesn’t want their illusions dashed, you can ask to be excused from the drawing. They’re cunning, but also nice.)
While I’m alerting you to the largesse of our host, let me mention another good deal: subscribe to Seed magazine, and they’ll give you this utterly faboo Sb beaker/coffee mug. I picked one up while I was in NY, and they are great — I’m half-seriously thinking I ought to get 6 subscriptions myself so I can have a whole set in my house, especially since my Trophy Wife™ has been casting covetous glances at my mug. Imagine your mornings, reading Seed, sipping coffee from that lovely mug; you’ll be the perfect image of the upscale nerd, just like me.
The other interviewed guests are amazing. I thought this guy was dead!
Some of you may have never seen an arthropod embryo (or any embryo, for that matter). You’re missing something: embryos are gorgeous and dynamic and just all around wonderful, so let’s correct that lack. Here are two photographs of an insect and a spider embryo. The one on the left is a grasshopper, Schistocerca nitens at about a third of the way through development; the one on the right is Achaearanea tepidariorum. Both are lying on their backs, or dorsal side, with their legs wiggling up towards you.
There are differences in the photographic technique — one is an SEM, the other is a DAPI-stained fluorescence photograph — and the spider embryo has had yolk removed and been flattened (it’s usually curled backward to wrap around a ball of yolk), and you can probably see the expected difference in limb number, but the cool thing is that they look so much alike. The affinities in the body plans just leap out at you. (You may also notice that it doesn’t seem to resemble a certain other rendition of spider development).
Our Minnesota Health Commissioner, a Republican appointee who was supported by our Republican governor through a number of startlingly clueless incidents, has finally resigned. Here’s a short summary of her career:
This summer, Mandernach was criticized over her suppression of a state study about 35 cancer deaths related to taconite mining on Minnesota’s Iron Range.
In 2004, her credibility suffered when a website posting by the department suggested that abortion might have a role in breast cancer. Critics denounced those claims as junk science, and the wording was removed from the website.
So she hid real cancer risks and promoted fake cancer risks. She got it wrong coming and going! How could that be? Could it be…ignorance and arrogance?
Marty said his misgivings began about a year after her appointment, when Mandernach was forced to remove the wording on the website that claimed a link between abortion and breast cancer.
“She told me it was her judgment to override all of the scientific information at the time,” Marty said.
What were the qualifications of this paragon to override scientific evidence? She was “a former nun and teacher, was chief executive of the Mercy Hospital & Health Care Center in Moose Lake”. Doesn’t that fill you with confidence?
I’ve been trying to recollect what horrible thing I said in that interview with that film crew … what juicy, ghastly, evil comment I might have made that will be plucked out and impaled on a stick and waved to the audience to inflame them. It’s a waste of time, of course — I tend to be far too mellow in person, despite occasional brief declamations that religion is crap, and they’re going to have to strain a bit to find anything sufficiently inciteful.
And then I remembered — the interviewer was mildly obsessed with one thing that he brought up several times. It was a quote from this interview, otherwise most memorable for the way that kook John A. Davison turned the comment thread into a maelstrom of inanity.
Last year, Answers in Genesis ran an essay contest for young creationists — the prize was a $50,000 scholarship to Liberty University (second prize must have been a $100,000 scholarship). Well, they ran it again this year, and the ‘winners’ have been announced, and a sorry lot of recitations of bogus creationist talking points they are. Evolution turns people into immoral killers! Darwinism leads people to abortion and Hitler! Cells are full of little machines created by Jesus! It’s really sad to see young people led down the path of stupidity like that.
If you really must read them, you can … but Zeno has read and summarized them so you don’t have to. Maybe I should read them more myself — since a new semester is beginning next week, they’d recalibrate my brain to have lower expectations, and all of my freshmen students will be brilliant, literate geniuses by comparison.
Nah, I don’t have to. They already are, and I know it.
