Once a crank, always a crank

DaveScot, the anti-science slug from UncommonDescent, is doing an experiment: he’s got a friend who is taking dichloroacetate (DCA) to treat his cancer. DaveScot thinks this is wonderful and useful, but quite the contrary: a one-person uncontrolled trial is pretty much a perfect example of bad science.

One funny (funny weird, because it’s also actually kind of evil) point from the post: he’s shilling for a quack commercial site that is selling DCA—purportedly for animal use. They sell doses for 150 pound animals. That’ll come in handy if my pet kangaroo gets cancer.

Anyway, nice to see that crackpottery is so unfocused. Many of the big wigs in ID are also HIV-deniers, in addition to being evolution-deniers; now we’re seeing one of them jump on the snake oil bandwagon. I wonder if there are also greater than average numbers of cold fusion fans and UFO believers in the ranks of the IDists? There might be an interesting sociological study in that.

Call me when the angels come down and do something; until then, give the credit to people

Ugh. Jim Wallis. That left-wing theo-nut.

Progressive politics is remembering its own religious history and recovering the language of faith. Democrats are learning to connect issues with values and are now engaging with the faith community. They are running more candidates who have been emboldened to come out of the closet as believers themselves.

What planet is he from? Have American politicians of any party been afraid to label themselves as religious at any time in the past century? We see the opposite problem: they all declare themselves best buddies with a god.

He also goes on to do the usual post-hoc appropriation of every good idea that has ever come along to the credit of religion: abolition, civil rights, the overthrow of communism, on and on, glossing over the fact that we people of reason were fighting the good fight, too, and that religion seems to be one of those nonsensical foundations that allows people to argue any ol’ which-way they want, and that there people of faith fighting against those same good ideas.

I think all religion is good for is moral thievery—stealing the credit for the good that human beings do and passing it along to their priests and fictitious gods.

Stephen Frug gets even crankier about this. Please, please, get these raving kooks out of both parties, and let’s have rational policy making that owes nothing to religious nonsense.

Basics: Gastrulation

That guy, John Wilkins, has been keeping a list of presentations of basic concepts in science, and he told me I’m supposed to do one on gastrulation. First I thought, no way—that’s way too hard, and I thought this was all supposed to be about basic stuff. But then I figured that it can’t be too hard, after all, all you readers went through it successfully, and you even managed to do it before you developed a brain. So, sure, let’s rattle this one off.

In the simplest terms, gastrulation is a stage in early development; in human beings it occurs between two and three weeks after fertilization. It is that stage when a two-layered cell mass undergoes a set of specific movements and interactions that establish the three germ layers of the embryo (endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm) and the beginnings of a three-dimensional structure. The end result doesn’t look like much of an animal, but it has set up pools of cells that will contribute to specific future cell types, and has laid down the rough outline of tissues along the body axis.

[Read more…]

The Dumbening of America continues

Somebody shoot me now. The Washington Post tallies up congressional votes, and in an astounding display of technological mastery, allows you to sort and display them by the congressperson’s astrological sign. If you’ve ever wondered whether Scorpios were more likely to vote for highway appropriations than are Virgos, now you can find out.

I really want to know what the conversations the editors or publishers had about this decision were like. I’m thinking they were getting worried about how idiotic and cowardly the press has been looking lately, so someone decided to do something bold and exciting and revolutionary…and this is what they came up with.