On Edge, Jerry Coyne has a response to Sam Brownback’s dissent from evolution. These are excellent questions, and I’d like to see them answered!
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
On Edge, Jerry Coyne has a response to Sam Brownback’s dissent from evolution. These are excellent questions, and I’d like to see them answered!
Morgan Smith is six years old and is going to have a birthday party with a pirate theme. His parents hoisted a Jolly Roger up the flagpole, and…boom, some officious titzypritzel goes bustling off to the city council to complain. Down goes the flag. Now there is what a deranged bureaucrat might call a “happy ending”:
A Stafford Borough Council spokesman said: “A planning application has been made for a Jolly Roger flag to be flown at a property in Stone.
“The application is currently under review and will include planning officers looking at the impact the flag has on the area, with the decision expected by the end of this month.
“Legislation requires planning approval before it can be flown from the flagpole.”
Erk. That’s the antithesis of pirate. I say, hoist the flag, run out the cannon, and give the pretentious stuffed shirts at the Stafford Borough Council a broadside. Give that mob of six year olds cake, ice cream, and good sugary soft drinks, hand ’em each a cutlass, and turn ’em loose on the neighborhood. Yarrr, that’s the pirate solution.
The various ID blogs are all atwitter over the new textbook the Discovery Institute is going to be peddling, Explore Evolution. I’ve seen a copy, but I’m not going to give an extensive review just yet. I will say that it’s taking a slightly different tack to avoid the court challenges. It does not mention gods anywhere, of course, but it goes further: it doesn’t mention Intelligent Design, either. The book is entirely about finding fault with evolution, under the pretext of presenting the position of evolutionary biology (sort of) together with a critique. The biology part is shallow, useless, and often wrong, and the critiques are basically just warmed over creationist arguments.
What it actually is is Jonathan Wells’ Icons of Evolution rewritten and reworked as a textbook.
While we’re waiting for the Panda’s Thumb server to come back up, with some new material on Behe’s new book, I’ll recommend Blake Stacey’s dissection of the malaria mutants. This little fable that Behe summarized about the frequency of chloroquine-resistant mutations in the malaria parasite is the centerpiece of his book, and the important odds of 1 in 1020 was the yardstick by which he measured evolution — it was the magic number, the limit to evolution, the likelihood that a fairly simple set of mutations could occur … and the whole story is bogus. The book has been out for only about a week and the whole thing is just crumbling to pieces already.
Not that it will matter in the slightest, of course. The Edge of Evolution isn’t a science book, it’s a propaganda piece — and the big lies are just fine for that purpose.
This fellow Kaufman sent me a link to this very odd photo.
Now my interest is piqued. Does anyone know what this is from?
It’s an article titled “I love teaching evolution”…on the Chalcedon foundation page, in column on homeschooling, beneath a quote and a picture of crazy ol’ R.J. Rushdooney.
Evolution is a topic that repeatedly enters into our curriculum the same way that sin is a topic that gets covered in depth. How am I adequately educating my child if I fail to cover in detail the lies and deceptions that are prevalent in our humanistic culture? The Christian homeschooling parent must be prepared to understand, articulate, and refute the preposterous claims that currently serve as explanations for the origins of life and the presence of all creatures great and small. Fortunately, there are many good books and publishers that have taken the time to make this task much easier.
I think this one belongs to Greg Laden. I’m going to stagger off and rest my bedazzled, overloaded brains.
(thanks to Jesse for that horrible vision.)
I passed on listening to the Democratic debates, so you can sure as heck bet I skipped the recent Republican debate. Just as well, too; the candidates got pressed on that evolution question again, and wouldn’t you know it, it simply triggered an avalanche of idiocy, with Mike Huckabee leading the way. Just look at these quotes.
The very freshest, sweetest, neatest Tangled Bank is now online. It’s got links! To science!
P.S. A few people are worried that the Panda’s Thumb seems to be down right now. They’re having some server problems, it’s nothing to be too concerned about (it is not an external attack), and they’re in the midst of migrating to a new server anyway, so all should be well again soon without too much fuss.
Do you realize that if we could get them to believe this (and you know, they’ll believe anything), it would cut the crowding at prime beach recreation sites by half or more?
The initial change from camouflaged to conspicuous takes only milliseconds due to direct neural control of the skin. Full expression of the threat display (right) is two seconds. Video frame rate is 30 frames per second. Watch the video clip.
Everyone here is familiar with the incredible ability of cephalopods to change their appearance, right? If you aren’t, review your cuttlefish anatomy and watch this video. A few frames from the video are shown on the right.
This is an amazing ability, and the question is how do they do it? Roger Hanlon has been spending years tinkering with cephalopods, trying to puzzle it out and come up with an explanation. There are a couple of things a master of disguise needs.
A good visual system. To match the background, you need to be able to see the background at least as well as the predator trying to see you.
Fast connections to the effector organs. Cephalopods have motor nerves that go straight from their brains to the chromatophore organs with no synaptic delays along the way.
The hard part: cutaneous chromatophore organs that can change intensity and texture with a fair amount of spatial resolution. Cephalopods have tiny, discrete sacs of pigment scattered all over their body, each one ringed with muscles that can iris shut to conceal the pigment, or expand the sac to expose the pigment. There are also muscular papillae that work hydrostatically to change the texture of the skin from smooth to rough to spiny/spiky.
An algorithm. A set of rules that translate a visual field into an effective skin pattern that hides the animal.
One of the minor surprises of this work is that that last item, the algorithm for generating camouflage, may not be that complex. By studying many camouflaged organisms, they’ve categorized camouflage techniques into just three different strategies.
