Help Gary Farber

Gary Farber of Amygdala is in a crisis, both financially and in his health. This is such a waste: Gary is one of the all time great online raconteurs with a long history of bloggy productivity and the respect of swarms of other internet personalities. If someone were setting up a weblog franchise similar to scienceblogs, they ought to snap him up to anchor their site—he’s that good. And at this point, the tiny amount he’s asking for means he’ll work for cheap.

Help him out however you can. And if you’re looking for an interesting and provocative commentator, hire him!

Crazy people near where I grew up? No way!

I remember Federal Way! It was just up the hill from where I grew up, and although it was never a destination of interest, we would pass through its majestic strip malls on the way to Dash Point or Saltwater State Park. Now Federal Way is in the news as a haven for a few wingnuts. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised, but this one does express a point of view I find both novel and incoherent.

They’re protesting the showing of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth in the schools up there. I could understand the complaints if they were objecting to the presentation of a partisan campaign film for a presidential candidate (there is a bit too much of that in the movie), but they don’t—they never seem to find that angle troubling. Instead, the vomit all over the science, the part that’s pretty darn good and unobjectionable.

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Uh-oh…this is going to backfire

One of the lesser diaries on Daily Kos is calling for a boycott of Scienceblogs and is asking readers to email the gang at Seedmedia and tell them to spank one of our colleagues here. All this because Dr Charles thinks John Edwards is a piss-poor presidential candidate. Now I happen to disagree on Edwards worth as a candidate, but I do agree with some of the criticisms: Edwards sure is awfully rich, and good lawyerly arguments are often very, very bad scientific arguments. But anyone who had actually read much of Charles’ site would know that he’s a liberal humanist who actually wants Barack Obama for president, a candidate I detest about as much as he does Edwards. Will I be censured by dKos for that? I guess I can kiss my chances of being invited to speak at YearlyKos ever again goodbye.

One of the paradoxes of this medium, too, is that now that dKos has linked to Dr Charles, and I and the Mungers are chiming in, he’s probably going to get a little surge of traffic today. It would be a good idea for him to open that article to commenting, because he’d probably get a lot of vociferous arguments that might win more repeat traffic. I have the impression, though, that Dr Charles really isn’t into long, loud wrangles, which is probably why he didn’t open comments on it in the first place.

By the way, pestering the nice people at Seed about us is ineffectual and counterproductive. None of us were selected for our political views, and any liberal bias here is entirely a side-effect of the representation of conservative thought in America by a rather nasty know-nothing party of anti-science ignoramuses, which does tend to alienate people who favor science. If we were a country of Rockefeller Republicans and Shirley MacLaine Democrats, we’d have more blogs railing at the Democratic party (and if in continued political evolution, the two parties transformed themselves in that direction, I’d be among those railers.)

Also, think about it: if the management were malleable by the flow of complaints from people who were offended by some of the things we bloggers write, who do you think would be #1 on the chopping block? Not Dr Charles, that’s for sure; I think it would be a blog with a name that starts with a “ph” and ends with an “ula”, and “phlyctenula” is an icky subject name, and the “phylum Sipuncula” is poorly represented here.

The Wit and Wisdom of Doug Kaufman, PA, Pastor, Kansan, Gumby

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The Kansas Board of Education is going to be re-evaluating the anti-science standards the formerly overwhelmingly right-wing crazy board had approved—they’ve since elected more moderate members—and the creationists aren’t happy about it. When reading the stories, there was this name that kept coming up: Doug Kaufman. I don’t know a thing about the man, but from all of his newspaper quotes, I’m getting an impression of a real Gumby, a fellow who has one thought in his head and who bellows it out at every opportunity. If only that thought weren’t wrong…

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Home, safe and sound

I’m back home! I’m tired! I have to go take care of flies and fish! If you want to read some science, though, my cavefish article for Seed is online, so you can do that while I try to recover from all the traveling. But of course, you all already subscribe, so you probably read it last week.

I just plowed through all the comments on the delurking thread—you know you can all keep talking, don’t you? I only bite the heads off creationists, so you’re safe.

Anencephaly and right-wing moralizers

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There’s an important phenomenon in development called neurulation. This is a process that starts with a flat sheet of ectodermal cells, folds them into a tube, and creates our dorsal nervous system. Here’s a simple cross-section of the process in a salamander, but in general outline we humans do pretty much the same thing. Cells move up and inward, and then zipper together along the length of the animal to produce a closed tube.

It’s a seemingly simple event with a great deal of underlying complexity. It requires coordinated changes in the shape of ectodermal cells to drive the changes in tissue shape, and invisible in simple diagrams to the right are all the inductive interactions going on that trigger the differentiation of the tube into a nervous system.

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Bird brains

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I’m teaching a course in neurobiology this term, and it’s strange how it warps my brain; suddenly I find myself reaching more and more for papers on the nervous system in my reading. It’s not about just keeping up with the subjects I have to present in lectures (although there is that, too), but also with unconsciously gravitating toward the subject in my casual reading, too.

“Unconsciously”…which brings up the question of exactly what consciousness is. One of the papers I put on the pile on my desk was on exactly that subject: Evolution of the neural basis of consciousness: a bird-mammal comparison. I finally got to sit down and read it carefully this afternoon, and although it is an interesting paper and well worth the time, it doesn’t come anywhere near answering the question implied in the title. It is a useful general review of neuroanatomical theories of consciousness—even if it left me feeling they are all full of crap—but in particular it’s an interesting comparative look at avian brain organization.

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