Must be one of those easily dismissible radical fringe types

“Archbishop of York”? What kind of silly, made-up title is that?

The Archbishop of York has said British Christians should see Muslims as allies in the struggle against secularism.
In a speech at York Minster, Dr John Sentamu said British Muslims were not offended by Christianity and preferred it to a secular state.

Or maybe he was just mistranslated? Apparently not.

It has often been Muslims, as well as leaders of other faiths, who have joined with Christians in refusing to accept the creeping secularisation that would replace ‘Christmas’ with ‘Winterval’, and remove references to faith from public noticeboards for fear of causing offence. It is both my view and my experience, that most British Muslims do not feel threatened by our Christian moral foundations but by the cynicism of secularised culture that denies its own foundations. What they object to is the attempt to build human society without God. And so given the choice between the two prefer a faith environment, even one which they do not share, to that of a secularist state.

Oh. It’s the War on Christmas already.

Rhabdomeric and ciliary eyes

i-ccbc028bf567ec6e49f3b515a2c4c149-old_pharyngula.gif

We are all familiar with the idea that there are strikingly different kinds of eyes in animals: insects have compound eyes with multiple facets, while we vertebrates have simple lens eyes. It seems like a simple evolutionary distinction, with arthropods exhibiting one pattern and vertebrates another, but the story isn’t as clean and simple as all that. Protostomes exhibit a variety of different kinds of eyes, leading to the suggestion that eyes have evolved independently many times; in addition, eyes differ in more than just their apparent organization, and there are some significant differences at the molecular level between our photoreceptors and arthropod photoreceptors. It’s all very confusing.

There has been some recent press (see also this press release from the EMBL) about research on a particular animal model, the polychaete marine worm, Platynereis dumerilii, that is resolving the confusion. The short answer is that there are fundamentally two different kinds of eyes based on the biology of the cell types, and our common bilaterian ancestor had both—and the diversity arose in elaborations on those two types.

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Working together against the creationists…

Red State Rabble declares that we must stand united against the common enemy, creationism and such anti-scientific forces of unreason that threaten our secular institutions. That’s a nice, fuzzy statement, which I personally suspect is unrealistic and unworkable, but let’s give it a try.

Our first test: the Pope has made an interesting statement.

Pope Benedict XVI on Monday issued his strongest criticism yet of evolutionary theory, calling it “unreasonable”.

Speaking to a 300,000-strong crowd in this German city, the former theological watchdog said that, according to such theories derived from Charles Darwin’s work, the universe is “the random result of evolution and therefore, at bottom, something unreasonable”.

He has also just spoken out against secular societies—it seems that secularism is a greater problem than radical Islam.

But the section on Islam made up just three paragraphs of the speech, and he devoted the rest to a long examination of how Western science and philosophy had divorced themselves from faith — leading to the secularization of European society that is at the heart of Benedict’s worries.

I presume we all going to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in agreement that the Pope is wrong, he has completely misrepresented evolutionary theory, and that he should not be concerned about secular society—it is every person’s privilege to refuse to participate in any religion? We should all deplore his fallacious intrusion into a scientific matter, and all of us who are together on the side of science should unambiguously repudiate his opinion.

In the spirit of our shared community, I’ll step aside and refrain from chewing out the Pope, and defer that privilege to my colleague, Ken Miller, who is always willing to draft letters criticizing those who harm the cause of getting the public to recognize the validity of science. Perhaps he can draft a rollicking good letter telling the Pope where he can get off? I think it should definitely mention that Pope Benedict’s clerical status gives him absolutely, positively no credibility or status in assessing biological issues, and perhaps points out that we all stand as one against efforts to undermine science, whether they’re made by a creationist pope or some uppity god-hating atheist.

It should be something we can all agree on.

To unity!

Useful information for training your cephalopods

i-61f51cd4dc9a4b0466fecf741f8dea20-lorenz.jpg

Everyone knows the story of Konrad Lorenz and his goslings, right? It was a demonstration of imprinting: when young animals are exposed to a stimulus at a critical time, they can fix on it; Lorenz studied this phenomenon in geese, which if they saw him shortly after hatching, would treat him like their mother, following him around on his walks. Similarly, many animals seem to experience sexual imprinting, where they acquire the sexual preferences that will be expressed later on.

I just ran across a charming short letter about imprinting in cephalopods, and somehow the story seems so appropriate. Imprint a young, freshly hatched cuttlefish on something, and they don’t treat it like Mom, and they don’t later want to mate with it—they want to eat it. Lorenz was lucky he was working on birds rather than cephalopods.

The experiment is straightforward. Cuttlefish normally prefer to eat shrimp over crab. If, the day after hatching, small crab are put in the tank with the hatchlings for at least two hours, and then removed (the crabs are not eaten), then 3 days later when tested again, the cuttlefish will prefer to kill and eat crabs over shrimp. The procedure is very specific: they have to be exposed to crab for at least two hours, within 2 hours after sunrise on their first day after hatching.

The paper has a good, succinct description of why many animals would have this mechanism:

Precocial animals, like domestic
chicks and cuttlefish, which are
independent within hours of hatch
or birth and which receive no
posthatch parental care have
two options for acquisition of
information: bring it into the world
with you (unlearned preferences
for food, sexual partners and so on)
or pick up the information as you go
(trial and error learning). Imprinting
allows something in between:
a certain degree of flexibility in
response, useful for learning
information for which the timing is
likely to be predictable—food
seen in first few hours of life,
sibling/parents seen during
juvenile stages—but in which
specifying the exact details of
the experience is not useful.

An evil man could think of many nefarious things to do with this bit of information, I think.


Healy SD (2006)Imprinting: seeing food and eating it. Curr Biol.16(13):R501-502.

Wilkins explains it all

Wilkins is keeping us busy lately: he also has a a whole series on why creationists are creationists. The short answer to the problem he gives is to teach them the process of science, not the rote solutions, and to catch them early—I agree, college is too late. I think he missed one other corrective though. He has a diagram illustrating the forces on a growing mind that drive people towards science, or towards pro-tradition, strongly anti-science attitudes. I can’t help but notice that all the “folk-based heuristics” are driving attitudes towards the anti-science position.

There must be some folk-based heuristics that promote good science. Shouldn’t one of our strategies be to root out the anti-science forces at the earliest ages, replacing them with those science based heuristics or even folk heuristics that promote science? When there’s forces of ignorance dragging our children down, maybe we should also think about opposing the bad as well as promoting the good.

Man in funny hat dislikes, doesn’t understand evolution: News at 11!

The Pope speaks, John Wilkins replies. Wilkins is sufficient, but I just had to comment on one silly thing the pope said about the consequences of evolution.

Man, “would then be nothing more than a chance result of evolution and thus, in the end, equally meaningless,” said the Pope.

This is terrible news. Forget evolution; I am the chance result of one out of trillions of my father’s sperm meeting one out of hundreds of thousands of my mother’s ova. And, oh no, the allelic content of each of those gametes was the result of chance molecular events in meiosis. And each of those gametes contained a handful of random mutations. I can see in my brothers and sisters that chance could have resulted in rather different outcomes.

Whoa … my exalted manliness was also the result of a roughly 50:50 chance—it’s like one of the primary qualifications for Ratzinger to have become pope was little more than a coin flip.

So chance makes everything meaningless? I guess my life must be nothing, then, and the papacy too is just random noise. I guess in his recent get-together with his students on evolution, his reported willingness to listen was all a sham.

House jumps the shark

True confession: I try to watch the medical drama House when I can. It’s lead character is an acerbic and brilliant atheist M.D. (played by Hugh Laurie, a comedic actor—which was a smart casting decision), and the humor is snarky and dark. That’s just the kind of thing I enjoy. It’s been going downhill, I think, because the episodes have gotten far too predictable—there’s always a weird illness which is handled via increasingly wild semi-random diagnoses that always, and I definitely mean always, ends with the complete cure of the patient. The infallibility is wearing a little thin.

Last season’s finale almost made me give up. They turned the gross-out factor up to 11 (exploding testicles and eyeballs popping out), and resolved everything with the lamest, laziest television cliche: it was just a dream. I hoped it was just an aberration.

Last night’s episode, though, blew it. I have lost faith in House. <spoilers below>

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