Rivers of blood

Some have complained that my post on the snake slaughter gave them nightmares. If that’s you, do not click on this next link! I’m usually fairly tough about seeing grisly gore, but this video of a dolphin harvest in Japan is extremely unsettling. A slaughterhouse is always going to be an ugly piece of work, but what’s on display there is also callous indifference to the suffering of the animals, and methods that increase stress and pain. This video shows animals in agony. Even if I were to accept the argument that they are “mere” animals being processed for food, there is no excuse for the brutality of the methods.

Encephalon #18

At last, it’s time for Encephalon, the carnival of neuroscience. There were a lot of submissions, and I’ve tried to organize them into four categories: basic and cognitive neuroscience addresses the problem of understanding brains, more medically and psychiatrically inclined work tries to fix brains, a few crazy dreamers think about technological ways to improve brains, and some rare individuals wonder about how brains evolved. I should mention that brains are incredibly complex and all of these efforts are struggling against the immensity of the problems…but it’s fun to try and to watch, and sometimes we actually make progress.

I also need to complain that the last Encephalon was done pirate style, depriving me of a creative schtick I could have used. Curse you, Jake Young, you scurvy dog.

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Evolution of the jaw

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What do you know…just last week, I posted an article dismissing a creationist’s misconceptions about pharyngeal organization and development, in which he asks about the evidence for similarities between agnathan and gnathostome jaws, and what comes along but a new paper on the molecular evidence for the origin of the jaw, which describes gene expression in the lamprey pharynx. How timely! And as a plus, it contains several very clear summary diagrams to show how all the bits and pieces and molecules relate to one another.

The short summary is that there is a suite of genes (the Hox and Dlx genes, which define a cartesian coordinate system for the branchial arch elements, Fgf8/Dlx1 genes that establish proximal jaw elements, and Bmp4/Msx1 genes that demarcate more distal elements) that are found in both lampreys and vertebrates in similar patterns and roles, and that vertebrate upper and lower jaws are homologous to the upper and lower “lips” of the lamprey oral supporting apparatus.

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What a waste of some fine reptiles

Why not slaughter snakes? The bible says it is their fate to be ground under our heel, after all. Laelaps has a story about a town in Texas that turns butchery into a fun family event — warning, there is a photo, and if you decapitate enough snakes, you can get a lot of blood spattered around.

I was most disgusted at the rationale; I heard this kind of stupid excuse a lot when I was a young fellow, in the country around Eastern Washington:

According to Yahoo!News, some justify the atrocities by claiming that it keeps livestock safe from the dangerous snakes, and although I haven’t seen any numbers, I wouldn’t imagine that rates of mortality by snakebite are very high among livestock.

Think for a moment. Can you imagine a rattlesnake hunting down and swallowing a cow? Then maybe you can swallow that story. Snakes don’t prey on cows. They might rarely bite one that stumbles across it, but that’s not going to be a major health hazard to a cow.

I’m hoping the lovely town of Sweetwater, Texas experiences the sweet justice of a plague of rats and mice.

Does my music say I’m a psychopathic freak, or just boring and bourgeois?

Chris of Mixing Memory claims that you can make accurate personality assessments about a person just from listening to ten of their favorite songs. OK, let’s play that game. Here are ten songs I like.

That wasn’t an easy list to assemble. Only ten? It can’t be very representative. There ought to be some David Bowie and Annie Lennox and Tori Amos and Björk and Patti Smith on there, and some days I feel like Flogging Molly or Pearl Jam or Kraftwerk or Lords of Acid or even, dare I admit it, Enya … but for that moment when I skimmed through my iTunes library, those up there jumped out as pretty darned appealing.

I’m not sure what anyone can determine from that list, though — it looks like it’s largely the “Intense and Rebellious” category in Chris’s list, with a little of the other three categories tossed in.

Should we be happy about this?

So today we learn that Rep. Pete Stark admits to being godless.

There is only one member of Congress who is on record as not holding a god-belief.

Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.), a senior member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, Chair of the Health Subcommittee, and member of Congress since 1973, acknowledged his nontheism in response to an inquiry by the Secular Coalition for America.

Although the Constitution prohibits religious tests for public office, the Coalition’s research reveals that Rep. Stark is the first open nontheist in the history of the Congress. Recent polls show that Americans without a god-belief are, as a group, more distrusted than any other minority in America. Surveys show that the majority of Americans would not vote for an atheist for president even if he or she were the most qualified for the office.

Herb Silverman, president of the Secular Coalition for America, attributes these attitudes to the demonization of people who don’t believe in God. “The truth is,” says Silverman, “the vast majority of us follow the Golden Rule and are as likely to be good citizens, just like Rep. Stark with over 30 years of exemplary public service. The only way to counter the prejudice against nontheists is for more people to publicly identify as nontheists. Rep. Stark shows remarkable courage in being the first member of Congress to do so.”

In November, 2006 the Secular Coalition for America, a national lobby representing the interests of atheists, humanists, freethinkers, and other nontheists, announced a contest. At the time, few if any elected officials, even at the lowest level, would self-identify as a nontheist. So the Coalition offered $1,000 to the person who could identify the highest level atheist, humanist, freethinker or any other kind of nontheist currently holding elected public office in the United States.

In addition to Rep. Stark only three other elected officials agreed to do so: Terry S. Doran, president of the School Board in Berkeley, Calif.; Nancy Glista on the School Committee in Franklin, Maine; and Michael Cerone, a Town Meeting Member from Arlington, Mass.

Surveys vary in the percentage of atheists, humanists, freethinkers and other nontheists in the U.S, with about 10% (30 million people) a fair middle point. “If the number of nontheists in Congress reflected the percentage of nontheists in the population,” Lori Lipman Brown, director of the Secular Coalition, observes, “there would be 53-54 nontheistic Congress members instead of one.”

I’m a bit amused that after Stark, the next highest elected officials who aren’t afraid to admit their unbelief are three (count ’em, three) school board members scattered across the country. Is there active discrimination to exclude non-believers from the democratic process? You know there is.

Oh, and I don’t know a thing about Stark’s politics, other than that he’s a Democrat. Any of his constituents out there who want to let us know if he’s a representative we should be proud of?

Lynn Margulis blog tour

Lynn Margulis has sent the opening statement for her blog tour below. You should feel free to respond to it, raise other questions of any relevant sort, or say whatever you want in the comments; she’ll be along later today to respond to those that interest her. I will be policing the comments, so trolls, please don’t bother; serious comments only, and keep in mind that she’s only going to respond to a limited subset, so make ’em good.

In addition, she’ll be available later today in the Pharyngula chat room (channel #pharyngula on irc.zirc.org; if you don’t have an IRC client, that link will let you use your browser to join in) from 12:00-1:30pm ET. Dive in there for a more interactive give-and-take with Dr Margulis.

What a pleasure to write openly for Pharyngula even though, in principle, I am leery, even with this blog, of any internet participation. The haste and style online by its very breezy nature generates misinterpretation and misunderstanding. Nothing online written about me is entirely accurate, except perhaps my address at the University of Massachusetts.

Although misunderstanding permeates all human communication, the internet amplifies these tendencies. Sound bite-hype is far more useful to those who assert religious truths and would banish authentic science from the public sphere than to the scholar or scientist. Science itself, and even more so, science writing, ever cautious, ever tentative and ever questioning is permeated with boring hesitancies and stuttering qualifications. Most readers simply ignore it since they find it incomprehensible. The more accurate the scientific description, the more daunting the language to any outsider. The more clear the expression of a scientific idea is, the more specialized the terminology. The clearest scientific ideas are mathematical equations opaque to all but the specialist.

So, when reporters and popular writers attempt to communicate real science the plagues of distortion, misunderstanding and misrepresentation are inevitable. Any statement outside the immediate purview of the detailed science tends to be “translated” into common language. To express new ideas that challenge the paradigm in which the scientist works new language is required. If the language is too new neither the scientist nor the science popularizer is understood. Especially when one’s work is heterodox to the prevailing trend -it is easy to be dismissed as a “crank” or “on the fringe.” Or, even more likely, to be ignored. The convenient fiction, created by marketers and politicians, that “consensus” plays a major role in original science, helps to generate confusion in the lay public about the vast difference between established scientific fact and ideologically-driven nonsense.

Scientists seek evidence. Eclipses could not be predicted, calendars could not be distributed, tide tables could not be published, airplanes could not be built to fly, food plants not grown, bridges nor buildings built, in the absence of precise knowledge of celestial mechanics, gravity, air flow, soil nutrients, flowering plant sexuality, metal compression and tensional strengths, etc. Scientific facts, scientists know, lie in the details. Explanatory power, falsifiable prediction, reproducible experimental results underlie all scientific theory. Within the detailed framework there are no “scientific controversies”. Theories explain, hypotheses make precise predictions either verifiable or not, results are either reproducible or they aren’t. The most serious communication problem is that specialized knowledge, an arcane literature and years of specialized training are required for participation in any science and all science by its very nature is severely limited to its objects of study. No botanist can participate meaningfully in nuclear physics nor can physicists analyse genetic data. Science communicators, even the very best, and there many (e,g, those who write for Science News, Nature, Science and the New York Times Tuesday pages, National Public Radio and the like) can not comprehensibly describe anything without bias and oversimplification, ever. No writing, if it is to be widely understood, can be without bias. I believe that no meaningful distinction or description of anything, science included, can be made without an historical, including natural-historical, context. Yet most scientists live in the “now”; they tend to lack a long view and any knowledge outside the limits of their own specialized field. Sometimes their “field” is more a budget constraint or a whim of a dead scholar than a natural science. Some “fields”, clearly are not natural science, like the field called “cancer”. This implies that science writing too unavoidably displays bias, prejudice, nationalism, profound ignorance, incompleteness and other manifestations of “slanted truths”.

Scientists too often know little about the cultural and historical context of their ideas. Neo-Darwinians biologists, for example, really believe that “evolution” is a subfield of biology, especially zoology. Hence they ignore the non-zoological components of evolutionary science (e.g., all of historical geology including especially paleontology; environmental science, ecology, atmospheric chemistry, microbiology, etc.) They rarely acknowledge that their theoretical frames derive from an Anglophone-capitalist model, and inevitably carry the prejudices, assumptions and philosophical orientations of our milieu. Because most people interested in evolution live in an Anglophone-capitalist culture, assumptions of neo-Darwinians are unstated. Concepts such as the validity of “cost-benefit” and “competition vs. co-operation” terminology or the superiority of mathematical analysis are uncritically assumed. Many unstated assumptions are made because of the bias of the “evolutionary biologists”, the majority of whom have animal biology/zoological training who share our cultural orientation. There is, in fact, paltry evidence for the neo-Darwinian “thought-style”. The staunch neo-Darwinist claims have become less and less valid as information from other fields (e.g., molecular biology and the fossil record) has increased. It is not unusual, especially in the science of evolution, that theories contradictory to the neo-Darwinian “thought-style” are ignored or rejected, not on the basis of their claims, or proof of those claims, but on the, often unconscious, grounds that they do not agree with our biases. Read Ludwik Fleck.

So here we have an opportunity for open discussion – to listen to nature, to perceive the nature of nature, to reveal scientifically-documented facts beyond prejudices. We attempt, with civil dialogue based on sound science, to achieve, in good faith, an understanding of each other and the world. Science is limited, what is known for sure is miniscule in contrast to the great unknown, but the deliberate faith-based distortion of what really is known is despicable. We will avoid the cant, rant and desperate attempt to distort so common on both sides in the so-called “religion-vs science” debate. Whiteheadian philosophers, many Unitarian and Buddhist scholars, all true scientists agree with David Bohm’s sentiment that “science is the search for truth” whether or not we like that truth. And Emily Dickinson’s sentiment, from her poem “Tell all the Truth but tell it Slant ” is even more compelling:

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind–

Lynn Margulis,
Mar 10, 2007

Luskin? Reviews Carroll? That’s insane.

Who do you think the brilliant minds at the Discovery Institute would recruit to review Sean Carroll’s new book, The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)? Somebody with some knowledge of biology, perhaps, some faint whiff of respectable biological credentials, who might be able to actually assess (and in the DI’s case, cunningly distort) the science in the book? They’ve got so many legitimate scientists to choose from!

So of course, the duty falls on Casey Luskin’s slender, slippery, snake-like shoulders.

Oh, man, it is an awful review. It goes on for a tedious 15 pages, carps on Darwin and Darwinism 47 times, and right from the starting gate is one long whine that Carroll is preaching Darwinism as a religion (here’s a wonderfully representative example of the kind of evidence Luskin uses: Carroll ‘interestingly always capitalizes the term “Nature”‘ [emphasis in original]. Damned by a convention of the English1 language!), all in the most plodding prose. These are words that must be read in a nasal monotone for their full impact, I suspect.

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