Reason #7 to vote for Pharyngula

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Yeah, I’m thinking of the kittens. I’m thinking real hard.

I was going to say, “Because if you don’t vote for me, I’m feeding the kittens to the Kraken,” but then I realized that the kind of people who’d vote for me would probably want me to feed the kittens to the Kraken. And then I realized it didn’t matter how anyone voted, because I was going to feed the kittens to the Kraken anyway. So what the heck. Kittens. Kraken. Kraken Chow. That’s the way it is. As the kittens must accept their fate, so must Phil.

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Vote for Pharyngula (and remember, you can vote every day!). Because the kittens won’t be spared whether you do or don’t.

P.S. I’m sure Respectful Insolence would love to have the endorsement of a kitty-grinding blog for Best Medical/Health Issues Blog. I’m holding out for the promise of a Hitler Zombie/EneMan crossover, though.

Last gasp of my development course

Today, I gave my final lecture in developmental biology this term. We have one more class session which will be a final discussion, but I’m done yapping at them. Since I can’t possibly teach them everything, I offered some suggestions on what to read next, if they’re really interested in developmental biology. They’ve gotten the fundamentals of the dominant way of looking at development now, that good ol’ molecular genetics centered modern field of evo-devo, but I specifically wanted to suggest a few titles to shake them up a little bit and start thinking differently.

  • For the student who is interested in the field, but doesn’t feel that development is necessarily their discipline, I recommended Richard Lewontin’s The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It’s short, it’s easy, and it’s a good counterweight to the usual gene-happy approach we see in developmental biology.

  • Since we are a liberal arts university, and we value a philosophical approach in addition to the usual bluntly pragmatic tactics we follow in the sciences, I also recommended one work of philosophy: The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Susan Oyama. That one is not an easy read, except maybe to the more academically minded. I mentioned that Developmental Systems Theory does not have the powerful research program that is making evo-devo so successful, but it’s still a usefully different way of thinking about the world.

  • If any of my students wanted to go on to grad school in developmental biology, and hoped to make it a profession, I had to tell them that they are required to read D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It’s old, it’s a little bit weird, but it’s still a major touchstone in the discipline.

  • Lastly, I told them that there was one more book they had to read if they wanted to consider a career in development: Developmental Plasticity and Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mary Jane West-Eberhard. If I were a young graduate student in the field right now, I think I could just open that book to a random page and find an interesting and challenging research problem right there. I might have to flip through a few dozen pages before I found one that wasn’t impossibly hard, but hey, it’s one of those books that fills you in on the array of issues that people are worrying over at the edge of the science.

I don’t think any of these would be a good foundation for an undergraduate course (either Thompson or West-Eberhard or Oyama would probably have a lethal effect on the brain of any unprepared student trying to plow through them), but they’d be great mind-stretchers for any student planning to move on.

So all my lecturing is done for the term, and all that’s left are monstrous piles of grading that will grow ominously in the next week and a half even as I struggle to keep up, and then I can try to polish it all off by Cephalopodmas.

Reason #6 to vote for Pharyngula

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We’re in good shape. Pharyngula is slowly pulling ahead of Bad Astronomy, and I think Phil has just conceded by urging his readers to vote for me. He is admitting that a vote for him is a vote against the eventual squid domination of the Earth, so naturally no one in their right mind is going to vote for him anymore. He also includes a picture of the cutest little kitten as a token of his surrender.

Vote for Pharyngula (and remember, you can vote every day!). Unless you think kittens don’t deserve tentacles.

P.S. I have to give my vote to Majikthise for Best Individual Blog.

AiG poisons a few more minds

A while back, I mentioned this essay contest by Answers in Genesis in which the prize was a $50,000 scholarship to Liberty University. If you’re curious about the winner and one of the runners-up, Zeno has the story: the winner’s essay is all about how anti-matter supports the Bible, and the third place winner has become the official advisor on ID to a presidential candidate (in the sense that my crazy second cousin was a presidential candidate, once upon a time). It’s all rather creepy and sad—poor kids. So young and already sucked into the lunatic fringe.

It’s all OK if you are a Christian

Our country, with the approval and encouragement of George W. Bush, has been carrying out a program of religious indoctrination and the unconstitutional endorsement of evangelical Christianity. Federal money has been funneled into “faith-based” programs that make religious dogmatists prosper, and have no other actual, real-world value. The clearest examples are the prisons, where con artists like Chuck Colson have been engaged in a kind of ministry that is actually religious extortion and bribery.

The cells in Unit E had real wooden doors and doorknobs, with locks. More books and computers were available, and inmates were kept busy with classes, chores, music practice and discussions. There were occasional movies and events with live bands and real-world food, like pizza or sandwiches from Subway. Best of all, there were opportunities to see loved ones in an environment quieter and more intimate than the typical visiting rooms.

But the only way an inmate could qualify for this kinder mutation of prison life was to enter an intensely religious rehabilitation program and satisfy the evangelical Christians running it that he was making acceptable spiritual progress.

The article documents many instance of this kind of behavior line up at the trough and get cash—large amounts of cash—to proselytize to captive audiences. It’s genuinely despicable. This is exactly why the government should not be involved in favoring one religion over another—these gasbags cannot be trusted to put the interests of their target audience above their need to preach dogma.

For another example of the sleazy behavior of evangelicals, I give to you Kent Hovind. Hovind is a dishonest creationist who was caught committing tax evasion. Not only was he skimming to enrich himself, but by playing games with their salaries and paying them under the table, he was screwing over his employees, which seems to be a most Christian thing to do. He’s been convicted and thrown in jail, and he has been sporadically posting blog entries from prison. These are appalling stories of a con man who can’t stop bilking his fellow inmates.

have also been teaching math and science to some of the others. It is great to see convicted drug dealers get excited when they learn fourth grade level math for the first time. I have spent quite a bit of time with one 29-year-old man who cannot read at all. I have been teaching him phonics and we are reading Genesis 1, 2, 3 and John 1, 2, and 3. His face lights up when he sees that he can do it. I offer commissary items like soup or coffee to men who memorize Bible verses. There is no way to describe the joy that they show when they get it right. Many have never memorized scriptures in their life, and maybe that is why they are in jail. Scripture helps us to “cleanse our ways” Psalm 119:9-11.

Hovind is not a good teacher. I’ve heard his lectures; he’s a fraud and a liar who babbles at a frantic pace, who has been peddling anti-scientific crap for decades, and now he claims to be teaching science to his fellow inmates. This is an injustice. We’re locking up these poor fellows as punishment, isn’t it a bit much to also allow a bunco artist like Hovind to fill their heads with lies and actively contribute to their ignorance?

Also note the outright bribery I highlighted in the quote—the man has no shame at all.

In fact, he is so shameless I expect that he’ll soon be applying for federal aid in his propaganda efforts…and given the record of this Republican administration, he’ll probably get it. After all, a belief in Jesus seems to be sufficient qualification for any clown to be a teacher (or a president!), overcoming any amount of stupidity.

(crossposted to The American Street)