Scurrying hither and thither

It’s another traveling day for me! I’m off to Minneapolis for a few meetings, and also this important event tonight:

Café Scientifique
Antibiotics in Agriculture
with Timna Wyckoff
Tuesday, May 9, 6-8 p.m.
Varsity Theater, Dinkytown
Free. Must be 18 or older to attend.

The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that more than 70% of the antibiotics produced each year in the U.S. are used in livestock production. How exactly are antibiotics used in agriculture? Do those uses lead to bacterial resistance? Does this have an impact on human health? Timna Wyckoff, assistant professor of biology at University of Minnesota Morris, will discuss the questions and answers surrounding this controversial topic, and share her recent work involving bacterial antibiotic resistance at conventional and organic dairies. Sponsored in part by the University of Minnesota Morris through their Café Scientifique program.

Note that the speaker is UMM’s very own Timna Wyckoff. Yay, us!

Then, tomorrow I have to scoot on down to Madison, pick up #2 Son and a few tons of accumulated college stuff, and zip all the way back to Morris. I’m hoping to have a few oddments of time to post a few things—there’s some new stuff on diploblast Hox genes that I want to mention, that will fit in well with the reruns I ran yesterday—and I’m also going to squeeze in some more grading. This is a fun week, isn’t it?

Why does everyone hate Richard Cohen?

The poor man is inundated with hateful email. People don’t like him, they’re angry at George Bush, they accuse him of being Bush’s lapdog (a charge he denies, but Digby provides the evidence—hatefully, no doubt), and he just can’t understand why (at least I can answer that one: it’s because he’s not very bright).

Cohen can whine all he wants about the fact that people don’t like him, but here’s the charge to which I must take strong exception:

But the message in this case truly is the medium. The e-mails pulse in my queue, emanating raw hatred. This spells trouble — not for Bush or, in 2008, the next GOP presidential candidate, but for Democrats. The anger festering on the Democratic left will be taken out on the Democratic middle. (Watch out, Hillary!) I have seen this anger before — back in the Vietnam War era. That’s when the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party helped elect Richard Nixon. In this way, they managed to prolong the very war they so hated.

Oh, yeah—don’t be angry, you’ll lose! And please, please don’t throw me into that briar patch, Br’er Fox!

I despise George W. Bush, and I’m extremely angry at the direction the Republican party has taken my country. That, it seems to me, is the appropriate response; why would anyone with my best interests at heart suggest otherwise? We’re in the middle of a morass of a war that was started by those assholes on the basis of an error (charitably) or pure venality and stupidity (most likely), our people are dying, the Middle East has become more unstable, and what are we supposed to do? Nod pleasantly at the nice oilmen, sit back and enjoy our high fat diets and cable TV, and try to be placid? That’s insane. We should be angry. We should be fighting back. We should be standing up with veins throbbing at our temples, shouting at the tepid Democrats who want our votes that they damn well better wake up and oppose the status quo. Cohen himself says that “Institution after institution failed America—the presidency, Congress and the press”…and we’re not supposed to be furious about that? We’re not supposed to demand change?

As for the Vietnam War—I remember that. I remember the demonstrations and the college campuses lighting up with howls of protest. I remember the dead every night on the television news. That’s also a war the people wanted to stop, and we screamed at the top of our lungs until they heard us. We were so loud that Nixon had to promise “peace with honor” and to “end the war and win peace” to get elected. In the 60s and 70s, that vigorous opposition had even the Republicans admitting that they somehow had to end that wasteful war; have you noticed how quiet the campuses and city streets are now, and how no one in power is admitting their failures yet? The message of Vietnam is that we need to mobilize more anger and stir up more strenuous, vocal opposition.

It’s the lapdogs of the administration, the tools of the destructive status quo, whose job it is to quell the angry mob. Rise up and scream, people, ignore the lackeys of the Right who want you to be ashamed of righteous fury.

Plan B, again

The idiots at ABC News have an article in which they describe the efforts of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to get good information out there about emergency contraception, and they get it all wrong:

Plan B, the brand name for emergency contraception, can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus after a woman has unprotected sex or experiences contraceptive failure (like a condom breaking). It has to be taken within 72 hours of having sex and is made of the same hormones used in birth control pills.

Look, it prevents ovulation, OK? Not implantation.

They’re interviewing ob-gyns about their campaign against misinformation and encouraging people to be prepared, and instead of asking how the damned pill works, they repeat the same old bogus story the anti-contraception kooks are spreading around.

DarkSyde has a post on this at dKos. And I have to say that the commenters there who keep insisting that there might be a remote possibility of some other effect than on ovulation are irritatingly obtuse. I had to write this in reply to one of them.

How many times do I have to say this? There is ABSOLUTELY NO CLINICAL EVIDENCE FOR ANY EFFECT OTHER THAN ON OVULATION. Vague hypotheticals that it might do X, Y, or Z don’t cut it, unless you’ve got some supporting observations.

This is exactly how the pro-choice movement shoots itself in the foot. Take some remote, unlikely, unsupported possibility that sometime, somewhere, some zygote might not implant, and use that negligible unlikelihood to make dithering progressives get all tentative and weak-kneed. Jebus. Even if one in a million times some zygote got flushed (compared to the 500,000 times in a million that it will be spontaneously aborted), WHO CARES? Is it worth giving an abortion-doctor-killer somewhere a little bit of a sanctimonious boost in the execution of his God-given mission to make sex a little bit more guilt-inducing?

I also said that whatever negligible possibility of other forms of interference exists is negated by the remote possibility that an angel might dash up the woman’s vagina to escort God’s favorite sperm directly to the waiting egg. Can we just call it a wash and stop playing the game the Religious Right wants us to play on this issue?

America, Return to God!

My mailbox today contained something very amusing, if it weren’t so evil: someone sent me a copy of this 128 page, glossy rag titled “America, Return to God”, from Great Commission Center International. It’s a wretched but expensive looking thing, full of articles from such lying luminaries as David Barton, D. James Kennedy, James Dobson, and Tim LaHaye, all advocating an American Theocracy. I learned that the passion of Dobson’s heart is to deny homosexuals the right to marry, Barton urges us all to vote Biblically, LaHaye thinks God will not bless us as long as pornography is legal.

Whoever sent it to me, thank you very much. It’s a reminder of the idiocy I will fight to my dying day. Oh, and may you stew in ineffectual ignorance until your dying day, and may you then pass on into oblivion blissfully, confident of an eternal award, unaware of the darkness before you. As you live with your eyes closed, you should end the same way.

Everyone else, follow the link above to the “ARTG Movement,” and order your own copy. It’s free! Bleed the bastards dry!

A complex regulatory network in a diploblast

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The Wnt genes produce signalling proteins that play important roles in early development, regulating cell proliferation, differentiation and migration. It’s hugely important, used in everything from early axis specification in the embryo to fine-tuning axon pathfinding in the nervous system. The way they work is that the Wnt proteins are secreted by cells, and they then bind to receptors on other cells (one receptor is named Frizzled, and others are LRP-5 and 6), which then, by a chain of cytoplasmic signalling events, removes β-catenin from a degradation pathway and promotes its import into the nucleus, where it can modify patterns of gene expression. This cascade can also interact with the cytoskeleton and trigger changes in cell migration and cell adhesion. The diagram below illustrates the molecular aspects of its function.

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[Read more…]

Ruse at UM

Bad timing! On Wednesday morning, I have a meeting at the Bell Museum in Minneapolis, and then I have to drive to Madison to pick up my son…so I don’t think I can possibly be back in time for this:

The Ecology Evolution and Behavior seminar on Wednesday, May 10 (4:00 p.m. in 335 Borlaug Hall on the St. Paul Campus—Coffee and cookies are served
outside of room 100 Ecology preceding each seminar 3:30 p.m.) is featuring Michael Ruse, who will speak on some variant of the evolution/creationism/ID debate.

Maybe some of you Minneapolitans/St Paulians who read this will be able to make it, but I think I’d have to drive at 180mph down I94 and back, and Connlann would have to break down his dorm room and load it into the car in 10 minutes flat. Somebody should stop by and chew him out for that nonsense he shared with Dembski a while back, though. Bring beer, and take a swig every time he accuses “Darwinists” and biologists of being fundamentalists, OK?

Hox genesis

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One of the hallmark characters of animals is the presence of a specific cluster of genes that are responsible for staking out the spatial domains of the body plan along the longitudinal axis. These are the Hox genes; they are recognizable by virtue of the presence of a 60 amino acid long DNA binding region called the homeodomain, by similarities in sequence, by their role as regulatory genes expressed early in development, by the restriction of their expression to bands of tissue, by their clustering in the genome to a single location, and by the remarkable collinearity of their organization on the chromosome to their pattern of expression: the order of the gene’s position in the cluster is related to their region of expression along the length of the animal. That order has been retained in most animals (there are interesting exceptions), and has been conserved for about a billion years.

Think about that. While gene sequences have steadily changed, while chromosomes have been fractured and fused repeatedly, while differences accumulated to create forms as different as people and fruit flies and squid and sea urchins, while continents have ping-ponged about the globe and meteors have smashed into the earth and glaciers have advanced and retreated, these properties of this set of genes have remained constant. They are fundamental and crucial to basic elements of our body plan, so basic that we take them completely for granted. They determine that we can have different regions of our bodies with different organs and organization. Where did they come from and what forces constrain them to maintain their specific organization on the chromosome? Are there other genes that are comparably central to our organization?

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Bilateral symmetry in a sea anemone

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There are quite a few genes that are known to be highly conserved in both sequence and function in animals. Among these are the various Hox genes, which are expressed in an ordered pattern along the length of the organism and which define positional information along the anterior-posterior axis; and another is decapentaplegic (dpp) which is one of several conserved genes that define the dorsal-ventral axis. Together, these sets of genes establish the front-back and top-bottom axes of the animal, which in turn establishes bilaterality—this specifically laid out three-dimensional organization is a hallmark of the lineage Bilateria, to which we and 99% of all the other modern animal species belong.

There are some animals that don’t belong to the Bilateria, though: members of the phylum Cnidaria, the jellyfish, hydra, sea anemones, and corals, which are typically radially symmetric. A few cnidarian species exhibit bilateral symmetry, though, and Finnerty et al. (2004) ask a simple question: have those few species secondarily reinvented a mechanism for generating bilateral symmetry (so that this would be an example of convergent evolution), or do they use homologous mechanisms, that is, the combination of Hox genes for A-P patterning and dpp for D-V patterning? The answer is that this is almost certainly an example of homology—the same genes are being used.

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Cancel those Florida vacation plans!

Weep for poor persecuted Kent Hovind. They’ve shut down Dinosaur Adventure Land.

County commissioners showed no sympathy to members of the Creation Science Evangelism ministry who spoke out Thursday night at a commission meeting about the county’s actions.

“Scripture also says ‘Render unto Caesar what Caesar demands.’ And right now, Caesar demands a building permit,” County Commission Chairman Mike Whitehead said.

On the other hand, these guys are criminal con-artists and scum, so hold back those tears.

Legal questions are nothing new for Dinosaur Adventure Land and the leaders of the church group that operates it:

  • In 2004, The Internal Revenue Service raided Hovind’s home and businesses. Agents said Hovind had failed to pay taxes. That case is pending, and federal attorneys declined to comment about it.
  • While the building permit case was in court, the ownership of the theme park was transferred to Stoll, who resides in Washington State, according to court papers. Stoll has been investigated at least twice by federal authorities, court records show.

Last year, the U.S. attorney in Seattle filed a lawsuit against Stoll, charging him with promoting a scheme encouraging people to avoid paying taxes by claiming to be religious entities, according to news reports.

A federal judge ruled against Stoll, ordering him to stop the practices. Stoll said Thursday that he doesn’t recognize the ruling because he was never properly served with court papers.

(via God is for Suckers)