The Morris Café Scientifique lurches to life again!

Once again this year, I’m setting up our Café Scientifique-Morris, which is going to be held on the last Tuesday of each month of the university school year. This time around, that means the first one falls on…Halloween! So we’re going to do something fun for that one: maybe some costumes, lots of clips from classic horror movies, I definitely think we’re going to need some bubbling retorts of colored fluids, and the chemistry department is tentatively going to provide some treats (ice cream made with liquid nitrogen—chemistry and treats don’t usually go together in people’s heads, I know.) This is the announcement for the first talk:

i-ea9288230b587c16f4c56e3c67c3b525-halloween_announcement.jpg

I’ve been ripping a few DVDs from my collection with classic portrayals of scientists—the Universal Frankenstein series, Re-animator, the Bond movies, etc. (any suggestions? Pass ’em on)—which show us off as evil villains, and I’m going to show short clips from them to illustrate our poor image. Then I’m going to follow up with more but less exciting clips of people like Sagan and Wilson and Dawkins and, if I can track it down, Bronowski to illustrate the real humanism of good scientists. Suggestions for the latter part are also welcome, and that will be the heart of the talk, but face it: I don’t want to overdo the moralizing, and all the fun is going to be in the monster-makers.

I’ve also finalized our schedule. I’ve opened it up to a few people on the other side of campus, so we’re also going to hear about the legal standards for the admission of scientific evidence, and the economics of alternative power generation and transmission, in addition to a discussion of the chemistry we all use in our homes, a bit of astronomy, and a session of insect identification.

  • 31 October 2006 :: PZ Myers, Biology
  • 28 November 2006 :: Theodora Economou, Law
  • 30 January 2007 :: Panel discussion, Chemistry
  • 27 February 2007 :: Arne Kildegaard, Economics
  • 27 March 2007 :: Kristin Kearns, Physics
  • 24 April 2007 :: Tracey Anderson, Biology

It’s looking like a good year for this seminar series. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop on by!

The Special Favors for Fundamentalists Act of 2005

Before you read further, browse the Carnival of the Godless. It’ll salve the pain when you read about the new conservative perfidy.

Our Republican overlords have taken one more step on the road to theocracy with the approval of H.R. 2679, the Public Expression of Religion Act. You can read the full text of the bill, but here’s the gist:

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a court shall not award reasonable fees and expenses of attorneys to the prevailing party on a claim of injury consisting of the violation of a prohibition in the Constitution against the establishment of religion brought against the United States or any agency or any official of the United States acting in his or her official capacity in any court having jurisdiction over such claim, and the remedies with respect to such a claim shall be limited to injunctive and declaratory relief.

What this does is give religious organizations a special privilege, bestowing on them a small measure of impunity in breaking the law, all with the intent of discouraging citizens from seeking relief from violations of the prohibition against establishment of religion. It’s a curious thing: it’s basically saying that someone can be found guilty of law-breaking, but if they are carrying out their criminal activity in the name of religion, there is a whole class of punishments that cannot be applied to them, and specifically, lawyers working to prevent violations of church and state will not be rewarded for their efforts if successful. They are legislating to support violations of the Constitution.

Nice and sneaky. The religious bigots know they want to break the law, so the solution is to put hurdles in place to inhibit attempts to make them accountable.

My local representative, Collin Peterson, voted for it. I’ve got one of his signs in my yard right now, and I’m going to rip it out and throw it away. I’ve already sent him a letter telling him that I think he’s done a vile and Republican thing, and that I don’t vote for Republicans.

It’s funny how, in the name of fighting against the mythical War on Christmas, conservative morons have declared war on the Constitution…and the dupes in the Democratic party are going along with them.

Cool data!

Nick Matzke has
compiled all the data on hominin cranial capacities into a single chart:

i-0c26d21598bc8af6947b122840553c28-cc_v_time.gif

I think I can see a pattern there, can you? He also has data on body size and brain size over there, take a gander at it. It looks like a simple and obvious example of evolutionary change in our lineage, I think.

Alas, it only shows specimens older than 10,000 years. I’m sure that right around 6,000 years ago, there was a sudden, dramatic change as the deity injected a soul into those crania.

You must be kidding, Mr Unwin

Here’s another review of Dawkins’ The God Delusion(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It’s unbelievable, as if the critic hadn’t actually read the book. Here’s the hed/dek:

Dawkins needs to show some doubt
Scientists work in a field full of uncertainties. So how can some be so sure God doesn’t exist? asks Stephen Unwin

Uh, what? Two things immediately come to mind: certainty isn’t a claim Dawkins makes anywhere, and…Stephen Unwin???!? Unwin is a remarkably silly man, as anyone who has read his book, The Probability of God will know. Unwin goes on with some very strange inferences.

[Read more…]

Hox complexity

Here’s a prediction for you: the image below is going to appear in a lot of textbooks in the near future.

i-9a6c4415bc9836c30f2c411c0936d212-septuple_hox.jpg
(click for larger image)
Confocal image of septuple in situ hybridization exhibiting the spatial expression of Hox gene transcripts in a developing Drosophila embryo. Stage 11 germband extended embryo (anterior to the left) is stained for labial (lab), Deformed (Dfd), Sex combs reduced (Scr), Antennapedia (Antp), Ultrabithorax (Ubx), abdominal-A (abd-A), Abdominal-B (Abd-B). Their orthologous relationships to vertebrate Hox homology groups are indicated below each gene.

That’s a technical tour-de-force: it’s a confocal image of a Drosophila embryo, stained with 7 fluorescent probes against different Hox genes. You can clearly see how they are laid out in order from the head end (at the left) to the tail end (which extends to the right, and then jackknifes over the top). Canonically, that order of expression along the body axis corresponds to the order of the genes in a cluster on the DNA, a property called colinearity. I’ve recently described work that shows that, in some organisms, colinearity breaks down. That colinearity seems to be a consequence of a primitive pattern of regulation that coupled the timing of development to the spatial arrangements of the tissues, and many organisms have evolved more sophisticated control of these patterning genes, making the old regulators obsolete…and allowing the clusters to break up without extreme consequences to the animal. A new review in Science by Lemons and McGinnis that surveys Hox gene clusters in different lineages shows that the control of the Hox genes is much, much more complicated than previously thought.

[Read more…]