Wiki-conspiracy

Here’s an interesting leak, if true. Someone (“Yellow Rose”, or YR) is a mole within a religious group trying to subvert the Wikipedia:

YR gathered intell on a baker’s dozen fundamentalist techno-geeks, resembling a cult within a cult, who have become Wikipedians. Lacking a Y chromosome and being thus subordinated to menial church chores, she could not herself get closer than the loneliest of the 13 guys, but the Pentecostal sexual prohibitions at least afforded her the ability to avoid sacrifices espionage agents often have to make. YR emphasizes that their names mean nothing, and their ages mean less, and that the country they come from is called Texas. They were brought up there and taught there the church to abide, and that the worldview they live, by has God on its side. Empowered by God, and led by a charismatic, MIT, computer science sophomore (who also plays lead guitar in a Christian rock band), this squad-size cohort of Christian soldiers is chipping away at Wikiscience, in subject areas entirely predictable. Clever they are too, in taking advantage of Wikiethics, specifically NPOV (i.e., Neutral Point of View), where all views must be represented, even if demonstrably incorrect; any fundamentalist worth his salt can drive a truck threw such a loop hole, and they have begun doing so. Intelligent design and biblical floods are being commingled with Darwin and DNA. The process is so far more apparent on the discussion pages than on actual pages, where God’s soldiers employ a Pentecostal version of good cop, bad cop. The bad cop is an apparent Christian trying to interject religion where science contradicts his worldview, and the good cop(s) is disguised as an atheist lending support by invoking the NPOV rule.

This wouldn’t be at all surprising. Creationists really aren’t necessarily stupid—just wrong, deluded, and dedicated to advocating a stupid point of view.

I’m safe from all temptation here in Minnesota

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On this day 172 years ago, Richard Dana set sail. About 35 years ago, I discovered Two Years Before the Mast in my local library, and it turned me into a sea story junkie. I read Forester and Sabatini and Melville (of course!)—fortunately, Melville got me more interested in the biology of those creatures that lived in the sea, so I didn’t stow away in the next brigantine that docked in the Seattle harbor.

Two Years Before the Mast is still a great read, but the romance of the sea is sure buried deep beneath the appalling misery and social injustice—the tales of flogging and sudden accidental death are grim—but still…

Notwithstanding all that has been said about the beauty of a ship under full sail, there are very few who have ever seen a ship, literally, under all her sail. A ship coming in or going out of port, with her ordinary sails, and perhaps two of three studding-sails, is commonly said to be under full sail; but a ship never has all her sail upon her, except when she has a light, steady breeze, very nearly, but not quite, dead aft, and so regular that it can be trusted, and is likely to last for some time. Then, with all her sails, light and heavy, and studding-sails, on each side, alow and aloft, she is the most glorious moving object in the world. Such a sight, very few, even some who have been at sea a great deal, have ever beheld; for from the deck of your own vessel you cannot see her, as you would a separate object.

One night, while we were in these tropics, I went out to the end of the flying-jib-boom, upon some duty, and, having finished it, turned round, and lay over the boom for a long time, admiring the beauty of the sight before me. Being so far out from the deck, I could look at the ship, as at a separate vessel;-and there rose up from the water, supported only by the small black hull, a pyramid of canvas, spreading out far beyond the hull, and towering up almost, as it seemed in the indistinct night air, to the clouds. The sea was as still as an inland lake; the light trade-wind was gently and steadily breathing from astern; the dark blue sky was studded with the tropical stars; there was no sound but the rippling of the water under the stem; and the sails were spread out, wide and high;-the two lower studding-sails stretching, on each side, far beyond the deck; the topmast studding-sails, like wings to the topsails; the top-gallant studding-sails spreading fearlessly out above them; still higher, the two royal studding-sails, looking like two kites flying from the same string; and, highest of all, the little skysail, the apex of the pyramid, seeming actually to touch the stars, and to be out of reach of human hand. So quiet, too, was the sea, and so steady the breeze, that if these sails had been sculptured marble, they could not have been more motionless. Not a ripple upon the surface of the canvas; not even a quivering of the extreme edges of the sail-so perfectly were they distended by the breeze. I was so lost in the sight, that I forgot the presence of the man who came out with me, until he said, (for he, too, rough old man-of-war’s-man as he was, had been gazing at the show,) half to himself, still looking at the marble sails-“How quietly they do their work!”

Morphological embryology of a sea spider

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Tanystylum bealensis male, ventral view, showing eggs and instar 1 (protonymphon) on
ovigerous legs. in. 1, instar 1 (protonymphon); pa, palp; pr, proboscis; 1, first walking leg; 2, second
walking leg; 3, third walking leg; 4, fourth walking leg.

Surely, you haven’t had enough information about pycnogonids yet, have you? Here’s another species, Tanystylum bealensis, collected off the British Columbian coast. That’s a ventral view of the male, and those bunches of grapes everywhere are eggs and babies—males do the childcare in this group. These animals also live in relatively shallow water, in the lower intertidal zone, so it was possible to collect thousands of them and develop a complete staging series. Below the fold I’ve put some illustrations of the larvae, which are even cuter.

[Read more…]

Sea spiders in the news

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Pycnogonids really are fascinating animals and they deserve more attention. There’s a short news article on sea spiders that mentions their odd life style and their taxonomic awkwardness.

For over 100 years, scientists have been puzzling over how exactly to classify sea spiders or pycnogonids.

They crawl along the bottom of the sea floor, sometimes more than 6000 to 7000 metres down, where they live in the dark, feeding on slow-moving soft-bodied sponges and sea slugs.

The creatures are segmented and have an exoskeleton, which makes them an arthropod, the same grouping as crustaceans, insects, centipedes and spiders.

But they also have a very strange collection of features, including a unique feeding structure.

“They have a proboscis that’s like a straw that they insert into the animals and suck out the juices,” says Arango.

Such features make it difficult to fit them into any of the known groups of arthropods.

“They look like spiders, but they are not real spiders,” says Arango. “It’s been very hard to place them in a position within the tree of life.”

They really are hard to place—I’ve reviewed two articles on that subject, one that places them with the anomalocarids and another that groups them more conventionally, with the chelicerates (I’m going with that last one right now—patterns of Hox expression trump interpretations of innervation patterns, I think.)

Would you let Foucault or Derrida treat your cancer?

Martin Rundkvist has discovered a peculiar little paper. It’s titled “Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism”, and here’s part of the abstract:

Background Drawing on the work of the late French philosophers Deleuze and
Guattari, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement
in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards
to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health
sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific
arena.

Objective The philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari proves to be useful in showing
how health sciences are colonised (territorialised) by an all-encompassing scientific research
paradigm — that of post-positivism — but also and foremost in showing the process by
which a dominant ideology comes to exclude alternative forms of knowledge, therefore
acting as a fascist structure.

It’s a paper that objects to the hegemony of EBM. That’s “Evidence Based Medicine” to you and me. The authors also resent the reliance on RCT—Randomized Clinical Trials. This is so strange that I had to read the whole thing.

Yes, I actually did.

And, you know, there actually is a teeny-tiny germ of a worthwhile idea imbedded in it. It’s sloshing about in the midst of a lot of impenetrable jargon, misplaced complaints about reliance on that horrid bug-a-boo, “evidence,” and worst of all, utterly outrageous accusations of fascism and references to Hitler and Mussolini, and talk about terror and totalitarian violence. It’s a bit overblown, but here’s one interesting point:

Of course, we do not wish to deny the material and objective existence of the world [that’s a relief, since he had just finished complaining about the people who are wedded to ‘evidence’], but would suggest, rather, that our relation to the world and to others is always mediated, never direct or wholly transparent. Indeed, the sociocultural forms of this mediation would play a large part in the way the world appears as full of significance. Empirical facts alone are quantities that eclipse our qualitative and vital being-in-the-world. For example, how should a woman assign meaning to the diagnosis she just received that, genetically, she has a 40% probability of developing breast cancer in her lifetime? What will this number mean in real terms, when she is asked to evaluate the meaning of such personal risk in the context of her entire life, a life whose value and duration are themselves impossible factors in the equation?

That’s actually useful to think about. Unfortunately, the ultimate grand failing of this paper is that it doesn’t present much thought about the questions, and proposes absolutely nothing to complement or replace that ol’ Evidence Based Medicine…the only message I got out of it was that the authors felt like complaining about those mean doctors and granting agencies that demand evidence for treatments.

I must be one of those evidence-demanding fascists, because my first thoughts on reading his question were that 1) evaluating the meaning of one’s entire life is something that can be done without demanding the suspension of evidence-based prospective treatments, and 2) isn’t this exactly the kind of situation that other ol’ fascist, Stephen J. Gould, found himself in when he was diagnosed with mesothelioma? He describes the process he went through in The Median Isn’t the Message, and it seems to me that he found the honest answers to his problem in the evidence, the data, and the assistance of modern medical care.

That’s a more productive and useful attitude than complaints about modern medicine as tools of 20th century totalitarianism, which is all this paper has to offer. There certainly isn’t any discussion of any alternatives.

Smacking down more lies about Plan B

It’s really not that hard to understand, but what’s blocking acceptance are the amazing lies people say about Plan B emergency contraception. Ema found a ghastly op-ed that got everything wrong; try reading my summary of Plan B, then the op-ed by Abby Wisse Schachter, and see if you can spot all the errors. You won’t be as thorough as Ema, though, who has posted a wonderfully detailed, complete annihilation of Schachter’s article.

Why does Teresa Nielsen Hayden hate America?

She’s full of advice for terrrarists on state of matter. Now in addition to confiscating our toothpaste, the security people at the airport are going to make us pee into a chromatograph before they let us on the plane.

Let’s just end the slow, lingering buildup and cut straight to the final requirement. Before we can fly, make us all strip naked, take a diuretic and laxative and purge ourselves, and then shackle us to our seats before takeoff.