Naked anaspids

This strange fish is Euphanerops longaevus, which is one of two species of 370 million year old jawless fishes (the other is Endeiolepis aneri, and the paper suggests that they may actually represent differently preserved members of the same species). These are soft-bodied animals that are usually poorly preserved, and are of interest because they seem to have some properties in common with both the lampreys and the gnathostomes, or jawed fishes. Their exact position in the vertebrate family tree is problematic, and the experts go back and forth on it; sometimes they are grouped with the lampreys, sometimes as cousins more closely related to the gnathostomes.

i-c1c5dca42fa356ba2ec87991433b646b-euphanerops.jpg
Euphanerops longaevus, preserved as an imprint. Scale bar, 10 mm.

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ORFans!

Paul Nelson has been twittering about ORFans for some time now—he seems to precede his talks by threatening to make us evolutionists tremble in our boots by bringing them up, but he never seems to follow through. Ian Musgrave got tired of waiting for him to give us a coherent creationist argument about them, and has gone ahead and cut him off at the knees by explaining the place of ORFans in evolution.

In case you’re baffled by the jargon, “ORF” is an Open Reading Frame, or a stretch of DNA bracketed by a start and stop codon; it’s a kind of bare minimum criterion for recognizing an actual gene within a DNA sequence. An ORFan is an orphan ORF sequence, or one that doesn’t have a known function or affinity to other known genes. It is not surprising that genes exist that do not have an easily recognized homology with other genes—novel genes have to arise sometime, and we do not have a complete understanding of all sequences of all organisms.

The short answer is that Nelson is deluded, and ORFans do not conflict with evolution at all…but read Ian’s post for all the details.

Are you ready for Coulter?

Here’s a description of the contents of her newest book:

Though liberalism rejects the idea of God and reviles people of faith, it bears all the attributes of a religion itself. In Godless, Ann Coulter throws open the doors of the Church of Liberalism, showing us:

  • Its sacraments (abortion)
  • Its holy writ (Roe v. Wade)
  • Its martyrs (from Soviet spy Alger Hiss to cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal)
  • Its clergy (public school teachers)
  • Its churches (government schools, where prayer is prohibited but condoms are free)
  • Its doctrine of infallibility (as manifest in the "absolute moral authority" of spokesmen from Cindy Sheehan to Max Cleland)
  • And its cosmology (in which mankind is an inconsequential accident)

Then, of course, there’s the liberal creation myth: Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

For liberals, evolution is the touchstone that separates the enlightened from the benighted. But Coulter neatly refutes the charade that liberals are rationalists guided by the ideals of free inquiry and the scientific method. She exposes the essential truth about Darwinian evolution that liberals refuse to confront: it is bogus science.

How many lies can you count in that?

Now here’s the best part: guess who is her source on matters of evolution?

William Dembski.

I’m happy to report that I was in constant correspondence with Ann regarding her chapters on Darwinism.

That is so typical of Coulter’s research: find the most wrong-headed fool around and parrot his ill-informed opinions. This is going to be world-class suckage. This book is going to be a black hole of reason—reading it is going be like sticking your brain in a Cuisanart. What we’re going to find in there is all the lies and nonsense we can expect to hear echoed back at us for the next decade, the dishonest crap that every clueless wingnut bozo is going to absorb instead of real science.

And I’m going to have to read it. For I so love the world that I will sacrifice my neurons to bring my people rebuttals.

The Discovery Institute is bleeding credibility

More than once, I’ve said that I think the Discovery Institute is on the wane; Dover dealt a serious blow to their credibility, and demonstrated that their strategy was not an effective one for helping creationists get their way. That’s really all they had, was the promise that their pseudo-secular approach would give anti-evolutionists an inroad into the public school system, and it is clear now that that is not true.

I’ve also noticed that people give me a leery look when I say that—the DI has been a recent but ubiquitous feature in the Creation Wars—but now I can just tell you all to read this article.

“Dover is a disaster in a sense, as a public-relations matter,” said Bruce Chapman, a former Seattle city councilman and founder of the Discovery Institute, the country’s primary supporter of intelligent design. “It has given a rhetorical weapon to the Darwinists to say a judge has settled this,” he said.

Even some critics of evolution have taken the ruling as a sign that the fight to bring intelligent design into public schools may be over.

Judge Jones voiced it authoritatively, but I think we knew it all along: the backers of ID were almost all creationists of the old school, who saw this as nothing but a loophole they could exploit. Even the Fellows of the DI were readily admitting, outside of their official pontifications and press releases, that they believed their Designer was a God, and the Christian deity no less. The article does a nice job of documenting these beliefs, and here’s something I never thought I would say…I agree with Rush Limbaugh.

“Let’s make no mistake,” Limbaugh said on his radio show. “The people pushing intelligent design believe in the biblical version of creation. Intelligent design is a way, I think, to sneak it into the curriculum and make it less offensive to the liberals.”

Fortunately, that last clause is all wrong (we still found it offensive), so I can still say Limbaugh is a pompous gasbag who derives his authority from oxycontin-fueled bluster rather than evidence, and my world isn’t totally shaken.

Oh, but wait…I also agree with Cal Thomas! My aching brain.

Columnist Thomas, a former spokesman for the conservative Christian political group Moral Majority, said the court decision shows that academic debates, lawsuits and alternate explanations are not the way to fight the secularization of the United States.

“It should awaken religious conservatives to the futility of trying to make a secular state reflect their beliefs,” Thomas wrote.

Now that statement has more ominous overtones coming from Thomas—I think he’s implying that we need to get rid of the secular nature of the state altogether—but in general I think he’s right. Right now we have a body of precedent on the separation of church and state (and enough religious people who also appreciate the protection that separation gives them) that makes it difficult for even the ignorant wingnuts with which the Republicans are trying to stock the courts to ignore, and it is so unambiguously clear that all forms of creationism are religiously motivated, that barring even more radical destruction of the institutions of our government, creationism is just not going to fly overtly in the public schools. The frontal assault on the education system has been rebuffed, and among the severely wounded still moaning on the glacis are the followers of the Discovery Institute, and their generals have also been exposed as comic opera buffoons.

Does this mean I think we’re winning the Creation Wars? Not at all. I think one fairly recent player has been knocked out of contention, at least temporarily, nothing more. The more insidious creationist strategy of sapping the educational system by stocking school boards with anti-intellectual cretins and applying pressure to suppress scientific education and increase scientific ignorance is ongoing and is painfully effective…and we haven’t mustered a strong response to it yet. We flail at individual instances, but don’t have a more permanent institutional strategy for promoting and maintaining good science teaching at the pre-college level. We’re holding the top of the wall while they undermine our foundations, and we know where that is going to lead.

I also think that while we must win court cases like Kitzmiller v. the Dover School Board, we’re fooling ourselves if we think legal decisions are anything more substantial than stopgap measures. Losing a case like that would be catastrophic, but winning has its own costs. It solidifies opposition by feeding resentment. Every court case in this struggle, from Dayton to Dover, has failed to change a single mind, and while they have told us much about creationists and creationism, they’ve done nothing to educate people about science and evolution. And that’s the only place where this war can be won, in public education, both in the schools and among the general public.