Yet another timeline

The true history of the world is told in the movies, so obviously what we need is a compilation of movie events to see what was really going on. It’s a work in progress, so there are a few gaps—the period between 1 zillion BC and 65,000,000 BC is a bit sparse on information—but more recent events are better covered. For instance, the year of my birth was quite busy:

1957 New Zealand – Lionel Pritchard and his girlfriend Paquita battle a horde of zombies (Braindead)
Camp Crystal Lake, New Jersey – Jason Voorhees drowns (Friday the 13th)
Michael Myers born (Hallowe’en)
Lana Turner meets Johnny Stompanato (L.A. Confidential, 1997)
The Iron Giant
October Sky

Zombies, supernatural mass murderers, and giant robots…oh, yeah, I remember that. The late 1950s were rife with alien invasions and mutant monsters, too. Lana Turner is a little out of place, until you realize it’s also the year my wife was born.

(via Eclecticism)

Evolving spots

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Here’s what seems to be a relatively simple problem in evolution. Within the Drosophila genus (and in diverse insects in general), species have evolved patterned spots on their wings, which seem to be important in species-specific courtship. Gompel et al. have been exploring in depth one particular problem, illustrated below: how did a spot-free ancestral fly species acquire that distinctive dark patch near the front tip of the wing in Drosophila biarmipes? Their answer involves dissecting the molecular regulators of pattern in the fly wing, doing comparative sequence analyses and identifying the specific stretches of DNA involved in turning on the pigment pattern, and testing their models experimentally by expressing novel gene constructs in different species of flies.

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Good ol’ MnGOP

You really must take a look at the Republican Party of Minnesota Permanent Platform. It’s full of interesting goodies.

There are 19 items in the section on civil rights: ten of them are various permutations of “NO ABORTION!”; two are against gun control; one is to protect people from being forced to join labor unions; one promotes the public display of the Ten Commandments; and one is a commendable condemnation of torture and slavery, but with an annoying qualifier.

Condemning religious, political and ethnic persecution in any country, specifically the
oppression, slave labor, torture and murder of religious believers.

I guess oppression, slave labor, torture and murder of the godless warrants only a “meh.”

There’s also the usual insistence that marriage is between a man and a woman only, there shouldn’t even be civil unions or any legal equivalent between same-sex couples, and a new one to me: they want a “Covenant Marriage” option…as if fundamentalists weren’t more prone to divorce than many of us others.

Here’s the one that really gets me, though.

Protecting educators from disciplinary action for including discussion of creation science, adopting science standards that acknowledge the scientific controversies pertaining to the theory of evolution.

There isn’t anything in there about improving science education, or even an acknowledgment of the importance of science; just this lame stance excusing bad teachers for peddling nonsense in the classroom. It’s official. It’s in the state party platform. Minnesota Republicans are creationists.

Paternal pride

My daughter has posted her ACT scores (if you don’t know what they are, they’re an exam high school kids take; here’s an explanation of the scores). She did very well, especially considering that she took them a year earlier than most kids do. She’s a sophomore in high school, and she wants to go to UMM full time next year, taking advantage of our state’s PSEO program. She’s going to be a full-time college student at the age of 16.

I knew she could do it. I just told her that if she kept her grades up and did well on the exams, I wouldn’t take her to the Purity Ball. What a great motivator for smart young ladies!

They’ve got smellier stuff than we do, too

We biologists think we’re all grody and cool with our dead mice, but then some smart-aleck chemist has to go trump us all with thermite explosions. That just isn’t fair.

Just wait. Now some physicist is going to come along and make us all envious with his homebuilt laser.

Hold it! I just had a brilliant thought! If we got a physicist, a chemist, and a biologist together, we could make a laser-triggered thermite mouse trap. That would be waaaaaay better than a glue trap.

Najash rionegrina, a snake with legs

It’s a busy time for transitional fossil news—first they find a fishapod, and now we’ve got a Cretaceous snake with legs and a pelvis. One’s in the process of gaining legs, the other is in the early stages of losing them.

Najash rionegrina was discovered in a terrestrial fossil deposit in Argentina, which is important in the ongoing debate about whether snakes evolved from marine or terrestrial ancestors. The specimen isn’t entirely complete (but enough material is present to unambiguously identify it as a snake), consisting of a partial skull and a section of trunk. It has a sacrum! It has a pelvic girdle! It has hindlimbs, with femora, fibulae, and tibiae! It’s a definitive snake with legs, and it’s the oldest snake yet found.

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Let’s bring back barber-surgeons

Spot is quoting Kevin Phillips and his new book, American Theocracy(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). He’s describing the stagnation of scientific progress in the West when religion set its heavy hand on learning.

Symptom number two [referring to attributes regimes that become increasingly theocratic], related to the first, involves the interplay of faith and science. What might be called the Roman disenlightenment has been well dissected in Charles Freeman’s The Closing of the Western Mind (2002). He dwells on how Rome’s fourth- and fifth-century Christian regimes closed famous libraries like the one in Alexandria, limited the availability of books, discarded the works of Aristotle and Ptolemy, and embraced the dismissal of Greek logicians set forth in the gospel of Paul [well, there is no gospel of Paul, but never mind]. To Freeman, the elevation of faith over logic stifled inquiry in the West- leaving the next advances to Arab mathematicians, doctors, and astronomers-and brought on intellectual stagnation.” It is hard,” he wrote, “to see how mathematics, science or associated disciplines that depended on empirical observations could have made any progress in this atmosphere.” From the last recorded astronomical observation in 475, “it would be over 1,000 years-with the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus in 1543-before these studies began to move ahead again.”

Keep that in mind while reading Orac’s discussion of creationists in medicine. It’s depressing that such an important and respected profession is overrun with shortsighted ignoramuses.

You can be an adequate doctor and be a creationist: you don’t need to understand evolution to follow your training and cut out a gall bladder or give an injection or diagnose a known disease. It just means that you will follow by rote the procedures of your predecessors. The practice will stay the same, but progress will stop. We will fall once again into the situation Phillips describes (although I suspect our successors will emerge from Farther Asia this time around.)

Orac talks about some of the reasons why it’s difficult to get doctors to be solidly and openly on the side of good science, but I think it’s essential for the prestige and future advancement of the medical profession that more of them think about correcting this failing in their training policies. Are they to be smart, flexible, adaptive, creative, and intellectual people striving to understand the workings of the human body, or is it enough to be a collection of technicians who know how to manipulate the tools of their trade? What makes a doctor different from a chiropractor if neither are to be rooted in good science?