PZ Myers’ Own Original, Cosmic, and Eccentric Analogy for How the Genome Works -OR- High Geekology

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I’m teaching my developmental biology course this afternoon, and I have a slightly peculiar approach to the teaching the subject. One of the difficulties with introducing undergraduates to an immense and complicated topic like development is that there is a continual war between making sure they’re introduced to the all-important details, and stepping back and giving them the big picture of the process. I do this explicitly by dividing my week; Mondays are lecture days where I stand up and talk about Molecule X interacting with Molecule Y in Tissue Z, and we go over textbook stuff. I’m probably going too fast, but I want students to come out of the class having at least heard of Sonic Hedgehog and β-catenin and fasciclins and induction and cis regulatory elements and so forth.

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Long, silky blonde hair…

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…on a crustacean? Kiwa hirsuta is a new decapod crustacean discovered living near hydrothermal vents in the Pacific. It’s eyeless as well as hairy.

I’m sure there’s a dumb blonde joke in this somewhere, or since it was discovered by a French team, something about unshaven armpits. I wonder how low the comments are going to sink on this one; go ahead and vent and get it out of your system.

David Berlinski: très creepy

There’s a bizarre “interview” with David Berlinski at one of the ID blogs. What’s bizarre about it, and the reason I have to put “interview” in quotes, is that the interviewer and interviewee are both David Berlinski. It is nothing more than a pompous exercise in preening his ego; he arrogantly babbles on, saying nothing much except to sneer at anyone who has pricked that colossal ego.

I’m pleased to say that I’m one of them, and again find myself in good company.

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Fred Hutchison, Renaissance fool

Please forgive me: you’ve probably all forgotten Fred Hutchison, the incredibly delusional right-wing paragon of hubris, but I’ve got to bring him up again. He wrote one of the more painful diatribes against evolution on Alan Keyes “Renew America” site (yeah, that Alan Keyes; you know we’re deep in crazytown already) which I ripped up a while back. This is a guy who gets everything wrong, and wraps it all up in the most astonishingly pretentious, arrogant tone. Hutchison himself is a CPA. He thinks he has demonstrated that Darwin and Einstein were all wrong.

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A small step for a scientist…

DFLers, today is the day for the precinct caucuses. Here in Morris, we’re meeting in Old Number One Southside at 7 PM—be there! Most importantly, Pete Wyckoff is running for the chairmanship of the Stevens County DFL party. We need to get a scientist elected for the position, since this is our first step in American domination, which will culminate in the election of a philosopher-king to run the country.

First Stevens County, Minnesota…then the world!

Black & White

I was just thinking there was something especially weird about that Wilkow rant against abortion. He’s asked whether life begins at conception, and he replies with an irksomely stupid question of his own: “…scientifically speaking, when a sperm and egg comes together, what happens? Is death created?” The caller who asked the question is stumped and avoids it, unfortunately, but it’s an interestingly bad reply.

I was a bit baffled by it at first myself, until I realized what Wilkow is hoping for: that the person would answer “no”, and then he could triumphantly declare that therefore he was right, life is created at fertilization. It’s a beautiful example of the bifurcation, or false dichotomy, fallacy—and it’s given an extra special dash of pretentiousness with that clause, “scientifically speaking”. I thought of a few ways it could be answered.

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Those crazy politicians, aren’t they funny?

Minnesota had a vampire running for governor, which was pretty messed up…but Pandagon has found a couple of real prizes among the new crop of candidates, Merrill Keiser and Larry Kilgore. Keiser is anti-abortion and anti-homosexuals—he thinks homosexuality should be punishable by death. Kilgore wants the same thing, and also thinks adultery warrants execution. Just crazy stuff, huh?

There is a difference between our Jonathan the Impaler and these two Christian wingnuts: the vampire is a joke without a prayer of victory, but Keiser and Kilgore are typical excrescences of Christian Fundamentalism, with endorsements and money and a voting population that contains enough insane people who will pull the lever for anyone calling themselves “Christian” that they’ll get a number of votes. I don’t think they can win, but they’ll be taken seriously by far too many people.

They’ll also have a loud segment of the media behind them. Talk radio has kooks like Andrew Wilkow (whose rant you can hear at Crooks and Liars). I don’t think Wilkow is an isolated case; I’m an NPR kind of guy, but flipping around the radio dial here is a frightening experience.

And, of course, there is the current definitive example of the inmate running the asylum: Governor Mike Rounds of South Dakota. There is a tendency to dismiss people like Keiser and Kilgore as mere radical outliers, weirdos who really aren’t at all indicative of what’s actually going on in the body politic. They’re out there, though, and what they’re accomplishing is to give cover to people like Rounds; they can always point to the people who want to kill doctors and women, and say, “See, I’m not such a bad guy after all—I just want to throw doctors and women in prison!”

Give it a few more years. We’ll have politicians who will try to highlight their deep humanity by arguing that they want to kill the homos and adulterers with a painless lethal injection, rather than the stoning method advocated by the real wackos.