Mike Dunford is a graduate student in the Department of Zoology at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, where he studies evolution. He's also a contributer to The Pandas Thumb. As is the case with everyone else here, his opinions are his own, and do not necessarily represent those of any organization he is affiliated with.
July 23, 2008
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:34 PM • 0 Comments• View blog reactions
July 22, 2008
Category: Daily Linkfests
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:32 PM • 0 Comments• View blog reactions
July 21, 2008
Category: Daily Linkfests
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:32 PM • 1 Comments• View blog reactions
July 19, 2008
Category: Science, Policy, and Management
Yesterday afternoon, Judge Donald Molloy of the Federal District court for Montana issued a preliminary injunction reinstating Endangered Species Act protections for grey wolves in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. This is very good news for the wolves. Although a preliminary injunction will only protect the wolves until the lawsuit is resolved, a judge will only issue one if it appears likely that the party requesting the lawsuit is going to win at trial.
A friend of mine emailed me a copy of the decision. It's forty pages long, and very little of it is kind to the Fish and Wildlife service. It certainly leaves no doubt whatsoever as to which party the judge believes is likely to ultimately prevail when the trial is concluded. After examining the claims made by each party, Judge Malloy concluded that it appears that the FWS arbitrarily and capriciously reversed several of its own prior conclusions and decisions in order to justify their decision to delist the affected populations.
The timing for this decision really couldn't be better. Without the preliminary injunction, all three states would have been able to go ahead with plans for wolf hunts this fall. Montana and Wyoming hadn't yet published their hunting guidelines and quotas, but had they been anything like the ones proposed in Idaho, the consequences for the species could have been severe. (I can't honestly say that Idaho's guidelines would have decimated their wolf population, but that's only because "decimate" implies that the mortality would only be 10%. They were planning on shooting more than a third of the wolves in the state.) The decision also came on the same day that fish and wildlife officials in Washington state confirmed the presence of at least a small group of wolves in their state for the first time since the 1930s.
The plaintiffs (a group of environmental groups) made argued that the Fish and Wildlife Service should not have delisted the grey wolf populations for several different reasons. Let's take a quick look at at a couple of these reasons, why they're important, and how the court viewed them.
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:32 PM • 16 Comments• View blog reactions
July 16, 2008
Category: Daily Linkfests
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:33 PM • 0 Comments• View blog reactions
Category: Religion
Apparently, Chad's dog has at least some of the issues surrounding the PZ Myers/Eucharist desecration issue figured out. I'm not sure, but I think she understands them much better than some of the folks who have been commenting here. And she expresses things with so much more grace and panache than I usually manage.
Posted by Mike Dunford at 8:57 AM • 1 Comments• View blog reactions
July 15, 2008
Category: Daily Linkfests
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:33 PM • 0 Comments• View blog reactions
July 14, 2008
Category: Daily Linkfests
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:31 PM • 1 Comments• View blog reactions
July 12, 2008
Category: Religion
I really had no plans on posting more about the whole PZ and the eucharist thing. I got my own views off my chest last night, and there haven't been any new developments in the case itself. The initial reactions to Paul's post are in, and the commenters have sorted themselves into three groups ("Rock on!", "Dude. Not cool.", and "Where's the firewood?"). It's unlikely that there's going to be a lot of movement from one group to another. Under the circumstances, writing another post on this issue has all the appeal of sticking my finger in a pencil sharpener.
But then there was the side issue. It was probably inevitable, but some of the discussion surrounding all of the lunacy has actually brought up a point that is worth discussing: what's the difference between what Paul said, and the publication of the infamous "Mohammed" cartoons a couple of years ago?
This point was raised by a couple of posts at Andrew Sullivan's blog. In the first, he condemned PZ's threat to desecrate the Eucharist. In the second, he responded to readers who wondered if he might be suffering from a double standard. Sullivan, after all, was a very vocal supporter of the Danish newspapers that received threats after publishing cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed.
Jason Rosenhouse was among those who weren't very thrilled with Sullivan. To a certain extent, this is understandable. It's very easy to get the impression, Jason points out, that the different reactions might have been sparked more by the fact that in only one of the two cases was Sullivan's own religion insulted. There's another point Jason makes, however, where I think he misses something very important:
Posted by Mike Dunford at 8:34 PM • 51 Comments• View blog reactions
Category: Religion
Over the last couple of days, I've considered posting something on the controversy that's been sparked by PZ Myers' comments about the eucharist, and the reaction of Bill Donohue and the Catholic League to those comments. I've been putting it off because it's not an easy post for me to write. The entire incident has suffered from a lack of heroes. Instead, it's been a case where someone has behaved badly, but someone else has behaved worse.
I've interacted with Paul Myers on various internet forums for at least a decade now. In that time, he's done many things that I respect, and a few that I greatly admire. His recent post offering to publicly desecrate the Eucharist if someone would be so kind as to send him some does not fall into either of those categories.
To be fair to Paul, it's not like he pulled that idea out of the blue. A college student in Florida smuggled a consecrated host out of a Catholic Mass at the school. When this became widely known, a large number of Catholics became extremely outraged, and the student received a number of death threats. The college responded by supplying armed university police officers to stand guard - not over the student who received the death threats, but at Mass, to protect the eucharist from future kidnapping. The university police will apparently be receiving additional backup from a nun that the diocese is sending to help protect the Eucharist. (No, I'm not making any of that up.)
It's easy to understand why Paul - and, for that matter, any number of rational people - were outraged by that story. The kid removed something from the church that is, as far as anyone can tell from any measurements of any physical properties, a thin wafer made out of wheat. It's about the size of a quarter, costs a lot less, and has both the texture and flavor of glue. It is absolutely, completely, and utterly insane that there are people who are willing to threaten the life of another human being who failed to display proper reverence for an object that is, by all objective standards, nothing more than a Necco Wafer that's been subjected to a flavorectomy.
Regardless of what we believe about the Eucharist, we should all be able to get behind the idea that it's absolutely wrong to threaten to kill someone who treats it disrespectfuly.
Paul's offer to desecrate a host was made in that context. I'm not totally sure whether it was made in the spirit of standing in solidarity with the threatened student, to attempt to show the people making the threats that it won't work, to try to show everybody that there's no apparent difference between desecrating a host and mangling a cracker, some combination of the above, or for some reasons I've missed. To be honest, I don't think the reason really matters. Let's just say that it came in reaction to the absolutely outrageous behavior of others, and leave it at that.
Paul's response to the death threats was to turn around and threaten to do something that's guaranteed to offend (if not horrify) every Catholic who finds out about it, whether or not they were in the select group of pin-heads who wish they'd been born early enough to get an on-the-job anatomy lesson working for the Inquisition. He made it very clear that he has absolutely no respect for anyone who believes in something as irrational as transubstantiation, and absolutely no qualms about hurting their feelings.
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:23 AM • 54 Comments• View blog reactions
July 11, 2008
Category: Daily Linkfests
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:32 PM • 0 Comments• View blog reactions
July 10, 2008
Category: From the Right
I don't know what it is, but there's clearly something about the G8 conference that interferes with George Bush's ability to restrain his inner frat brat. At the G8 two years ago, you might recall, the Commander-in-Chief grabbed international headlines when he gave German Chancellor Angela Merkel an impromptu (and uninvited and unwelcome) neck rub during a meeting. Apparently, disgracing his office and nation once at the G8 wasn't enough of a legacy for the man.
Various news sources in the United Kingdom are reporting that the President decided to unleash his inner frat brat on the global stage again this year. From the Telegraph:
The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."
He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.
Mr Bush, whose second and final term as President ends at the end of the year, then left the meeting at the Windsor Hotel in Hokkaido where the leaders of the world's richest nations had been discussing new targets to cut carbon emissions.
Isn't it nice to see that our President is still willing to show the rest of the world that he's got the maturity level you'd expect to find in a junior-varsity football locker room?
Posted by Mike Dunford at 4:55 PM • 5 Comments• View blog reactions
Category: Daily Linkfests
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:35 PM • 0 Comments• View blog reactions
July 9, 2008
Category: Daily Linkfests
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:33 PM • 0 Comments• View blog reactions
July 8, 2008
Category: Daily Linkfests
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:35 PM • 0 Comments• View blog reactions
July 7, 2008
Category: Daily Linkfests
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:32 PM • 2 Comments• View blog reactions
July 6, 2008
Category: Picture Posts
I took this one last winter, while I was on vacation out in the French countryside.
City Hall, Chaussenac, France. (Population 246)
Posted by Mike Dunford at 8:52 PM • 2 Comments• View blog reactions
July 5, 2008
Category: Doing Science
Timo Hannay just responded, over at one of Nature's blogs, to the hordes of bloggers who were somewhat displeased with the tone and content of Declan Butler's recent Nature article. Now that someone from Nature has returned fire, and other bloggers have fired back, it's likely that this whole thing is going to turn into one of those multi-day, multi-article kerfuffles that do so much to maintain blogging's reputation as the WWE of the scientific world. Which is cool, as far as I'm concerned. It's been a while since I've grabbed a folding chair and climbed into the Cage of Death. I'm ready to go.
But not quite yet.
Before we start throwing each other onto collapsable tables, or driving bulldozers through the ring, it might be good to stop and look at the idea that's at the core of this conflict: open access. Just what is open access? More importantly, why is it something that so many scientists get worked up over?
Posted by Mike Dunford at 10:01 PM • 4 Comments• View blog reactions
July 4, 2008
Category: Humor
Happy 4th of July, everyone!
Posted by Mike Dunford at 6:24 PM • 0 Comments• View blog reactions
Category: Daily Linkfests
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:32 PM • 0 Comments• View blog reactions
July 3, 2008
Category: Daily Linkfests
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:36 PM • 0 Comments• View blog reactions
Category: Misc Science
As you may or may not know, there's been some conflict in the scientific publishing industry over the last few years. Traditional business models have been challenged by an "open-access" model, where the papers are freely available to the general public. In the traditional model, the money comes through subscription charges, and the readers pay for the privilege of access to the research. In open access publishing, the papers are freely available. The costs are covered through a variety of means, including fees paid by the authors.
Many of the traditional publishers have clearly felt threatened by the open access movement, and have taken fairly aggressive action to try and curb the perceived threat. (Back in early 2007, for example, an industry group hired a public relations pit-bull, and launched a massively dishonest lobbying effort in an attempt to derail efforts to require free access to papers that report results funded by federal grants.) Apparently, at least some of the major "traditional" publishers are still feeling threatened. Yesterday, an article by Declan Butler appeared on the Nature website that discusses the current state of financial affairs at PLoS. That would be fine, of course, if the article was reasonably objective and neutral in tone. Unfortunately, this one wasn't. The article was not entirely unfair, but it certainly fell far short of what I would have hoped to see from a journal with Nature's history and reputation.
Posted by Mike Dunford at 8:56 AM • 4 Comments• View blog reactions
July 2, 2008
Category: Daily Linkfests
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:34 PM • 1 Comments• View blog reactions
July 1, 2008
Category: Daily Linkfests
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:36 PM • 0 Comments• View blog reactions
Category: Life in an Army Family
It's a little bit loud at the new Authority Family residence right now. The guys in the picture are practicing right overhead at the moment. The dog's in the bathtub, and the cat just did a backflip.
As always, feel free to click the thumbnail above for the full size version. That picture was taken at one of last week's practices. 1/500th of a second at f/8 using a 180mm lens.
Posted by Mike Dunford at 9:52 AM • 1 Comments• View blog reactions
June 30, 2008
Category: Daily Linkfests
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:34 PM • 2 Comments• View blog reactions
Category: Truly Misc
For a number of reasons, I've been gone from my own blog for most of the last couple of months. Moving had something to do with it, but I think the biggest reason was that after two years as part of the ScienceBlogs collective and something like a year or so on my own before that, I just plain needed a break.
I'm back, the batteries are recharged, and I've got absolutely no idea what you'll be seeing here over the coming weeks and months. I know I want to do some things differently, but I learned a while ago not to make promises - even to myself - about what I'm going to change. This time, I'm just going to wing it.
Posted by Mike Dunford at 10:47 AM • 3 Comments• View blog reactions
June 8, 2008
Category: Presidential
Senator John McCain, it appears, is not a fan of William Jennings Bryan. In a recent interview with USA Today, the Republican Party's nominee for President compared the three-time Democratic nominee for president from the turn of the last century to the Party's current nominee:
"I believe that people are interested very much in substance," McCain said. "If it was simply style, William Jennings Bryan would have been president." (Bryan, a noted orator, lost three presidential elections as the Democratic nominee in 1896, 1900 and 1908.)
It would be easy for me to dismiss McCain's dislike of Bryan as a rare point that he and I can agree on. Bryan's legacy, after all, is dominated by three great failures and one Pyrrhic victory: the Presidential elections, and his successful prosecution of one John Scopes for the crime of teaching Darwinism. Given my strong support for teaching real science in science classrooms, it probably wouldn't surprise anyone if I were to say that McCain got this one right.
The problem is, he didn't.
Posted by Mike Dunford at 9:16 AM • 11 Comments• View blog reactions
May 14, 2008
Category: "Supporting" the Troops
The following quote is taken verbatim from the transcript of an interview that President Bush did with Politico.com yesterday. I'm presenting it without any further comment, because there really isn't a hell of a lot than can be said - and we're still stuck with the shallow little twit for the next 251 days:
Q Mr. President, you haven't been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, it really is. I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as -- to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.
Posted by Mike Dunford at 8:46 AM • 5 Comments• View blog reactions
May 5, 2008
Category: Public Perception of Science
Since the beginning of March, I've been putting in a lot of time at a part-time job. I needed to get out of the house a lot more than I had been, and a friend needed people for his smoothie cart business. It's not rocket science, but it's not all that bad a way to kill time while making a little bit of money. It's also given me some insights into various aspects of life that I hadn't spent much time thinking about.
One of the insights involves just how many people there are out there who are on diets that they absolutely don't understand.
I've lost count of the number of people who have asked me if the fruit smoothies that I'm selling are "low-carb". When I tell them that the drinks are real fruit smoothies, containing lots of real fruit, a distressingly large percentage of them say something like "OK, I'll take a large strawberry banana."
I do understand that there are a lot of people out there who don't understand that sugars and starches - all sugars and starches - are carbohydrates. I don't think that speaks well for the overall state of science literacy, but it's probably not knowledge that most people are going to need all that often. If you're on a low-carb diet, though, it really might be a good idea to take the time to educate yourself about just what carbs are.
Posted by Mike Dunford at 12:57 PM • 12 Comments• View blog reactions
Category: Personal
You may have noticed a lack of new posts on this blog over the last few weeks. There are a few reasons for this, most of which involve being busy doing other things. I've been working a lot of hours at a part time job that doesn't allow for much online activity. We're also getting ready to relocate (again) - this time to Pensacola, Florida. Both of those factors will pretty much be done with by the middle of June. Until then, though, I'm not going to be able to blog as much as I'd like.
Posted by Mike Dunford at 11:22 AM • 1 Comments• View blog reactions
April 30, 2008
Category: "Supporting" the Troops
Back at the beginning of April, ATA airlines suddenly went out of business. With no prior warning, they filed for bankruptcy and suspended all flights. This decision was sparked by FedEx's still unexplained decision to drop ATA from the group of airlines that they use to fulfill their military charter contracts as of October 1st.
Before going belly-up, ATA did a lot of military charter business. So much, in fact, that the loss of the carrier means that troops are still facing delays of several days in coming home from the war zone. Apparently, FedEx has been unwilling to suck up the extra costs that they'd face if they brought in another carrier to make up the lost flights.
Of course, the military authorities don't seem to think this is actually a problem:
According to Sgt. Douglas DeMaio, an Army Central Command spokesman, the entertainment offerings on base in Kuwait keep most troops happy while they wait for flights.
That's right. You may not have seen your family for 15 months, and you may be stuck in Kuwait for another week just because there's no airplane to take you home, but it's all good - you can play Donkey Kong while you're waiting.
Good job, guys. Take another $1.93 out of petty cash, and buy another magnetic ribbon for your SUV.
Posted by Mike Dunford at 8:42 AM • 0 Comments• View blog reactions
April 22, 2008
Category: Presidential
Senator Hillary Clinton has apparently decided to join John McCain in calling for a "gas tax" holiday for the summer. Their plan would suspend the 18.4 cent per gallon tax on gas (and the 24.4 cent tax on diesel fuel) from Memorial Day to Labor Day, giving consumers a temporary break from the high cost of fuel. If, that is, the companies that sell the fuel don't decide to raise their prices and erase the relief.
In a Presidential campaign season that's been marked by more than its fair share of stupid ideas, this one's still a standout. Nothing says "responsible leadership" (or, for that matter, "intelligent campaigning") in times like this than proposing a measure that would:
Thank you, Senator Clinton, for once again reassuring me that backing Obama isn't as bad an idea as the alternative.
Posted by Mike Dunford at 12:23 PM • 7 Comments• View blog reactions
Category: Public Perception of Science
On Sunday, Chris Mooney and Randy Olsen both tried to make the case that Ben Stein's "Evolution Caused the Holocaust" movie was a success at the box office. Both of them have been rather spectacularly condemned for calling Expelled a success, but I'm not sure that they're entirely wrong. I just don't think that they took a hard enough look at some of the issues involved.
Let's start with the basic facts. Expelled hit theaters on Friday. It was aggressively marketed prior to release, and opened on 1,052 screens - the most ever for any documentary. On Sunday, estimates suggested that the movie would bring in well over $3 million for the weekend, but the actual figures were not quite that high. That's probably because (Randy Olsen's assertion notwithstanding) ticket sales fell off rapidly over the course of the weekend. (Expelled brought in $1.2 million on Friday, but only $990,000 on Saturday, making it the only movie in the top 50 in theaters this weekend to drop from Friday to Saturday. The slide continued on Sunday, when the movie brought in $775,000.)
Posted by Mike Dunford at 11:27 AM • 23 Comments• View blog reactions
April 17, 2008
Category: Anti-Evolutionism
Casey Luskin is currently in the middle of a multi-part "rebuttal" to Michael Shermer's review of Expelled. In the latest installment