July 16, 2009
Category: Pointless polls
Polls are bad enough, but the editorial that went with this one is something else. A group is lobbying to slap a bunch of religious phrases on the US Capitol Visitor's Center, and their rationale is inane.
The engravings will cost less than $100,000 of the center's total $621 million price tag. Fighting this silly lawsuit will probably cost more than the engravings themselves.
One hundred thousand dollars isn't peanuts, and the argument that nobody should oppose them because it will cost even more money is ridiculous — if economy is a concern, then don't vandalize the building in the first place! No engraving costs, no legal expenses, we're all happy.
But this guy hasn't quite hit his stride yet. Let's bring on the tired old "freedom of religion, not freedom from religion" argument.
Let's start by pointing out the First Amendment doesn't grant freedom "from" religion, just freedom "of" religion. It doesn't ban religion, it provides freedom for all so that one denomination doesn't dominate or become the official state religion. Whether you practice a religion or not is up to people's preferences.
No one is forced to worship because they saw the motto on a $20 bill. Or because they recited the Pledge of Allegiance. It's pretty innocuous.
All right, I say this fellow needs to put his money where his mouth is. Let's add "Praise be unto Allah", "No gods, no masters", and "Hail, Xenu!" to the center and to our money — think he'll argue that it is all innocuous then?
Now that he has convinced you of the quality of his arguments, go vote.
Should the national motto, "In God We Trust," be engraved on the Capitol Visitor Center or other government buildings?
Yes: Our motto reflects America's religious heritage and should be displayed.
62.5%
No: The slogan is an unconstitutional endorsement of religion and should not be used for state purposes. 37.5%
Posted by PZ Myers at 7:51 AM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Open Thread
I've got a franchise, I guess. The Thread That Will Not DIE is going to go on and on. I've once again closed the old thread, and here you go, more fresh virgin database entries to despoil. Go ahead and fill it up!
Posted by PZ Myers at 7:34 AM • 27 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 15, 2009
Category: Organisms • Science
I must thank the reader known to me only as CAC for sending me DVDs of the Inside Nature's Giants programs. I've been enjoying the dissections of an elephant and a whale in the evening — most of the organisms I cut into are millimeters long and require very sharp, thin instruments, so it's interesting to see ones that require hip waders and backhoes.
You should all lobby your local PBS stations and tell them these would be wonderful additions to the lineup! You might also suggest that broadcasting them during the dinner hour might not be recommended.
Posted by PZ Myers at 8:37 PM • 31 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute has published an opinion piece in the Boston Globe in which he makes a rather anachronistic argument for ID: Thomas Jefferson was a supporter. I knew the creationists were sloppy scholars and had a poor grasp of history and science, but this is getting ridiculous.
Here, I have to help them out.
Date | Jefferson | Darwin |
1743 | born | - |
1776 | Writes the Declaration of Independence | - |
1809 | Ends his term as President of the US | born |
1823 | Writes the quote Stephen Meyer will find so appealing: I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition.
| 14 years old. |
| 1826 | Dies. | Darwin is a student at the University of Edinburgh. |
1831 | Dead. | Voyage of the Beagle |
1859 | Still dead. | Publishes the Origin. |
1882 | Still very dead. | Darwin dies, too. |
They do overlap a bit in time, but Jefferson was 33 years in the grave before Darwin got around to explaining how we don't need a designer to explain the living universe. I rather suspect that no ship was dispatched from Virginia to Shropshire to get young Charlie Darwin's rebuttal of the 1823 claim, either. It's even less likely that Jefferson's zombie rose up in 1859 to take a quick gander at these new ideas spreading through biology and decided, nah, he likes intelligent design better.
I could be wrong. Maybe the Biologic Institute has been holding seances and has received Jefferson's imprimatur — I wouldn't put it past them. Otherwise, though, Meyer is making a ludicrously stupid argument.
By the way, even if the DI had Jefferson's revivified head in a jar, and it was making anti-evolutionary pronouncements, it wouldn't make a bit of difference to evolutionary biologists. Doctors might be excited, though.
Blake is even more succinct.
Posted by PZ Myers at 7:22 PM • 80 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Development • Evolution • Genetics • Molecular Biology • Science
No, not really — my title is a bit of a sensationalistic exploitation of the thesis of a paper by Peterson, Dietrich, and McPeek, but I can buy into their idea that microRNAs (miRNAs) may have contributed to the pattern of metazoan phylogenies we see now. It's actually a thought-provoking concept, especially to someone who favors the evo-devo view of animal evolution. And actually, the question it answers is why we haven't had thousands of Cambrian explosions.
In case you haven't been keeping up, miRNAs are a hot topic in molecular genetics: they are short (21-23 nucleotides) pieces of single stranded RNA that are not translated into protein, but have their effect by binding to other strands of messenger RNA (mRNA) to which they complement, effectively down-regulating expression of that messenger. They play an important role in regulating the levels of expression of other genes.
One role for miRNAs seems to be to act as a kind of biological buffer, working to limit the range of effective message that can be operating in the cell at any one time. Some experiments that have knocked out specific miRNAs have had a very interesting effect: the range of expressed phenotypes for the targeted message gene increases. The presence or absence of miRNA doesn't actually generate a novel phenotype, it simply fine-tunes what other genes do — and without miRNA, some genes become sloppy in their expression.
This talk of buffering expression immediately swivels a developmental biologist's mind to another term: canalization. Canalization is a process that leads organisms to produce similar phenotypes despite variations in genotype or the environment (within limits, of course). Development is a fairly robust process that overcomes genetic variations and external events to yield a moderately consistent outcome — I can raise fish embryos at 20°C or at 30°C, and despite differences in the overall rate of growth, the resultant adult fish are indistinguishable. This is also true of populations in evolution: stasis is the norm, morphologies don't swing too widely generation after generation, but still, we can get some rapid (geologically speaking) shifts, as if forms are switching between a couple of stable nodes of attraction.
Where the Cambrian comes into this is that it is the greatest example of a flowering of new forms, which then all began diverging down different evolutionary tracks. The curious thing isn't their appearance — there is evidence of a diversity of forms before the Cambrian, bacteria had been flourishing for a few billion years, etc., and what happened 500 million years ago is that the forms became visible in the fossil record with the evolution of hard body parts — but that these phyla established body plans that they were then locked into, to varying degrees, right up to the modern day. What the authors are proposing is that miRNAs might be part of the explanation for why these lineages were subsequently channeled into discrete morphological pathways, each distinct from the other as chordates and arthropods and echinoderms and molluscs.
Read on »
Posted by PZ Myers at 4:59 PM • 63 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Open Thread
I've just seen Mooney and Kirshenbaum's latest eruption of petulance, and I also see that people are commenting away in various threads here. I really can't get to it until later, and I can't say that I'm enthusiastic about addressing such a flaccid blubbery bit of self-pity anyway, so let this thread be the central place for teeth-gnashing, fulminations, denunciations, or defenses. Or if you've got anything else interesting to say, feel free to announce it.
You're also supposed to read this, which should cover most of the scatological expressions of outrage.
Posted by PZ Myers at 2:17 PM • 322 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
And following the lead of all past hires by that eminent institute of advanced ideology, Ann Gauger doesn't understand biology or logic. She does have a Ph.D. in a relevant field, but it just goes to show that having a degree doesn't mean you necessarily understand science. I will look forward to further examples of poor reasoning from yet another incompetent in Seattle.
By the way, she also hails from my old hometown of Kent, Washington…a completely meaningless coincidence that still manages to embarrass me.
Posted by PZ Myers at 11:10 AM • 53 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Religion
Someday, someone will be able to tell me what distinguishes the theology of Wiley Drake from the theology of any random con man.
Posted by PZ Myers at 10:16 AM • 126 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
…and this is a 
