I was just on a webminar with Carl Zimmer and Chris Mooney, talking about their new books. Carl went first, and at the end of his presentation there was a drawing for a copy of his book, The Tangled Bank, and he chose 18, and that was me, and now I'm so excited, and they will send me the book, and I will read it, and, and, and (gasping for air)...More than 20 years ago, Rich Lenski, then at University of California, Irvine, started a simple experiment. On a Wednesday morning, the 24 February 1988, he started the parallel evolution of 12 populations of Escherichia coli, all clonally derived from a single bacterium and competing for limited sugar in Erlenmeyer flasks. Each day, roughly half a billion new copies of the E. coli genome are made in each flask as the bacteria multiply, along with about a million mistakes, meaning that in the span of a few days, virtually all conceivable mutations in the bacteria’s five million base pair genome will have been attempted. Most of these mutations make no difference or are deleterious, but a few make the bacteria grow a little bit faster — providing up to a 10% growth advantage over their predecessors. The fastest ones are extremely rare and the population must ‘wait’ a couple of days for them to show up.
Every night, the bacteria run out of the sugar glucose and go dormant. The following day around noon, a researcher plunges a pipette in and sucks up 1% of the culture to inoculate a fresh flask. Those faster at gobbling up glucose will send more of their descendants to the following day’s pipette and, after a few weeks, descendants of the fastest one will be the only ones transferred as the mutation ‘sweeps’ to fixation.
Thank you for signing our Darwin Day Petition. Unfortunately, we were unsuccessful in obtaining a presidential proclamation this year, but we plan to keep growing our movement in hopes of a proclamation next year.It really ought to be up there on Obama's list of priorities along with health care, the economy, and ending American hegemony (and maybe it is, but this one is just a much tougher nut to crack). Maybe next year...
Darwin Day is administered by the American Humanist Association (AHA). The mission of the AHA is to be a clear, democratic voice for Humanism in the United States; to increase public awareness and acceptance of humanism; to establish, protect and promote the position of humanists in our society; and to develop and advance humanist thought and action. In short, we strive to bring about a progressive society where being "good without God" is an accepted way to live life. Become a member!
President Obama and liberal members of Congress now strongly urge repealing current law for a new “LGBT Law,” allowing for open and practicing homosexuals, bisexuals and transgenders to serve in the military.We are not surprised.
Should open homosexuals, bisexuals and transgenders be allowed to serve in the U.S. Military?
Yes 344
No 5,335
Cast your Vote in the Online Poll
Do you think Jesus would be happy by reading your blog?Only ten days left to say something stupid in the name of Jesus, so get your comment in. Pick any post about evolution or atheism, tell evolution-lovers to eat dirt because Jesus rode a triceratops, or whatever, and you can be nominated too.
His take on Christianity.Come one, he had twelve guys in dresses following him around 24/7. Totally.
"I think Jesus was a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems. On the cross, he forgave the people who crucified him. Jesus wanted us to be loving and forgiving. I don't know what makes people so cruel. Try being a gay woman in the Middle East -- you're as good as dead."
Jesus was certainly compassionate, but to say He was “super-intelligent” is to compare the Son of God to a successful game-show contestant. More seriously, to call Jesus a homosexual is to label Him a sexual deviant. But what else would we expect from a man who previously said, “From my point of view, I would ban religion completely.”Okay, so the gay comment is worse, but that was of course expected. As for Jesus being a sexual deviant, I wonder what Donohue thinks normative sexual behavior is. Celibacy?
We’re not sure what’s worse—John’s ignorance or intolerance. In any event, if we thought we could persuade him to issue an apology, we would try. But given his recidivism, we won’t even bother to ask. One thing is clear: someone needs to straighten John out.Translation: "Ignoring our own intolerance of sexual diversity, we'd really like to get more attention (please?), for example by calling for an apology (God needs our help) from the most brazenly gay man in the world, who by the way ought to join one of those groups who heal homosexuals though prayer."
Category: Skepticism
Maloney is a naturopath in the state of Maine, where quacks like him get to call themselves "doctors". These so-called "doctors" get to make recommendations like this, in which he disparages standard flu vaccines and suggests these useless prescriptions:Parents waiting for vaccinations can provide their children with black elderberry, which blocks the H1N1 virus. A single garlic capsule daily cuts in half the incidence and the severity of a flu episode for children.There's another way you can tell he's a quack. When a student, Michael Hawkins, dared to criticize him, pointing out that "Naturopathic medicine is pure bull" and stating that naturopaths are underqualified and do not deserve the title of "doctor," Maloney took action to silence him. After all, we can't have people questioning quacks — that just makes them look even more ridiculous, which could lead to a loss of business.
So Maloney complained to Wordpress, where Hawkins blog was located, and got them to shut it down. This does not speak well of craven Wordpress; if you're using Wordpress hosting, you might want to reconsider it and move elsewhere. You know, to someplace that respects reality.
Now not only is Maloney a quack, but he's a stupid quack. Shutting down blogs that criticize him? That never, ever works. In fact, it tends to backfire rather severely — because now a much bigger blog is going to spread the word that Christopher Maloney is a quack. I'm also going to ask all of you out there who reads this to echo the message: Christopher Maloney is a quack. Won't that be fun? Poke the net, and the net pushes back.
Share the message. Let the whole world know that Christopher Maloney is a cowardly quack.
He's also tasteless. This is possibly the ugliest youtube video ever.
Posted by PZ Myers at 9:14 PM • 41 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Grrlscientist herself is hosting the all round science blog carnival this time: Scientia Pro Publica 21: Darwin's 201st Birthday Edition.We can see their confusion even where they are trying to agree with evolutionary biologists: they are even ignorant of what fitness means. This is how they define it:... co-varies with the probability that it will contribute its phenotypic traits to its offspring... Hilarious!we’ll follow the current consensus according to which an individual’s relative fitness co-varies with the probability that it will contribute its phenotypic traits to its offspring.This is not just wrong. To see why, imagine an individual that passes on its phenotype to every one of its offspring. According to Fodor & Piattelli-Palmarini, it has maximal fitness: transmission is 100%. But imagine that the trait is for only having two offspring. Compare that to an individual who half the time passes on the trait of having 10 offspring, and the rest of the time the offspring are sterile. Fodor & Piattelli-Palmarini may think that these individuals are less fit, but if these are the only two phenotypes in the population, the “fitter” phenotype will be lost. For the rest of us fitness is defined in relation to the population (and the environment!), not transmission within a family.
Cool article as for me. I'd like to read something more concerning that theme. The only thing it would also be great to see on this blog is some photos of any gizmos.The cell phone jammer is a link to a store that sells something. I bet the post Evidence says no life on Mars could really use pictures of gizmos, yeah.
David Stepman
Cell phone jammer
Newly released aerial photos of the World Trade Center coming down on September 11th, 2001.
Detlev Arendt's lab at EMBL looks at the evolution of the central nervous system in Bilateria. A brand new letter in Nature, Ancient animal microRNAs and the evolution of tissue identity, explores the link between the birth of ancient microRNAs and body plan evolution.Animals from different branches of the evolutionary tree -- different lineages -- possess specific microRNAs that evolved only in their lineage. But they also have microRNAs in common: ones which they inherited from their last common ancestor, and which have been conserved throughout animal evolution.MicroRNA are short RNA nucleotide sequences regulating gene expression mainly by supressing it. So they say that because one specific microRNA is found working in a specific part of the worm's brain, and this same microRNA also works in the same part of the human brain, then the common ancestor also had this same brain part. Saying that this microRNA has been conserved since the last common ancestor - something that the conclusion hinges on - is a bit of a mouthful. It could be true, but it is an assumption that could be contested.
(...)
The scientists reasoned that if an ancient microRNA is found in a specific part of the brain in one species and in a very similar location in another species, then this brain part probably already existed in the last common ancestor of those species. Thus, they were able to glean a glimpse of the past, an idea of some of the traits of the last common ancestor of worms and humans.
We reason that any specific localization shared between protostomes and deuterostomes (the two major superphyla of bilaterian animals) should probably reflect an ancient specificity of that microRNA in their last common ancestor.This last common ancestor lived sometime during the Cambrian (say 555 million years ago), and we are supposed to infer that a 22 long microRNA could not have changed its role on regulating genes expressed in the brain?
At the present state of analysis, we can only speculate about the tissue-specific ancient roles of these microRNAs, by extrapolating from observations in other animal models. [Emphasis added.]And that's a fine thing to say. But going from this to "Last Ancestor Humans Shared With Worms Had Sophisticated Brain, microRNAs Show" is a little over the top.
Obama's new military: Gays showering with straightsIt's been a while since I've heard something really juicy from the always odious AFA. Of course, they are fundamentalist Christians, so they think sex between two men is the most repugnant thing they like to think about every night after they save their prayers. Making it their business what other people do in private is a religious right. (AFA website.)
Gays showering with straights? Absolutely.Gotta love pretty much every word of it.
If President Obama, congressional Democrats, and homosexual activists get their wish, your son or daughter may be forced to share military showers and barracks with active and open homosexuals who may very well view them with sexual interest.
Talk about creating a hostile work environment for people who practice normative sexuality!
As former General Colin Powell observed in 1993 (before bowing to pressures of political correctness), "...it would be prejudicial to good order and discipline to try to integrate gays and lesbians in the current military structure."
undermine recruiting and retention, impact leadership at all levels, have adverse effects on the willingness of parents who lend their sons and daughter to military service, and eventually break the All-Volunteer Force.So much for patriotism, eh? Do you imagine enforcing a no-sex policy in the showers? And impact leadership? Why? Because of sexual harassment? I think they imagine the effect of the first gay general. "Camouflage is out, men. Rainbows are in.
"Overturning the ban will likely preclude advancement and promotions for officers and chaplains who do not publicly affirm homosexual behavior, essentially ending their military careers.I'm not sure what "affirm" means in this context, but surely you can be promoted whether or not you publicly state that you support gays in the military, or homosexuality in general. If, on the other hand, affirm here means that they cannot live with working side by side with homosexuals, then they are, in my mind, unfit for leadership. I mean for officers. Chaplains? No, it seems like a prerequisite to be a homophobe, so perhaps that does present a genuine problem. My solution would be to get rid of army chaplains, but that's another story.
If we do not insist that the ban on homosexual military service be retained, our military will no longer be the place America's families want to send their best and brightest young men and women.Oh, is that where they are going now?
How did the process of protein import in mitochondria—which facilitated the evolution of this organelle, and thus, eukaryotic cell evolution—arise? Was the process driven by the ancestral host cell or by the prokaryotic endosymbiont, or by both?
A take-away restaurant near my house offers customers free home delivery or a ten per cent discount if you pick up. It sounds much better than saying you get no discount for picking up and suffer a ten per cent fee for delivery – this is the power of ‘framing’.(Via BPS Reseach Digest.)
"I'm starting to see the value of Kant."RMAOTLF! About time, I'd say.
It used to annoy me to be called the king of woo woo. For those who aren't familiar with the term, "woo woo" is a derogatory reference to almost any form of unconventional thinking, aimed by professional skeptics who are self-appointed vigilantes dedicated to the suppression of curiosity.Any form of thinking must be dealt with with skepticism, at first. It's just that Chopra's thinking, when skeptically evaluated, doesn't hold up to reality. It goes against all the evidence.
I get labeled much worse things as regularly as clockwork whenever I disagree with big fry like Richard Dawkins or smaller fry like Michael Shermer, the Scientific American columnist and editor of Skeptic magazine. The latest barrage of name-calling occurred after the two of us had a spirited exchange on Larry King Live last week. . Maybe you saw it. I was the one rolling my eyes as Shermer spoke. Sorry about that, a spontaneous reflex of the involuntary nervous system.I'm going to a debate with Chopra vs. Shermer next month. Will look for rolling eyes.
Afterwards, however, I had an unpredictable reaction. I realized that I would much rather expound woo woo than the kind of bad science Shermer stands behind. He has made skepticism his personal brand, more or less, sitting by the side of the road to denigrate "those people who believe in spirituality, ghosts, and so on," as he says on a YouTube video. No matter that this broad brush would tar not just the Pope, Mahatma Gandhi, St. Teresa of Avila, Buddha, and countless scientists who happen to recognize a reality that transcends space and time. All are deemed irrational by the skeptical crowd. You would think that skeptics as a class have made significant contributions to science or the quality of life in their own right. Uh oh. No, they haven't. Their principal job is to reinforce the great ideas of yesterday while suppressing the great ideas of tomorrow.Oh come on, Deepak. It is through skepticism that scientists increase our knowledge about the world. And let me fix that sentence for you: "happen to
I've baited this post with a few barbs to see if Shermer can be goaded into an actual public debate. I have avoided his and his followers' underhanded methods, whereby an opponent is attacked ad hominem as an idiot, moron, and other choice epithets that in his world are the mainstays of rational argument. And the point of such a debate? To further public knowledge about the actual frontiers of science, which has always depended on wonder, awe, imagination, and speculation.And skepticism. Without skepticism there is no shield against the woo woo. I can't wait to hear what the 'actual frontiers of science' are, as Chopra sees them. More evidence for life after death, is my bet.
P. S. In light of a few of the comments I would like to clarify something. I hold great value and trust in the scientific method when practiced honestly. Also, I have nothing against healthy skepticism which retains an open mind to future possibilities in science. What I am really addressing here is the brand of professional skepticism that Shermer stands for that borders on cynicism and which leads to a rigid attachment to materialist science. It is the cynicism and prejudice that refuses to explore the new frontiers of neuroscience, genomics, epigenetics, information theory and the understanding of consciousness that I am speaking to. [Emphasis added.]I'm baffled. Those fields of science... skeptics refuse to explore them? Scientists, skeptics, and Shermer as well, happen to be very interested in those frontiers. I don't get it. Please explain how Chopra can claim those as i) dismissed by skeptics, and ii) beyond materialism.
The researchers removed 29 chips, each the size of a poppy seed, from across the dinosaur’s body. Mr. Vinther put the chips under a microscope and discovered melanosomes.
(...)
Dr. Shawkey can accurately predict the color of feathers from melanosomes alone. The scientists used the same method to decipher Anchiornis’s color pattern.Anchiornis had a crown of reddish feathers surrounding dark gray ones, and its face was mottled with reddish and black spots. Its body was dark gray, but its limb feathers were white with black tips.
Gore: "Under the governor's plan, if you kept the same fee for service that you have now under Medicare, your premiums would go up by between 18% and 47%, and that is the study of the Congressional plan that he's modelled his proposal on by the Medicare actuaries."In other words, half of voting America vote they way they do because they are stupid. Very, deeply, and profoundly stupid. In twenty, fifty, or ninety years historians will look back at this period shaking their heads, grappling with the inanity. Hard to believe people really were that dumb.
Bush: "Look, this is a man who has great numbers. He talks about numbers.
"I'm beginning to think not only did he invent the internet, but he invented the calculator. It's fuzzy math. It's trying to scare people in the voting booth."
Mr Gore was talking sense and Mr Bush nonsense - but Mr Bush won the debate. With statistics, the voters just hear a patronising policy wonk, and switch off.
In Carnival of Evolution #20, which is just out this morning, Psi Wavefunction has taken the URLs of the submitted posts and analyzed them as if they were proteins. 
Next edition, CoE #21, will be on Mauka to Makai. Submit your posts already using this form.
Scientia Pro Publica #20 is up on Kind Of Curious. This time it includes a post by Nature Blog's Henry Gee about the recently discovered oldest tetrapod footprints. What does it all mean?And a challenge:
It means that the neatly gift-wrapped correlation between stratigraphy and phylogeny, in which elpistostegids represent a transitional form in the swift evolution of tetrapods in the mid-Frasnian, is a cruel illusion. If – as the Polish footprints show – tetrapods already existed in the Eifelian, then an enormous evolutionary void has opened beneath our feet.
Note: the first person to find any part of this post quote-mined in support of creationism will receive the highly prestigious and coveted Order of the Unicycling Girrafe.Not sure what a girrafe is, though. Exciting!
Proving Evil exists doesnt mean anything. Yes God created Evil but without it human life could not exist.Congratulations to Taylor!
Good cannot exist without Evil, aka you cant know one thing without knowing its opposite and thats why human life could not exist without Evil. God created Evil knowing that it is the only possible way human life could exist.
So in the end - Evil is in itself Good, because without it we could not exist in this world at all.
Seeing as probably nobody will believe or understand that u can email me if u want and i'd be happy to explain further. tsharp811@yahoo.com
There is a happy little Facebook competition going on between evolutionists and creationists. First the creationists created we can find 1,000,000 people who don't believe in Evolution befor June, which today has an impressive 25,696 fans. Spelling errors and all.
From that evolved the We can find 1,000,000 people who DO believe in Evolution before June, which now sports 111,880 fans.
Monrovia, Liberia. Man. It's so fucked up you won't believe it. Deep, deep, crazy bad all over. You gotta, gotta! see this video - the Vice Guide to Liberia - if you EVER watch any on the web at all, you must see this video of an American team intervieweing ex-warlords in Liberia. Murder, rape, drugs, shit, piss, malaria, more drugs, and cannibalism. And that's with the UN there.