A message from Mr. West

Kanye West likes Beyonce's website better. Gotta try it.

Carnival of Evolution teaser

October 1st important events in history:

1050 years ago, Edgar the Peaceable becomes king of all England (959).
820 years ago, Gerard de Ridefort, grandmaster of the Knights Templar since 1184, is killed in the Siege of Acre (1189).
180 years ago, South African College is founded in Cape Town, South Africa (1829).
140 years ago, Austria issues the world's first postcards (1869).
70 years ago, after a one-month Siege of Warsaw, hostile forces entered the city (1939).
60 years ago, the People's Republic of China is declared by Mao Zedong (1949).
40 years ago, the Concorde supersonic transport plane breaks the sound barrier for the first time (1969).
30 years ago, the United States returns sovereignty of the Panama canal to Panama (1979).
20 years ago, Denmark establishes the World's first legal modern same-sex civil union called "registered partnership" (1989).
0 years ago, Carnival of Evolution, the 16th edition, will air on Pleiotropy (2009).

Paper finally submitted to PLoS

I finally submitted my manuscript to PLoS Computational Biology. Woot! Can't quite believe the rigidity of the submission process, though. Lots of HTML editing of figure captions in order for the paper to be posted online. The layout rules for the manuscript are also burdensome, and, including a submission to the e-Print archive, it has taken most of today to get it all done. I'll be pretty upset if the editors decide not to send it out for review after all that trouble.

The paper, Impact of Epistasis on Evolutionary Adaptation, will be viewable at the arXiv shortly, I trust...

---

Update 9/20-09:
It's now available on at the arXiv.

Obama calls Kanye West 'Jackass'

Listen to it right here. Then take the poll below and vote 'Way to go!'

The audio was recorded just before Obama went on camera to do an interview with CNBC. Before the interview began, Obama -- referring to Kanye's antics on stage -- said "I thought that was really inappropriate," then adding, "He's a jackass."

Obama on Kanye...
Way to go! 93%
Inappropriate 7%
Total Votes: 456,550

P.S. I just killed a fly in mid-flight. It was bugging the hell out of me.

The rare footed snake from China

A snake with a rare atavism was discovered (and clubbed to death) in a Chinese bedroom. It had a single foot.



As freaky as this is, an atavism - the occurrence of an ancestral trait otherwise lost in the extant species - is good evidence for evolution. Given the right mutation(s), an organism may develop a trait as it was in all the ancestors of the species. There are many examples of this, such as humans with tails.



So what caused this? Contrary to what the snake expert on the site said, an autopsy won't reveal the cause. For that the snake's genome has to be sequenced. Was it a mutation in the germ-line (either egg or sperm), or a somatic mutation during early development? The fact that the snake only had one leg suggest that it would be somatic, or it would most likely have had two. (My youngest son has two different eye-colors, and no doubt that is caused by a somatic mutation.) What kind of mutation (single nucleotide, or a larger scale event)? And note, that if it is a somatic mutation, offspring of this individual would not have had legs. Shame that. I'm sure lots of people would fancy havinga rare legged snake, for a pet or for dinner.

---

Update 9/16/09:
Other good hypotheses have surfaced. Ironically, PZ Myers is guessing that pleiotropy is to blame (the irony being that I should have thought of that), by way of some gene(s) that control limb development also have other functions, and that constraint then prevented the gene(s) from being destroyed. Instead it could be silenced specifically for limb development, and it is this repressor that PZ guesses has been suppressed during early development by an environmental factor, leading to activation of the genes that make the limb. Another hypothesis is that the whole thing is a photoshop hoax, and yet another that it is the leg of the snake's last meal protruding through the skin. I highly doubt this last idea, seeing that the limb and digits are very well defined, which seems unlikely if the skin belongs to the snake.

Reform the grant application process

The way research grants are evaluated and awarded makes bureaucrats out of scientist.

That's the bottom line as presented in a perspective article in PLoS Biology.
Real Lives and White Lies in the Funding of Scientific Research:
The granting system turns young scientists into bureaucrats and then betrays them

Here's the cause of the problem (wrong selection pressure):

The peculiar demands of our granting system have favoured an upper class of skilled scientists who know how to raise money for a big group [3]. They have mastered a glass bead game that rewards not only quality and honesty, but also salesmanship and networking. A large group is the secret because applications are currently judged in a way that makes it almost immaterial how many of that group fail, so long as two or three do well. Data from these successful underlings can be cleverly packaged to produce a flow of papers—essential to generate an overlapping portfolio of grants to avoid gaps in funding.

And here's the consequence (better grant-writers, less innovative research):

Thus, large groups can appear effective even when they are neither efficient nor innovative. Also, large groups breed a surplus of PhD students and postdocs that flood the market; many boost the careers of their supervisors while their own plans to continue in research are doomed from the outset. The system also helps larger groups outcompete smaller groups, like those headed by younger scientists such as K. It is no wonder that the average age of grant recipients continues to rise [4]. Even worse, sustained success is most likely when risky and original topics are avoided and projects tailored to fit prevailing fashions—a fact that sticks a knife into the back of true research [5]. As Sydney Brenner has said, “Innovation comes only from an assault on the unknown” [6].

And, finally, the solution:

Drastic simplification of this grant-writing process would help scientists return to the business of doing science. Grant applications should be much shorter, and if so, scientists would spend less time writing them and less time reviewing other applications.

(...)

The solution is to allow, say, only three to five of the best papers of the group from over the previous five years to be offered for assessment (as Howard Hughes Medical Institute already do in the US). The evaluation of these papers should be corrected for the size of the group, i.e., productivity would be rated per person, not per group. If these reforms were enacted, the pressure to rush out many papers would be replaced by pressure to complete projects that report stories of value and present them well.

Asses grant applications on previous work, rather than future work. Previous work documents that the P.I. can get research done, and what the quality of that research is. This would also, crucially, free up time for researchers to do research, rather than writing grant applications.

Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Wilson + Watson

E. O. Wilson and James Watson met at Harvard last week to discuss enemies in science. They once were, but now appreciate that fact.

Memorable quote:

Watson believes that scientists ought to push themselves to be stars, making at least one great achievement, going for the gold.

"Why should scientists be stars?" Krulwich prods.

Watson answers without missing a beat. "It's better to be bright than dim."

Ha! Not bad for the old guy (which in no way means I concur with any of his views about intelligence...).

Mr. Pink on solving complex problems

Totally share-worthy talk at TED: Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation.

Bottom line: Rewards don't work for problems where thinking out of the box is part of the solution. Science knows it, but apparently business managers don't. Doing it for money does not get the job done faster, except for very straight-forward tasks.

Mr. Pink is basically saying that when complex tasks needs to be solved, don't set monetary incentives. Sounds very much like grad-school to me.

Evolution highlights

Here's a few recommendations for short reads about evolution:

Study examines the evolutionary fate of 'useless' traits, about relaxed selection, costly traits, and loss of function.

Scientists Use MicroRNAs To Track Evolutionary History For First Time, about how microRNA can improve our knowledge of phylogenetic relationships.

Ancient Fossils Shed New Light on Evolution of Humans, about how 1.8 million year old fossils from Georgia might change our understanding of the evolution of Homo erectus (i.e. not Homo sapiens).

Evolutionary constraints permeate large metabolic networks, about an approach showing that metabolic pathways are highly constrained. (This article is written by Andreas Wagner, who does great science, but is not my favorite science-writer.)

Ebert on creationists

I await 'Creation' not with anticipation, for as Roger Ebert predicts, those who admire Darwin are likely to be disappointed. Read Ebert's non-review.

Ebert muses over what caused Darwin to delay publication of The Origin, mentioning the possible theological implications of his theory. Then he says,

Did it occur to Darwin or his wife that nothing in his ideas precluded the existence of God? Today, no major religion finds conflict between God and the theory of evolution. The majority of Christians can live with both ideas; religious opposition to Darwin is limited primarily to a fundamentalist minority of American Christians.

Beg your pardon?

Oh sure, nothing about evolution precludes the existence of God, unless one has specific ideas about what 'God' means. And I think we can all agree to be fairly certain that to Charles and Emma it meant Yahweh - the one who created the heavens and humans in their present form, etc. etc. The creation myth that goes with that interpretation of the Bible is too in direct conflict with evolutionary biology. It does not preclude the existence of some god, but it does preclude that God did the things that Emma and (earlier) Darwin most likely attributed to God.

No major religion finds conflict between evolution and God?! Ebert, do you spend all your time inside a theological seminary? Because that's the only place where Christians are 100% comfortable with evolution, and those Christian professors of theology are really atheists. (If you don't believe me go to a talk about 'Ground of Being' and other such stuff, or read Tillich.)

Baptists, Evangelicals, Mormons, and Pentecostals are definitely not very comfortable with evolution, and many lutherans are likely to profess some sort of ID preference (whether they know of the discotute or not). At least, none of these denominations are deists, and evolution, astronomy, geophysics, nuclear physics, and geology together pretty much thwart anything but strict deism. If it wasn't for cognitive dissonance the heads of most of 'the majority of Christians' would be seen exploding on a daily basis.

Perhaps we can designate those American Christians who oppose evolution as 'fundamentalists', but then we would have to include more than what can be called a minority. Or vice versa.

Also, have Ebert heard what followers of that other major religion of the world, Islam, think about evolution? Muslims are hardcore creationists, and the vast majority are totally unable to "live with both ideas."

But, while I think Ebert is wholly uninformed on this matter, he ends with a good point:

Meanwhile, have you wondered why, if the Mayans were able to pinpoint the end of time in 2012, they were unable to see that their own civilization would collapse in the ninth century?

Indeed.

Math-challenged reverend hijacks plane with cans of hommus

Josmar Flores tried to hijack a plane in Mexico yesterday.

“He is a reverend,” Garcia Luna said. “He said it was a divine revelation that drove him to this action.”

What a lunatic! Praise the Lord that this is the only case ever where divine revelation has driven anyone to commit dangerous acts like this one.

The hijacker was wearing jeans and a white shirt when he was paraded in front of reporters after his arrest and appeared to be smiling and chewing gum. He took action because yesterday’s date, Sept. 9, 2009, represented an upside-down 666.

I guess that's why nothing like this happened on June 6th, 2006, because that's 999 upside-down, and that doesn't mean anything.

The story gets better:

Flores is a born-again Christian who had been on the verge of suicide. He spent time in jail in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, for armed robbery, Garcia Luna said.

Flores threatened the crew from Aeromexico flight 576 with a fake bomb made from a red light affixed to three cans of hummus about an hour after takeoff from Cancun, Garcia Luna said. The pilot told the authorities and later acted as interlocutor between Flores and officials once the plane landed in Mexico City at about 1:40 p.m. local time.

Three cans of hommus. As the saying goes, you can't make this stuff up. Soon they'll ban food on planes altogether.

The bat-eating tits

Others have already blogged it, so I'm writing this just to make absolutely sure that no one misses the bat-eating tits (with footage). They almost make my heart swell with pride.

Erasmus Darwin for some credit

A correspondence in the newest edition of Nature, quote in full:

Nature 461, 167 (10 September 2009) | doi:10.1038/461167b; Published online 9 September 2009

Evolution pioneers: celebrating Lamarck at 200, Darwin 215

William E. Friedman¹
1. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA
Email: ned@colorado.edu

Sir

I take issue with the contention that Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles, tackled evolution only in poetic terms, as implied by Dan Graur and colleagues in their insightful Book Review ('In retrospect: Lamarck's treatise at 200' Nature 460, 688–689; 2009).

Erasmus Darwin's most important contributions to evolutionary thought will be found in the very unpoetic prose of the first volume of his major medical and zoological treatise, Zoonomia, published in 1794.

Here, notably in Section 39, are discussions of deep time and the descent of all life from a single ancestor, bauplan homology among vertebrates, the analogy of artificial selection as a means of understanding descent with modification, and a brief but clear enunciation of the process of sexual selection.

One need only to look at the backlash against Erasmus Darwin's evolutionary ideas, in the savage political cartoons of James Gillray in 1798 and of others, to understand that — years before Lamarck made his contributions to evolutionary thought — Erasmus Darwin was triggering strong reactions for promoting a transformist view of biodiversity.

This year is justly celebrating the history-altering contributions of Charles Darwin. But it is equally important to take stock of the critical intellectual steps before 1859 that made scientific and social acceptance of evolution possible.

Besides Erasmus Darwin and Jean Baptiste Lamarck, a host of other influential evolutionists, including Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Robert Chambers, Baden Powell, Herbert Spencer and Alfred Russel Wallace, deserve to be recognized (as well as read) for having laid a path to a modern view of descent with modification.

(Emphasis added.)

This is most fascinating information. I had no idea that Erasmus Darwin had written about so many of the concepts that Charles are famous for. I just checked out Zoonomia on Amazon. It can be downloaded to the Kindle for free (as can many other books). However, next best to that, my library has a free electronic version that I have just accessed online. Yeah!

On the second page of that is a humorous erratum:

ERRATA.
THE reader will pleafe to excufe en error of the corrector of the prefs - the paging from 154 - 171 is omitted, although the fubftance and fubject of the work is correctly continued - and he will pleafe to alter one figure with his pen that follows 235, by making it 236, &c. to page 250.

The Bookbinder will pleafe to obferve, that there is no fignature M, and that the book is perfect wanting it.

I have noticed before that old s's looks like f's, but in this case there are also properly looking s's, such as in 'prefs.'

Also, you gotta love the request for the reader to add page-numbers by pen. I seriously think I'll do the same with my first book.

Does that last sentence mean that, apart from the missing signature M, the book is perfect?

"Pundit" will become a derogatory term

FOX News is notorious, I know, for its "fair and balanced" approach to keeping viewers entertained. I don't watch news on TV at all, though, but get all updates from the web. Still, I don't particularly frequent FOXNews.com either. However, on Google news one item caught my eye: Why the Obama Administration Will Implode In Weeks, by Kevin McCullough, a pundit who "was the first pundit to predict Obama's presidency (back in December 2006)." That would be except for my friend, Ed, who predicted in way back in 2004 when Obama was elected senator of Illinois. Ed is not a pundit, but still. Anyone else who can make that claim?

Of course, now that he's pals with Nostradamus, his duty as a political pundit is to share his prediction for Obama's precidency. As he says "it behooves me to tell you the course I believe the next few weeks will take."

And as the title says, the Obama administration is going to implode with the the next six to eight weeks (published September 1st). Why? He lists the reasons:

1. Health Care's Long and Painful Death
2. Cap-and-Trade Will Be the Largest Tax Increase in American History
3. Unemployment Will Remain
4. Obama's Integrity Has Been Tarnished in August
5. A $3 Trillion Dollar Budget
6. A Coming Middle Class Tax Hike

Problems, indeed, should any of it become reality. But, "implode?" What does that even mean? That all confidence in this administration will have evaporated in five to seven weeks from now? That Obama will be on his knees begging McCain and Palin to take over the White house?

I, on the other hand, hereby make the prediction that the word "pundit" is going to become a derogatory term within the next, say, 4 to 5 months. I could be wrong, and pundits everywhere could become the heros they deserve to be for the expert advice they give on their radio shows syndicated on 197 stations across the country and in fair and balanced columns on FOX News.

But I'm not holding my breath, and I'd advise you against it as well.

Soliciting posts for Carnival of Evolution

Next month, on the first of October, I will be hosting Carnival of Evolution here on Pleiotropy, and I predict a number of great posts about evolution will be submitted. However, I don't expect especially many to be submitted, and I would like to change that.

You are hereby strongly recommended sending at least one, but preferably two, posts that you have written on any subject that relates to the study of evolutionary biology. Posts about evolution might include

• reports on peer reviewed papers,
• experiences teaching evolution,
• debunking of creationism,
• evolution related op-eds,
• book reviews,

and anything else that you can think of that deals with evolution in any way.

The previous 15 carnivals averaged 13 and a third posts per carnival per edition, with a standard deviation of 4.8, with a range from 5 to 24. It's time to top that. There is more evolution going on in the blogosphere, and we need to hear about it on CoE.

If I don't see my inbox filling up with submissions really soon, I will probably solicit posts directly from people who I know blog about evolution.

Submit your evolution posts at Blog Carnival or email me directly at bjorn@bjornostman.com.

Babu's back belching bible and biology

Sorry to say, but Babu Ranganathan (B.A. in Bible and Biology from Bob Jones) is at it again, spewing forth utter nonsense about molecular biology, evolution, and abiogenesis. In a short article, DNA by chance impossible, he puts forward some conjectures that he has dealt with many times before.

I had at first written a snarky rebuttal, but deleted it because I couldn't figure out what the hell the point would be. Babu has written this very thing so many times, and he is both not too well educated about biology, and married to a Christian creationist ideology that he must make the facts fit. Just go read the darned thing, and then ask yourself how it is that he knows that DNA could never have originated by chance alone. What does it mean, in Babu's interpretation, that something came about by 'chance'? Then ask yourself if that is what serious scientists actually posit about the origin of DNA.

He does end the article by a statement that I have not seen the likes of before:

Both sides of the evolution/intelligent design controversy should have the opportunity to present their scientific arguments to students. No one is being forced to believe in God, so there is no real violation of separation of church and state.

No one is being forced to believe in God... so we can say anything we want to anyone anywhere? Tell elementary school students that evolution is wrong and creationism is right, and that if they don't believe that, they will end up in Hell. As long as you don't force them to believe it, this is not separation of church and state? Then what does this word 'force' really mean? That you enter their brains and force the neurons to fire in a manner that makes the brain believe in creationism?

What the hell is the point of these inane articles? Is this really what he does for a living? How does that work?

Innocent man executed

Liveblogging a reading* of a New Yorker article about a man who was exceuted in Texas for the murders of his own children, Trial by Fire. Was he innocent?

(* For the record, I've liveblogged reading an article once before, and I take full responsibility for inventing the procedure.)

Willingham's house burned one morning in 1991 or 1992, and the firemen found him outside, while his three toddlers had died from smoke inhalation. Two fire investigators examined the house after the fire was put out, and found evidence that the fire had been started by a human dousing the children's room with a flammable liquid. Other evidence also pointed to arson, and Willingham was the only suspect. He was convicted and sentence to death. He never admitted of any wrongdoing.

Interesting fact which I have often wondered about: Why is it more expensive to execute someone than to keep them in prison for the rest of their life? Sounds like it shouldn't be true.

because of the expense of litigation and the appeals process, it costs, on average, $2.3 million to execute a prisoner in Texas—about three times the cost of incarcerating someone for forty years.

Willingham couldn't afford a lawyer, so he had one assigned. I often wonder if those lawyers that are assigned are the bottom-of-the-class kind of lawyers, of what the deal are with those.

Part of the evidence against Willingham was that a fellow inmate said that Willingham told him that he took “some kind of lighter fluid, squirting [it] around the walls and the floor, and set a fire.”

Willingham was offered a deal to serve a life sentence rather than getting the death penalty if he would plead guilty. He declined the offer.

Here's an odd fact:

Willingham’s refusal to accept the deal confirmed the view of the prosecution, and even that of his defense lawyers, that he was an unrepentant killer.

Then, either way the prosecutor and the defense lawyers would conclude that he was a killer. I'm not saying Willingham was innocent, but this is like throwing a woman into the river and saying she' a witch if she floats. Apparently no one could understand why he would not plead guilty, but I think I can. Perhaps he'd rather die than serving a life sentence and admitting something he did not do. And, if he did do it, perhaps he didn't really want to live any longer.

The trial took only two days.

Years later a woman, Gilbert, corresponds with and visits Willingham in jail. She becomes interested in the case and reads the trial records. She finds that several witnesses were inconsistent. For example,

An even starker shift occurred with Father Monaghan’s testimony. In his first statement, he had depicted Willingham as a devastated father who had to be repeatedly restrained from risking his life. Yet, as investigators were preparing to arrest Willingham, he concluded that Willingham had been too emotional (“He seemed to have the type of distress that a woman who had given birth would have upon seeing her children die”); and he expressed a “gut feeling” that Willingham had “something to do with the setting of the fire.”

Dozens of studies have shown that witnesses’ memories of events often change when they are supplied with new contextual information. Itiel Dror, a cognitive psychologist who has done extensive research on eyewitness and expert testimony in criminal investigations, told me, “The mind is not a passive machine. Once you believe in something—once you expect something—it changes the way you perceive information and the way your memory recalls it.”

Interesting facts, those.

So this woman, Gilbert, talks to a lot of people who knew Willingham, and some of them weren't so sure that he was guilty. Some said they "could not imagine him killing his children." At this point I feel like saying, though, that I regard this kind of statement as not meaning anything much, really. I don't think it plausible that of all the guilty criminals it isn't possible to find someone they knew who would say such a thing. Most of the time people who commit crimes are probably behaving themselves very well, not showing signs of sociopathy or any such thing.

When Stacy [Willingham's wife and mother of the three children] was on the stand, Jackson [the prosecutor] grilled her about the “significance” of Willingham’s “very large tattoo of a skull, encircled by some kind of a serpent.”
“It’s just a tattoo,” Stacy responded.
“He just likes skulls and snakes. Is that what you’re saying?”
“No. He just had—he got a tattoo on him.”
The prosecution cited such evidence in asserting that Willingham fit the profile of a sociopath

Think about that before you get your first tattoo. And don't listen to heavy metal:

At one point, Jackson showed Gregory Exhibit No. 60—a photograph of an Iron Maiden poster that had hung in Willingham’s house—and asked the psychologist to interpret it. “This one is a picture of a skull, with a fist being punched through the skull,” Gregory said; the image displayed “violence” and “death.”

Gilbert finds that more evidence is bogus, particularly the testimony by the fellow inmate, who looks like he lied about that whole confession-in-prison thing.

Another wow-fact:

During America’s Colonial period, dozens of crimes were punishable by death, including horse thievery, blasphemy, “man-stealing,” and highway robbery.

Even blasphemy? One more of those:

In 1868, John Stuart Mill made one of the most eloquent defenses of capital punishment, arguing that executing a murderer did not display a wanton disregard for life but, rather, proof of its value. “We show, on the contrary, most emphatically our regard for it by the adoption of a rule that he who violates that right in another forfeits it for himself,” he said. For Mill, there was one counterargument that carried weight—“that if by an error of justice an innocent person is put to death, the mistake can never be corrected.”

But it happens:

In 1993, Ruben Cantu was executed in Texas for fatally shooting a man during a robbery. Years later, a second victim, who survived the shooting, told the Houston Chronicle that he had been pressured by police to identify Cantu as the gunman, even though he believed Cantu to be innocent. Sam Millsap, the district attorney in the case, who had once supported capital punishment (“I’m no wild-eyed, pointy-headed liberal”), said that he was disturbed by the thought that he had made a mistake.

Liberals are pointy-headed? What does that mean? But true, I have read elsewhere that one of the traits of conservatives is that they don't have a huge problem with some innocent people suffering when it's for the sake of the whole community; they can live fine with social injustice. Liberals not so much. Me, not a chance. Scalia just denies that it has ever happened:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in 2006, voted with a majority to uphold the death penalty in a Kansas case. In his opinion, Scalia declared that, in the modern judicial system, there has not been “a single case—not one—in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops.”

• • • • • • •
But, ladies and gentlemen, the really phenomenal part of this story in the New Yorker comes in the end (it's an article of over 16 thousand words).

It turns out that the evidence that the fire was lit by a human was all bogus. Bogus science. The two investigators didn't really know what they were talking about, and they made the usual assumptions about what causes certain tell-tale signs, and they turned out to be wrong. The science didn't hold up, and when a third expert, Hurst, examined the evidence only weeks before Willingham was to be executed, he found that all the signs of arson really pointed to “flashover”—the point at which radiant heat causes a fire in a room to become a room on fire.

But Hurst was too late.

The warden told Willingham that it was time. Willingham, refusing to assist the process, lay down; he was carried into a chamber eight feet wide and ten feet long. The walls were painted green, and in the center of the room, where an electric chair used to be, was a sheeted gurney. Several guards strapped Willingham down with leather belts, snapping buckles across his arms and legs and chest. A medical team then inserted intravenous tubes into his arms. Each official had a separate role in the process, so that no one person felt responsible for taking a life.

(Emphasis added.)

After his death, his parents were allowed to touch his face for the first time in more than a decade. Later, at Willingham’s request, they cremated his body and secretly spread some of his ashes over his children’s graves. He had told his parents, “Please don’t ever stop fighting to vindicate me.”

Remember Scalia's claim?

There is a chance, however, that Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.”

Suck on that, Scalia!

Abolish the death penalty now!

Recommended reading: Conservapedia

The exchange of letters between Rich Lenski (of the famous E. coli experiments) and Andy Schlafly (founder of Conservapedia) came up in a lab meeting today.

I just read the whole thing again, and highly recommend this thoroughly enjoyable read for those who didn't see it back in June, 2008: Conservapedia:Lenski dialog.

Also check out the Conservapedia Commandments:

4. When referencing dates based on the approximate birth of Jesus, give appropriate credit for the basis of the date (B.C. or A.D.). "BCE" and "CE" are unacceptable substitutes because they deny the historical basis. See CE.

Carnival of Evolution #15

Carnival of Evolution 15 just went up at Southern Fried Science, from where I'll highlight this post by Satya where she asks this question:

The Rexes and Spots of the world have been man’s best friend for 15,000 years. But when and where did humans begin domesticating these furry companions?

I'd like to argue, though, that perhaps it wasn't really humans that domesticated dogs, but rather the other way around. Seriously.

Anyhow, the paper that the post is about is from Carlos Bustamante's lab and their collaborators, and they call into question the hypothesis of an East Asian origin for dog domestication, which could mean that when humans trotted out of Africa, they did it with dogs at their sides. One could then wonder whether it was the dogs who followed the humans, or the other way around...

Looking forward to Dawkins' newest book

The prose of Richard Dawkins is getting stronger. He newest book, The Greatest Show On Earth, will be a really reasonable read if it's as good as this appetizer from last week:

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips . . . continue the list as long as desired. That didn’t have to be true. It is not self-evidently, tautologically, obviously true, and there was a time when most people, even educated people, thought it wasn’t. It didn’t have to be true, but it is. We know this because a rising flood of evidence supports it. Evolution is a fact, and [my] book will demonstrate it. No reputable scientist disputes it, and no unbiased reader will close the book doubting it.

I hasten to say that while I agree with Dawkins that the theory of evolution is such a well tested model of what happens to living things on Earth, I'll say that doubt is to be cherished. It is with doubt in hand that any theory is understood, always being questioned at every turn along the way. As a researcher, there is no reasonable doubt left that evolution has, is, and will continue to occur, but both the fine and the coarse details are still diligently worked on, and doubt is a prerequisite of skepticism, and skepticism is the sine qua non of any scientist.