August will be amazing

It’s official! I’ll be attending the Secular Student Alliance conference in Columbus, OH from August 7th to the 9th and I’ll be joining PZ in his visit to the Creation Museum on that Friday. Wooo! I’m pretty sure this will be the most amazing trip to the Creation Museum ever, so I’m super excited. Totally going to get a photo of me riding a dinosaur and then sobbing in front of the evolution exhibits.

You don’t need to be a member or a student to go to the SSA conference or the Creation Museum trip. Midwestern people, you totally need to come. I mean, I’ll be there. …Well, okay, more importantly PZ and Hemant and Dan Barker will be there. I just like to think I’m that important.

If you can’t come, you should at least think about donating to the SSA. It’ll help counteract the money we’re giving Ken Ham.

Q&A – Defeating Creationism

“Jen,

Hey, I’m a big fan of your blog. I just thought of an interesting Q&A for when you are taking your week off: How best can we defeat Creationism? Creationism was completely defeated in the scientific community more than a hundred years ago and in the US court system numerous times in the last 50 years. However, Creationism still has a very strong grip among everyday US Americans. The polls have consistently shown that roughly 50% of all Americans believe that humans were created in their present form less than 10,000 years ago. What can we do to reverse this trend?

thanks,

Jason

http://chaoskeptic.blogspot.com“

Wow, you know, you guys could have thrown me a couple gimme questions. Nope, right onto solving the creationism problem! Haha, well, I’m just an undegrad with some odd ideas floating around in my head, so I’m unlikely to have the best solution, but I’ll at least ramble about what I think for a bit.

I honestly don’t think acceptance of evolution will increase in the US until religious belief decreases. We already see this trend among young people, which gives me hope that it will continue with time. I know a lot of scientists will argue that acceptance of evolution (and science in general, for that matter) is compatible with religious belief – but I’m going to have to side with the likes of PZ and Coyne and Dawkins and say this isn’t true. Scientific thinking is inherently opposed to religious thinking. Science is based on facts and experimentation and tweaking our idea of what is true so it becomes more and more accurate. Religion is based on belief and faith, where even facts that prove you wrong can be brushed away with some nonsensical mental acrobatics.

So how do we defeat creationism and intelligent design? Defeat religious and supernatural belief. We need to promote skeptical, critical, scientific thinking, and that’s incredibly hard to do when people still believe in miracles and ghosts and heaven and all other sorts of nonsense. Thankfully as people become less and less religious, they’ll probably accept evolution more and more. I think there will always be the extreme evangelical creationists, but the best we can do it make it so they’re a crazy little minority. Once we get to that stage we can start bugging the liberal Christians (since we’re talking about the US) to really understand evolution.

What do I mean by that? There are plenty of Christians who do believe in evolution. While I’m glad they exist, they either don’t fully understand the implications of evolution, they interpret the Bible so liberally that what it says doesn’t even matter anymore, or they’re doing some impressive doublethink (which I think most liberal Christians get particularly adept at). Religious people who attempt to reconcile their beliefs by saying God “guided” evolution do not really believe in evolution by natural selection. They believe in evolution by some omnipotent being fiddling with mutations, which is not scientific thinking. At least they won’t get in the way of evolution being taught in schools, but they still don’t really understand it. I think the only religious people who can really accept evolution are the ones who take a deistic view of God – that he decided to let evolution be the mechanism of how all the variety of life came to be. But that still doesn’t make any sense. The whole beauty of evolution is that it is a natural process. It didn’t need some god to create it, because it works based on chemistry and physics and probability etc etc.

And now I’m just rambling. Let me summarize: It’s going to be freaking hard.

Almost done

I should probably have a lot more to post about now that the conference in almost over, but I’m so brain dead that I can’t come up with much. Hearing technical biology talks (80% of which are over my head) from 8 to 5 is just mentally exhausting after a while. That being said, I really enjoyed the conference. There’s so much cool science going on out there, and now I have all these neat ideas floating around in my head. And while the whole grad school application process still freaks me out, I feel like I have a lot better idea of what I need to do since we had some talks about that.

Though honestly, the best part was just being around so many nerdy biologists. It was amazing sitting in a bar, and instead of hearing people talk about sports, hearing people talking about transcriptome characterization or population genetics or who knows what. Everyone just went into absurdly geeky mode. Take this dinner conversation, just one example out of many:

My Prof: Those are all the Oregon State people over there, and those are all the Michigan people sitting there.
Me: And all of us Purdue people clumped together here.
My Prof: Yeah.
Me: So overall we have a diverse population, but when you look at subpopulations there’s very low variation.
My Prof: Yep!

One more, just if you don’t believe me:

Me: Excuse me! *trying to scoot past someone to get in a seat* Sorry!
Guy: Oh, don’t worry, it’s an open niche that needs to be filled!

My flight leaves 6:45 am tomorrow and I’ll be back in my apartment around 7 pm (hopefully). I plan on wearing my atheist club shirt for that trip, so we’ll see if I get any fun stories out of that. You know you’re officially a blogger when you start doing random crap just for the potential blog posts.

Heathen Mecca

Conference is going well so far. Saw talks by Eugenie Scott, David Sloan Wilson, and some professors I’m interested in for grad school who were really nice. Also saw an awesome professor from Canada who gave his whole talk (titled Origins & maintenance of sex: The evolutionary joy of self sex) not wearing shoes (yay hippie evolutionists). Though the best thing by far is how often people giggle about creationism and Intelligent Design, how people joke about us all being heathens and atheists, how when people refer to religion or religious people they’re doing so as outsiders like religion is this weird cultural phenomena (instead of actually believing it)… For the first time, I am somewhere where I am an atheist and I am a part of the majority. I can’t explain how awesome that feels. Thank you, Evolution 2009.

Maybe one day I’ll feel this way all the time. Maybe I just need to move to England.

Seattle/Idaho Update!

Hey everyone! I managed to find a computer lab at the University of Idaho, so I’m slowly recovering from my internet withdrawal. And luckily for you, this computer lets me upload photos from my camera, so you get to see fun stuff! Woo!

My flights from Indianapolis to Chicago and Chicago to Seattle were kind of uneventful, which is a good thing. Once I got to Seattle I met up with this Guy from the Diversity program (who I had never met) to go exploring a bit. And yes, yes I did visit the Discovery Institute:Man, was that place small. The only reason I found it was because I had the exact address. It was just this locked door with a crummy looking buzzer next to it, and a flight of stairs that led up to what looked to be just a couple of offices. Unfortunately, I didn’t go inside. Sorry guys. I was thinking about at least buzzing them, but Guy had never heard of the DI, so I didn’t want to drag him into it. Once I explained it to him he laughed, though. That’s the one plus of hanging out with evolutionary biologists: I can giggle about Intelligent Design and they don’t think I have horns sprouting out of my head.

Speaking of crazy people in Seattle, I love some of the wacky stuff you see in big cities. The very first thing we saw getting off the bus downtown was a homeless screaming nonsensically at everyone. The only part I could make out was her repeated use of “Motherfuckers!!” I swear she looked just like the scary religious lady from Wife Swap. I also saw a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, and this lovely sign of Obama with a Hitler mustache:
Still not quite sure what their point was. They were two young people, and they didn’t seem to enjoy me giggling and taking a picture. “You’re a sports fan aren’t you?” the guy asked me. “What?” “You just think this is entertaining.” “Yes, yes I do.” And then I walked away.

Visited Pike Place Fish Market and the Original Starbucks:
Space Needle, etc:
Up in the Space Needle (freaking expensive to go up, but the view was awesome):
After that we were pretty much pooped, so we headed back to the Aiport. Our final flight to Pullman still didn’t leave for about three hours, so we wandered around a bit. We found a Croc Shop with nothing but those awful croc shoes. The rainbow wall of crocs amused me to no end, so I had to take a picture. We didn’t hang around long because it smelled like plastic and stinky feet.
We were also sitting right by a little bar/restaurant. Apparently the NBA final game was going on or something (hey, we’re a bunch of biology nerds, it took us a while to figure out) and there was this giant crowd of people watching the game. I love people watching, so it amused me to see thirty people staring unmovingly at a screen and then all cheering and groaning at the same time. One of the gate checkers literally came and screamed at a pilot for being ten minutes late for boarding because he was watching the stupid game, hahaha.
Our final flight was only about 40 minutes long, though oddly enough, it had the best complimentary refreshments. Not only did we actually get a snack and free pop, but they were offering free beer and wine. Like, decent beer and wine. It was 11:30 pm (felt like 2:30 am to me because of the time change), but being good college students, we all had some. Bad idea. I was already exhausted, but after that I was so tired that I was wavering between passing out and becoming completely delusional. We finally checked into our dorms around 1:30 am, which means I had been up for 22 hours straight… wooo. I’m also very reminded why I like living in an apartment:
I think most dorm rooms resemble prison cells, but this one is particularly bad. Maybe it would be nicer if it was full of my personal belongings. I’m mainly curious what the hell the little half window with a slidey door by my head is. It reminds me of some sort of trap door prisoners would use to smuggle in cigarettes and spoons or whatever.

Scary dorm room aside, the rest of campus is beautiful. The town is tiny – I think I saw the whole thing in about a ten minute walk – but it’s still really pretty. Definitely very green compared to the brick covered Purdue.
I’ll try to keep you updated if anything else interesting comes up. I’ll be much more busy once the conference starts, but I’m sure crazy things will happen.

Leavin on a jet plane, etc etc

Well tomorrow I’ll leave my apartment at 7:30 am and won’t be back until 7 pm on Wednesday the 17th for Evolution 2009, wooo! Because I care about you guys so much, I’ve set up autoposts for every day I’m gone to show you some random fun videos I like. Don’t want to leave you without updates for a week! I’ll have limited internet access through my phone and some public computers at the conference, but don’t expect too much. Even though my phone has a keyboard, I don’t think I could tolerate typing more than a paragraph, haha. I’ll make sure to tweet a sadface when I’m standing outside the Discovery Institute. Don’t worry, the lack of updates will be made up with the billion stories and photos I’ll probably have when I get back.

Somewhat related, should I wear my club t-shirt on my various plane rides home? Photos of the atheistic beauty here… I mean the shirt, not the model. I look like I’m on uppers in the first photo and downers in the second one, wtf. Anyway, might make a neat social experiment. Where do I get the most dirty/confused looks: Pullman, Seattle, Chicago, or Indianapolis? …I think I know the answer to that one already.

Edit: Here, have a photo of where I’m going. Pretty, isn’t it?

Wooo Scientific Adventures!

I’m starting to get pretty excited for Evolution 2009, which I’ll leave for in a week (June 11th, to be exact). It’s a pretty ginormous conference – apparently it attracts 1,000+ biologists. The program itself is a massive tome (can you find me in there? I’m in it, promise!). I’m going with three labmates and my professor, and there are a bunch of professors speaking there that I’m interested in for grad school, so it should be fun.

I’m lucky enough to go because I was accepted as part of their Undergraduate Diversity Program. They take 15-18 undergrads who somehow are “diverse” and pay everything so we can go to the conference. Plane ticket, hotel room, registration cost, food, everything. We even get Professor/Grad student mentors to help show us around the first day, and a special little social thing. Pretty freaking amazing. I’m not sure exactly what criteria made me diverse…if it was just being female, or if it was my work with the atheist club (though that’s probably a majority for an evolution conference, heh). Either way, I’m super grateful that they have this program and I get to be a part of it. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to afford to go.

One gripe though (I know, I know…beggars can’t be choosers, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, yadda yadda). Man are the flights they booked for me awful. I asked to fly with my lab group, but they said they already booked flights for the program. I go 10 am Indianapolis > Chicago > Seattle > Pullman > Shuttle to Moscow, Idaho > Arrive at midnight. One, I’m always annoyed with flights from Indy to Chicago, since I could just freaking drive to Chicago in less time than all the hassle of flying from Indy. Two, I have a 9 hour layover in Seattle. I could theoretically drive to Moscow in less than 6 hours. Three, my return flight from Pullman leaves at 6:45 am, blargh.

The layover annoys me mainly because it’s just inefficient – however, since it’s so huge, I’m going to be able to spend the day exploring Seattle. I’ve never been there before, so now I’m kind of excited. I’m going to store my luggage at the airport and rely on buses/taxis/walking for some adventure. Anyone have any suggestions on must see places or even just awesome local places to eat dinner? So far I’ve been recommended the Space Needle, the Pacific Science Center, Pike Place Fish Market, and the Freemont Troll. I’m not sure what else there is to do, other than stalking Dan Savage and scowling at Starbucks world headquarters while hypocritically buying a cafe mocha.

Evolving Robot Behavior

Yet another reason why science is freaking amazing. Swiss scientists have a population of robots, and they’re watching their behavior evolve. Each robot had LEDs and photodetectors, and its habitat consists of battery-charging “food” zones, and battery-draining “poison” zones. Their programming is initially random, and after they’ve traveled around their habitat a certain amount of time, the scientists turn them off and select the robots with the highest battery life. The programming from these robots gets combined and is used in the next generation.

Repeated enough times, and you start seeing trends. The robots “learn” to approach the food and stay away from the poison. Not only that, but you see the emergence of cheaters and helpers. Cheaters lure robots to the poison, only to go eat the food now that the other robots are busy being poisoned. And the helpers go stand by the poison and warn other robots with their blinky lights to not come near it.

How freaking cool is that? I for one welcome our new robot overlords. I just hope the equilibrium frequency for cheaters stays low.

Mice given human speech gene

Man, science is so cool. Stuff like this is why I’m a geneticist. The FOXP2 gene is considered the “language gene” in humans. People who have nonfunctional versions of the gene have a hard time controlling the fine movements in the face needed for forming words, and their areas of the brain associated with language are less active. FOXP2 is found throughout the animal kingdom and is associated with vocalization and song learning. It is also highly conserved – except in humans. While mice and chimpanzees have the same version of the gene, humans have two non synonymous mutations – that is, two different amino acids.

So what did these scientists do? They stuck the human version of FOXP2 into mice to see what would happen. No, the mice didn’t start talking like Mickey, but they showed changes in brain structure that is associated with human speech and had different ultrasonic vocalizations. Unfortunately we’re not fluent in Mouseish, so we don’t know if these mouse pups are suddenly speaking at a Shakespearean level, but it’s still pretty neat.

This is especially exciting because we kept coming back to this topic in my Eukaryotic genetics class. Our professor was telling us the above information about FOXP2. “What if you put a human FOXP2 in a chimpanzee?” a student asked. “I wonder what would happen.” Half of the class’s eyes twinkled with mad scientist glee (the half that will be researchers, not med students I assume). Our professor sort of laughed nervously. “I don’t know, have fun getting an ethics committee to accept that.” I turned to one of my friends and mouthed, presumably with an evil grin, “I’m gonna do it!!” and it turned into a running joke for the class. She’s the one who sent me the article. We haven’t been scooped quite yet, but almost!! I better get crackin’ on my talking chimp.

Humans vs. Animals

Many parts of this image annoy me (click for bigger version), but my biggest gripe is this quote: “Humans have long considered themselves truly unique. But it turns out that the better word from ‘unique’ is ‘more advanced.'”

Sigh. No, “more advanced” isn’t the better word. In fact, it’s worse than unique. At least it’s true that we’re unique in that we have a certain combination of skills that other animals don’t have, though I’d still argue all animals are unique. But viewing humans as more advanced than the rest of the animal kingdom is a fallacy. It goes back to the Scala Naturae, or the Great Chain of Being. This was the idea that everything in the universe could be ranked in order of how perfect or advanced it was, with God at the top and amoebas and dirt at the bottom. Mammals are better than birds, hawks are better than pigeons, trees that bear fruit we eat are better than ones we don’t, etc.

But that’s not how things work. Through evolution, everything has had the same amount of time on this planet to evolve. Bacteria are just as adapted to their environment as a tree or a tiger or a human. While they’re less complex, I wouldn’t say they’re less advanced. Advanced implies that there’s some end goal in mind that we’re comparing them to, usually the wonderful Homo sapeins. Think of it this way. What if other animals considered themselves the most advanced, and were comparing us to them?

Dolphins: They can only hold their breath for a couple minutes? And they can’t echolocate? Ha! Even bats can do that!

Ducks: They can’t sleep with one half of their brain at a time? But what if a predator wants to come and eat them in the middle of the night! How will they escape if they don’t keep one eye open? Man, they are goners!

Swallow: Humans can’t instinctively migrate thousands of miles to a place they’ve never been before? They need maps and GPS, and they still get lost trying to find the Walmart that’s 15 minutes away? Wow, just wow.

Clark’s nutcracker: I can remember where I stored thousands of seeds across a 15 mile area over the winter, and you can’t even find your car keys. Humans.

Thermus aquaticus: A toasty 160 degrees F is the perfect temperature for me. You start breaking a sweat at 90?! What a bunch of pansies!

Yeah, we wouldn’t fare too well (and I could probably keep going with this list forever). There are plenty of things animals do better than us, but we don’t view those traits as important because we don’t necessarily need them. The environment we evolved in is different than that of a Clark’s nutcracker, so we don’t need that awesome of a memory. It goes both ways – Clark’s nutcrackers don’t need to have language or build fires or have long distance stamina. That doesn’t make them less advanced – they just had different evolutionary needs.

I still think humans are special – we can’t deny that we have certain traits not seen anywhere else in the animal kingdom, or the fact that we’ve actually developed civilization (minor point). But as a biologist, I see all creatures as special with their unique adaptation for their environment. We shouldn’t judge them by human standards.