They announced their decision to shut down the organization and cancel future conferences yesterday. This is sad news — it has always been an innovative, interesting event, but they faced a terrible hit when one of their founders, Bora Zivkovic, was slammed with charges of harassing women, and they’ve been struggling to get donations to support the organization. I suspect they may also have gotten a bit over-extended, too, since they’d been creating satellite conferences on narrower topics at different locations (which was an excellent idea, by the way, but may not have been wise if their core operations were overtaxed).

The full announcement is below the fold.

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I’ve been so disappointed in the journal BioEssays lately. It hasn’t gotten bad, exactly, it’s just changed, moving away from my interests. It used to have lots of papers on developmental biology, and now it rarely does; I think it’s since Adam Wilkins left the journal staff.

But every once in a while I still check in. I may have to change my mind about the quality. They’ve published an article on cancer by Lineweaver, Davies, and Vincent, on their absurd “atavistic theory of cancer”. It’s embarrassingly bad — I’ve written about it before, and Davies openly admits that it’s based on … Haeckelian recapitulation.

You should be dumbfounded by this revelation.

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Watch. It’s very soothing.

A company that makes drill bits for fracking is painting them Susan G. Komen Pink — that specific intense shade that has become fixed in the public eye as the color of breast cancer research. Note, though, that this is entirely an initiative by the drill bit company, and there doesn’t seem to be a specific partnership, and the company doesn’t seem to be donating any money to breast cancer research, but are just painting all their bits a different color than usual, and tossing in a breast cancer pamphlet.

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Deja vu…years ago, we I was a wee young grad student and the only labs doing work on zebrafish were at the University of Oregon, we used to have to do this annoying thing everyone called the “zebrafish litany” at our talks. Because they were relatively unknown, we had this short explanation for why we were working on zebrafish: rapidlydevelopingtransparentvertebrateembryos. And later we added “genetics” and “transgenics” and “medicalapplications” to the boilerplate. As the mob of zebrafish acolytes grew, I swear you could hear the squishy sounds of eyeballs rolling every time we started our introductions.

Well, the laugh is on them. Now everybody gets to read the zebrafish litany, and we’re taking over the known universe.

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I’m familiar with a certain company for their manufacture of electron microscopes and spectrophotometers, and there they proudly slap their name on their products. But strangely, they don’t attach their name to their most widely used, most popular, mass market product. Can you guess what it is?

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Science magazine has updated their list of Twitter Science Stars to add a few of the people they missed before — so now I’m #18, rather than #10. I am crushed.

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All right, Larry Moran, why did you post about this paper now? I finished the unit on the origins of life in my cell biology class over a week ago, and this summary of the metabolism first model of abiogenesis would have been very helpful. I first gave them a review of redox reactions in chemistry, and then some general ideas about events in deep sea vents that generate a source of energy that early chemistry could have tapped, but this paper is full of specifics — probably a bit too heavy going for college sophomores, but they could have appreciated some of the diagrams.

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William Dembski spoke at the University of Chicago in August, and a video of the talk is available. I tried to watch it, I really did, but I ended up skipping through most of it (one of the advantages of seeing it on youtube!). Here’s my rather stream-of-consciousness monolog as I was flicking like a damselfly over the stagnant pond of his words:

“Get to the point, Bill. Skip. No biology. Skip. No biology yet. Skip. Wait, that model is anti-biology…evolution doesn’t work like that. Watches a short segment. Nope, nonsense. Skip. No biology, skip. Oh, “specified complexity”…does he define it? Listens intently for a bit. Nope. Skip. Dawkins’ weasel program? He still doesn’t understand it! No biology, no biology, no biology, I’m done.”

I know, that wasn’t very informative, but then, neither was the talk. There were a few shots of the audience, and they didn’t seem particularly enthralled, either.

Joe Felsenstein watched the whoooole thing, though, and has some very sharp observations on Dembski’s model.

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