(via Cannabis Culture)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
In Australia New Zealand:
It started when seven-year-old Alijah got a small cut on the bottom of his foot in December 2012.
"Of course we didn’t think it was too serious, it was just a little cut but a couple of days later he started getting symptoms like a stroke on the side of his face," Mr Williams says.
"A couple of days later during the night he started to get cramps across his face. His face would contort and he was in a lot of pain."
After 24 hours in Auckland’s Starship Children’s hospital, the doctors diagnosed Alijah with tetanus, and he was taken to intensive care.
His parents didn’t get him a tetanus shot because they were afraid of vaccines.
In California:
Whooping cough, also known as pertussis, has claimed the 10th victim in California, in what health officials are calling the worst outbreak in 60 years.
Since the beginning of the year, 5,978 confirmed, probable and suspected cases of the disease have been reported in California.
All of the deaths occurred in infants under the age of 3 months, says Michael Sicilia, a spokesman for the California Department of Public Health. Nine were younger than 8 weeks old, which means they were too young to have been vaccinated against this highly contagious bacterial disease.
"This is a preventable disease," says Sicilia, because there is a vaccine for whooping cough to protect those coming in contact with infants, and thereby protect the infants.
However, some parents are choosing to not vaccinate their children. In other cases, previously vaccinated children and adults may have lost their immunity because the vaccine has worn off.
Ignorance kills, and we’ve got people promoting ignorance.
People like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. likes to talk. When he calls you to discuss vaccines, he talks a lot, uninterruptably. He called Keith Kloor after Kloor wrote a story for Discover about RFK Jr.’s keynote address to a convention of people who think vaccines cause autism. You can read about their conversation at Kloor’s blog. Phil Plait wrote a story about RFK Jr. for Slate last week, pointing out that the idea that vaccines cause autism is a crackpot theory that has been thoroughly debunked, that it is dangerous, and that RFK Jr. is one of its most effective proponents.
Kennedy claims that thimerosal, a preservative used in some vaccines, causes autism. No, it doesn’t. This has been tested out the wazoo, and there’s no connection between autism and thimerosal, or autism and vaccines, for that matter. In order to back up his claim, Kennedy is reduced to completely misrepresenting the scientific evidence.
For a guy whose family has such a distinguished record of public service, Kennedy says some pretty awful things about government employees: “The lies that you are hearing and printing from the CDC are things that should be investigated.” He spoke to one scientist (he named her but I won’t spread the defamation) who, he said, “was actually very honest. She said it’s not safe. She said we know it destroys their brains.”
I asked the scientist about their conversation. She said there is in fact no evidence that thimerosal destroys children’s brains, and that she never said that it did.
There’s a pattern here.
When RFK Jr. challenged the university scientist about a study of the biological activity of thimerosal in vitro, which “everybody accepts because journalists hadn’t read it,” the scientist said, “ ‘Oh, yeah, you’re right about that.’ He backpedaled.” That’s because “now he was dealing with somebody who wasn’t afraid to read science.”
I talked to the scientist, who would prefer I not use his name because he gets death threats from unhinged anti-vaxxers. He said, “Kennedy completely misrepresented everything I said.”
I don’t know why Kennedy is bothering to misquote scientists and trying to get scientific authority to back him up, though, because he doesn’t believe in scientists anyway. He’s got a gigantic conspiracy theory in which all these scientific organizations are lying.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s elaborate conspiracy theory is just as delusional and dangerous. Rather than accepting the findings of the Institute of Medicine, the National Institute of Mental Health, or the American Academy of Pediatrics, Kennedy says the scientists are lying. He says vaccine-makers are intentionally poisoning kids and giving them autism. Only he and his fellow activists know the truth because journalists, although they may report aggressively on the National Security Agency, Defense Department, and Central Intelligence Agency, are cowed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Apparently hereditary political lineages are a really bad idea. The UK has Prince Charles, and the US has Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
These are awesome. I want a swarm for a pet.
Upwards of 3 feet long and in some cases-as thick as a garden hose and have the texture of jello. There’s mucus. These things are crazy.
Key words: EAT EVERYTHING. ALIVE or DEAD. These have been fed almost everything-and they eat what’s given them: fecal pellets, starfish, dead seal meat, fish, sponges, sea anemones, worms amphipods, penguin meat, sardine meat (with tomato sauce!) and on and on….
(via The Echinoblog.)
This language stuff is messy and complex. I was looking at this series of maps illustrating American pronunciation differences, and was starting to see a pattern in my own language — basically, if you look at the general rule for Washington state and Minnesota (which are often the same), that’s how I talk. With one exception:
I grew up spending many summers wading in the Green River collecting those crustaceans (and eating them), and we always called them crawdads, without question. “Crayfish” was a formal name, “crawfish” was unheard of. It’s green on this map.
Then I realized…it was my father the fisherman who taught us about crawdads, and his family was apparently Appalachian Scots-Irish way, way back, who ended up in Iowa during the Civil War era, and eventually wandered into lives picking fruit and vegetables in the Spokane-Yakima axis…and those areas are all greenish on the map. Cool. There are these vestiges of my family history lurking right there on my tongue.
One weird thing about the article on this, though. It says,
Regional accents are a major part of what makes American English so interesting as a dialect.
American English doesn’t vary all that much — I can easily understand everyone all across the country. English in the United Kingdom, though — that’s where you get the strong regional accents.
(via Skepchick.)
Another day, another stupid creationist argument. This time, it’s some pastor whining that biologists don’t understand how animals survive the winter. We don’t?
These insects are not the only ones that hibernate – there are several others butterflies, insects, and even frog that make antifreeze in the fall and hibernate through the winter. Insects in all stages of life – eggs, pupa, and adult (CHECK THIS) – have been programmed to make various versions of antifreeze chemicals in order to survive freezing weather. How did the first Mourning Cloak butterfly learn to make anti-freeze? If it failed even once, the result was death – an evolutionary dead-end. God designed this butterfly to survive the brutal winter as an adult butterfly. The next time you see a butterfly very early in the spring – chances are it is a butterfly that knows how to make antifreeze!
How many attempts to survive the winter did the woolly bear caterpillar try? When did a certain caterpillar “get it right” and survive? Remember there had to be both male and female surviving to produce eggs and continue the species. The original Arctic woolly-bear caterpillar had to make this antifreeze so that its cells would freeze without rupturing for not just one winter…but 13 times for 13 winter freezes…always remembering to produce the antifreeze only just before winter arrived. Then it had to learn to completely rearrange its body structure to turn into a moth on the 14th spring.
How do evolutionists explain this? They don’t! The Arctic woolly-bear caterpillar, the Mourning Cloak butterfly, and a myriad of other creatures were designed to survive through the freezing winter. When you see design, there must be a Designer and that Designer is God. Those who wish to deny God’s existence see this marvelous design and say evolution did it – random mutational changes filtered by natural selection caused all this marvelous design to happen…but this is just storytelling and hand waving – it explains nothing.
Gosh, what a surprise — an ignorant creationist. Actually, we do. Winters aren’t all-or-nothing — look at a globe, and we have these things called latitudes, where we can see variation in the intensity of winters. Minnesota gets rather cold in January, while Nebraska is milder, and Texas is milder still. That means it’s trivial to find animals with a range that spreads from mild to cold environments, and that natural selection can have both variation and different selection regimes to operate. This isn’t difficult at all.
Furthermore, anti-freezes aren’t hard to generate: these are just small molecules that lower the freezing point or bind nascent ice crystals to suppress ice formation. These things evolve all the time by chance! Ask Sean Carroll.
Insects have evolved a variety of cryoprotective substances. As winter approaches, many freeze-tolerant insects produce high concentrations of glycerol and other kinds of alcohol molecules. These substances don’t prevent freezing, but they slow ice formation and allow the fluids surrounding cells to freeze in a more controlled manner while the contents of the cells remain unfrozen.
For maximum protection, some Arctic insects use a combination of such cryoprotectants and antifreezes to control ice formation, to protect cells and to prevent refreezing as they thaw. Indeed, a new kind of antifreeze was recently discovered in the Upis beetle by a team of researchers from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. Unlike the protein antifreezes of other beetles, snow fleas and moths, the Upis antifreeze is a complex sugar called xylomannan that is as effective at suppressing ice growth as the most active insect protein antifreezes.
The necessity of avoiding freezing has truly been the mother of a great number of evolutionary inventions. This new finding raises the likelihood that there are more chemical tricks to discover about how insects cope with extreme cold.
Carroll has written a book, The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution
Meanwhile, arctic cod also carry an antifreeze protein…but it’s different and of independent origin from the one found in antarctic notothenioid fish.
So, actually, this creationist is completely wrong. Not only can we explain the evolution of antifreezes in animals, we do so in explicit detail, with step-by-step analyses of the molecular events behind them. If you want to see “storytelling and handwaving” that “explains nothing”, you’ll have to go to the loons who say “God did it.”
I’ve been in work and personal overload lately, and I apologize for not annoying people here nearly as frequently as I’d like. The work overload, at least, will likely lift soon. In the meantime, I wanted to pass something along about an opportunity for biodiversity-oriented bloggers. It’s below the fold. For you non-fold-looking-under Hordelings, here are some cuddly cacti:
Hey, I was only joking when I said fishing rule breakers ought to be chopped up for shark chum, but some days…this story about fisherman bragging about killing a record 1300 lb mako shark gives me second thoughts. There’s nothing praiseworthy about exterminating a top predator, especially one that doesn’t threaten your terrestrial butt at all.
There is a poll, if you’d like to express your opinion.
Should sharks be protected from fishing?
Yes 86%
No 14%
It’s been a busy, productive, tiring day. I’ve been working hard, leading and administering, while my student Josh has been working hard working working. We’re building a benchtop fish system and I seem to have spent a lot of the day in local hardware stores gathering stuff that Josh then assembles and cuts and hauls and scrubs and cleans. It’s a rough life.
Anyway, here’s the work in progress. On the left is the fish system…well, the shelves in place. On the right is the bulk of the fish system, in pieces and boxes and on the floor. We’ll be plumbing things together tomorrow, at least the stuff we’ve got — more bits will be trickling in as the week goes on. By this time next week I expect to see water cascading everywhere and fish frolicking and mating! And mermaids! And sirens! Manatees, even!
Josh just started work yesterday. I think we’re making wonderful progress already.
