Priceless artifact for sale!

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Oh, lord, I am convinced. Look at this fossil; it’s a perfect human footprint, with a dinosaur track right on top of it! The people who found it promise that it’s not a fake, they’ve actually done a CAT scan of the rock to show that it is genuine, somehow. This will revolutionize paleontology and shake up the entire field of evolution!

It’s also available for the taking on ebay. Only $5, and more than 10 of them are in stock.

It’s a bit pricey, but worth it for something that would get me an easy publication in Nature. I wonder…I’ve got a gross of nails from the True Cross here that I’ve been selling for the same price, maybe they’d take one in trade?

Chiropractic poll needs adjustment

I wouldn’t let one of those quacks get near my neck, let alone any other body part, but apparently Connecticut chiropractors are fighting hard to suppress the information about risk of serious injury from cervical manipulation. And it’s poll time!

Chiropractic Warning: Should chiropractors be required to tell their patients about the remote risk of a stroke from cervical manipulation?

Yes (505 responses)
28%
No (1155 responses)
63%
Depends (163 responses)
9%

Nice spin in the question, too. It’s only a “remote risk” of paralysis, stroke, and death from an ineffectual ‘treatment’. Maybe Connecticut should go further and require that patients also be informed that chiropractic is also a pointless exercise that in good hands is nothing but physical therapy, and in ill-informed hands is dangerous nonsense based on 19th century pseudo-science? Yeah, tell your patients about “subluxions”.

Mrs. Robinson has some standards

Iris Robinson is an MP in Northern Ireland who has been, umm, frolicking. She was 58; she had been having an adulterous affair with a 19 year old. Eh, that’s a private matter between her and her husband, you’re thinking, and we shouldn’t care about it, as long as it doesn’t affect her performance in her job.

Except…

She’s been using her government connections to funnel money to her boy toy. Lots of money.

He [the young man] said Iris Robinson, now 60, gave him two checks for 25,000 pounds ($40,000) each, but she then asked him for 5,000 pounds ($8,000) back, possibly to donate to the evangelical Protestant church she attends.

Wow. Teen-aged lovers cost $80,000 now? Even with the 10% rebate, that’s way out of my price range.

But wait…she needed the money back to give to her church? That’s a bit hypocritical, I think, unless this is the Church of Free (or Not-So-Free) Love. It’s not though; she actually has a reputation as a conservative freak about sex. She doesn’t like homosexuals at all.

There can be no viler act, apart from homosexuality and sodomy, than sexually abusing innocent children.

There must be sufficient confidence that the community has the best possible protection against such perverts.

…

What I say I base on biblical pronouncements, based on God’s word. I am amazed that people are surprised when I quote from scriptures. It shows the churches either aren’t preaching God’s word or are watering it down.

I cannot think of anything more sickening than a child being abused. It is comparable to the act of homosexuality. I think they are all comparable. I feel totally repulsed by both.

Get that? Consensual homosexual behavior: more vile than raping children! And she isn’t even Catholic.

She may have been boinking a youngster 40 years her junior and barely above the age of consent, but at least she wasn’t cavorting with a peer and an equal with similar backgrounds and interests and the same sexual organs! That would be bad.

The anastomosing thread that never ends!

The last edition of the Never-Ending Thread has once again grown beyond reason, with no end in sight. At the same time, a thread that began with a sneer at creationists and grew to such proportions that it needed to expand to another thread has also bloated up to the point where it needs trimming.

So there I am, holding two tubes on the internet that are pulsing and spewing, ready to cut both off…and what is any scientist’s natural inclination in such circumstances? Why, to take the severed ends and suture them together and see what happens! That is this new thread, an anastomosis between two, count ’em, two old threads. I wonder…will it explode?

I must also confess to some curiosity about how Sven will cope with the fusion.

Skin-deep Christianity

I was one of those weird kids growing up: nose always in a book, bored by sports, happy to go to school. This was a bit strange because my father had been a broken-nosed lineman on the varsity high school football team, was always playing hooky to go fishing, and once he graduated, went off to a succession of manly muscular jobs, working on the railroad, as a lumberjack, and eventually as an auto mechanic. I think he was perpetually baffled by the bookish nerd he’d fathered, but then, he had six kids and everyone of us ended up different, independent, and stubborn in our own ways. And that was just fine, that’s what good parenting is about — supporting your kids just enough that they can be free to be themselves. My parents did a good job.

When I had kids of my own, I also discovered how hard that is. Children can be wilful little beasts, but they are also desperate for approval. It would have been so easy to raise a family of neurotic, unhappy, but miserably obedient dependents, if only I’d been willing to impose my views on theirs, and withheld love to get my way. As it is, though, I’ve ended up with three kids who’ve each gone off in their own weird direction — sometimes leaving me baffled — but I trust them to know their own minds and be willing to struggle a bit to figure out what works for them, not necessarily what works for me.

So it was with a special revulsion that I read this story of oblivious parents giving their kids home tattoos. They were branding them with their religious identity, inking crosses into their skins, which explains a lot, since smug Christians tend to be completely blind to the freakishness of their obsession, but it wouldn’t make any difference if they’d been atheists punching scarlet “A”s into their childrens’ shoulders — it’s child abuse. It completely misses the point of parenting, which is not the same as indoctrination, and confuses guidance and education with ownership. Here’s what the mother said about it:

“I’m their mother,” Patty Jo Marsh said late Saturday. “Shouldn’t I be able to decide if they get one?”

No.

Children are your responsibility, not your personal sheet of blank paper. They aren’t there for you to scribble on, crumple up, and throw away if you don’t like them. Isn’t it weird how the religious wackjobs can howl about how a fetus is a human being that must be granted the privilege of existence, but once it pops out, it reverts to being a possession, a thing that mommy and daddy can do with as they please?

Jeez, next thing you know they’ll be demanding the right to chop off the ends of the boys’ penises. Or to take a chunk of broken glass to the girls’ clitorises.

Nah, nobody would be that crazy.

I feel sorry for this kid

His class was going to go on a field trip to a museum; his parents denied the trip and scrawled their reasons why on the note.

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Note: Just to let you it is not that we don’t believe in things like that, it is just misleading when you talk about it being billions of years old, when we all know that the world is only about 6,000 years old. So why would I pay so that you can misslead my children, your world is just a revolving(?), ours has a start and an end. God created the world. He created animals and man all in the same week. It was also Adam who named all the animals, they will do the essay ‘Rock and Minerals’ but it might not be 5 pages long, and about billions of years, it will be according to the Bible.

That’s just sad. And it happens fairly often; a few years ago, our university theater group put on a play about tolerance for local schools, and the notes from parents refusing to allow their kids to see it flooded in. It’s just not that often that one of those notes get scanned and put up on Failblog.

Christian martyr complex on a hair-trigger

One of those lunatic religious right sites compiled a list of the top ten “anti-christian attacks” of 2009…and the pathetic thing about it is how feeble and largely imaginary the attacks are. They range from a rantin’ anti-choice pastor getting arrested for harassing women at a clinic to the existence of those uppity gays who complain when Christians lie about homosexuality. There isn’t one crucifixion or involuntary lion-feeding on the whole list. Read this dissection of the compilation — those poor guys are really desperate for some notable oppression.

Tetrapods are older than we thought!

Some stunning fossil trackways have been discovered in Poland. The remarkable thing about them is that they’re very old, about 395 million years old, and they are clearly the tracks of tetrapods. Just to put that in perspective, Tiktaalik, probably the most famous specimen illustrating an early stage of the transition to land, is younger at 375 million years, but is more primitive in having less developed, more fin-like limbs. So what we’ve got is a set of footprints that tell us the actual age of the transition by vertebrates from water to land had to be much, much earlier than was expected, by tens of millions of years.

Here are the trackways. Note that what they show is distinct footprints from both the front and hind limbs, not drag marks, and all that that implies: these creatures had jointed limbs with knees and elbows and lifted them and swung them forward to plant in the mud. They were real walkers.

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Trackways. a, Muz. PGI 1728.II.16. (Geological Museum of the Polish Geological Institute). Trackway showing manus and pes prints in diagonal stride pattern, presumed direction of travel from bottom to top. A larger print (vertical hatching) may represent a swimming animal moving from top to bottom. b, On the left is a generic Devonian tetrapod based on Ichthyostega and Acanthostega fitted to the trackway. On the right, Tiktaalik (with tail reconstructed from Panderichthys) is drawn to the same shoulder-hip length. Positions of pectoral fins show approximate maximum ‘stride length’. c, Muz. PGI 1728.II.15. Trackway showing alternating diagonal and parallel stride patterns. In a and c, photographs are on the left, interpretative drawings are on the right. Thin lines linking prints indicate stride pattern. Dotted outlines indicate indistinct margins and wavy lines show the edge of the displacement rim. Scale bars, 10 cm.

They were also big, approximately 2 meters long. What you see here is a detailed scan of one of the footprints of this beast; no fossils of the animal itself have been found, so it’s being compared to the feet of Ichthyostega and Acanthostega, two later tetrapods. There are definite similarities, with the biggest obvious difference being how much larger the newly-discovered animal is. Per Ahlberg makes an appearance in a video to talk about the size and significance of the mystery tetrapod.

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Foot morphologies. a, Laser surface scan of Muz. PGI 1728.II.1, left pes. b, Complete articulated left hind limb skeleton of Ichthyostega, MGUH f.n. 1349, with reconstructed soft tissue outline. c, Left hind limb of Acanthostega, reconstructed soft tissue outline based on skeletal reconstruction in ref. 8. We note the large size of the print compared to the limbs of Ichthyostega and Acanthostega, and that the print appears to represent not just the foot but the whole limb as far as the knee. d, digit; fe, femur; ti, tibia; fi, fibula; fib, fibulare. Scale bars, 10 mm.

What’s it all mean? Well, there’s the obvious implication that if you want to find earlier examples of the tetrapod transition, you should look in rocks that are about 400 million years old or older. However, it’s a little more complicated than that, because the mix of existing fossils tells us that there were viable, long-lasting niches for a diversity of fish, fishapods, and tetrapods that temporally coexisted for a long period of time; the evolution of these animals was not about a constant linear churn, replacing the old model with the new model every year. Comparing them to cars, it’s like there was a prolonged window of time in which horse-drawn buggies, Stanley Steamers, Model Ts, Studebakers, Ford Mustangs, and the Honda Civic were all being manufactured simultaneously and were all competitive with each other in specific markets…and that window lasted for 50 million years. Paleontologists are simply sampling bits and pieces of the model line-up and trying to sort out the relationships and timing of their origin.

The other phenomenon here is a demonstration of the spottiness of the fossil record. The Polish animal has left us no direct fossil remains; the rocks where its footprints were found formed in an ancient tide flat or lagoon, which is not a good location for the preservation of bones. This suggests that tetrapods may have first evolved in these kinds of marine environments, and only later expanded their ranges to live in the vegetated margins of rivers, where the flow of sediments is much more conducive to burial and preservation of animal remains. That complicates the story, too; not only do we have diverse stages of the tetrapod transition happily living together in time, but there may be a bit of selective fossilization going on, that only preserves some of the more derived forms living in taphonomically favorable environments.

Niedzwiedzki G, Szrek P, Narkiewicz K, Narkiewicz M, Ahlberg PE (2010) Tetrapod trackways from the early Middle Devonian period of Poland. Nature 463(7277): 43-48.