I do have to agree that kids can say the darndest things, and they are more perceptive than your average Christian.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I do have to agree that kids can say the darndest things, and they are more perceptive than your average Christian.
Way back in July, I proposed that an appropriate response to the inane creationist ads that were appearing on scienceblogs was for people to take advantage of one, an offer of a free booklet on creationism, and then we’d all tear it apart mercilessly. I ordered mine, a lot of you did likewise, and some of you have even written critical posts already.
I forgot.
It wasn’t my fault, though. They didn’t send me my booklet! I jumped through their hoops, I filled out their form, I did everything they asked, and I set the issue aside, anticipating that the arrival of tripe in the mail would be my wake-up alarm to get going. It never happened.
Anyway, we’ll salvage something. If you already wrote a dissection, leave a link in the comments here. I’ll try to pull off a web copy of their garbage, and use that instead. Let’s set a date — a week from today — on which I’ll post my criticisms and link to everyone else’s.
Cheesy cheap creationist frauds, <grumble, grumble, grumble>
The atheism conference in Australia is going to be huge (note the logo in the left sidebar here), with attendance in the thousands, a swarm of speakers, etc. It’s fairly typical for regions to support that kind of influx of tourist dollars into their economies; they want to encourage more visitors. Strangely, though, while the conference leadership has applied for government support in this project, there has been no word yet.
Hmmmm.
Now you might be thinking that this sort of enterprise should be entirely self-supporting, which is true. But then again, consider similar sorts of events with a religious goal, like the Parliament of World Religions or Catholic Youth Day, to which the Australian government has cheerfully provided assistance. There seems to be something unfair going on here.
It seems to me that there are only two consistent positions to take here. Either there will be an equitable distribution of government support to all such conventions, or there will be no support for any of them. If there is to be no assistance to the Global Atheist Convention, then I should hope that the Australian government will also immediately withdraw all funds that would have gone to the religious conventions they’ve been propping up.
Lately, all the polls people have been sending me are already going in the right direction — have I become superfluous? Are atheists everywhere already gleefully clicking buttons in polls without my prompting?
Oh, well, here’s another one. An ambitious priest gets assigned to Brighton, which he calls “the most Godless city in Britain”. He has declared that it is now his intention to transform the place into a sanctuary for unctuous old farts with their brains scrambled by nonsense (uh, those are my words, not his, if you couldn’t tell.) So the local newspaper ran a poll to see what people thought of that.
Is Reverend Archie Coates right to repeat the description of Brighton as “Godless”?
yes, and it’s good he intends to help change this:
14%no, it has its troubles but it is generally a good place:
14%being described as Godless is a compliment:
72%
Those secularists in Britain are just having a good time giving Archie the raspberry, aren’t they?
One more quote from Rev Archie:
Rev Coates last night said: “Since I moved to Brighton six weeks ago I have realised that it is a lot more godly than I imagined. If you look around you see the creativity, the vibrancy and the life of the city.”
Twit. Those are symptoms of godlessness, not godliness.
I think the best thing to do with this video by Jon Rawlinson is let it load in HD, put it on full screen, and set back and mellow out for a few minutes.
You know, the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan could have a real money-maker video here: just aim a camera at that tank for hours, fill up a DVD, and sell it online. They could do a whole series. I’d buy it.
Man, it’s a pretty cool planet we’ve got here. I hope we can take better care of it, so it isn’t all confined to a few large tanks here and there.
But this judge won’t marry interracial couples.
A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have. Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.
“I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.”
That last paragraph is a classic. The “I have lots of X friends” is pretty much a cliche, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard the “I let X use my bathroom” excuse. I’d love to know if he would let a gay person use his bathroom, just so we could calibrate his bigotry a little more precisely.
Comments are superfluous on this one.
It’s yet another transitional fossil! Are you tired of them yet?
Darwinopterus modularis is a very pretty fossil of a Jurassic pterosaur, which also reveals some interesting modes of evolution; modes that I daresay are indicative of significant processes in development, although this work is not a developmental study (I wish…having some pterosaur embryos would be exciting). Here it is, one gorgeous animal.
One important general fact you need to understand to grasp the significance of this specimen: Mesozoic flying reptiles are not all alike! There are two broad groups that can be distinguished by some consistent morphological characters.
The pterosaurs are the older of the two groups, appearing in the late Triassic. They tend to have relatively short skulls with several distinct openings, long cervical (neck) ribs, a short metacarpus (like the palm or sole of the foot), a long tail (with some exceptions), and an expanded flight membrane suspended between the hind limbs, called the cruropatagium. They tend to be small to medium-sized.
The pterodactyls are a more derived group that appear in the late Jurassic. Their skulls are long and low, and have a single large opening in front of the eyes, instead of two. Those neck ribs are gone or reduced, they have a long metacarpus and short tails, and they’ve greatly reduced the cruropatagium. Some of the pterodactyls grew to a huge size.
Here’s a snapshot of their distribution in time and phylogenetic relationships. The pterosaurs are in red, and the pterodactyls are in blue.
Darwinopterus is in there, too—it’s the small purple box numbered “7”. You can see from this diagram that it is a pterosaur in a very interesting position, just off the branch that gave rise to the pterodactyls. How it got there is interesting, too: it’s basically a pterosaur body with the head of a pterodactyl. Literally. The authors of this work carried out multiple phylogenetic analyses, and if they left the head out of the data, the computer would spit out the conclusion that this was a pterosaur; if they left the body out and just analyzed the skull, the computer would declare it a pterodactyl.
What does this tell us about evolution in general? That it can be modular. The transitional form between two species isn’t necessarily a simple intermediate between the two in all characters, but may be a mosaic: the anatomy may be a mix of pieces that resemble one species more than the other. In this case, what happened in the evolution of the pterodactyls was that first a pterodactyl-like skull evolved in a pterosaur lineage, and that was successful; later, the proto-pterodactyls added the post-cranial specializations. Not everything happened all at once, but stepwise.
This should be a familiar concept. In pterodactyls, skulls evolved a specialized morphology first, and the body was shaped by evolutionary processes later. We can see a similar principle in operation in the hominid lineage, too, but switched around. We evolved bipedalism first, in species like Ardipithecus and Australopithecus, and the specializations of our skull (to contain that big brain of which we are so proud) came along later.
As I mentioned at the beginning, this is an example of development and evolution in congruence. We do find modularity in developmental process — we have genetic circuits that are expressed in tissue- and region-specific ways in development. We can talk about patterns of gene expression that follow independent programs to build regions of the body, under the control of regional patterning genes like the Hox complex. In that sense, what we see in Darwinopterus is completely unsurprising.
What is interesting, though, is that these modules, which we’re used to seeing within the finer-grained process of development, also retain enough coherence and autonomy to be visible at the level of macroevolutionary change. It caters to my biases that we shouldn’t just pretend that all the details of development are plastic enough to be averaged out, or that the underlying ontogenetic processes will be overwhelmed by the exigencies of environmental factors, like selection. Development matters — it shapes the direction evolution can take.
Lü J, Unwin DM, Jin X, Liu Y, Ji Q (2009) Evidence for modular evolution in a long-tailed pterosaur with a pterodactyloid skull. Proc. R. Soc. B published online 14 October 2009 doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1603
I should have mentioned that Darren Naish has a very thorough write-up on Darwinopterus!
I think I like this band, NOFX.
