I’m slamming the door shut on yet another thread that will not die, which was in turn the progeny of another enduring thread — as you might guess, this one was fueled by a thickheaded creationist’s refusal to acknowledge the evidence. Alan Clarke, if you start regurgitating creationist BS here again, I will shut you down. Otherwise, if necessary, converse here.
I’ve been reading a new book by Jack Horner and James Gorman, How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn’t Have to Be Forever(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and I was pleasantly surprised. It’s a book that gives a taste of the joys of geology and paleontology, talks at some length about a recent scientific controversy, acknowledges the importance of evo-devo, and will easily tap into the vast mad scientist market.
It is a little scattered, in that it seems to be the loosely assembled concatenation of a couple of books, but that’s part of the appeal; read the chapters like you would a collection of short stories, and you’ll get into the groove.
The first part is about Horner’s life in Montana, the Hell Creek formation, and dinosaur collecting. Hand this to any kid and get him hooked on paleontology for life; I recall reading every book I could get my hands on that talked about Roy Chapman Andrews as a young’un, and it permanently twisted me…in a good way. This will have the same effect, and many people will think about heading out to Garfield County for a little dusty adventure. I know I am — all that stands in my way is South Dakota.
A good chunk of the book is about molecules and how they show the relatedness of dinosaurs to birds, and to the work of Horner’s former student, Mary Schweitzer, who discovered soft tissue in T. rex bones. Horner presents a good overview of the subject, but is also appropriately cautious. You’ll get a good feel for the difficulty of finding this material, and for interpreting it; he clearly believes that these are scraps of real T. rex tissue, but how intact it is, what kinds of changes have occurred in it, and how much information will be extractable from these rare bits of preserved collagen (or whatever) is left an open question.
Finally, the subject of the title…Horner was an advisor to the Jurassic Park movies, and right away he dismisses the idea of extracting 65 million year old DNA in enough quantity to reconstitute a dinosaur as clearly nothing but a fantasy. That’s simply not how it can be done. But he does have a grand, long-term plan for recreating a dinosaur.
What is it? Why, it’s developmental biology, of course. Development is the answer to everything.
Here’s his vision, and I found it believable and captivating: start with a modern dinosaur, a chicken, figure out the developmental pathways that make it different from an ancient dinosaur, and tweak them back to the ancestral condition. For instance, birds have lost the long bony tail of their ancestors, reducing it to a little stump called a pygostyle. In the embryo, they start to make a long tail, but then developmental switches put a kink in it and reduce it to a stub. If we could only figure out what specific molecules are signaling the tissue to take this modern reducing path and switch them off, then maybe we could produce a generation of chickens with the long noble tails of a velociraptor.
My first thought was skepticism — it can’t be that easy. There may be a simple network of genes that regulate this one early decision to form a pygostyle from a tail, but there have been tens of millions of years of adaptation by other genes to the modern condition; we’re dealing with a large network of interlinked genes here, and unraveling one step in development doesn’t mean that subsequent steps are still competent to respond in the ancient pattern. But then, thinking about it a little more, one of the properties of the genome is its plasticity and ability to respond in a coherent, integrated way to changes in one part of a gene network. That capacity might mean you could reconstitute a tail.
And then, once you’ve got a tailed chicken, you could work on adding teeth to the jaws. And foreclaws. And while you’re at it, find the little genomic slider that controls body size, and turn it up to 11. What he’s proposing is a step-by-step analysis of chicken-vs.-dinosaur decisions in the developmental pathways, and inserting intentional atavisms into them. This is all incredibly ambitious, and it might not work…but the only way to find out is try. I like that in a scientist. Turning a chicken into a T. rex is a true Mad Scientist project, and one that I must applaud.
One reservation I have about this section of the book is that too much time is spent dwelling over ethical concerns. Need I mention that real Mad Scientists do not fret over the footling trivia of the Institutional Review Board? These are chicken embryos, animals that your average member of the taxpaying public finds so inconsequential that they will pay to have them homogenized into spongy-textured slabs of yellow protein to be slapped onto their McMuffin. Please, people, get some perspective.
As for respecting the chickens themselves, what can be grander and more respectful than this project? I would whisper to my chickens, “With these experiments, I will take your children’s children’s children, and give them great ripping claws like scythes, and razor-sharp serrate fangs like daggers, and I will turn them into multi-story towers of muscle and bone that will be able to trample KFC restaurants as if they were matchboxes.” And their eyes would light up with a feral gleam of primeval ambition, and they would offer me their ovaries willingly. I’d be doing the chickens a favor. Maybe some chicken farmers would have cause to be fearful, but I wouldn’t be working on their embryos, so let them tremble.
Oh, all right. Horner is taking the responsible path and putting some serious thought into the ethics of this kind of experiment, which is the right thing to do. It’s also the kind of project that will generate serious and useful information about developmental networks, even if it fails in its ultimate aim.
But I have a dream, too. Of a day when biotechnology is ubiquitous, and middle-class kids everywhere will have a cheap DNA sequencer and synthesizer in their garages, and a freezer with handy vectors and enzymes for directed insertional mutagenesis. And one day, Mom will come home with a box of fresh guaranteed organic free range chicken eggs, and Junior’s eyes will glitter with a germ of a cunning plan, fed by a little book he found in the library…and 30-foot-tall fanged chickens will triumphantly stride the cul-de-sacs of suburbia, and the roar of the dinosaur will be heard once again.
Eugenie Scott has been named to the Scientific American 10, the top 10 people in the past year who have demonstrated exceptional leadership and accomplishment in guaranteeing that future technologies will be applied to the benefit of humanity“. Everyone applaud now!
I’m sure this happens all the time.
A 2cm long fish apparently found it’s way into the penis of a 14-year-old boy from India in a bizarre medical case.
The patient was admitted to hospital with complaints of pain, dribbling urine and acute urinary retention spanning a 24-hour period. According to the boy, the fish slipped into his penis while he was cleaning his aquarium at home.
This is precisely why, when I’m cleaning the bank of tanks in my lab, I make sure to keep my pants on.
(via Rev. BigDumbChimp, who always finds stories like this.)
We have a new blog around these parts, and it’s by a science librarian. Be quiet and respectful of the other patrons when you visit, and don’t get any fines — he will hunt you down.
And deserved it is, in this remarkably ignorant article by a creationist named Peter Heck. It starts out very, very badly.
It never ceases to amaze me how intellectually condescending evolutionary naturalists can be. Keep in mind, these are folks who believe that an indescribably tiny wad of nothingness exploded into a fully functional, structured, and ordered universe of orbiting planets and complex creatures without any supernatural agency involved. They are the ones who cling to a theory known as spontaneous generation – the notion that dead matter can just suddenly pop to life. They are the ones who champion a man (Charles Darwin) who suggested that Africans were more closely related to gorillas than Caucasians. They are the ones who believe that a wolf-like animal with hooves took to the water, lost its legs, and morphed into a whale (Cetaceans). If anyone should go easy on the intellectual condescension, it’s these people. But they don’t.
Wow. Let’s begin at the top.
Scientists believe that the universe began in the Big Bang because a large body of astronomical observation and mathematical work provides evidence that it happened. It’s odd, it’s counterintuitive to us short-lived humans who don’t see a large enough span of time to see changes on an astronomical scale, and there certainly are a lot of unanswered questions about what was going on in the first instant of our origin…but the physics all points in that direction. On the other hand, of course, we’ve got creationists who believe the universe was poofed into existence pretty much as it is right now by a snap of a god’s fingers 6,000 years ago, and the reason they think that is because priests of a tribe of nomadic goat-herders said so. Who should be intellectually condescending here?
Biologists recognize that the basis of life is chemistry — that we are the product of some wonderfully interesting biochemical reactions. We do not believe in spontaneous generation, but we do know that the boundary between biology and chemistry is very, very fuzzy indeed, and that there was a transition in the history of life where chemical replicators gradually acquired sufficient complexity that they became the basis for life. Again, this is the product of evidence and experiment: we see molecular indicators of the common origin of all life, and that we see even in our own cells the hallmarks of a history with a much simpler origin. On the other hand, of course, we’ve got creationists who believe a god independently created each species fixed and eternal, and that there are few enough of these unchangeable forms that they could all be loaded on a big boat. Why do they think so? Because a few Jewish poets and mystics scribbled down a page and a half of metaphor in an old book. Who should be intellectually condescending here?
Charles Darwin had complex views on race (I recommend Desmond and Moore’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) for a good overview). He did have the common biases of his time, and certainly did believe that white Europeans were the best and most advanced of all peoples. However, the creationists of the time also shared those views, and in many cases were much worse. Louis Agassiz, for instance, thought that black and white people were independently created; he found Darwin’s view, that Europeans shared blood ancestry with Africans, to be repugnant in the extreme. The views of the religious were divided between slavery-promoting, black-denigrating believers in plural origins who thought blacks were marked as inferior by their god, and abolitionists who read the Bible as describing a brotherhood of all peoples. Darwin’s idea of evolution actually provided scientific support for the unity camp — and he himself found slavery abhorrent. To claim that Darwin was deplorable because he was a racist is both a gross misreading of history (nothing new to creationists) and a logical fallacy (also nothing new), since his views on race have nothing to do with the validity of his scientific ideas. Who should be intellectually condescending here?
The evolution of whales is also a matter of fact and evidence. We have the fossils; we can see a pattern of change across geological time, from those hooved terrestrial quadrupeds to flippered ambush predators adapted to living in the shallows to four-flippered, paddle-tailed swimmers to obligate water-dwellers with flukes and no hind limbs, with many stages in between. It is a beautiful and strongly-supported example of macroevolutionary change. So yes, we believe it — you’d have to be blind to ignore the testimony of the rocks. On the other hand, of course, we’ve got creationists who are shown the succession of forms and retreat to arguments that they’re just the animals who missed Noah’s big boat. The reason they think so is because a century of ludicrous apologists for fundamentalist faith have been frantically denying the emerging evidence. Who should be intellectually condescending here?
The rest of Heck’s article professes to cite specific instances of evolutionary problems. Swine flu isn’t an example of evolution — it’s just microevolution. He makes up stories to support his claim.
If Darwin was right, we should be able to observe and replicate gene mutations that yield new information nearly everywhere we look. We simply cannot.
But we do. All the time. The mechanisms are documented and demonstrated, and we even have thorough experimental confirmation of the acquisition of new genetic properties in evolving populations.
Heck continues his creationist twaddle with more outrageous claims.
Meanwhile, what we can find are innumerable cases of destructive gene mutations, where we end up with less genetic information than what was originally present. Take the recent discovery of perfectly preserved octopus remains. The discovery revealed that these ancient octopi actually had more genetic information than do modern octopi. Call it “Darwin in reverse.” Both horizontal and destructive mutations support the creationist model…and both devastate Darwin’s.
Errm, what? I wrote about those Cretaceous octopods — there was absolutely nothing in the work to quantify genetic information. What they revealed was a pattern of change — that macroevolution thing that Heck denies — in support of evolutionary explanations for octopus origins. And evolutionary models do not demand any direction for information; lineages can be streamlined and simplified, or they can become more elaborate and complicated. Everything is in response to local opportunities.
Who should be intellectually condescending here? I think the side that presents the evidence, actually seeks out new knowledge to test their conclusions, and actually demonstrates some knowledge and scholarship deserves to be a little uppity and arrogant. It’s the people like Peter Heck, who are utterly ignorant of the science, mangle what little they know, and actively mislead people about the evidence who might deserve a little condescension. My only reservation about that is that I tend to favor treating ignorant, lying twerps with open contempt instead.
Perfect: cobble together an obscenely irrational hybrid of religion and science in the vain attempt to appease everyone at once, and what do you get? Something to annoy everyone at once.
Oh, no. I spent a long day traveling, getting my daughter to the airport in Minneapolis so she could fly off to Phoenix for 10 weeks of research (she has arrived, and seems a bit shocked to be in a desert), and then I drove all the way back. I sit down to see what has happened in the world, and discover that Charlotte Allen hates me. She doesn’t like you much, either. And she got her little tirade published in the LA Times. Let’s take a look and see what she doesn’t like about us.
Her opening is clear. She thinks we’re “crashing bores”. A hint for Ms. Allen: never start an essay by declaring your subject to be boring. Either your readers will stop at that point, or they’ll read on and discover that despite your claim, you seem to be concerned enough to write on at excessive length about something that is supposedly boring.
Second paragraph: she says something about Eagleton. I read Eagleton’s book, and didn’t recognize her summation (Dawkins and Hitchens indulged in “a philosophically primitive opposition of faith and reason that assumes that if science can’t prove something, it doesn’t exist”), either from the Eagleton book or from the statements of either Hitchens or Dawkins. This line of argument doesn’t last beyond one paragraph, however — perhaps because there is no way she can defend it — and she quickly drops any pretense of wanting to engage a substantive argument. Instead, she tells us more specifically why we’re boring.
My problem with atheists is their tiresome — and way old — insistence that they are being oppressed and their fixation with the fine points of Christianity. What — did their Sunday school teachers flog their behinds with a Bible when they were kids?
Well, personally, I don’t feel that I’m opressed. I’ve pointed out before that it’s awfully easy for an atheist to just keep his or her mouth shut and pass for a believer. My usual theme instead is to show what a botch theists have made of the country, and how hypocritical they are, and how absurd their beliefs are. But otherwise, yes, we do have de facto discrimination against the godless in America; we have some blatant examples, and of course there is the obvious fact that one must be a professing believer to get elected to office in most places in this country. All Allen musters against this evidence is the claim that atheists are a tiny minority (which makes it all right to discriminate, I guess?), and there are only six states with anti-atheist clauses in their constitutions. Logic…not her strong suit.
As for the claim that we’re fixated on the “fine points of Christianity”, I don’t think so. Atheists are more concerned with the basics: where is the evidence for a god, any god? Some of us are a bit fascinated with the Christian obsession with the details of ritual and dogma in the absence of any reason to accept their core beliefs, but that’s not our weird fixation, Ms. Allen — it’s yours.
Then there is an incoherent middle where she just flames on about how mean atheists are (I call them all horrible names, you see), never seeming to notice that all she is doing is spouting angry vitriol about atheists. Gripe, gripe, gripe. The only time she even tries to state what the position of theists might be is in her closing paragraph, and again, she’s oblivious to the problem with her position.
What atheists don’t seem to realize is that even for believers, faith is never easy in this world of injustice, pain and delusion. Even for believers, God exists just beyond the scrim of the senses. So, atheists, how about losing the tired sarcasm and boring self-pity and engaging believers seriously?
Yes? We know you work hard to maintain a belief in a loving, personal god in the absence of evidence and the existence of facts that contradict you. We agree with you that it is remarkably unlikely and difficult to understand. We also agree that the existence of god is something you can’t sense — we can’t sense it either. Whenever we engage you seriously this is the same stuff we get, over and over again: we’re just supposed to believe in the absence of your ability to explain why we should.
There simply isn’t anything to engage in Allen’s howl of outrage. I’m a little surprised that something so shallow and empty could get published in the LA Times at all, especially with Charlotte Allen’s track record. My only previous encounter with her was an astonishing rant in the Washington Post, in which she flatly claimed that women were dumber than men. Seriously. While claiming there was no difference in average intelligence.
It should be impossible to take this raving crazy loon seriously, but somehow she’s getting published in major newspapers. That’s the real mystery.
President George W. Bush was a god-fearing child given control of our military apparatus…or perhaps he was a child manipulated by a military that found religion a convenient hook. Frank Rich describes the internal propaganda used during the war. What I find shocking is that Bush received regular intelligence briefings with covers that invoked a combination of G.I. Joe war imagery and militaristic bible verses.
Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)
What’s up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world’s apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout “would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”
Well, now they’ve leaked. Here’s an example.
It’s appalling on so many levels: that Rumsfeld thought that polishing up his report with the jingoistic equivalent of a clear plastic binder would win him points; that it apparently worked; that religion was used to promote war in the White House; that it was used despite the fact that it could worsen our chances of success. And we still have Dick Cheney doing a cheerful media tour encouraging us to support torture, which really wasn’t torture, but if it was, it was good for us.
We lived under the rule of monsters for eight years. We can’t just pretend it didn’t happen, we need to fight back in the courts to condemn these people and their actions.
