When I heard that Sean Hannity had jauntily offered to allow himself to be waterboarded, I confess to a moment’s small, viciously gleeful anticipation. However, archy makes a good case for not doing it. After all, if it really is torture, and torture is wrong, and we argue that we shouldn’t even be doing it to putative terrorists…we also shouldn’t be doing it to the small, weak-minded, and stupid.
Michele Bachmann gave a science lecture to congress. As you might imagine, this was a grand spectacle of stupidity.
Just a few things that jumped out at me (I’m sure you can find more by listening carefully, but I could not bear to pay too much attention).
She repeats over and over that CO2 is a natural gas. Yes, we know…no one is claiming otherwise. (Also, what would an “unnatural” gas be, anyway?) Nitrogen is also a natural substance, it helps plants grow, and we produce perfectly natural nitrogenous materials from our bodies — so does that mean that we should stop sewer services and allow everyone to wallow in their poop?
She claims that not one study has ever been produced to show that CO2 is harmful, and she goes further to claim that CO2 is a harmless gas. We could correct that in just a few minutes: give me a large tank of CO2 and a small room containing Michele Bachmann, and we’ll give her a personal experience.
The atmosphere is 3% CO2? Is she really that ignorant? It’s more like 0.03%. And again, no one is arguing that CO2 is evil — it’s that its concentration has distinct effects on the temperature of the planet, and that concentration is changing.
I apologize, world. We’ll try harder to get this loon out of office at the next election. Until then, could you all either just ignore her, or point and laugh?
(via Mock, Paper, Scissors)
Please, someone, tell the priests to go tend to their rituals and quit pretending to ha have any understanding of reality. A new archbishop has tried to use biology to argue for his archaic moral position, and I just want to slap him.
Archbishop Timothy Dolan yesterday said advocates of gay marriage “are asking for trouble,” arguing that traditional, one-man/one-woman marriage is rooted in people’s moral DNA.
“There’s an in-built code of right and wrong that’s embedded in the human DNA,” Dolan told The Post in an exclusive, wide-ranging interview, a week after becoming the New York Archdiocese’s new leader.
“Hard-wired into us is a dictionary, and the dictionary defines marriage as between one man, one woman for life, please God, leading to the procreation of human life.
Every word an ignorant lie. There is no genetic basis for a moral code except, perhaps, in the broadest sense of intrinsic rewards for social behavior — Catholicism is not biologically heritable. There is nothing in us that hardwires simplistic monogamy — human cultures have had a wide range of different patterns of sexual behavior. And gay people do not have desires in defiance of their biological impulses, but as consequences of them.
Ah, well, I’m sure Timmy Dolan will go far in the Catholic hierarchy — it doesn’t reward intelligence or knowledge, and he’s got neither.
There was a rally in LA for a group in favor of animal experimentation, Pro-Test, which also had a counter-rally by animal rights groups. You can guess which side I’m on in this debate: blocking experimentation on animals would kill biological research dead. The tactics of the anti-vivisectionists are also reprehensible and deserving of condemnation.
The Pro-Test group, an offshoot of an Oxford, England-based group founded in 2006, was organized by J. David Jentsch, a UCLA neuroscientist who was the target of a recent attack by anonymous animal-rights activists. In the attack, Jentsch’s car was set on fire while it was parked in front of his Westside home. (The FBI recently announced that a reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible has been increased to $75,000.) Jentsch, who researches schizophrenia and drug addiction, conducts tests on monkeys. While he acknowledges that some monkeys are killed as part of his research, he maintains that they do not suffer. Jentsch was expected to speak at today’s rally.
Most importantly, we’re biologists. We’re in this business because we have a passion for the organisms we study, not because we’re some kind of sick sadists. We’re also currently swaddled up to our ears in regulations and monitors to prevent abuses of the animals in our care.
Unfortunately, the article discussing this rally has associated with it a poll. This makes me rather cranky—it’s a serious issue worth discussing, so please, don’t slap a stupid internet poll on it. It just means that advocacy groups will push at the numbers as if they mean something. So, please, go forth and destroy this pointless metric:
Can medical research on animals be conducted humanely?
Yes — and I support it if the animals are treated well 27% (1872 votes)
No — it’s inhumane by definition and I don’t support it 73% (5049 votes)
Not sure <1% (4 votes)
How did we ever let these clowns run the country for so long?
John Boehner. No comment from me needed, let his own words speak for him.
Appearing on ABC’s This Week, the Ohio Republican was asked what to describe the GOP plan to dealing with greenhouse gas emissions, “which every major scientific organization said is contributing to climate change.”
Boehner replied: “The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know when they do what they do you’ve got more carbon dioxide.”
We in academia are part of an insidious plot to promote Obama’s socialist agenda by teaching nothing but “community organizing” all the time. At least, that’s the impression you might get from right wing anti-academic freedom sites, as this quote might suggest.
Google the phrase “college and university courses in community organizing” and you get 9,990,000 entries, at least as of today.
One problem: the goon who did this search typed it into google without the quotes, which means that it returned every page where a college used the word “college” and a university used the word “university” and a community used the word “community”. Properly enclose the phrase in quotes, and the number of entries you get is…two.
The Republicans do make me despair of humanity, sometimes.
It’s a somewhat odd article in which I apparently attributed evolution to nothing but chance, since the only alternative is Design. This, of course, is not my view, but there’s enough other stuff in there to stir up controversy that maybe we’ll stir up a contentious audience.
There is, apparently, an intelligent design creationism proponent on the faculty of Southern Oregon University, and they got a few comments from him.
Professor Roger Christianson said there are alternative explanations of how diversity happened, and “people who believe in intelligent design feel the complexity of life is too great to come about by naturalistic forces.”
Christianson, an evangelical Christian, said he has brought up intelligent design and creation science in class to show the swing of the pendulum between the two schools of thought, and “I suggest the truth is somewhere in the middle.”
“I talk mostly about adaptation that can be seen from either point of view,” he said. “… I see the world as an evolving pot, with natural selection as the driving force, but I certainly don’t rule out that an intelligence or a creator is involved.”
Charming. Of course, my talk tonight is specifically a counter to that silly and ignorant notion that the fact that organisms are complex must imply that they were designed. And no, there aren’t two schools of thought: there are religious kooks on one side, and the scientific evidence on the other…and only in the minds of the deluded is the correct answer “somewhere in the middle”.
Experience tells me, though, that Professor Christianson will be nowhere near my talk tonight.
It’s yet another transitional fossil, everyone! Oooh and aaah over it, and laugh when the creationists scramble to pave it over with excuses.
What we have is a 23 million year old mammal from the Canadian arctic that would have looked rather like a seal in life…with a prominent exception. No flippers, instead having very large feet that were probably webbed. This is a walking seal.
What it tells us is that marine pinnipeds almost certainly had an origin in the arctic, derived from terrestrial and semi-aquatic forms — these were more otter-like animals.
You’ll want to learn more about this beautiful creature. There is a website all about Puijila (in English, French, and Inuktitut) where you can find all kinds of images…and you can also find out how to pronounce “Puijila“, something we’re all going to have to practice. Who knew paleontology was going to lead us all into learning a few words of Inuktitut?
Rybczynski N, Dawson MR, Tedford RH (2009) A semi-aquatic Arctic mammalian carnivore from the
Miocene epoch and origin of Pinnipedia. Nature 458:1021-1024.
There will be a few opportunities for informal conversation today. I’ll be on an evolution walk at Briscoe Geology Park at 2:00pm today, and for those of you who can’t bear the thought of seeing me without a beer or four in you, I’ll be popping by the Standing Stone Brewing Company sometime after 9:30…after my talk and after I’ve had some dinner with Jefferson Center folks. If I’m late, don’t panic, just have some good conversation with other godless Pharyngulistas, and I’ll get there eventually.
I’m here in Ashland, and you’ll be able to catch me on the radio in about 45 minutes, at 9am. It’s a call-in show, too, so have fun.
The rest of my day is busy, too — you can find out more at the Jefferson Center website.
