Perversely brutal

All right, I like cephalopods. I admit it. So why do I find this article about hunting octopus in the Mediterranean so entertaining? I mean, the guy is diving down, stabbing the octopus between the eyes with a pointy stick, and then…

Next step: the octopus must be tenderized by slamming it against a large rock at least a hundred times or more. When its natural color changes to white, I rinse it repeatedly in sea water and drag it back and forth over a rough rock surface with a rhythmic motion. A white foam is released, and this movement must continue until all the foam disappears. When the muscle has completely relaxed, the texture of the flesh changes and the color turns to a grayish white. I grab two tentacles and pull them apart gently…the flesh should tear. Then—and only then—is the octopus ready for cooking.

What follows are recipes. Forgive me, I must be truly evil, because he had me drooling.

A refreshing way to start the morning

Ah, what can be better than a good night’s sleep, a hot shower, a cup of coffee, and finding a book review by AC Grayling on a cool spring morning? In this case, it’s not so much a review as a cheerful dismemberment and deposition of the fragmented corpse into an acid bath. John Polkinghorne has written another of those books of religious apologetics that tries to claim the privilege of scientific thought while not engaging any.

John Polkinghorne’s former student Nicholas Beale runs a website on behalf of his mentor, on which questions about religion, and the relation of religion to science, can be posted. This apparently self-published book is a compilation of 51 of these website questions with Beale’s and sometimes Polkinghorne’s answers. The questions range over creation, the existence of evil, evolution, intelligent design and most of the other familiar old debating points, plus “How does the death of Jesus save the world?”, “Why believe Jesus rose from the dead?” and “How much do you need to believe to be a Christian?”

Since these latter questions premise membership of the asylum already, I shall focus just on the various questions that touch on the relation of science and religion, because the interest attaching to Polkinghorne is that he is a physicist who became a Church of England vicar, which makes people think that he has a special line into the science-religion question. Were he a vicar who gave up the Church of England to become a physicist he would not be regarded as anything more special than sensible; but this is how the world wags.

See? Bracing! Read the whole thing to wake yourself up fully and be prepared to meet the day with a happy contempt for foolishness.

Theoretical ecology of vampires

For some reason, I find this hilarious — it’s an exercise in applying the mathematics of population ecology to the dynamics of human-vampire interactions. It’s the real deal, the actual kinds of math used by those wacky evolution and ecology nerds, all built around some estimates of the rates of vampire siring measured against the rates that Buffy-style vampire slayers take them out. Here’s the kind of thing you’ll see in the document:

i-40ab1ceba09a7ced56a36f54f4e7dc5a-vampire_calc.jpeg

I like it. In case you’re wondering, Buffy’s Sunnyvale reaches a stable equilibrium with a population of about 36,000 humans and 18 vampires.

(Hmm. I posted this in the “Life Science” channel of scienceblogs. Maybe I need to lobby for an “Undead” channel now.)

Creationists vs. Texas

A while back, the Institute for Creation Research tried to get approval to issue degrees in the state of Texas — they would have used this authority to churn out science teachers whose knowledge would have been derived entirely from the Bible and young earth creationist tracts. Fortunately, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board flatly turned them down, one of the smart moves in which Texas can take some pride.

Now, however, the ICR is now suing the THECB. Seriously. Even better, the lawsuit is a dense compendium of concentrated hilarity.

The sixty-seven-page complaint teems with various factual claims and legal arguments, leading a blogger for the Dallas Observer (April 20, 2009) to quip that it “reads kind of like stereo instructions.” It also teems with unabashed creationist rhetoric, citing articles from the ICR’s publication Acts and Facts along with case law, explaining that Paredes — born as he was in 1942 — was not a witness to the Big Bang, asserting that discussions about the origin of life and the formation of the earth “do not become ’empirical science’ simply because those discussions emit from the oral cavities of ‘scientists'” (p. 33), and insisting that the Big Bang “should not be confused with the ‘great noise’ mentioned in 2nd Peter 3:10” (p. 21).

I find it heartwarming that the creationists are once again demonstrating their profound legal acumen on top of their mastery of logic and science. Those of you who find amusement in outré and hysterical legal documents can read the whole of the complaint online.

Don’t let the enablers of torture get away with it!

President Obama has released memos on the policies on prisoner interrogation under former President Bush. These are horrifying documents that expose the immorality of the previous administration. Unfortunately, Obama has not gone far enough: it’s a good start to reveal the truth, but what needs to be done next is to investigate the senior officials who advised the perpetrators that torture was legal.

That investigation should start with the lawyers who wrote these sickening memos, including John Yoo, who now teaches law in California; Steven Bradbury, who was job-hunting when we last heard; and Mr. Bybee, who holds the lifetime seat on the federal appeals court that Mr. Bush rewarded him with.

These memos make it clear that Mr. Bybee is unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the Constitution. Congress should impeach him. And if the administration will not conduct a thorough investigation of these issues, then Congress has a constitutional duty to hold the executive branch accountable. If that means putting Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales on the stand, even Dick Cheney, we are sure Americans can handle it.

After eight years without transparency or accountability, Mr. Obama promised the American people both. His decision to release these memos was another sign of his commitment to transparency. We are waiting to see an equal commitment to accountability.

We need to organize to bring these criminals to justice. You should sign petitions demanding the appointment of a special prosecutor, and demanding that California impeach Jay Bybee.

This is the least we can do, and I think even these petitions don’t go far enough: I want to see George W. Bush and Dick Cheney held accountable for their villainy. Start here, though, and bring the corrupt lawyers who made excuses for horror to trial.

Minneapolis lulz opportunity

If anyone is in the Roseville area tomorrow, somewhere near Northwestern College, you might have an entertaining time if you drop in on a meeting of the Twin Cities Creation Science Association. I can’t even imagine what they’re going to say in this one.

God’s Design in Weather

Weather is more talked about
than any other topic. God has
arranged the weather system on
the earth. There are patterns to
this weather. How does a tornado
form? What causes hurricanes?
Why aren’t raindrops larger?
Science is about finding patterns
and then predicting what will
happen. The study of weather
allows us to think God’s thoughts
after him.

What does that even mean? Should someone bring up God’s apparent hatred of trailer parks?

The impeccable logic of evolutionary psychology: spit or swallow?

Jerry Coyne carries out an amusing exercise in reasoning like an evolutionary psychologist: why does human semen taste bad? It turns out that it is really easy to invent all kinds of entirely reasonable rationalizations for it: in particular, it’s to promote ejaculation in the orifice that is more likely to result in pregnancy, since women can’t get pregnant by way of their stomach. It’s all deductively logical, but built on premises floating in thin air, with no empirical foundation at all…the usual flaw on which evolutionary psychology fails.

It does open up all kinds of angels-dancing-upon-pins sorts of questions. By the same logic, shouldn’t most women find anal sex extremely distasteful and unpleasurable (there’s another subject for Coyne to use in an informal poll — or maybe not, unless he really wants a reputation as a perv). Would the unusual anatomical arrangement in Deep Throat be evidence against evolution? And say…shouldn’t there be selection against male interest in fruitless pornography? There’s potential for a whole industry to flower around the pursuit of these questions. With illustrations.

Crank science is as crank science does

I was sent this story about genes and IQ, and right from the beginning, my alarm bells were ringing. This is crank pseudoscience.

Gregory Cochran has always been drawn to puzzles. This one had been gnawing at him for several years: Why are European Jews prone to so many deadly genetic diseases?

Tay-Sachs disease. Canavan disease. More than a dozen more.

It offended Cochran’s sense of logic. Natural selection, the self-taught genetics buff knew, should flush dangerous DNA from the gene pool. Perhaps the mutations causing these diseases had some other, beneficial purpose. But what?

At 3:17 one morning, after a long night searching a database of scientific journals from his disheveled home office in Albuquerque, Cochran fired off an e-mail to his collaborator Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

“I’ve figured it out, I think,” Cochran typed. “Pardon my crazed excitement.”

The “faulty” genes, Cochran concluded, make Jews smarter.

Why are European Jews prone to certain genetic diseases? My first answer would be to consider that they are a sub-group isolated by a history of bigotry from the outside, and strong cultural mores from the inside that promote inbreeding. These are variations amplified by chance and history.

I would not be offended by this. It’s logic, too. Natural selection is important, but it’s not everything — but so often, “self-taught genetics buffs” get the emphasis all wrong, and think of evolution as a machine that churns out generations that are relentlessly optimized for the best of all possible solutions, and these are the people who are also unsatisfied that evolution also churns out mistakes that are perpetuated over and over again. Errors happen, and their existence does not need an explanation; there is also no tendency by a benign nature to balance every individual’s shortcomings with a beneficial mutation.

Mr Cochran’s flaw is in his premise. There is no reason to assume that the frequency of every allele in a population must be the product of a selective advantage. The mathematics was worked out in the last century, and we know that even deleterious alleles can go to fixation in a population. His frenzied scribblings and off-the-wall database searches were driven by a need to reconcile the facts with his naïve and erroneous vision of evolution, and are not very convincing.

Here’s another explanation: this isolated subgroup of Ashkenazi Jews also had a culture with a deep historical respect for scholarship, and emphasized and supported education and learning to a greater degree than the larger culture surrounding them. Their children therefore begin life with a leg-up on intellectual pursuits. We don’t need a genetic explanation for their better performance (on average) on academic tests. Note also that this does not exclude a genetic component, but now at least we’re talking about an environmental factor that favors selection for intelligence. Again, though, I haven’t seen any convincing evidence for such a thing; personally, I think our intelligence is built on a shared genetic/development core that enables a wide range of kinds and degrees of intelligence to be expressed in response to environmental conditions.

But here’s the final confirming evidence that Cochran is a crank and a non-scientist.

It would be easy to test the theory, said Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognition researcher: “See if carriers of the Ashkenazi-typical genetic mutations score higher on IQ tests than their noncarrier siblings.”

Cochran and Harpending readily acknowledge the need for such experiments. But they have no plans to do them. They say their role as theorists is to generate hypotheses that others can test.

“One criticism about our paper is ‘It can’t mean anything because they didn’t do any new experiments,’ ” Cochran said. “OK, then I guess Einstein’s papers didn’t mean anything either.”

I don’t agree with Pinker that it would be easy — there’s going to be a lot of individual variation in performance, and I think it’s very hard to split the variables of culture and genetics apart in these kinds of tests. But at least he’s offering a positive approach to the problem, and that would be a good starting point.

But Cochran isn’t interested in doing them? He’s just a theorist? That’s where he begins to sound exactly like an intelligent design creationist.