I can still be surprised

Aren’t letters to the editor fun? They publish some of the craziest stuff.

One of the many problems with Darwin’s theory of evolution pertaining to mankind is that neither Charles Darwin nor his worshippers take into account extra-terrestrial life.

It’s pretty hard for someone to draw conclusions on mankind when Darwin had never seen nor heard of UFOs. That’s kind of like teaching math but not understanding trigonometry.

Most of us in the Niagara Region live on a lake bed (Lake Iroquois). The Indians cannot be blamed for having an effect on this major geographical landscape change anymore than modern man can be blamed for the weather patterns we see today. There is such a thing as pole shifting, and according to people who have studied Mayan culture we are quite possibly in the midst of a pole change — which many people believe will be in 2012.

In his letter, Keith Wigzell ironically contradicts himself when he says that man as part of the animal kingdom is one of the last to appear.

Does this mean evolution stopped at man, or that God stopped creating his creatures?

I certainly believe that all life evolves consciously and spiritually; however, to suggest that man evolved from a monkey is simply silly.

John Kocsis

Beamsville

I have heard many arguments against evolution before, but to disqualify Darwin because he hadn’t seen a UFO is a new one to me. How about Bigfoot? Do you also have to score a Sasquatch sighting in order to be credible?

Texas has a problem

It’s not good news for Texas children in the public school system.

A new survey released by the nonprofit group Texans Care for Children shows that one out of every three Texas students may not make their way across the graduation stage to receive their diploma.

The survey reveals that Texas is ranked last in high school graduation rates and also found that more children in Texas had to retake kindergarten.

How are we going to fix this?

I know! Put a creationist dentist in charge of the educational system! Are you feeling reassured yet?

And seriously, this is a cruel trick to play on children. People sometimes throw out the idea that colleges ought to just smack down these states with poor science standards and a tradition of misrule by not allowing them admission — that would teach those states, but good — but let’s not lose sight of the victims. Those kids get one chance at a decent education, and they are not to be blamed for the short-sightedness and stupidity of their parents and their politicians.

When we are fighting against creationism, we aren’t just working for the future advantage of abstract scientific principle, we are fighting for children right now whose brains are being crippled and twisted and poisoned.

Open season on fresh meat

You may have noticed a recent influx of whining wackaloons, whose enchanting cries have consisted mostly of “You’re all so uncivil” and “This is not a science blog”. This is fallout from the Weblog Awards, where a couple of climate change denialist blogs have effectively turned out the disgruntled conspiracy theorist vote. One of those blogs will almost certainly win the ‘award’ — which tells you the value of these contests — so don’t worry about that. However, I do want to reply to the mindless, repetitive complaints of our new visitors, even though they will almost certainly evaporate when the award voting closes later today.

I want my commenters to be uncivil. There is no virtue in politeness when confronted with ignorance, dishonesty, and delusion. I want them to charge in to the heart of the issue and shred the frauds, without hesitation and without faltering over manners. These demands for a false front of civility are one of the strategies used by charlatans who want to mask their lack of substance — oh, yes, it would be so goddamned rude to point out that a huckster is lying to you. I am quite happy that we have a culture of being rude to frauds here.

The other claim is also a stupid distraction. This is a blog by an educator and scientist. We are not one-dimensional caricatures — I write about whatever interests me, whenever I feel like it. To claim that because I sometimes laugh and sometimes get angry and am a concerned citizen of a screwed-up country and have interests outside of journals and academia and am a father and husband and am willing to express myself on any topic that strikes my fancy means that there can’t possibly be any science here implies that you are a freaking idiot with a bizarrely narrow view of who scientists are, and a peculiarly close-minded vision of how this medium actually works.

Keep this in mind, O Regular Readers of the blog, and please do feel free to be uncivil to these fresh fools from the pseudoscientific fringe of the blogosphere.

It’s because reptoids are color-blind and can only see things in motion

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Jeffrey Rowland points out a great truth: there must be a conspiracy of bad web design behind all the wacky sites on the web. If he’d only more carefully read one of the victims of the conspiracy, David Icke, he’d have drawn the web design expert as a reptoid illuminatus.

Wait! Everyone knows this! Is Rowland hiding something? Is he part of the global cabal?

Soon, we’ll all have Steve Pinker’s genome to play with

Genome sequencing is getting cheaper and faster, and more and more people are having it done. A new addition to the ranks is Steve Pinker, who contemplates the details of his personal genome in an interesting essay. It’s got to be fascinating, in a terribly self-centered way — I’d love to have a copy of mine someday. It’s an opportunity to see a manifestation of one’s own lineage, your biological history all laid out for you. There’s the ability to compare with others, and see hints of statistical correlations and associations with specific traits and even, unpleasantly, diseases. Pinker also makes the point that you are not determined by your genome — the man famously has a wild head of hair, and as it turns out, he’s also carrying a bit of sequence that seems to predispose carriers to baldness.

At the same time, there is nothing like perusing your genetic data to drive home its limitations as a source of insight into yourself. What should I make of the nonsensical news that I am “probably light-skinned” but have a “twofold risk of baldness”? These diagnoses, of course, are simply peeled off the data in a study: 40 percent of men with the C version of the rs2180439 SNP are bald, compared with 80 percent of men with the T version, and I have the T. But something strange happens when you take a number representing the proportion of people in a sample and apply it to a single individual. The first use of the number is perfectly respectable as an input into a policy that will optimize the costs and benefits of treating a large similar group in a particular way. But the second use of the number is just plain weird. Anyone who knows me can confirm that I’m not 80 percent bald, or even 80 percent likely to be bald; I’m 100 percent likely not to be bald. The most charitable interpretation of the number when applied to me is, “If you knew nothing else about me, your subjective confidence that I am bald, on a scale of 0 to 10, should be 8.” But that is a statement about your mental state, not my physical one. If you learned more clues about me (like seeing photographs of my father and grandfathers), that number would change, while not a hair on my head would be different. Some mathematicians say that “the probability of a single event” is a meaningless concept.

Another thing I should think having a copy of your genome should drive home is how much of it is incomprehensible; we simply don’t know what most of it does, and even in the example mentioned above, we don’t have a causal relationship between one variant of the rs2180439 SNP and head hair, only a rough correlation. That’s the promise of the future, that we can now get copies of this book of our genome…we just have to get to work learning how to read it.

I’ve got my eye on the progress in genome sequencing. When the price hits $1000 (which isn’t at all unlikely to occur in my lifetime), I know I’m going to have it done, just because it’s a book I’ve been waiting most of my life to read.

Who has the weird eyes?

That guy Ben Goldacre just blew my mind. What is the most popular cosmetic surgery in Asia? Blepharoplasty. Many people want to have the Western “double eyelid”, while I didn’t even know I had a double eyelid until I saw a few comparison pictures! In addition to plastic surgery, people buy cheap plastic gadgets to create a wrinkle, or use ugly do-it-yourself methods with acid and double eyelid tape (yes, there is such a product).

I am rather weirded out. A wrinkle I never even noticed before, or at least took for granted, is apparently a mark of beauty to some people who lack one. That’s just screwed up. Or, more interestingly, it’s an indication of how much attention people pay to the details of eyes.