This is the day the Canvassing Board will announce their decision in the Minnesota senate race, and since he is ahead by 225 votes, that means Al Franken will be declared the victor.
Expect 5-alarm histrionics from the right wing, howls of outrage on talk radio, and the wing nut blogs to go ballistic. Also expect the Coleman campaign to charge the state supreme court and demand to be handed the office. It will be very entertaining. The freakout is only warming up.
A certain astronomer was impressed with this video:
Cool animation for sure (and even better in hd), but Bad Evolution. Once again, we get the portrayal of evolution as a progressive process, driven by lots of bloody (oily?) battles between individuals. This is the kind of thing that perpetuates common myths about biology.
Also, cyborg women are not the end result of evolution. They’re more like a delightfully exotic weird side-effect, way out on the fringe of diversity.
A newspaper editor sent me this bizarre little letter. Apparently, the writer, a Mr Nick Lally, was spamming it all over the place, and his copy was also sent to addresses at these domains (actual email addresses stripped to protect the already put-upon):
@ncnnow.com, @krcb.org, @krcb.org, @californiaconnected.org, @humboldt1.com, @ksee.com, @telemundo.com, @koce.org, @cbs.com, @nbc4.tv, @angnewspapers.com, @modocrecord.com, @arcataeye.com, @pulitzer.net, @goldcountrymedia.com, @bakersfield.com, @bakersfield.com, @berkeleydailyplanet.com, @eastbayexpress.com, @canyonnews.com, @bhweekly.com, @bigbeargrizzly.net, @paloverdevalleytimes.com, @carmelpinecone.com, @carmichaeltimes.com, @chicoer.com, @chicoer.com, @triplicate.com, @gte.net, @svcn.com, @svcn.com, @svcn.com, @svcn.com, @svcn.com, @davisenterprise.net, @independentvoice.com, @ivpressonline.com, @herburger.net, @nctimes.com, @eurekareporter.com, @timesstandard.com, @dailyrepublic.net, @pressbanner.com, @fontanaheraldnews.com, @goldcountrymedia.com, @mcn.org, @fresnobee.com, @herburger.net, @gilroydispatch.com, @theunion.com, @hmbreview.com, @pulitzer.net, @thevalleychronicle.com, @freelancenews.com, @pinnaclenews.com, @hb.quik.com, @pe.net, @pulitzer.net, @valleysun.net, @kvsun.com, @recordbee.com, @compuserve.com, @lodinews.com, @pulitzer.net, @gazettes.com, @jewishobserverla.com, @laopinion.com, @dailynews.com, @DowntownNews.com, @latimes.com, @losbanosenterprise.com, @paloaltodailynews.com, @maderatribune.net, @maderatribune.net, @malibutimes.com, @MammothTimes.com, @mantecabulletin.com, @mcn.org, @almanacnews.com, @modbee.com, @modbee.com, @montereyherald.com, @morganhilltimes.com, @mtshastanews.com, @ktsftv.com, @sainte.tv, @indiancountry.com, @napanews.com, @marinij.com, @sierrastar.com, @ojaivalleynews.com, @dailybulletin.com, @dailybulletin.com, @ocregister.com, @palipost.com, @hax.com, @avpress.com, @paradisepost.com, [email protected], @arguscourier.com, @arguscourier.com, @mtdemocrat.net, @bizjournals.com, @angnewspapers.com, @ptreyeslight.com, @portervillerecorder.com, @busjournal.com, @redbluffdailynews.com
That looks like he had found a directory of California newspapers and was sending his important missive to all of them. Lally is not from California, which makes me wonder if he flooded all the other states in the same way…let me know if you see some garbage with his name in it in your local paper.
Anyway, you’d think that such a widely disseminated letter must contain very important information, but I doubt that the gang here will be surprised at all to learn that it is a poorly written collection of creationist crap. I’ve put it below the fold for your grisly appreciation.
By the way, the author claims to have been a science teacher. I wonder how many young minds were poisoned and how much inquiring curiousity was stifled by this ignorant know-nothing.
The Countess has been nominated for various awards for her writing, and she’d like our help in getting the word out.
I warned her that you people aren’t a flock of sheep who will just follow the beckoning, nubile arm of any horror/fantasy author who cocks an enticing eyebrow at them, so I twisted her arm a bit. If she wins an award with our help, she will write a story just for us. Isn’t that incentive enough? I thought about demanding that it include cephalopods, but decided I’d rather be surprised. So go vote, maybe we’ll get a story!
(Does anyone else feel a bit like a Lost Boy now?)
As Wilkins notes, they’ve admitted it now: the producers of Expelled lied to make their movie.
The documentary links such scientists to Nazis. The reaction was what one would expect.
“We wanted to generate anger,” Ruloff said.
“We always knew we’d get extreme anger on the one side and extreme support on the other. We also think we got extreme interest in the middle.”
Nice guys. You know, it’s pretty easy to get people angry with you by lying about them, but that doesn’t mean it’s a productive strategy.
It did get an uninterested middle to pay attention, though, he’s right on that. Of course, what most of those people quickly learned was that Ruloff was a dishonest fraud. That probably wasn’t his intent.
We had a new addition recently: check out Culture Dish. It’s a biology blog! We need more of those around here.
Spiders are amazingly sophisticated animals, and probably the premiere complex adaptation of modern spiders is the ability to spin silk. They have multiple internal glands that can produce multiple kinds of silk — webs contain different kinds, from structural strands to adhesive strands, and other kinds are used for spinning egg cases and for wrapping prey — and they are sprayed out through small spigots mounted on swiveling spinnerets, which are modified opisthosomal (abdominal) limbs. Obviously, these detailed features did not spontaneously appear all at once, but had to have evolved progressively. A couple of fossils have recently been described that reveal a) silk spinning is ancient, from at least the Permian, but that b) these early spiders did not have the full array of modern adaptations.
Here is a pair of fossils: Permarachne novokshonovi, from the Permian in Russia, and a more recent specimen, and Palaeothele montceauensis, from the Carboniferous in France. Both are eight-legged arthropods, and if you saw one scuttling about now you wouldn’t hesitate to call them spiders. There are some differences, though: Permarachne in particular shows a little less tagmosis, or fusion and specialization of segments, than we usually see in spiders, and it also has that prominent flagellum (which is completely different from a bacterial flagellum!), a long segmented ‘tail’ covered with sensory hairs that was probably a sense organ; it has no sign of a web-spinning function.
What about the production of silk and webs in these old spiders? Here’s another specimen, Attercopus fimbriunguis, a 376 million year old fossil. It’s a little less dramatic because these are fragments of cuticle that have been carefully extracted by dissolving the rocky matrix with acid; it means, unfortunately, that it is more fragmented, but the advantage is that now we can zoom in microscopically and see far more detail in the structure. What we can now see in pieces of the ventral plates of the opisthosoma are small spigots, and in a few cases, there are even strands of spider silk still extended from these pores. In F, there’s also a nice shot of a chelicera (fang) from the spider — it’s wicked sharp, but the small holes seem to be preservation artifacts, and there’s no sign that venom secretion, another important spider adaptation, has evolved yet.
One of the critical observations here is very simple: no spinnerets. These spiders did not have the modified limbs with sets of spigots that we see nowadays, but instead, had a series of spigots arrayed across the bottom of the abdomen. They almost certainly were not able to make webs: what they could have done was produce sheets of silk, of the kind that could be used to make egg cases or wrap around prey. These are another example of a transitional fossil, forms that have only some of the capabilities of a later organism.
(via Cheshire, who promises to have his own post on this paper soon.)
Selden PA, Shear WA, Sutton MD (2008) Fossil evidence for the origin of spider spinnerets, and a proposed arachnid order. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA 105(52):20781-20785.
The latest news from those militant atheists is that Michael Newdow, and many others, are suing to block the religious element of the presidential swearing-in ceremony. And guess who will be interviewed on Atheists Talk radio at 9am Central time? Michael Newdow! Call in and egg him on, or moan about the futility of it all.
This week, Nature magazine published a short list of recent important developments in evolutionary biology that support the theory of evolution, as a tool to help explain that evolution is definitely a dynamic and useful theory in our field and to demonstrate that the evidence is still growing. Here’s a short summary of the 15 stories the editors picked out, but you should also read the freely available article, 15 Evolutionary Gems. Teachers, put this in your classroom!
The discovery of Indohyus, an ancestor to whales.
The discovery of Tiktaalik, an ancestor to tetrapods.
The origin of feathers revealed in creatures like Epidexipteryx.
The evolution of patterning mechanisms in teeth.
The developmental and evolutionary origin of the vertebrate skeleton.
Speciation driven indirectly by selection in sticklebacks.
Selection for longer-legged lizards in Caribbean island populations.
A co-evolutionary arms race between Daphnia and its parasites.
Non-random dispersal and gene flow in populations of great tits.
Maintenance of polymorphisms in populations of guppies.
Contingency in the evolution of pharyngeal jaws in the moray.
Developmental genes that regulate the shape of beaks in Darwin’s finches.
Evolution of regulatory genes that specify wing spots in Drosophila.
Evolution of toxin resistance.
The concept of evolutionary capacitance: the idea that environmental stress can expose hidden variations that are then subject to selection.
Everyone and their mother is sending me a link to this flickr set, via Boing Boing, of something called “cephalerotica”. I just don’t know…there are all these clumsy mammals inserted into the art that distract from the erotic part.
