Bad arguments, useless poll

There is this strange site that has collected testimonials for the existence of god. If I were a believer, I’d be embarrassed at the painful lack of logic in these rationalizations. To the question “I believe in god because…”, answers are non sequiturs like “because he is the creator” or “because god is real” or “because I don’t do bad things”.

There is also, of course, a poll, because nothing says shallow like adding a pointless poll to a web page. The question is “ Does God exist?. The answers so far suggest that some doubters have already started pharyngulating it.

No! 51.6%

Yes 47.5%
Not Sure 0.9%

Another possibility is that random readers who stumble across the site read a few of the testimonials and are so appalled at their inanity that they immediately lose their faith in a sudden fit of enlightenment. Go ahead and read a few. They will simultaneously confirm your disbelief and disappoint you with the inadequacy of the average human mind.

98%

A survey of scientists in Texas reveals that the vast majority reject all versions of creationism — only 2% give it any respect at all. This is in Texas, the state with Don McLeroy, creationist dentist, running the educational show. There is some dissonance there.

What about that 2%? The survey explains those:

What can we say about the small minority of Texas science faculty (2%) who evidence some measure of support for intelligent design/creationism? (For purposes of this analysis, intelligent design/creationist supporters are all respondents who indicated either “Modern evolutionary biology is right about the common ancestry of all extant organisms, but it is necessary to supplement it by invoking periodic intervention by an intelligent designer” or “Modern evolutionary biology is mostly wrong. Life arose through multiple creation events by an intelligent designer, although evolution by natural selection played a limited role.”)

The educational profile of this group is revealing. Ten supporters of intelligent design/creationism responded to the question, “Have you taught a course that included a substantial block of material on human evolution?”. Of the ten, seven persons replied “no,” as compared to three who replied “yes.” So we readily see that most intelligent design supporters identified in this survey do not teach courses that address evolution. Even more strikingly, no person in the subsample of those supporting intelligent design reported teaching graduate students about human evolution within the past five years. (Another way of phrasing this last point is to say that there was no person out of the total sample of 464 respondents who said they both supported intelligent design and had taught graduate students within the past five years.) We are therefore safe in concluding that the already thin support for teaching intelligent design vanishes to essentially zero when looking at established Texas biology and biological anthropology faculty who teach at the graduate level.

Heh. Bill Dembski = “essentially zero”.

The heartbreaking beauty of development

This is a spectacular video of the development of Clypeaster subdepressus, also called a sand dollar or sea biscuit. These are stunningly beautiful creatures (as are we all, of course), and it is so cool to see them changing here. The video starts with a little echinoderm porn — these animals are profligate with their gametes — and then we see early divisions, gastrulation, the formation of the pluteus larva, metamorphosis into Aristotle’s lantern (one of the more charming names for a developmental stage), and into an ungainly spiky juvenile.

This is why some of us are developmental biologists: it’s all about the exotic weirdness and delicate loveliness of transformation.


A Sea Biscuit’s Life from Bruno Vellutini on Vimeo.

Pro forma announcement of a pointless change elsewhere

What I suspect is the most popular Intelligent Design site on the net (which is not saying much at all), uncommondescent.com, is getting a bit of a shake-up. Bill Dembski is stepping away from it, DaveScot is no longer a moderator, they’re adding paypal donation buttons…well, OK. I’m feeling ho-hum about it all. Once upon a time, I’d check in weekly to see what flavor of nonsense they were promoting, but increasingly I’ve found that I simply don’t care what the kooks were saying. It’s become a nice self-constructed ghetto for the irrelevant lunatics, with the virtue that I can easily ignore them. The changes will, I think, make them even more boring.

Charismatic cephalofauna

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Christine Huffard sent me a note alerting me to the publication of her latest paper, and she thought I might be interested because I “seem to like cephalopods”. Hah. Well. I’ve noticed that Dr Huffard seems to have some small affection for the tentacled beasties herself.

The paper follows on an old tradition and an old problem. While people have no problem distinguishing human individuals, we have a tough time telling one individual animal from another. This perceptual difficulty complicates problems of studying variations in behavior or physiology, or monitoring numbers and behavior, in natural populations. One solution is tagging or marking the animals in some way, but that always has the risk of changing or harming the disturbed animals — non-invasive procedures are much preferred. This is an especially difficult problem with small animals, like zebrafish or small octopus; I’ve struggled myself with trying to track individual fish in experiments.

I came up with one solution, and Huffard et al. have come up with something similar: humans can be trained to recognize distinctive individual variations, and learn to identify single animals. In this paper, they describe a pattern of white pigmented regions that are consistent within single animals of the species Wunderpus photogenicus…and as you might guess, that is a great excuse to put together a collection of photographs of these aptly named animals.

[Read more…]

Aussie prudes

I’ve never thought of Australia as a particularly strait-laced place — rather the opposite, actually — so why have they elected a government that wants to do something as stupid as putting an internet filter in place for the whole nation? They claim that they’re out to block child pornography, the usual entry-level excuse to impose censorship, but then they also announce that they will filter “other unwanted content”, which means…what? Watch out, Australia, this is the first step towards allowing the government to control all of your information.

One opposition tactic that might work is to point out that there is one common piece of smut that ought to be filtered under these rules, but that many people consider virtuous: that work of unrepentant filth and violence, the bible.

The opposition is stirred, and rouses itself to action: a new party has emerged to fight the censorship, among other things. It’s called the Australian Sex Party, which better fits my image of the land down under.

Chumbawamba drinks a toast to Charlie

All of nature in its place
By hand of the designer
Comes our Charlie spins the world
From here to Asia Minor
In between the Platypus
And perfect Aphrodite
Charlie come with opposing thumb
To question the Almighty

Over the river and over the sea
Through holy storm and thunder
Steer a course for a brave new world
Of common sense and wonder

See the dancing President
The congressman and teacher
Jumpin’ to the music of
The wealthy Midwest preacher
Charlie come with a brand new dance
Get on the floor and follow
Find yourself a partner and
We’ll swing into tomorrow

Over the river and over the sea
Through holy storm and thunder
Steer a course for a brave new world
Of common sense and wonder

Armed with truth we’re stepping out
Come join the worldwide party
Charge your glass and face the world
We’ll drink a toast to Charlie

Over the river and over the sea
Through holy storm and thunder
Steer a course for a brave new world
Of common sense and wonder.

Philadelphia!

Everyone wants to know what I’m doing in Philly this week. Me, too! Here’s everything I know so far.

  • I’m flying in on Wednesday morning, 19 November. At 5pm, I’m giving a talk on science blogging at the Kelly Writers house on the U Penn campus.

  • Thursday, 20 November, is the big event: Janet Browne will be lecturing at 6pm. I’ll be there in the audience, enjoying myself. You should be there, too. You’ve all read her magnificent two-volume biography of Darwin, right?

  • Sometime after that, the evening of the 20th, I’m going to aim to attend Drinking Skeptically, at Tattooed Mom’s, 530 South Street.

  • On Friday, the 21st, I’ll be presenting at a symposium between 11 and 5. I don’t think this is open to the public, but I could be wrong — I’ll let you know. I’ll be talking about abuses of embryology by creationists and by some legitimate scientists.

There are many other items on my personal agenda. I might be doing something with the Secular Society of Temple University, if I can wedge it in. I’m certainly going to sneak away to a museum or two sometime: The Academy of Natural Sciences has always been a favorite spot of mine, and they’ve got a cast of Tiktaalik on display now. The Mütter Museum is also showing an exhibit on evolution and medicine. I’ll post something once I get there if my schedule firms up.

We have more details on the Friday symposium, which is open to the public.

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Hooray! I win the prize for longest title!