Recall the car dealership ad that suggested that non-Christians sit down and shut up? A poll by a television station asks, Does the Kieffe and Sons Ford ad make you want to buy a car from the dealership? The only choices are “yes” and “no” — they don’t even include “no, it convinces me to never buy anything from those clowns”, so the poll is a bit biased already.
Would you believe that right now 31% are saying “yes”? They like car salesmen who discriminate.
Jerry Coyne recently gave a talk at Rockefeller University, which is now available on video. It’s a good talk, making points familiar to most readers here about the absurdity of creationism/intelligent design, with clean examples to rebut their major arguments. The real treat comes at the very end, though, when Coyne goes off the reservation to state the obvious: that religion is the root of the problem here, and that religion and science are fundamentally incompatible.
I’ve been saying this for years. Will you believe me now?
It’s not often that something as delicate as details of the reproductive tract get preserved, but here’s a phenomenal fossil of a Devonian placoderm containing the fragile bones of an embryo inside, along with the tracery of an umbilical cord and yolk sac.
This is cool: it says that true viviparity, something more than just retention of an egg internally, but also the formation of specialized maternal/embryonic structures, is at least 380 million years old. Hooray for motherhood!
Here’s a reconstruction of what the animal would have looked like in life, as it is giving birth to its young.
Long JA, Trinajstic K, Young GC, Senden T (2008) Live birth in the Devonian period. Nature 453:650-652.
So, 9% of the respondents at this Genome Technology poll think creationism should be taught alongside evolution in science class, and another 3% think it should be left up to the school. I think someone else must be making an effort to crash a poll — let’s counter their feeble efforts, shall we?
(via Evolution, Life and other musings)
I’ve discovered a couple of important things at this meeting.
One, late night sessions at west coast meetings are deadly for any of us coming from more eastern time zones. At least the morning sessions are low stress.
Two, I haven’t heard one Drosophila talk yet, and the message is clear: we’re now in the stage of evo-devo in which everyone is diversifying and chasing down a wide array of species. There was a bit of model-system bashing, but at the same time, everyone is acknowledging the crucial role of those traditional, but weird and derived, lab critters in providing a point of comparison and being the source of many of the tools being used to explore phylogeny now. I thought, though, that the smartest comment of the evening was that now everything is a model system.
I’ve got some dense piles of notes on the evening session, but I’m going to give you the short version of everything, with an emphasis on the novel twists.
Michael Akam talked about segmentation genes, which every developmental zoologist now knows inside and out — trust me, this is a familiar topic with over 25 years of detailed research … in Drosophila. Akam made the point that now it’s looking clear that three of the major segmented phyla, the arthropods, annelids, and chordates, may be using related genes to accomplish segmentation, but they seem to be using different mechanisms — so he considers the question of whether segmentation in these three is homologous is still an open question. He also discussed recent work on the centipede Strigamia (definitely not a lab animal: they can’t breed them in the lab yet, so all the work is done by collecting embryos in the field, in Scotland). They have a dynamic pattern of segment addition that is very different from what you find in flies, and more similar in some ways to chodate segmentation.
Chelsea Specht talked about floral evolution in the Zingiberales. I’m an animal guy, so even the most basic stuff in this talk was entirely new to me. I know the general rules of the spatial development of in the fruit fly of the plant world, Arabidopsis, and she gave us a bit of context there, reminding us of the concentric development of sepals, petals, stamens, and carpels. The Zingiberales are a large and diverse group of plants that includes bananas and ginger, and one characteristic is an extravagant modification of the canonical pattern, with extra stamens, a loss of select stamens, and a fusion of stamens to form a novel structure, the labellum, which in these plants functionally replaces the petals. So of course they’re looking into the genes involved in the patterns, which turn out to be the familiar Arabidopsis genes redeployed in new patterns.
Paul Sereno had a talk that took a very different tack, and was unfortunately giving it at the equivalent of 11:00pm Minnesota time, so I’m sorry to say I didn’t follow it carefully. He was discussing the analysis of morphology, and was advocating the development of tools and techniques to compare data sets in addition to the usual output, phylogenetic trees. He was making the case that a lot of morphological studies are actually very poor (a creationist in the audience would have loved it, largely because he wouldn’t have understood the context) because the input data sets of different studies are not comparable.
And now I have to get back to work and listen to the next set of talks.
Let’s not ever turn into Michelle Malkin, mmm-kay? She got Dunkin’ Donuts to pull an ad…because she didn’t like the scarf the model was wearing, and decided it was pro-Islamic.
It was paisley.
It’s not like the model was saying “Death to America” or “This iced coffee is perfect for cooling me down after a suicide bombing” or even, “Christians, shut up!” She’s not even in traditional Islamic dress — you can see her face, and a bit of her chest. But she is wearing a scarf, and as we all know, good Americans wear only traditional American clothes, which do not include scarves.
Scalzi and Plait have noted the lunacy. Of course, no one has yet noticed the truly insidious part of the story — this Palestinian kaffiyeh nonsense is a red herring. Paisley. Didn’t they live through the 60s? Have we already forgotten? Are we just going to overlook the significance until suddenly we find ourselves in bell bottoms and headbands with the scent of patchouli wafting through the air?
I’m impressed: the car dealership has backed down on their offensive ad. Their apology is a bit disingenuous — they claim they really don’t remember approving the ad, and they intended it to be humorous, which I don’t really believe — but the letter writing was effective. The minority who phoned in a few cuss words … not so much.
This game, Christian Versus Atheist, is one of those choose-your-own-adventure type text exercises. The good thing about it is that the atheist is particular fierce and monstrous and … hey, wait a minute…the picture they use resembles someone familiar…
Hmmm. Maybe it’s just the blood drooling out of one corner of his mouth. All the atheists I know look like that.
And it must also be time for the 106th edition of the Tangled Bank. Read it!
Check back at Pharyngula later — I’ve just arrived at the IEDG 2008 conference on Integrating Evolution, Development, and Genomics, and I’ll be filling you all in on the latest juicy cool evo-devo stuff.
