Those wacky fellas behind the movie Expelled are at it again. First, we have an
interview with Ben Stein. You can tell that the interviewer has drunk deep of the Discovery Institute spring.
I want. Look at this nifty Tentacle Arm:
And they’re cheap! $15! At one for each appendage, that would be $75.
The capybara is the current champion for rodents of unusual size — it weighs about 60kg (about 130 pounds); another large rodent is the pakarana, which weighs about a quarter of that. Either one is far too much rattiness for most people to want hanging around.
Now there’s another king of the rodents: Josephoartigasia monesi, which is estimated to have tipped the scales at about 1000kg, over a ton. Don’t worry about getting bigger rat traps; these beasties have been extinct for perhaps 2 million years. I’ve put a few pictures from the paper describing this new species below the fold.
One of our regulars here is Hank Fox, and some of you may have noticed his website has been rather static lately. Check again! He’s back at it, and in case you’re looking for a professional proofreader and editor, he’s offering his services online.
Neil Shubin, recent guest on The Colbert Report, author of the cover story of this month’s Natural History magazine, author of the newly released book, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and most significantly, well known scientist and co-discoverer of the lovely transitional fossil, Tiktaalik roseae, has made a guest post on Pharyngula, describing his experiences in preparing for appearing on television — it’s good stuff to read if you’re thinking of communicating science to the mass media, or if you’re a fan of either Shubin or Colbert.
Shubin apparently reads Pharyngula now and then, and he’ll probably take a look at the comments on that article — if you’ve got questions, ask away, and maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll grace us with a reply.
I thought it might be useful for the readers of Pharyngula to get my sense of the Colbert show experience.
Being a scientist on the show carries with it some challenges. We need to convey facts of science correctly and do so in a way reveals how fun our science is to do and to think about. We need to educate, enlighten, and excite. The challenge is we need to do this in 5 minutes with Stephen Colbert sitting across the table. To make matters worse, the show does not tell you the tack Colbert is going to take in advance, largely because so much of what he does is ad lib.
Because of this, I was terrified when I received the invitation last Fri. I took a few hours to accept, largely because I needed a family conference on the strike. Once I came to terms with my decision (the readers do a good in the commentary on the various issues that swirled for us), I began to prepare for the interview.
How did I prepare for the Colbert interview? In watching successful science interviews (of which there are a number of real good examples to emulate) I saw some general patterns to a successful visit. It also definitely appears that Colbert likes scientists and he want them to be able to tell their story.
The best answers I saw responded to Colbert’s questions with a sentence that captured the essence of the science in an entertaining way. So, the day of my interview I came up with a number such answers for the questions I thought I’d get. For the most part, I prepared with answers defending evolution vs. other non-scientific approaches.
I was pretty nervous before the interview, so much so that I didn’t sleep much the night before. And, as it turned out, my predictions about Colbert’s questions were largely wrong– Colbert didn’t even touch creationism and did a number of riffs on things that weren’t even in the book (like the final questions). I was aided, though, by the experience of preparing my answers. It exercised my brain in a way that allowed me to respond to the questions he really asked.
In thinking about the experience a few days later I have one thought on language. As scientists we are very used to using language with a great deal of precision (note the string in the commentary on common ancestry, group inclusion, etc.). The challenge is adapting our highly precise vocabulary to the demands of a five minute performance on a show which is fundamentally not about science. It is a tough tightrope to walk to balance between language that is both engaging and precise. I had mixed success, but that has to be our aspiration for these kinds of experiences.
You can ask the question, a valid one, why bother with these kinds shows? If it is so difficult, and the conceptual and linguistic apparatus of science doesn’t easily conform to this venue, why do it? For me the answer is that we need to make science part of the public conversation. We live in a society where Britany Spears latest foible gets more ink than Mello and Fire’s 2006 Nobel discovery of RNAi– a breakthrough on a little worm that will likely lead to treatments of many diseases. Something is wrong here.
Thanks for your comments and criticisms and I hope my personal experience gives some perspective.
Neil Shubin
Of course, he’s probably going to be proud of beating the Pope and Chuck Norris for this one.
I love bookstores — I like the ones that have huge stacks of strange used books where you can find surprises, and I also like the big online stores where I can order anything I want. My kids are all the same way; when we make trips into the big city, the whole mess of us usually end up spending hours in places like Cummings or Uncle Hugo’s. But I finally found a bookstore with no redeeming values at all, one I will never patronize.
It’s called Abunga, and their motto is “Empowering Decency as your Family Friendly Bookstore”. What that means is that they allow bookstore members to vote against books, and if enough people reject a book, the store removes it from its database. This makes no sense to me. There are a lot of books that I deplore, and the way I cope with them is that I don’t buy them. I don’t go to the manager and tell them that no one else should be allowed to buy them.
So of course one set of books already banned is Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Looking around the site, it seems that they’re mainly pushing is religious pablum, naturally enough.
It seems a small thing, but that’s what you get when you give a religious cult majority rule — it’s not an opportunity for them to relax and enjoy their culture, but a reason to suppress minority views.
I have mixed feelings about this article in Inside Higher Ed on the issue of approving an ICR degree program in Texas. On the one hand, it’s clear that the Texas bureaucracy is being cautious and thorough and working its way through their official protocols. Raymund Paredes, the commissioner of higher education, has raised concerns about the proposed program—online graduate degrees in he sciences are problematic because they lack the laboratory component; the proposed curriculum is not equivalent to other graduate programs in Texas; they haven’t documented that the ICR is a research institution. He’s said that because the subject is controversial, it’s going to be examined “thoroughly and fairly.”
OK, that’s all good. Let’s all calmly work through the proper channels.
On the other hand, though, it’s freaking insane. The ICR is an organization that demands a loyalty oath for its employees:
The statement of faith for everyone at the institute requires support for both “scientific creationism” and “Biblical creationism.” The former includes the belief that humans were created “in fully human form from the start” and that the universe was created “perfect” by the “creator.” The latter includes the beliefs that the Bible is literally true and “free from error of any sort, scientific and historical as well as moral and theological.” Specifically, the statement requires belief in the literal creation of the earth in six days, that Adam and Eve were the first humans, and in the virgin birth of Jesus.
This is a sectarian theological program, a rinky-tink mob of cultists with no scientific credibility at all, demanding that a state recognize its work as equivalent to, say, that of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Texas Austin. Alarmed? Every Texan ought to be furious at the idea that any yahoo with a Bible and a flaky idée fixe can set themselves up as logistically equivalent to a multi-million dollar research institution.
And these people are proposing to teach the state’s teachers, who will then go on to teach the state’s children.
The whole idea is subversive, lunatic, and destructive to the educational system as a whole, and the commissioner can simultaneously say that it is “controversial” and that he could still authorize the program? Insanity.
Texas is in the spotlight on this issue, but there’s another state that needs to be examined: California. The ICR is moving from California, where they have been handing out degrees in creationist inanity for many years — where has the quality control been, California?
Maybe every state ought to reexamine its approval processes. It’s hard to believe that we’re actually seriously considering whether fundamentalist nonsense and distortions should be regarded as equivalent to modern science, and that these crackpots and their clown college proposal weren’t laughed at and rejected out of hand.
(hat tip to RBH)
