The story that will not die

Good morning, anti-censorship intellectuals! Remember that story from January about Abunga Books, the online bookstore whose sole unique feature is that it claims to “empower decency” by enabling prudes to vote to censor their offerings? Now it has made ABC News. It’s amazing how much press this thing has received — I’m beginning to suspect there is some marketing genius behind the store who knows how to whip up a media frenzy.

They’ve got a couple of quotes from me and from the founder of Abunga, Lee Martin.

“Anything that irritates the right, they want off,” Myers told ABCNEWS.com “They can have a limited selection of books and select whatever political perspective they want. But [Abunga] is cloaking itself in democracy, and instead of being open-minded, they are being narrow-minded. It’s hypocrisy.”

Boy, I got that one exactly right. You should read how Martin defends himself against that charge.

In response, Myers’ readers mass e-mailed the company and logged on to Abunga.com to ban a number of religious books themselves, including the Bible.

“What they didn’t realize is that we control inventory from our members, and it’s pretty easy to see the difference of customers who are blocking ‘The Golden Compass’ and the Bible,” Martin said.

Martin insists his company has no agenda. “If you look at the books, we have a complete rainbow range of books, and we give to non-Christian ministries.”

(By the way, you’ll have a hard time finding a non-Christian ministry in their list of charities. They’ve got a few good secular groups in there, like regional hospitals and the March of Dimes, but it’s mostly a collection of openly evangelical organizations. I guess if you do stuff that actually works, like giving medicine, that counts as “non-Christian” to these guys.)

So they don’t have an agenda, and they’re just letting their customers control the inventory, but they can tell the difference between the ‘good’ customers who want to block The Golden Compass, and the wicked, nasty bad customers who want to block the Bible. We are all equal, except some of us are more equal than others.

Like I said, Abunga can have whatever bias they want, and they clearly want to be a right wing Christian bookstore. I don’t mind that at all, although they certainly wouldn’t be getting my business. My objection is that they want to pretend that they’re taking the high road and calling their bias “democracy,” when it clearly is not, and it is definitely not a noble enterprise — these are guys with yet another scheme to pander to right-wing ignorance and make money from it.

Of course, that’s my disagreement with their practices. The ABC News article takes a different approach that might be more effective in alienating their prospective clientele, by listing a selection of naughty books that are still easily available at Abunga. They’ve got a censorship filter, but it’s a mighty leaky one.

How much was that war?

We now have an estimate of the cost of the Iraq war. Remember when our administration was blithely proposing that it would require a few billion dollars?

The authors present a damning “Nightline” transcript in which one official, Andrew Natsios, blandly told Ted Koppel that Iraq could be completely reconstructed for only $1.7 billion. (With the war now costing $12.5 billion a month, Natsios’ estimate would have been accurate if he had stipulated that it would pay for four days’ worth of reconstruction. Which, considering the delusional nature of most of the Bush administration’s pre-invasion estimates, may have been how long it thought it would take to rebuild the country.) Other officials settled on a figure of $50 billion to $60 billion. Larry Lindsey, Bush’s economic advisor, went way out on a limb, suggesting that the war might cost $200 billion — a figure derided by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as “baloney.”

So how much has it cost? $3 trillion. That’s a bit of money.

In 2005, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the war had so far cost about $500 billion. That figure was obviously far higher than initial Bush administration estimates, but Stiglitz and Bilmes suspected it was still much too low. After researching the issue, they published a paper in January 2006 that conservatively estimated that the true cost of the war would be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. Even at the time, they regarded that estimate as excessively conservative, but didn’t want to appear extreme. Stiglitz and Bilmes’ book, which is based on that paper, doubles their earlier estimates to $3 trillion, making Iraq the second most expensive war in U.S. history, trailing only World War II, which cost an adjusted $5 trillion (and in which 16.3 million Americans served in the armed forces, with 400,000 dying). But the authors regard even their new figure as conservative: Their estimates range from $2 trillion, in the best-case scenario in which the U.S. withdraws all combat troops by 2012 and fewer veterans need medical and disability pay, to more than $5 trillion. Add in the cost to the rest of the world, and the price tag could exceed $6 trillion.

Bush was the evil incompetent who got this wasted effort started, but I can’t blame him alone: anyone remember that immense principled effort the Democratic party made to oppose the ramp-up to war? Nah, neither do I.

Hexapus!

OK, I say uncle. Everyone’s been sending me the story of the hexapus, the six-armed octopus found in England. Sure, he’s cute…

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…but I’m afraid it’s not that big a deal. It’s an ordinary sort of error — we know that cephalopod limbs develop from primordia that exhibit a pattern of fusion as it is, so an epigenetic error that causes either an excess of fusions or failure of arm buds to form isn’t a particularly dramatic event. Now, if they breed this octopus and find a heritable propensity for limb development failur, then I’ll be much more interested, since that means we’d be able to look at the mechanisms.

Now I have to get back to grading genetics exams…

It’s all connected

Huckabee may not stand a chance of winning a presidential nomination, but he can still make his pernicious influence felt.

Next year the Texas State Board of Education will be writing the science curriculum standards for Texas public schoolchildren, and Huckabee may bring enough conservative fundamentalist voters to the polls on March 4 to swing the balance of power on the board to the supporters of creationism. “If Huckabee marshals the religious right in Texas, particularly in North Texas, it has profound implications for the state board,” says Kathy Miller, executive director of the Texas Freedom Network (TFN), an Austin-based advocacy group whose stated goal is to “counter the religious right” in public policy issues, particularly education.

Not mentioned in the article is a potential counterbalance: a lot of moderates and liberals are strongly motivated in this election cycle to boot the bozos out. At least in Minnesota we saw a tremendous surge in DFL participation in the caucuses — there are a few sensible moderates and liberals left in Texas, right? And 100% of you are going to get out and vote, right? You’d better. Complacency is not allowed.

Wells says something stupid again

My animus for Jonathan Wells knows no bounds — he’s an appalling fraud who doesn’t understand the science he criticizes. Case in point: he recently smugly asserted that a recent study to characterize the molecular changes involved in the evolution of one kind of antibiotic resistance involved no necessary consideration of evolution at all. Well, yeah…like the modern concept of “door” requires no knowledge of carpentry or locksmithing for Wells to manage to open one, so Wells could blithely suggest we replace all the carpenters with Unification Church theologians and there would be no change in his daily interactions with doors. So sorry, Mr Wells: that you’re too stupid to see how the concept of evolution might guide research into the evolution of antibiotic resistance doesn’t mean the researchers are.

It helps me maintain my equanimity that Ian Musgrave has already ripped Wells a new one over his amazing demonstration of inanity.

Here’s a wonderful addition: the principal investigator of the paper in question has commented.

As principal investigator of the study under discussion, I’d like to strongly support the view advocated this page. In fact, I was completely amazed to see how our work has been misrepresented by M. Wells.

Actually, we did indeed use darwinian evolution within this work (something unusual in structural biology). In order to obtain an enzyme with increased stability (a critical point for structural studies), we used selective pressure to obtain mutants of the enzyme. We selected for bateria with increased aminiglycoside resistance, by plating them on antibiotic containing medium. It turned out that some bacteria evolved such stabler enzymes variants which made this whole study possible !

Finally, I would not consider myself as a chemist, I got my PhD in molecular microbiology. It seems that M. Wells finds it easier to portray us as non-biologists, and hence implicitly as non-evolutionists

Ow. That has to sting, if anything could ever penetrate the oblivious stupor that fogs Wells’ brain.

The choanoflagellate genome and metazoan evolution

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

What are the key innovations that led to the evolution of multicellularity, and what were their precursors in the single-celled microbial life that existed before the metazoa? We can hypothesize at least two distinct kinds of features that had to have preceded true multicellularity.

  • The obvious feature is that cells must stick together; specific adhesion molecules must be present that link cells together, that aren’t generically sticky and bind the organism to everything. So we need molecules that link cell to cell. Another feature of multicellular animals is that they secrete extracellular matrix, a feltwork of molecules outside the cells to which they can also adhere.

  • A feature that distinguishes true multicellular animals from colonial organisms is division of labor — cells within the organism specialize and follow different functional roles. This requires cell signaling, in which information beyond simple stickiness is communicated to cells, and signal transduction mechanisms which translate the signals into different patterns of gene activity.

These are features that evolved over 600 million years ago, and we need to use a comparative approach to figure out how they arose. One strategy is to pursue breadth, cast the net wide, and examine divergent forms, for instance by
comparing multicellular plants and animals. This approach leads to an understanding of universal properties, of how general programs of multicellular development work. Another is to go deep and examine closer relatives to find the step by step details of our specific lineage, and that’s exactly what is being done in a new analysis of the choanoflagellate genome.

[Read more…]

Bad hackers! Bad, bad!

Hackers have replaced the Irish Catholic page with a cute video and a link to the Irish Atheists page. I really should scold such deplorable virtual vandalism, but, well, instead I grabbed a quick screen capture before it gets taken down.

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I thought the video was pretty funny, too, mocking the silly costumery of the Catholic hierarchy. Alright, hackers, you were naughty, don’t do it again … but you did make me laugh.

Good news — it’s not a hack at all. Those clever Irish atheists merely beat the Irish Catholics to their domain name…so it should be up indefinitely.