Will they come when you do call for them?

We’re scatter-brained touristas on vacation, so pinning us down to specific times and places is hard. However, we are going to be puttering about in downtown Seattle on Friday, and I think we can commit to one thing: lunch! We’re going to pop into the Food Court at Seattle Center House around noon, and since it promises to be a gorgeous sunny day, we’ll then hang out around the International Fountain, where I will practice calling spirits from the vasty deep.

I still have to get the family to agree to evening plans, and some of my party absolutely refuse to have anything to do with heaping platters of marine invertebrates, which complicates matters. If we can agree on something ahead of time (feel free to make suggestions), I’ll mention our Friday evening plans here, too.

Bony non-naked vertebrates on parade

Since I brought up the hype for this Diesel fashion show, Phil has revealed that you can now watch it on the web.

It’s some kind of holographic light show on a fashion runway. I don’t know what the point of all the skinny people wandering around in clothes might have been, though. It didn’t make me want to buy any clothes, but a battery of lasers is looking more and more attractive.

Hey, guy, it’s an anastomosing rete at the base of the tree of life

Eamon Knight finds an irritating debate (you can listen to the podcast) between a real evolutionary biologist, Jerry Coyne, and a theologian and a philosopher, and … Paul Nelson of the Discovery Institute. The first three are all pro-evolution (although I found the theologian to be annoyingly apologetic for religion, naturally enough; Denis Lamoureux is a weird and obnoxious kind of Christian who seems to use science as a tool to proselytize) and Nelson fulfills the stereotype: he opens the debate with a quotemine and gross misrepresentation. He claims that W. Ford Doolittle rejects common descent. He claims that this notion that “all living things share a common ancestor” is being challenged; unfortunately and misleadingly, he puts the emphasis in the wrong place. Doolittle would say that “all living things share a common ancestor”. Doolittle argues that there was a large pool of organisms down near the root of the tree of life that liberally swapped genes among one another, so that you can’t trace life back to a single common ancestor — you can trace it back to a large population where species distinctions were greatly blurred.

Misrepresentation of legitimate scientists it’s about all Nelson brings to the debate. It’s an excellent example of why it’s a waste of time to treat these kooks as fair and equal and trustworthy.

For another example, Nelson claims that one justification for pushing ID is that our past understanding of biology was flawed (not that he says anything that ID contributes to our current understanding). He claims that when he was in school he was taught that “cells are just bags of enzymes”, and that ID has revealed all these amazing, unexplainable “molecular machines.” Nelson is about my age or younger; when I was taught cell biology back in those same dark ages, I certainly was not taught any such nonsense. Compartments and transport, for instance, were major parts of the curriculum.

It’s not just that these creationists don’t understand biology — it’s that they actively lie about biology. Don’t trust them.

Mike Dunford has another recent example of Nelson mangling a scientific conclusion.

Microblogology

Hey, if you’ve been wondering what the sex symbols of science blogging look like, here’s your chance: a video of some bloggin’ microbiologists hanging out in Toronto.

Although, that title … it’s hard to imagine an uglier word than “blog,” but they managed to coin one.

DL Overload

Whoa…there were a lot of people at Drinking Liberally last night, and I was rather overwhelmed with all of the introductions. How about if attendees use this thread to tell everyone and remind me of who you are—pass along links to your Seattle blog, too, or give us links to pictures.

It was a great evening, and the only blemish is that there are now about 50 more people who know that I’m not ten feet tall and that I don’t breathe fire.

You’re all going to be jealous as you learn who I met last night — the accounts (and photos) are trickling in. Other people at DL were:

Practicing information hygiene

A high school student loans a friend, another high school student, his copy of The God Delusion. Two things happen: the friend’s father loses his cool and complains to their school, and a school administrator suggests that this was an establishment clause violation. And this was at a school that allowed the Gideons to distribute bibles in the parking lot!

At least the lunatic father finally returned the book.

It’s ironic. I get accused of being some kind of deranged militant atheist, yet when my kids got handed tracts and evangelical comic books and were asked to attend church and sunday school with their friends (and all of those were reasonably common events), I just gave ’em the thumbs up, read the comics myself (they were uniformly terrible), and shooed ’em out the door on Sunday morning. Yet scrubbing the information their kids are allowed to see is common practice among the religious — it’s the primary reason for Christian home schooling, for instance.

I’ve always figured I was just boosting their intellectual immune system.

(via the Friendly Atheist)