No, not the Republican presidential candidates: you’ve got your choice of a blooming corpse flower named Perry or a six-legged hermaphroditic cow.
I do think the next Republican debate would be enlivened by the presence of these two. I’d vote for Perry.
4 May 1970: the Kent State murders.
I almost missed it—today is Thomas Henry Huxley’s birthday. There are some good photos at that link. The man certainly had a fine beard in his younger days, but I admit the cleanshaven look is how I always picture him.
If you’ve been looking forward to that debate between Ray Comfort/Kirk Cameron and the Rational Response Squad, it has been rescheduled. It will occur tomorrow, 5 May, in New York, but you won’t be able to see it until 9 May.
It will be streamed from ABC.com on Wednesday, 9 May, at 1:00pm EST.
Comfort claims he can prove the existence of god in 13 minutes. We’ve been waiting millennia for this amazing proof. I look forward to racing towards my nearest church (which happens to be Catholic) at 1:13 EST 5 days from now. Or do you think I should arrange to watch it with a priest so he can bless me or shrive me or give me a cracker or hear my confession or bugger me or dunk me in a tank of water or whatever magic they do to make sure I get to heaven as quickly as possible? I’m hoping it’s just the enchanted cracker, especially since that will fall during the lunch hour here in the midwest.
Is it true that the cracker tastes like raw pork?
Hey, not many carnival announcements this week. You know, if you’ve got a carnival that is in some way related to science, biology, godlessness, academia — my usual obsessions — feel free to send me notices and I’ll mention them in my weekly carnival roundup.
Next week’s Tangled Bank will be at Epigenetics News. send your science links in to me or [email protected] before 9 May.
This is an open thread. Go to it!
Knocked another one down — I finished the grades for the last exam in my genetics course (there is still an optional final next Friday). This was an important one, because I promised myself that if I could get them all done this afternoon, I would let myself go to the local theater to watch Spiderman 3 tonight. Those little internal incentives help a lot!
Grimpoteuthis is a cephalopod so cute, now it’s being compared to Pikachu. That’s harsh. Being plump and adorable is a good way to get kicked out of the savage monster club.
I know. I’ve been there.
Way back in the early 19th century, Geoffroy St. Hilaire argued for a radical idea, that vertebrates and most invertebrates were inverted copies of each other. Vertebrates have a dorsal nerve cord and ventral heart, while an insect has a ventral nerve cord and dorsal heart. Could it be that there was a common plan, and that one difference is simply that one is upside down relative to the other? It was an interesting idea, but it didn’t hold up at the time; critics could just enumerate the multitude of differences observable between arthropods and vertebrates and drown out an apparent similarity in a flood of documented differences. Picking out a few superficial similarities and proposing that something just looks like it ought to be so is not a persuasive argument in science.
Something has changed in the almost 200 years since Geoffroy made his suggestion, though: there has been a new flood of molecular data that shows that Geoffroy was right. We’re finding that all animals seem to use the same early molecular signals to define the orientation of the body axis, and that the dorsal-ventral axis is defined by a molecule in the Bmp (Bone Morphogenetic Protein) family. In vertebrates, Bmp is high in concentration along the ventral side of the embryo, opposite the developing nervous system. In arthropods, Bmp (the homolog in insects is called decapentaplegic, or dpp) is high on the dorsal side, which is still opposite the nervous system. At this point, the question of whether the dorsal-ventral axis of the vertebrate and invertebrate body plans have a common origin and whether one is inverted relative to the other has been settled, and the answer is yes.
Tomorrow is 5 May, and I mentioned in my
review of A Brief History of Disbelief that this excellent documentary on atheism/agnosticism was supposed to be aired on PBS stations all across the country around this time. It’s been hard to track down, though; I’ve looked in my local TV listings, and there’s no mention. Readers have contacted their stations directly, and some have reported back that they will be seeing it, while others have found that their stations are not carrying it. It’s very confusing.
Well, a reader found a grid listing all of the airdates and stations that will be showing A Brief History of Disbelief. If you’re in San Diego or Philadelphia, it’s well covered; otherwise, it’s scattered very sparsely on the map. It is not being shown in Minnesota.
