Believing and understanding

Larry Moran criticizes a dramatic Youtube video that purports to show how evolution works. He asks if we think this helps or hurts the cause of evolution education. Speaking as an evo-devo guy (forgive me, Larry), I’d also say it hurts. Without understanding the mechanisms of morphological change underlying the simulation, it’s useless. It doesn’t explain anything about the roots of the variation it’s demonstrating or the principles of the propagation of genetic change through a population — funny faces shift generation after generation, with no explanation given. It asserts change without showing how. That is not science.

This is also where I have problems with the Nisbet/Mooney thesis. I presume this kind of simplified, cartoony presentation is what they think we need more of, and that scientists ought to just swallow their pride arrogance and go along with the “framing”…but there’s a point where simplification and flash become the antithesis of good science. I don’t want people to believe in evolution, I want them to understand it.

Would the cartoon help them believe? Maybe.

Does it help them understand? No.

If you want to grasp the goals of scientists (and, tellingly, the goals of atheists), you have to understand that distinction between believing and understanding.

Wells on Hox structure: making the same mistakes over and over again

Jonathan Wells apparently felt the sting of my rebuttal of his assertions about Hox gene structure, because he has now repeated his erroneous interpretations at Dembski’s creationist site. His strategy is to once again erect a straw man version of biologist’s claims about genetic structure, show that biologists have refuted his dummy, and claim victory. The only real question here is whether he actually believes his historical revisions of what we’ve known about Hox genes, in which case he is merely ignorant, or whether he is knowingly painting a false picture, in which case he is a malicious fraud.

[Read more…]

What if the right role for science is to shatter the frame?

i-89c6bc933e52057cf77c7485797cd296-blog_against_theocracy.gif

Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney have a short policy paper in Science that criticizes scientists for how they communicate to the public. Mooney says that “many scientists don’t really know what they’re up against when suddenly thrust into the media spotlight and interactions with politicians” — I agree completely. We are not trained to be glib and glossy, and we simply do not come across as well as we could. We’re also not really that interested, generally speaking, in the kind of presentation that plays well in 3 minutes on a news broadcast. It’s more than a cosmetological failure, though; as Nisbet says, “scientists, without misrepresenting scientific information, must learn to shape or ‘frame’ contentious issues in a way that make them personally relevant to diverse segments of the public, while taking advantage of the media platforms that reach these audiences.” I can go along with that, too.

[Read more…]

Hagfish embryos!

i-7e80ff6ee77c160f6ca547f5ef88f958-hagfish_egg.jpg
A hagfish egg with a 14.3-mm pharyngula-stage embryo inside (arrows). Scale bar, 5 mm.

I’ve been looking forward to seeing these little jewels in print since I saw Kuratani talk about them at the SICB meetings in January. Hagfish are wonderfully slimy jawless chordates that have been difficult to raise in the lab—although if you poke a whale corpse rotting in the cold deeps you’ll find them swarming everywhere. The Kuratani lab has managed to keep animals of the species Eptatretus burgeri alive and healthy in a lab aquarium maintained at cold temperatures (16°C), and has even had success in breeding them. That object to the right is a single hagfish egg, brown and leathery-shelled and surprisingly big—it’s an inch and a half long!

They collected 92 eggs, and then another limitation emerged: it took 5-7 months for embryos to develop in a small number of the eggs. Hagfish aren’t going to be your typical fast-developing model system, I’m afraid, but they are extraordinarily cool animals, and it’s good to see work beginning on them.

[Read more…]

Darwin Fish contest!

i-77f62196a23388c7c58deacddab259e5-design_a_fish.jpg

I’m sure you’re familiar with the ubiquitous Darwin fish (which you can buy from Ring of Fire Enterprises, by the way). Here’s your chance: now you can improve on that old design by intelligently designing your own version (or as I prefer to think of it, developing and evolving your own version by a trial-and-error process). Follow the link to find the requirements and email address for submissions — the deadline is soon, on 16 April.

The winner’s design will be manufactured and sold by Ring of Fire — wouldn’t it be thrilling to see your heretical/scientific fish proudly displayed on random car bumpers?

(By the way, I am one of the judges for the contest. I will not be swayed by bribes, so don’t even try—I want a cool new widget to slap on my car.)

Reasons to believe, according to Collins

If I see Francis Collins’ pious, simpering facade one more time, I’m going to get really pissed off. Can someone please give that man a Templeton Prize and let him retire to the Cascades, where he can stare at waterfalls to his heart’s content? CNN has an article on “Why this scientist believes in God”, and it’s just more vapid crap distilled from his vapid book.

But OK, let’s take him at his word. He claims to be presenting reasons to believe … what are they? Do they meet any kind of scientific standard?

[Read more…]

So what should we ornery atheists call ourselves?

It’s not nice to annoy a fellow atheist, but once again we’ve got someone bound and determined to promote himself by dividing atheists into artificial camps and slamming the side with which he doesn’t identify. Greg Epstein, a “humanist chaplain” (whatever the hell that contradictory concatenation means), decided to disavow those horrible people like Dawkins and Harris as “fundamentalist atheists”. Outrage
ensued.

Ho-hum.

Whenever I see someone jabbering about “fundamentalist atheists”, a combination of terms that makes no sense at all and immediately reveals the speaker’s ignorance of both fundamentalism and atheism, I just write them off out of hand. It means we’re dealing with a moron. Maybe Greg Epstein has some great ideas and goals, but pffft, screw him, he’s not worth listening to. Moron.

However, the Friendly Atheist does ask a good question. We clearly have a division, with some of us being more <ahem> vigorous and uncompromising in our striving towards a consistently godless ideal, and others being a bit more laissez faire. What are we going to call those obnoxious loud-mouthed atheists who won’t sit quietly in the corner?

I have a word.

It’s “uppity.”

You can just call us those damned uppity atheists. Really, I won’t mind. I also won’t dismiss you as a moron, Uncle.