That’s an upside to global warming I hadn’t considered before

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Republicans are capable of thinking long term—really long term. After a recent hearing, Rep. Don Young (Reprehensible, Alaska) enlightened us with a Deep Thought:

Before he left the hearing, Young, noting the presence of network TV crews, took a moment to reflect on his thoughts regarding climate change, citing the benefit of global warming — not caused by man — in another eon to an area that today is frozen much of the year. “We’re dealing with the most northern part of the United States of America, and a most hostile climate, and we’re pumping oil, and I’d just like to remind them if they’re asked where did the oil come from, and I would say this to Al Gore specifically: This was a jungle at one time, this was a forest at one time, this was a fern-laden area with mammoths at one time, and that’s really why we’re pumping oil,” he said.

Oh, yeah! Global warming will foster the luxuriant bogs and swamps of a new, more tropical Alaska, laying down the deep beds of carbon that will fuel the SUVs of tomorrow’s America! Carbon dioxide…it’s for our future! (“Tomorrow” is defined as “100 million years from now”, and “America” refers to the evolved, sentient descendants of whatever species makes it that long and is resident on the tectonic plate corresponding to the current state of Alaska. No promises to current voters are intended or implied.)

A Minnesotan mentioned another little problem with Young’s peculiarly hopeful idea.

Next to speak was the committee’s ranking Democrat, James Oberstar of Minnesota, who reminded Young that while global warming might have been good for fern jungles, human civilization is another story.
“That happened years ago,” Oberstar said. “The place was uninhabited by humans at that time.”

Pssht. Nattering nabob of negativism.

I think it’s very ambitious. I’d always thought the Republicans would love to roll back history to the Middle Ages, but who’d have thought they’d set their sights on returning to the Carboniferous?

Planetary conspiracy theories

The dwarf planet formerly known as Xena has been renamed Eris, and it’s companion has been named Dysnomia, and Phil finds something funny: a guy who thinks renaming planets after discord and strife is a moonbat plot to mock the Bush administration. Seriously.

He’s nuts. War and chaos don’t come to anyone’s mind when they hear the name GW Bush. We all know the real devious reasons for juggling the names around.

  • It’s an anti-feminist plot to deprive that famous female historical figure and butt-kicking lesbian, Xena the Warrior-Princess, of her due honor.
  • It’s a feminist plot to punish Xena for making those horribly uncomfortable leather bustiers popular.
  • It’s a Discordian conspiracy to destroy Christianity. Hail Eris!
  • Look at that name, “Eris”. It makes no sense. But it’s “Sire” spelled backwards…obviously, the British Royal Family is behind it, and we all know that they are up to no good, those shape-shifting reptoid bastards.
  • Alternatively, it’s a typo: it’s supposed to be “Bris.” It’s a Jewish feminist conspiracy, and they decided that a butt-kicking lesbian warrior wasn’t aggressive enough, so they went to something more likely to strike fear in men’s hearts.
  • It’s a coded message from the Democrats. No more Floridas, no more Ohios—they’re calling in Electoral Reform International Services.
  • Aww, heck, forget the secret conspiracy stories. This is an organization under the Bush administration, after all…somebody screwed up and accidentally typed random letters into a form. Has anyone seen Deutsch lately?
  • They were going to name the two bodies Eros and Dysmenorrhea, but those two just didn’t get along, so they picked the next best names.
  • The REAL answer, the one we should worry about, is that all this shuffling about and renaming and categorizing of planets is an anti-evolutionist conspiracy. We now have dwarf planets; soon they’ll unveil pygmy planets, and then we’ll have the cosmic version of an irrefutable creationist argument, and we’ll be doomed.

Confirming the last possibility, we have the fact that this goon is so stupid, he thinks Kent Hovind makes a good scientific argument.

Must be one of those easily dismissible radical fringe types

“Archbishop of York”? What kind of silly, made-up title is that?

The Archbishop of York has said British Christians should see Muslims as allies in the struggle against secularism.
In a speech at York Minster, Dr John Sentamu said British Muslims were not offended by Christianity and preferred it to a secular state.

Or maybe he was just mistranslated? Apparently not.

It has often been Muslims, as well as leaders of other faiths, who have joined with Christians in refusing to accept the creeping secularisation that would replace ‘Christmas’ with ‘Winterval’, and remove references to faith from public noticeboards for fear of causing offence. It is both my view and my experience, that most British Muslims do not feel threatened by our Christian moral foundations but by the cynicism of secularised culture that denies its own foundations. What they object to is the attempt to build human society without God. And so given the choice between the two prefer a faith environment, even one which they do not share, to that of a secularist state.

Oh. It’s the War on Christmas already.

Rhabdomeric and ciliary eyes

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We are all familiar with the idea that there are strikingly different kinds of eyes in animals: insects have compound eyes with multiple facets, while we vertebrates have simple lens eyes. It seems like a simple evolutionary distinction, with arthropods exhibiting one pattern and vertebrates another, but the story isn’t as clean and simple as all that. Protostomes exhibit a variety of different kinds of eyes, leading to the suggestion that eyes have evolved independently many times; in addition, eyes differ in more than just their apparent organization, and there are some significant differences at the molecular level between our photoreceptors and arthropod photoreceptors. It’s all very confusing.

There has been some recent press (see also this press release from the EMBL) about research on a particular animal model, the polychaete marine worm, Platynereis dumerilii, that is resolving the confusion. The short answer is that there are fundamentally two different kinds of eyes based on the biology of the cell types, and our common bilaterian ancestor had both—and the diversity arose in elaborations on those two types.

[Read more…]

Working together against the creationists…

Red State Rabble declares that we must stand united against the common enemy, creationism and such anti-scientific forces of unreason that threaten our secular institutions. That’s a nice, fuzzy statement, which I personally suspect is unrealistic and unworkable, but let’s give it a try.

Our first test: the Pope has made an interesting statement.

Pope Benedict XVI on Monday issued his strongest criticism yet of evolutionary theory, calling it “unreasonable”.

Speaking to a 300,000-strong crowd in this German city, the former theological watchdog said that, according to such theories derived from Charles Darwin’s work, the universe is “the random result of evolution and therefore, at bottom, something unreasonable”.

He has also just spoken out against secular societies—it seems that secularism is a greater problem than radical Islam.

But the section on Islam made up just three paragraphs of the speech, and he devoted the rest to a long examination of how Western science and philosophy had divorced themselves from faith — leading to the secularization of European society that is at the heart of Benedict’s worries.

I presume we all going to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in agreement that the Pope is wrong, he has completely misrepresented evolutionary theory, and that he should not be concerned about secular society—it is every person’s privilege to refuse to participate in any religion? We should all deplore his fallacious intrusion into a scientific matter, and all of us who are together on the side of science should unambiguously repudiate his opinion.

In the spirit of our shared community, I’ll step aside and refrain from chewing out the Pope, and defer that privilege to my colleague, Ken Miller, who is always willing to draft letters criticizing those who harm the cause of getting the public to recognize the validity of science. Perhaps he can draft a rollicking good letter telling the Pope where he can get off? I think it should definitely mention that Pope Benedict’s clerical status gives him absolutely, positively no credibility or status in assessing biological issues, and perhaps points out that we all stand as one against efforts to undermine science, whether they’re made by a creationist pope or some uppity god-hating atheist.

It should be something we can all agree on.

To unity!

Useful information for training your cephalopods

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Everyone knows the story of Konrad Lorenz and his goslings, right? It was a demonstration of imprinting: when young animals are exposed to a stimulus at a critical time, they can fix on it; Lorenz studied this phenomenon in geese, which if they saw him shortly after hatching, would treat him like their mother, following him around on his walks. Similarly, many animals seem to experience sexual imprinting, where they acquire the sexual preferences that will be expressed later on.

I just ran across a charming short letter about imprinting in cephalopods, and somehow the story seems so appropriate. Imprint a young, freshly hatched cuttlefish on something, and they don’t treat it like Mom, and they don’t later want to mate with it—they want to eat it. Lorenz was lucky he was working on birds rather than cephalopods.

The experiment is straightforward. Cuttlefish normally prefer to eat shrimp over crab. If, the day after hatching, small crab are put in the tank with the hatchlings for at least two hours, and then removed (the crabs are not eaten), then 3 days later when tested again, the cuttlefish will prefer to kill and eat crabs over shrimp. The procedure is very specific: they have to be exposed to crab for at least two hours, within 2 hours after sunrise on their first day after hatching.

The paper has a good, succinct description of why many animals would have this mechanism:

Precocial animals, like domestic
chicks and cuttlefish, which are
independent within hours of hatch
or birth and which receive no
posthatch parental care have
two options for acquisition of
information: bring it into the world
with you (unlearned preferences
for food, sexual partners and so on)
or pick up the information as you go
(trial and error learning). Imprinting
allows something in between:
a certain degree of flexibility in
response, useful for learning
information for which the timing is
likely to be predictable—food
seen in first few hours of life,
sibling/parents seen during
juvenile stages—but in which
specifying the exact details of
the experience is not useful.

An evil man could think of many nefarious things to do with this bit of information, I think.

Healy SD (2006)Imprinting: seeing food and eating it. Curr Biol.16(13):R501-502.