One Man's Quest to Leave This Rock

http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/dekalb/stories/2008/10/24/emory_evolution_teach.html

Some students burst into tears when a high school biology told them they'd be studying evolution. Another teacher said some students repeatedly screamed "no" when he began talking about it.

Other teachers said students demanded to know whether they pray and questioned why the had to learn about evolution if it was just a theory.

What really astounds me is the architecture of life…The system is extremely complex. It's like it was designed… There's a huge intelligence there.

Of course, the creationists pounced on this like it was relevant or something.

Well, he was asked flatly whether or not he is a supporter of Intelligent Design, and here's his answer:

I am not. I am being taken out of context and upset about this. Abate [SF Chronicle reporter] interviewed me shortly after we had completed the genome and for a moment I waxed poetic about the complexity of what was there and the elegance of the 'design'. Evolution is very real - it is directly observable in the time frames of mutating bacteria, e.g. the acquisition of antibiotic resistance.

http://www.tonkafocus.org/Amicus%20brief%20info.htm

Oh, man. I've been laughing so hard that my sides hurt.

The Institute for Creation Research, a group of young-Earth creationist nuts who like to huddle together and publish Acts & Facts newsletters to hoodwink the gullible(*), have just claimed that Gregor Mendel published his paper on genetics in 1866 to refute Darwin's theory of pangenesis. It's in the October 2008 issue, and here in electronic format -- Christine Dao's article "Man of Science, Man of God: Gregor Johann Mendel":

http://www.icr.org/article/4126/

Small problem with that assertion: Darwin published his theory of pangenesis in 1868. That doesn't stop the article from claiming that the theory was popular in 1866, though. (Even if you want to argue that he was writing to combat Darwin's Origin of Species, which was published in 1860, it's telling that he didn't mention Darwin or evolution in his paper.)

God gave you a brain. It borders on blasphemy to refuse to use it.

(*) Regrettably, I have to include myself in that group. As a young whelp, I consumed Acts & Facts voraciously. Thankfully, I was exposed to some real facts later on in life, not merely dogma masquerading as fact.

I should note that I do not intend to promote pangenesis as plausible. It is a long-discredited idea. What is interesting to note here is that in their zeal to get a "real" scientist on their side who shows anti-Darwinian leanings, Ms. Dao and the ICR have failed to do even the most elementary fact-checking in their research.

I've made noises a few times in the past that the conservatives don't have a monopoly on bad science, and when the inevitable badness radiates from the other end of the political spectrum, I'd be just as upset.

Here's a quick example: Salon got themselves a physiognomist -- that is, someone who claims that you can tell a lot about the character of people by looking at their facial features -- and she claims she can tell McCain's economic policy from the size and angle of his nostrils, and Hillary Clinton's attention-grabbing personality from the breadth of her cheeks.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/10/15/nostril_twins/

Sure, when the Republicans come to power, science has to put up with the threats and censorship from people who prefer their power base or their favorite religious dogma to good research about, you know, reality. When the Democrats come to power, we get this -- completely spaced-out moonbats who spew beatific nonsense that no one bothers to analyze or question. (Sure, the article mentions that physiognomy isn't science -- but it never comes right out and says what it is: pure horsepucky. It seems perfectly content to allow her to have her say without an ounce of critical analysis.)

Neither side is great for science or for educating the public. But after eight years of heavy-handed efforts to silence what science has been trying to tell us, I guess I'd rather have science have to try to make itself noticed as one voice among countless others than to have announcements of disagreeable scientific conclusions altered, squelched, or denied. We'll see.

In more ignorance-is-bliss news: Albinos are being killed and sold -- piece by piece -- in Burundi.

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=68&art_id=nw20081014065655657C137717

Witch doctors have been preaching this nonsense that albino body parts are useful in attracting gold. You just place the parts outside the mine, and gold will come. (Or, since large fish have gold in their bellies -- no, I'm not making this up -- you can use the bits as bait for a better fishing haul.) Gullibility meets greed, and wham!

People die. Horribly.

Burundi has tried to solve the problem by rounding up the pale ones and put them in a safehouse surrounded by a 10-foot wall.

Things don't have to get this bad. The best safety against ignorance is knowledge. But for people who continue to ostracize the smart ones, or glorify the people who act on impulse and leave the thinking to the guys in lab coats, it's just a matter of time before creepy action like this starts to take place.

Maybe you've heard of 2008 TC3. Of course, it wasn't mentioned on any of the mainstream media outlets I tune into, so in case you didn't, here's the skinny.

This asteroid -- only in the neighborhood of two to five meters across -- was the first one ever found before impact with our planet.

We found this rock about a day before it entered Earth's atmosphere at 2:46 UTC on October 7 and exploded above northern Sudan, releasing 1.1 to 2.1 kilotons of energy (according to infrasound detector arrays in Kenya) -- roughly the yield of a low-level nuke. It became invisible for about an hour prior to impact because it had entered Earth's shadow. Thankfully, the area where the impact took place -- a remote section of the Nubian Desert -- is practically uninhabited.

Estimates are that Earth receives two or three of these impacts per year. Don't let the tiny size of the thing fool you. It's not the size of the impactor that primarily determines the explosive yield -- it's the velocity. This one was cooking along at 12.8 km/s (about 28,600 mph).

Kudos to the Spaceguard detection system for seeing this one.

Here's an animation of how the Earth would have looked if you were riding on the back of the thing:

http://orbit.psi.edu/?q=node/22

Montel Williams is gearing up for a new daytime talk show even as his old one is winding down.

http://tvseriesfinale.com/articles/the-montel-williams-show-host-already-eyeing-a-comeback/

So there's a poll at this site: "Should Montel have psychic Sylvia Browne on his new show?"

You shouldn't have to think real hard to know how I voted. If you're for helping people avoid unnecessary anguish, and if you think there's a snowball's chance that this vote will help Montel decide whether or not to spend one day a week hip-deep in kookery, you should vote that way, too.

So let's say you got a bunch of young girls together (13 to 18) -- say, a little over 500 of them -- and asked them what they want to be when they grow up. That's what the Guardian said a survey did here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/oct/03/science.choosingadegree

So how many wanted to be scientists?

Fourteen percent.

Compare that to the number who wanted to be models: thirty-one percent.

-=sigh=- I don't know whether to be disappointed, depressed, or outraged. I mean, that's more than twice as many girls who want to be judged on their appearance alone as want to be good thinkers.

Twenty-eight percent said that they want to be actresses. It's possible to be older than 25 and have a career as an actress, certainly, but these numbers seem to hint at something -- at how important young women see their contribution to be, or how convinced young women are that they can make a lasting change for good in the world.

I'm curious to know how the answers from a group of young boys would compare. Regardless, as someone who loves smart women, I'm saddened by the number who still seem to see the buying and selling of their bodies as a commodity as something desirable.

It's incredible to think that about a dozen years ago, we couldn't say for sure whether there were planets orbiting other stars. We suspected that there were, of course, but we hadn't actually detected any. Now that we've actually found some, they've started to really challenge our ideas about what happens in star systems.

Take, for example, the newly-discovered COROT-exo-3b:

http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEM0GG9FTLF_index_0.html

This planet has 21.6 times the mass of Jupiter, based on how much its star moves as it orbits (a star just a wee bit bigger than the Sun, incidentally). It completes a circuit every 4.25 days.

But what's weird is that it appears to have the same size as Jupiter, based on the amount of light it cuts off as it swings in front of the star itself. Some quick math shows that this planet has a density of about 28.7 g/cc. That's more than two and a half times as dense as lead (11.35 g/cc). Yow.

This is weird because planets that form close in to stars should have most of their mass either gobbled up by the forming star or blown away when the star ignites. The standard explanation for things like this is that the planet starts out far away from the star and gradually migrates closer in. The sheer number of these things that we're finding may simply be because our detection methods are currently biased; finding massive planets orbiting their stars closely is simply easier.

But this also highlights how difficult it can be to classify what we find. The article itself states that we don't know whether this is a planet or a failed star. Part of the fallacy, it seems to me, is thinking that things like bodies in space (which can form under all sorts of circumstances) can be easily classified the way that organisms can (which are largely determined by their ancestors). Astronomical bodies do not fit a nested hierarchical structure like organisms do because astronomical bodies do not fall into a family tree(*). If we try to fit them into a classification scheme they don't fit into, weird things around the edges will confuse our attempts to put everything into nice boxes.

Ask Linnaeus. He came up with our current classification scheme for organisms; the "scientific name" of a species (e.g., "Homo sapiens" for humans) comes from him. Once he had come up with a nested classification scheme for organisms, he attempted to do the same with minerals -- but failed miserably because rocks don't fit a family tree.

All this to mention two points (in addition to "Isn't this thing we just found cool?"): first, that this whole "What's a planet and what isn't?" isn't as deep a question as many think. We just decide what a planet is, and things that fit our definition are planets and things that don't aren't. We can't expect the Universe to play nicely, though, so when weird things show up around the fringe -- and they will -- we will have to add more and more arbitrary boundaries in order to decide what applies to our one-word synopsis of a heavenly body and what doesn't.

Second, all those creationists who insist that there's no evidence for evolution have yet to explain why it is that organisms are so easy to classify in a nested hierarchy -- in other words, why they look like a family tree (it's called the "phylogenetic tree", for those of you who haven't fallen asleep yet). This nested hierarchy is exactly the same whether we're looking at genetics, the molecule-sized machines inside an organism that keep it alive, or large structures like ear bones and blood vessels and legs and stuff. It's worthwhile to note that Linnaeus came up with his classification scheme long before Darwin published.

If all organisms don't share a common ancestor, someone sure went to a lot of trouble to make it look like we do.

(*) Except a gross one, of course. It's the case that planets orbiting Population II stars are made from the remnants of Population I stars. But how easy do you think it would be to trace biological lineages if parents were always blowing apart into their constituent atoms before children were formed?

Okay. You know that Jenny McCarthy is leading the cause aganist vaccinating children on the grounds that it renders them autistic, right? And you know that's a bile of horse puckey, right?

Wait until you see how she defends herself against one of her ideological foes, Amanda Peet, in Spectrum magazine and quoted here:

http://www.ecorazzi.com/2008/09/30/jenny-mccarthy-strikes-back-at-amanda-peet-over-child-vaccinations/

"(Peet) has a lot of [nerve] to come forward and be on that side, because there is an angry mob on my side, and I like the fact that I can say she's completely wrong." She added, "I look at (Peet) now and say to myself, 'That was me before I had autism in my life,' and until she walks in our shoes, she really has no idea."

So McCarthy's logical defense of her position is that she has an angry mob on her side?

I certainly pity her for having to deal with autism in a perpetual, personal way, but I have this weird notion that actually killing children trumps the warm, fuzzy feeling she gets from denying the facts of the matter.

That's right. You're killing children, Ms. McCarthy. You have no idea what anger is. I would relish the chance to demonstrate.

Some quick updates, since visiting family makes it harder than usual to write in depth.

First of all, congratulations to the SpaceX guys! They just successfully launched the first commercial liquid-fueled rocket to orbit. There'll be a few launches of their Falcon 1, and then the Falcon 9 will go into operation, which should be able to loft a few tons into orbit, giving businesses alternatives (besides NASA) if they want to put something up there.

Second, Obama trashed the Bush White House for how they handled NASA.

http://obama.senate.gov/press/080922-obama_calls_on_37/

He's surprisingly specific about this. The only misgiving I have is his call to "Demand that NASA take no further action that would make it more difficult or expensive to fly the Shuttle beyond 2010". I don't know if we can do that and develop the infrastructure necessary to get missions to the Moon going at the same time. This policy is a bold step in the right direction, but I'd be even happier if it urged Congress to make sure that NASA has the money it needs to do what it has to do. I don't see how we're going to do that as long as we're shoving money at conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, to be honest.

Third, China just launched their third manned mission. It had three people on board and included the country's first space walk. Who else wants to join in the people-in-space club? We only have three countries so far.

Fourth, a political group of which I am a part (Scientists and Engineers for America) has 61 Nobel Laureates who endorse Obama in an open letter to the American people:

http://sefora.org/2008/09/25/61-nobel-laureates-in-science-endorse-obama/

Fifth, the situation in Brunswick, North Carolina that I mentioned earlier is heating up a tidge:

http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20080929/ARTICLES/809290288/1004?Title=Debate_erupts_over_proposal_to_teach_creationism_in_Brunswick_schools

"It just amazes me some of those responses, how venomous they have been," said Fanti, who sparked the debate by proposing at the board's Sept. 16 meeting that the teaching of creationism share classroom time with evolution. "I don't even know what their definition of religion is. I can argue their views on evolution are a religion, too, because it can't be proven."

That only goes to show, Mr. Fanti, how deeply you misunderstand what "religion" means. Yes, it is true that one of the characteristics of religion is that it cannot be proven, but the fact of the matter is that very little can be proven. I cannot prove that my car is still in my driveway. My belief that it is still there is not religion.

Much more saliently, I cannot prove that gravity is holding me down, or that matter is made up of atoms, or any number of things that science addresses directly. Believing these things is not religion, either.

Evolution is supported by mountains of evidence and empirical data. No, it isn't "proven", but nothing in science is.

And much more importantly, your precious creationism is actively disproven by science. Rather soundly. Look into it.

The Rev. Brad Ferguson, Fanti's pastor at New Beginnings Community Church in Shallotte, said he supports Fanti's views.

"There is some scientific evidence supporting creationism," the Southern Baptist minister said. "Kids should be presented both sides. ... You can't isolate disciplines. Science and faith - they go together."

There is no scientific evidence to support creationism. None. Show me otherwise -- I dare you.

And I've said it before -- believing something in spite of the facts is not showing how science and faith "go together". If anything, it's either terribly mistaken or deperately deluded. You also don't present both sides if one side is clearly wrong.

Sixth, I got word that the Institute for Creation Research is advertising on FOX News:

http://www.icr.org/zlp-fn001/

I used to subscribe to their little Acts & Facts newsletter as a good little creationist. I have to admit that I can't help but feel a little bit of bile that this group continues to spread its tendrils and dupe the gullible.

You may or may not know that the Intelligent Design folks at the Discovery Institute have a book that explains their stance by the name of Explore Evolution.

Of course, compared to the sheer mind-bending volume of evidence showing how evolution works and has worked, it's insignificant. The number of people who take it seriously lends it more attention than it deserves. John Timmer (a fellow with a B.A. in biochemistry, a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology, and over a decade's worth of research in genetics and developmental biology) has taken it upon himself to look at the book and post a review, which I find highly amusing:

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/other/discovery-textbook-review.ars

The last paragraph is pure gravy.

But the book doesn't only promote stupidity, it demands it. In every way except its use of the actual term, this is a creationist book, but its authors are expecting that legislators and the courts will be too stupid to notice that, or to remember that the Supreme Court has declared teaching creationism an unconstitutional imposition of religion. As laws similar to Louisiana's resurface in other states next year, we can only hope that legislators choose not to live down to the low expectations of EE's authors.

Oh, I giggle.

So I watched the first episode of The Mentalist last night.

I'm intrigued. The main character is a former "psychic" who has since reformed, and now helps the police solve crimes. The main character, Patrick Jane, comes right out and says that there's no such thing as a psychic, and that anyone who claims to be is delusional, deceptive, or both.

Win.

On the downside, though, he denigrates anything supernatural (and I couldn't help but feel that the writers were speaking through him as he did). I can't blame him, in a way. Humans are very good at coming up with ideas -- we're an imaginative lot -- and something has to separate the ideas that tell us something informative about reality from the ones that are merely speculative or just useless. Science and reason are darned good tools to help us do that. (You may have noticed that I'm a fan.) I reluctantly admit that I often feel like I have more of a spiritual connection with atheists I know than many of my fellow Christians. Believing that all reality that matters is accessible to our senses and intellect just feels -- cleaner, somehow.

Like Occam's Razor carving away the excess crap.

Still, I think it's possible to be smart, reasonable, and a person of faith. In fact, I think you could probably get people to understand how necessary reason is if you could show how a reasonable person of faith approaches the unknown. Faith is foundational to a lot of people's sense of identity. If someone seems to hint that to think rationally, you must first abandon all trace of faith, many will simply be unwilling to think rationally.

I also wish they'd show more about how the main character comes to know what he knows (like Psych). Otherwise, I worry that people will think the writers are trying to lambaste psychics for no reason. ("Oh, look! Now how did he know that without being psychic?") I see a lot more of the evidence leading up to his conclusions ("Your father was a football coach... Your favorite color is blue") as I think about it, but I don't know if the average viewer will want to think about it that much.

(That's not to say that people could never come away from Psych with the wrong impression. Shawn Spencer is actively deceiving the entire Santa Barbara police department as well as a guest star or two per week into thinking that he's a psychic -- Burton Guster is the only one he berates for believing in woo-woo ideas -- and viewers might come away thinking that it's okay to be fraudulent like this. It ought to be obvious that Psych is being done for laughs, but there are some weirdos out there who own TV sets.)

SpaceX is trying again to get their Falcon 1 rocket to work. Try Number Four could be as early as Sunday (the 28th).

They detected a minor fault in the second stage liquid oxygen supply line during a static firing last Saturday (the 20th); it might not threaten the flight at all, but they have good reason to be cautious. (They're already working on flights 5, 6, and 7, but it would be nice to have a success. I'm rooting for them, of course.)

Okay. Someone in the FTC is paying attention. People need to be warned about fake cures, and they've tried, at least.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/MED_BOGUS_CURES?SITE=WWLAM&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

A lawyer by the name of Richard Jaffe who is defending these slimebuckets had this to say:

"In our view it's a battle between the right to speak and the government's censorship."

No. Lying to the public in order to sell a product does not fall under Freedom of Speech. It's fraud, Mr. Jaffe, plain and simple. When I get hit with insomnia and turn on the TV late at night to watch hucksters sell snake oil to the gullible, I have to wonder how many people have died from taking these fake medications and not getting the help they truly need. The fact that people like your clients are getting money by causing this to happen is reprehensible.

Hey, looks like I was wrong! McCain went and answered some science questions after all!

http://www.sciencedebate2008.com/www/index.php?id=44

... and now that both candidates have weighed in, you can vote on what kind of grade (A through F) each candidate should receive for his answers!

http://sciencedebate2008.com/vote/

Wired magazine reports that McCain has "ignored multiple requests for the identity of its science advisors"; the same article freely mentions Obama's science team, as you might guess from the headline:

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/09/obama-campaign.html

So apparently the Republicans still haven't figured out that what you need for science to work properly is open and honest communication. He makes a point about relying on science and technology, but in big and small ways, we all rely on science and technology; that means nothing about our desire to understand it or ensure that it can flourish. (McCain has made a point about not knowing how to use a computer, so I tend to be a little skeptical of his ability to lead this country back to scientific pre-eminence.) He also promises to appoint a Science and Technology Advisor. The thing of it is, though, that the current Republican administration also has a Science and Technology Advisor (John Marburger); he just gets ignored an awful lot, and I want reassurance that a McCain White House wouldn't be more of the same.

At least he recognizes that global warming is real and that we humans have something to do with it. He also recognizes our need for nuclear power, which is much more safe and clean than many seem to think. (In these stances, he does not differ from Obama.)

He thinks the market is the best way to find alternate energy sources. I'm not sure that that's true; the market hasn't been that good so far, even though we've known for decades about problems that come from our current energy sources. (I tend toward conservativism -- I like small government -- but there are things that the government ought to do for the public good. We should have learned 100 years ago that laissez-faire capitalism doesn't work.)

You know from my earlier post on his comment referring to planetaria as "foolishness" that I don't have much respect for his stance on science education. His answers on science education topics are too vague to reassure me.

He refers to "fetal farming" for stem cells, which doesn't exist and never has. I'm sure he appeals to some people who oppose the abortion of fetuses by making empty statements like this. Frankly, I oppose the abortion of fetuses, but I don't appreciate the smoke screen he throws up by making it sound like he opposes emotionally-charged ideas that don't actually exist. (I think we ought to be more careful about creating fetuses in the first place, so that we don't have some that need to be thrown away. But that's a tangent.) Should I be given credit for saying that I oppose the oppression of green men from Mars?

Of course, I'm very interested in his space policy. I generally agree with the rhetoric -- it's inspiring, it helps us to understand the Earth, it's critical for science, blah blah blah. Then he adds that we ought to keep the Shuttle flying until Ares is ready to go (which will be 2014 at the earliest; we all know how NASA's schedules can slip). Hmm. I don't know what to think about that. The Shuttle is already well past its useful lifetime; as much as I hate to surrender manned spaceflight for four years, I also don't know what to think about pushing the system that much further. I mean, if he backed it up with a willingness to supply a lot more resources, we'd have something. As it is, I worry that it might be used as an excuse to keep blithely flying the Shuttles because it's what we've been doing for a long time now.

All in all, even though I don't expect that too many voters will even pay attention to these answers, I'm inclined to give better grades to Obama -- simply because both of them seem to spout similar rhetoric, but Obama actually comes out and says what he will do about science. Yeah, I know, politicians and their promises. Your mileage may vary, and probably will.

Have you ever heard of JZ Knight?

JZ Knight claims to "channel" a warrior from Atlantis named Ramtha who died 35,000 years ago. She speaks in a growly voice and dispenses advice; people pay her cash by the wheelbarrowful.

One of her students decided that she could do this, too. She even started to make some money at it -- a smidge over $10,000.

What's a channeler with no other marketable skills to do when one of her students starts to cut into her market share? What else would you do in America? Sue!

Here's the really stupid part. JZ Knight won.

http://www.theolympian.com/672/story/586294.html

So if you ever get a word from some nutjob who does voices, remember that it's protected information. Those voices can sue you for every penny you've got. It's a miracle that ventriloquists and Rich Calliendo survive.