Mad as hell, and entertaining

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Via Twitter/BillCorbett: Back in 2002, John Scalzi pretty much nailed the three major strains of American political thought:

Liberals: The stupidest and weakest members of the political triumvirate, they allowed conservatives to turn their name into a slur against them, exposing them as the political equivalent of the kid who lets the school bully pummel him with his own fists (Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself).
…
Conservatives: Self-hating moral relativists, unless you can convince me that an intellectual class that publicly praises family values but privately engages in sodomy, coke and trophy wives is more aptly described in some other way.
…
Libertarians: Never got over the fact they weren’t the illegitimate children of Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand; currently punishing the rest of us for it. Unusually smug for a political philosophy that’s never gotten anyone elected for anything above the local water board.

Prefiguring, it turns out, the best entry in the 50 most loathsome people in America in 2008, #43: You.

You’re hopping mad about an auto industry bailout that cost a squirt of piss compared to a Wall Street heist of galactic dimensions, due to a housing crash you somehow have blamed on minorities. It took you six years to figure out what a tool Bush is, but you think Obama will make it all better. You deem it hunky dory that we conduct national policy debates via 8-second clips from “The View.” You think God zapped humans into existence a few thousand years ago, although your appendix and wisdom teeth disagree.

Wikipedia in simplified English: Double plus good?

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I have just learned about the simplified English version of Wikipedia from xkcd. It is Wikipedia, written for beginning English readers. That means the writers use simple words and short sentences. This makes them sound like Ernest Hemmingway. Simple English Wikipedia does not have an entry for Ernest Hemmingway. A search for “Ernest Hemmingway” on Simple English Wikipedia finds only a reference to Fall Out Boy and an article about Aleister Crowley.

There is one word I always look up when I want to try a new reference source.

Evolution
In the study of life and living things, evolution is the term used to describe the way a type of living thing changes over a long period of time. “Evolution” is a scientific theory (an explanation) that is used by scientists to explain why different creatures and plants are the way that they are, and act the way that they do.

That is pretty good.

A horse has a single hoof on each foot, a cow has two, a bird has its whole arm changed into a wing, and a human has a hand. But if we look at fossils – made when very old dead things got squashed between clay or sand, which hardened into rocks, we can see all these animals were once one type of animal: Fishes.

That is not as good. I am not sure why this is.

I lied. There are two words I always look up to try new reference sources. Can you guess the other one?

Mennonites
The Mennonites are a group of Christian Anabaptists named after Menno Simons (1496–1561). His teachings were a relatively minor influence on the group,though. They are of the historic peace churches. Mennonites are committed to nonviolence, nonviolent resistance/reconciliation, and pacifism.

That is double plus not as good. I am afraid that if I write like this much longer, I will forget how to write long sentences.

Feedburning, bookmarking, and tag cloud-ing

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Compulsive additions to the blog: syndication is now by Feedburner (apologies if this mucks with anyone’s existing subscriptions), social bookmarking links for every post courtesy AddThis, and – as you’ll note in the right-hand column – an attractive new label cloud by phydeaux3.

A second chance for Last Chance to See

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Just discovered: Stephen Fry joins Mark Carwardine in returning to the places and creatures visited by Carawardine and chronicled by Douglas Adams in the excellent little book Last Chance to See, a travelogue of desperately endangered animals. The second Last Chance, like the first, is principally a BBC documentary project – we shall have to see if a book grows out of Fry’s new journey. Regrettably, none of the video seems to be viewable this side of the Atlantic.

AV Club on Eyes Wide Shut

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Via kottke.org: The Onion AV Club rehabilitates Eyes Wide Shut. I don’t remember much of the critical panning that accompanied the movie’s original release, and I didn’t see it till some grad-student friends and I committed to watch Stanley Kubrick’s major films in chronological order a couple years ago. But I agree with the review that it’s up to Kubrick’s usual high standards.

Given the choice, though, I tend to prefer 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove, which between the two of them account for my interests in evolution, hard science fiction, conscientious objection to war, and Peter Sellers.

Why liberal Christians should fight Creationism

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Slacktivist Fred Clark bounces off that depressing, depressing poll result on American’s acceptance of the historical fact of evolution in a series of posts that beautifully encapsulate the liberal Christian frustration with YEC‘s and what he quite correctly characterizes as the relatively recent, highly non-conservative Biblical “literalist” movement. First, there’s exasperation at the sheer perversity of it:

It’s hard to know what that means, exactly, to “believe in” or “not believe in” evolution. It’s like not believing in Missouri, or not believing in thermal conduction. Those two examples are a bit different from one another, but they both get at aspects of what this odd sort of disbelief entails.

“Not believing in Missouri” doesn’t affect the Show-Me State one way or another. To say that you don’t “believe in” Missouri is really to say that you deny it exists — that its existence is a fact you refuse to accept. …

On the other hand, if someone tells you that they “don’t believe in” thermal conduction, it’s likely that they’re not so much saying they deny its existence as that they don’t understand what you mean when you say “thermal conduction.” For all their supposed disbelief, after all, they still avoid sitting on metal park benches in the winter. [Italics sic.]

Then, there’s vexation that people who subscribe to such nonsense claim to do it in defense of the value of Scripture:

[Literalism’s children, YECism and “Left Behind”-style apocalypticism] are new and radically innovative ideas introduced or adopted by people who had set out, initially, to uphold “the authority of the scriptures” (to use one of their favorite phrases). That this effort to defend the Bible’s “traditional” meaning has resulted in their introducing replacement meanings that override and disregard its traditional meaning is bitterly ironic, but this irony is lost on them.

And, finally, there’s anger over the very real consequences of literalism for faith:

House-of-cards fundamentalism allows for no distinctions between babies and bathwater, between the central tenets of the faith and the adiophora and error. So once one part of this belief system begins to collapse — as it inevitably will since young-earth creationism is disprovable — then it all has to go. …

The second reason that creationism or “creation science” is a pet-peeve of mine is that I spent many years working on behalf of the Evangelical Environmental Network to try to persuade evangelicals that “creation care” was not just permissible, but a responsibility. This is made much more difficult when the audience you are addressing — as was sometimes, but not always, the case — regards the first 11 chapters of the Book of Genesis as a “literal” journalistic account and only as a literal journalistic account. [Italics sic.]

Biblical literalism is bad theology, and that’s bad for the Church. If the Church is the expression of Jesus’ example and teaching in the world (Christ’s body, you might say), then Biblical literalism is literally preventing the expression of Jesus in the world.

——-
Edit, 19 Feb: fixed broken link to that depressing, depressing poll result.

Want to speciate? Stay home.

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ResearchBlogging.orgI’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the formation of new species is almost always an accident. There you are, adapting to changes in your obligate pollinator, or the local environment – and suddenly, you can’t mate with the folks on the other side of the mountain. That’s the lesson I take from an article in last week’s PNAS, which suggests that a diverse group of birds got that way by being homebodies [$-a]


Oriental white-eye
(Zosterops palpebrosus)
Photo by Lip Kee.

The authors (including Jared Diamond, who communicated the paper to PNAS), set out to determine why there are so many species of white-eyes, a group of songbirds distributed across Africa, Southeast Asia, and the southern Pacific. They built a phylogeny for the group, calibrated it to real time using the geological dates of origin for Pacific islands occupied by white-eyes, and then estimated the rate at which the group produced new species. They found, as reported by Wired.com, that the largest group of white-eyes have one of the fastest species-accumulation rates recorded in vertebrates, about 1.6 new species every million years.

That’s a weird result, when you think about it – we’re talking about birds, and widely-distributed birds, here. All things being equal, speciation is facilitated by lack of movement – Appalachian salamanders, for instance, diversified largely because they’re too gimpy to move between stream drainages very often [$-a]. Furthermore, the authors say, white-eyes don’t display a lot of ecological differences that might contribute to isolation. So how did they speciate at a record-setting pace?

The solution? The authors propose that white-eyes are prone to rapid changes in their dispersal ability. As evidence, they cite numerous cases in which white-eyes must have crossed great distances to colonize one island, then failed to make it across much smaller distances to colonize others nearby. Nodding to Diamond’s groundbreaking work on human history and cultural evolution, they compare this to the colonization of Polynesia, in which people stopped traveling long distances as the chance of discovering an uninhabited island decreased.

References

K.H. Kozak, D.W. Weisrock, A. Larson (2006). Rapid lineage accumulation in a non-adaptive radiation: phylogenetic analysis of diversification rates in eastern North American woodland salamanders (Plethodontidae: Plethodon) Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 273 (1586), 539-46 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2005.3326

R.G. Moyle, C.E. Filardi, C.E. Smith, J. Diamond (2009). Explosive Pleistocene diversification and hemispheric expansion of a “great speciator” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106 (6), 1863-8 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0809861105

Isn’t dating Darwinian enough already?

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Sent to me by Roxy Allen, who seems to be out to wave public misperceptions about evolution in my face (on Darwin Day, she pointed me to that depressing, depressing poll result): Darwin Dating is your go-to for eugenic relationship-building, or so it claims.

Sick of dating websites filled with ugly, unattractive, desperate fatsos? We are.

Darwin Dating was created exclusively for beautiful, desirable people. Our strict rules and natural selection process ensures all our members have winning looks. Will you make the cut?

Obvious issues: (1) members are actually self-selected, as long as they send in a reasonably good photo; (2) since when are photos on Internet dating sites honest indicators? (3) do you really want to go looking for a mate amongst attractive/dishonest people who self-selected for a pretend-exclusive fringe dating site? Bio-nerd issue: attractiveness may have little relation to true Darwinian fitness (i.e., ability to successfully raise lots of offspring).

Boycotting Louisiana over creationist law

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In the wake of Louisiana’s passage of a back-door Creationism “education” law, the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology is canceling plans to hold an upcoming conference in New Orleans. Good for them. The new location? Salt Lake City.