I have been very, very bad. I have been neglecting my obligations as a member of the blogosphere to share links to interesting stuff, all because I've been busy with travel and work. I missed the Carnival of the Liberals, the Accretionary Wedge, I and the Bird, the Carnival of Space, and even the Carnival of the Godless. I am wicked, the worthless scum of the earth, a footling twallop who deserves your scorn and needs to be demoted.

But I'm trying to catch up! I promise I'll do better!

I also overlooked Revere's Sunday Sermonette, which I usually catch: the latest is a tribute to George Carlin, but even worse, I missed the one from the week before, which was about one of my comments. At least Revere understands what I meant when I compared religion to knitting.

I haven't had an open thread in a while, either. Go ahead, excoriate me.

The propaganda movie opened in Canada, and the weekend box office numbers are in.

$24,374. Nationwide.

So Canada is a smaller country in population than ours, and their money is worth a little more than ours, but still…I don't think we can call that anything but a flop.

Where's Creationist Keith now? He was ranting about the hundreds of millions of dollars the movie was going to make, how it was going to trigger a world-wide change in attitudes towards evolution, and how it was going to get me fired. Boy, was that prediction ever wrong.

We've heard the arguments about the relative importance of mutations in cis regulatory regions vs. coding sequences in evolution before — it's the idea that major transitions in evolution were accomplished more by changes in the timing and pattern of gene expression than by significant changes in the genes themselves. We developmental biologists tend to side with the cis-sies, because timing and pattern are what we're most interested in. But I have to admit that there are plenty of accounts of functional adaptation in populations that are well-founded in molecular evidence, and the cis regulatory element story is weaker in the practical sense that counts most in science (In large part, I think that's an artifact of the tools — we have better techniques for examining expressed sequences, while regulatory elements are hidden away in unexpressed regions of the genome. Give it time, the cis proponents will catch up!)

This morning, I was sent a nice paper that describes a pattern of functional change in an important molecule — there is absolutely no development in it. It's a classic example of an evolutionary arms race, though, so it's good that I mention this important and dominant side of the discipline of evolutionary biology — I know I leave the impression that all the cool stuff is in evo-devo, but there's even more exciting biology outside the scope of my tunnel vision. Also, this paper describes a situation and animals with which I am very familiar, and wondered about years ago.

It's the nature of these things to trivialize. Yet again, media hysteria fuels the absurd fear that flipping a switch in Switzerland will Destroy The World…and they're running a poll to let non-physicists guess at the risks. This one has two polls: "Is the gaint[sic] particle smasher worth the risk?" and "Which do you think is more likely to destroy the world? Human actions or natural disaster?"

Go ahead, vote. Everyone's opinion is of equal value in matters of nuclear physics.