Do you think Livingston Parish public schools should teach creationism?

Yes, evolution is a lie 22%
Yes, so children can hear both sides 35%
No, religion has no place in science class 29%
No, we don't need to waste tax money on lawsuits 13%
Don't know 1%

I think readers here might have a slightly different set of answers than are up currently, though.

Disreputable rascals, every one.

Deriq has died. It's a sad fact that most cephalopods are very short lived.

"The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very, very brightly, Deriq."

Reading through the questions is weird: they're phrased in different ways, but one of the most common motifs is the "stumbling block". The boys are asked to judge whether an item of clothing is something that might cause them to think wicked thoughts…so once again, the women are to blame for inciting men's behavior by wearing tight jeans or a strapless dress.

They're also explicit about it:

We're not telling you what to wear — we're just telling you what we, as guys, have to guard against. It is God's Word, your own heart and conscience, and your parents and godly friends who should help you decide what to do about it.

What they have to guard against? They should be plainer. "We're not telling you what to wear — we're just listing the stuff that will justify raping you."

I get a Taliban tingle just reading it. It's a far more generous document than anything Islam dictates — young Christian men do not want young Christian women to wear burkas — but in principle, it's the same thing. It's men declaring ownership of women's bodies and telling them what to wear, with the the threat of justifiable sexual assault if they do not obey.

It is a little disturbing, though, to see that their logo has a picture of a woman with a veil over her face.

His other claim to fame is that he is a holocaust revisionist. He has written a book, The Pink Swastika, in which he claims that Hitler and his entire inner circle was gay, that the atrocities the Nazis committed were driven by the immoral impulses of the gay Nazi elite, and that the well-known anti-gay laws and mass murders of homosexuals in the Third Reich were just a cover, a distraction to conceal the fact that Nazis were all gay. Oh, and also that the reason they were murdered is that gays are intrinsically violent, anyway.

Lively is an evil little liar, so it was delightful to see him exposed on the Daily Show. This is one of the clearest illuminations of the insanity of these gay-hating evangelicals I've seen.

The best moment was after Lively expounded on his ferocious gay Nazi theory and how the Nazi's public denunciation of gays was evidence that they were all secretly gay, the interviewer asks him, "That which you hate the most you secretly are?" Reverend Scott Lively sits there stunned for a moment before he can say, "I'm not gay."

I don't see how we can conclude that he's not, though, given the Christian logic he has so impeccably applied to the problem.

I wouldn't worry about it. But now you've got an excuse to plan a party for next spring.

Sussman:I get a kick out of— You go to UC Berkeley, you go to Stanford, you go to these various campuses and these students are out there protesting, "We need more money for our schools!" And standing next to them are the professors. "We need more money for our schools!" Hey, have you ever asked that professor how much money they're making every year? These professors are all millionaires. They're millionaires with big, big salaries and big, big retirement packages. And yet they dress like little schmoes, you know, with their crummy jackets [Officer Vic: Patches on the elbow.] that are twenty years old, yeah, and patches on the elbow. And their ties are askew and their hair's kinda crappy and they drive crummy little cars and they're millionaires. They're all millionaires! And they actually have the gall to stand next to the kids who are protesting because their fees are too high. "We need more money for our schools!" So you can pay these millionaires!

Reality doesn't matter to these guys, does it? We wear the crummy jackets and drive the crummy little cars because that's what we can afford: professors are proud members of the middle class, not even the upper middle class. It isn't pretense.

I'm also not really getting a pay raise. In Minnesota, we're getting a pay cut this year.

I also think Vernon fails to grasp the problem here. For instance, he complains about the refusal of anti-creationists to debate the opposition.

The most resounding message emerging from the opposition is the idea that having "real science" share a platform with "bad science" will ultimately tarnish the reputation of the legitimate scientists and science communicators who choose to participate. This is essentially the same argument Richard Dawkins, PZ Meyers and others take when refusing to debate evolutionists. The concept here being that by sharing the stage with creationists, scientists lend credibility to the creationist arguments. In some ways, I think this is a cowardly response. If you have a sound argument, the opposition should not win the debate.

That's wrong on multiple levels. First, a debate is not won by sound argument; it's by persuasive rhetoric. Many creationists have that skill (I have to repeat a mantra I've got: creationists are not stupid, just ignorant and misled by ignorant arguments), so it is a serious tactical error to think that because all the facts and science are on your side, you're going to win debates. That's a recipe for consistent failure.

The other problem here is that I've "won" most of my debates…because the other side is just nuts. Jerry Bergman and Geoff Simmons, to name two, were raving loonies who made me embarrassed to be sharing a spotlight with them. There was no gain for me, and plenty for them. You get two possibilities: you'll face an eloquent rhetorician who will run rings around you despite your command of the facts, or you'll get a nutcase who makes you feel like you're sharing the podium with a brain-damaged hobo. Neither are great options.

The final big problem is that creationist debaters willingly lie and distract to win their arguments. The Gish Gallop is just one of the tools they use; they sputter out dozens of claims that are false and falsifiable, if you had an hour to address each one. And then, of course, if you do "win", they'll cheerfully lie to their little closeted evangelical audiences that they not only defeated you, but that you were a big abusive meanie who was rude and accused the creationists of making stuff up.

I have little hope for Vernon's endeavor if he doesn't grasp these basic realities of dealing with kooks.

As for Huffpo, he has a couple of hurdles. He has openly announced his intent to expose the "bad science" on HuffPo — while I like that idea, does he really think Ariana Huffington is going to look kindly on that proposal?

Also, we know that Huffpo editors censor articles. There isn't going to be any criticism of the site's major goals, the promulgation of Newage garbage, getting through unbutchered.

But let's assume Vernon succeeds, and gets a good science section with reputable contributors writing about good solid science and criticizing the pseudoscience and quackery otherwise rife on Huffpo. If it acquires even a scrap of prestige and respect, I can predict exactly what will happen: Deepak Chopra and Robert Lanza will ask Huffington to include their raving madness in that section. They write about "science" and "medicine", after all. And a credible science section on Huffpo will be quickly subverted to promote quackery.

Convergent Revolution agrees that Huffpo Science would be a bad idea. Huffpo is tainted fruit — stay away from it altogether.

It's an amazing example of inappropriate obliviousness, so painful that I thought Cohen had to be uniquely blind and self-centered…but no, the comments contain several people praising him for his fantasies about marrying and impregnating her. Gah. I need a shower now.

If you can't stomach the whole mess, read this distillation of the worst of Andrew Cohen.

(via Amanda.)

Now we're all caught up on everything.

(Current totals: 10,712 entries with 1,069,687 comments.)

Too many to list showed up, but several of the previously less voluble have agreed to comment more. Here is their chance: introduce yourselves!

Do you think The Ten Commandments should be displayed in government buildings?"

Yes 76%
No 23%
Undecided 1%

It seems rather silly to post a bunch of laws, most of which everyone in the building will cheerfully ignore.

But there's an odd disjoint here, too. It's the UK, a modern western nation. They have laws to prohibit mangling children.

The UK Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act 1985 makes it an offence to carry out FGM or to aid, abet or procure the service of another person. The Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003, makes it against the law for FGM to be performed anywhere in the world on UK permanent residents of any age and carries a maximum sentence of 14 years imprisonment. To date, no prosecutions have been made under UK legislation.

That's clear: a strict law and strong penalties, but no prosecutions — so it must be an effective law, right?

Wrong.

Some 500 to 2,000 British schoolgirls will be genitally mutilated over the summer holidays. Some will be taken abroad, others will be "cut" or circumcised and sewn closed here in the UK by women already living here or who are flown in and brought to "cutting parties" for a few girls at a time in a cost-saving exercise.

It's happening right now. It seems to me that there ought to be 500-2000 arrests in the UK this year, maybe more, since they've got a 7 year backlog of neglected criminality.

If medical neglect of children can be a prosecutable crime here in benighted America, why isn't the UK doing something to stop active, vicious mutilation of children?

And so, while humans inadvertently drive beneficial species, from tuna to corals, to the edge of extinction, their best efforts can't seriously threaten an insect with few redeeming features. "They don't occupy an unassailable niche in the environment," says entomologist Joe Conlon, of the American Mosquito Control Association in Jacksonville, Florida. "If we eradicated them tomorrow, the ecosystems where they are active will hiccup and then get on with life. Something better or worse would take over."

The article does mention mosquitoes immense contributions to biomass in general in many environments, particularly in the arctic, but this doesn't seem to perturb the mosquito-haters. It's odd, since I live in Minnesota, where we get clouds of the bitin' beasts, and they are regarded as major nuisances…but at the same time everyone understands that they also feed the fish that stock our lakes. I don't think a widespread mosquito extinction program would be entirely popular.

The commenters on the article seem much more sensible. I was happy to see one quoting Aldo Leopold:

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, "What good is it?" If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

The article mentions, for instance, that every animal in an arctic caribou herd loses 300 mL of blood a day to the depredations of mosquito swarms, which is definitely horrific for the caribou—but that's biomass that's getting transferred to birds and bats and fish. It seems to me that preventing that would be a rather substantial blow against species diversity, even if it did make some big charismatic mammals much more comfortable.

The area started swelling, and the fast-growing mass of blood vessels, known as a hemangioma, eventually caused her eye to swell shut and pushed the eyeball down and outward and started eroding the eye socket bone around the eye.

There are pictures at the link. It's not pretty. I know if my babies had a growth that was almost the size of a tennis ball that was destroying their face, I'd have been camped out at the hospital. But not Alayna's parents! They have a special treatment plan.

The Wylands and their church reject medical care in favor of faith-healing -- anointing with oil, laying on of hands, prayer and fasting. The parents testified at a juvenile court hearing last week that they never considered getting medical attention for Alayna.

According to court documents, Rebecca Wyland anointed Alayna with oil each time she changed the girl's diaper and wiped away the yellow discharge that seeped daily from the baby's left eye.

There they go with the magic anointing oil again! Does that stuff do anything? If we can waste time with homeopathy, maybe it's about time someone did some clinical trials with anointing oil and put that crap to rest (not that it would make a bit of difference…).

The Wylands are rather vile, but at least this is taking place in Oregon, where "it is a crime for parents to intentionally and knowingly withhold necessary and adequate medical attention from their children". Alayna has been placed in state custody for treatment, and both parents have been charged with first degree criminal mistreatment.

But wait, there's more! The father was previously married.

Wyland's first wife, Monique, died of breast cancer in 2006. She had not sought or received medical treatment for the condition, said Dr. Christopher Young, a deputy state medical examiner who signed the death certificate.

She died of untreated breast cancer? That poor woman — that's a hard death, an agonizing death, and often, an unnecessary death — can that entire wretched cult be indicted for torture-murder? They seem to be leaving quite a pile of dead women and children.

A gay netball coach fired from a Christchurch Christian school has gained compensation and an apology.

The 28-year-old man was employed as a girls' netball coach at Middleton Grange School in February, but said he was sacked by the board of trustees after members discovered his sexual orientation.

A gay man was fired from his job as coach of a girls' team? Wouldn't it have made more sense to fire him if he were heterosexual?

Oh, it's a religious school. They specialize in stuff that makes no sense.

Not all bloggers feel this way, Myers included. "We've known about those [institutional blogs] for some time--they aren't a problem," he wrote in an e-mail to NEWSWEEK. "Those sites were set up under the same conditions as the blogs of corporate scientist Mark Chu-Carroll, who works at Google, and university scientist PZ Myers, who works at the University of Minnesota. ... [The Pepsi blog blurred] the boundary between advertising and content. I agree that the institutional blogs also blur that boundary, just not quite as much. I can't insist that their blogs be labeled as advertisements, unless I want my blog marked as an ad for the University of Minnesota, or Chu-Carroll's as an ad for Google. It's complicated and messy."

There is some confusion out there, however. I do not claim to represent the University of Minnesota. Mark Chu-Carroll did not claim to speak for Google. My point was that if you take any blogger and look at the chains of affiliations they have (as we all do), we do not try to argue that every possible connection is a direct conflict of interest that demands a prominent disclaimer on the web page.

We ought to reserve the term "ad" for situations where an interest has paid money to be promoted, as PepsiCo did. The Weizmann Institute did not. Google did not pay to have Chu-Carroll peddle the company line, and he didn't. The University of Minnesota did not pay to have me scare away recruit potential students, although I may have done one or the other, accidentally. Weizmann, SETI, and Brookhaven have that in common with me and Chu-Carroll, and none of us cross the ethical barrier in the same way that PepsiCo did.

I actually think it's a good idea for institutions to have blogs at places like Scienceblogs. One thing I mentioned (but was not quoted) in my email to Newsweek is that the real challenge for institutional blogs is for them to be interesting. I rather like this quote from Carl Zimmer that summarizes their problem:

I do not, for example, assume that a piece of research is actually important just because a press release says it is. Imagine a press release with the headline, "Minor study published that is really not all it claims to be." Such things just don't exist.

I do have a solution for any financial problems, though: we just need to peddle more T&A and celebrity gossip, like Huffpo. Isn't that a bit illiberal, though, to build your brand on the backs of salacious stories about women? Not to mention the quackery and woo.

Although I guess I am also guilty of building an audience with blatant T&A^*, too.

^*Only in my case, that stands for "tentacles and arms".

I think it's wonderful. Truth is an essential part of accurately assessing the war.

And the war isn't going well. There are tales of atrocities on both sides, civilians being murdered by both sides, backhanded deals by Pakistan with both the US and the Afghan insurgents, and an increasing number of attacks — we aren't winning at all.

The other shocking bit about this revelation is that it wasn't done by any of the established media organizations — it took a stateless, independent organization to actually break the barriers to information that other media companies respect. Now, of course, Spiegel, the Guardian, and the NY Times are doing a fine job of analyzing the deluge of information…but once upon a time, we might have expected investigative journalists to do that work. I guess it's cheaper to hire a Judith Miller to massage government propaganda than to actually dig into the facts.

This sad fact about the news disappointed me.

Ask yourself: Why didn't Wikileaks just publish the Afghanistan war logs and let journalists 'round the world have at them? Why hand them over to The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel first? Because as Julien Assange, founder of Wikileaks, explained last October, if a big story is available to everyone equally, journalists will pass on it.

"It's counterintuitive," he said then. "You'd think the bigger and more important the document is, the more likely it will be reported on but that's absolutely not true. It's about supply and demand. Zero supply equals high demand, it has value. As soon as we release the material, the supply goes to infinity, so the perceived value goes to zero."

I have a very low opinion of most journalists — it's a career in disrepute, given the sad state of media affairs, especially with the pathetic state of television news. I glanced at some of the programming going on now, and most of what I saw were mannequins arguing over whether it was right to release these documents, rather than any substantive discussion of the horrors contained within them.

But I will say this: Julien Assange is a hero who is doing a great service to both rescue and revolutionize honest journalism.

(via Botany Photo of the Day)

The watch site doesn't like this comment from a Hitchens interview, but I think he's actually responding in an entirely appropriate way. He's got cancer; people are wasting their time praying for him. What does Hitchens think of that?

I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don't do any good, but they don't necessarily do any harm. It's touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I've got my just desserts ... I wish it was more consoling. But I have to say there's some extremely nice people, including people known to you, have said that I'm in their prayers, and I can only say that I'm touched by the thought.

Prayer does absolutely nothing, but most of the people doing it mean well and are seriously hoping for the best for him. Strangers who have no part in his treatment aren't doing less because they're on their knees babbling to the sky (although they are promoting such useless nonsense as acceptable), so it neither picks his pocket nor breaks his leg for someone else to believe. It's when belief infiltrates professional practice or public policy that it becomes an evil to be uncompromisingly opposed.

It's a tough line to draw. One doesn't want to be an enabler of stupid expressions of faith, but at the same time, one shouldn't discourage kind intent. Hitchens is in a situation where he's going to have to walk that line a lot.

It made me think…there would be a lot more vegans in the world if they could each declare one special exemption. I think "I'm a vegan, except when it comes to bacon" would be a very common phrase, just like "I'm a skeptic, except when it comes to religion."

Mmmm, bacon.

Peggy Needham, the deputy people's warden at the church, said that no further action would be taken.

"The backlash is from just one person," she said.

"Something happened that won't happen again. Something our interim priest did spontaneously.

"This person went to the top and emailed our bishop to make a fuss and change things. But he misjudged our congregation."

No, he didn't. He got exactly what he wanted. Notice that for most people in that church the incident with the dog was heartwarming — it fit well with their charitable vision of Christianity as a welcoming, friendly institution. One person complained, one bitter, dogmatic little man, and you know exactly what arguments he used: it was disrespectful to his imaginary god, it was a departure from church-sanctioned ritual, it gave worth to a mere animal that was reserved for good Anglicans. And the church bought it.

Hundreds of people value the humane, community-centered aspect of their church, and all that gets thrown out for one little pissant who truly believes in the petty, bogus disciplines of his poisonous faith.

I'll believe he misjudged that congregation when at the next communion, every one of them brings up a loved pet to the rail, and the priest serves every one of them. It won't happen, though, because the fear of god now compels them to obey.

It's been quite the embarrassment for the gullible Mr Mooney, and of course "Tom Johnson" has really demolished his own reputation.

"Johnson" has apparently sent out apologies to a few of the people he dishonestly slandered (I'm not among them; I guess he doesn't like me at all). Now Jerry Coyne has dug up details on the background, including having a conversation with "Johnson's" grad school advisor.

I wash my hands completely of the ugly little anti-atheist muckraker and will not be discussing him further in any context — he's dead to me. The only good thing to come out of the whole sordid mess was a tarnishing of the reputation of that other anti-New Atheist crusader, Mooney. And now the "Johnson" affair is over.

Tuesday at 6ish I'll be at the Pike Brewing Company waiting upon Ophelia Benson. Come on out! Buy us beer! I'm also thinking I might head up there a little early to visit the Seattle Aquarium, since it's right there in the neighborhood.

Friday at noon I'll be at Room B101, University of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford BC. This is a free talk, although the group there would gladly accept donations. I don't seem to have a topic for this talk, though…but I do hear that Abbotsford is B.C.'s epicenter of fundamentalism, so I'll probably say inflammatory things about creationism. Whee!

Friday at 7pm I'll be at UBC Westbrook Room 100, 6174 University Boulevard, Vancouver BC to talk about the role of atheism in science. Hmmm. Both of these are inflammatory topics…will British Columbia erupt in riots? Show up and see. Oh, and this talk is not free: $10. There's also a fancy pants reception afterwards that will cost $50.

Saturday at 5:00pm on I'll be attending…my 35th high school reunion with a gang of strange people I haven't seen in decades. You aren't invited unless you were also a graduate of Kent-Meridian High School, Class of 1975.

All times not specified will be spent hunkered over a keyboard. Go away, don't bother me.

It sounds great until you realize you're probably going to have to compete against the Cuttlefish.

This is disgraceful. A reader sent me a link to a Target catalog, and apparently they're now selling a Li'l PZ Action Set.

Think of the children.

(via The Skeptic's Field Guide)

(Current totals: 10,691 entries with 1,066,521 comments.)

Most of you don't understand evolution. I mean this in the most charitable way; there's a common conceptual model of how evolution occurs that I find everywhere, and that I particularly find common among bright young students who are just getting enthusiastic about biology. Let me give you the Standard Story, the one that I get all the time from supporters of biology.

Evolution proceeds by mutation and selection. A novel mutation occurs in a gene that gives the individual inheriting it an advantage, and that person passes it on to their children who also gets the advantage and do better than their peers, and leave more offspring. Given time, the advantageous mutation spreads through the population so the entire species has it.

One example is the human brain. An ape man millions of years ago acquired a mutation that made his or her brain slightly larger, and since those individuals were slightly smarter than other ape men, it spread through the population. Then later, other mutations occured and were selected for and so human brains gradually got larger and larger.

You either know what's wrong here or you're feeling a little uneasy—I gave you enough hints that you know I'm going to complain about that story, but if your knowledge is at the Evolutionary Biology 101 level, you may not be sure what it is.

Just to make you even more queasy, the misunderstanding here is one that creationists have, too. If you've ever encountered the cryptic phrase "RM+NS" ("random mutation + natural selection") used as a pejorative on a creationist site, you've found someone with this affliction. They've got it completely wrong.

Here's the problem, and also a brief introduction to Evolutionary Biology 201.

First, it's not exactly wrong — it's more like taking one good explanation of certain kinds of evolution and making it a sweeping claim that that is how all evolution works. By reducing it to this one scheme, though, it makes evolution far too plodding and linear, and reduces it all to a sort of personal narrative. It isn't any of those things. What's left out in the 101 story, and in creationist tales, is that: evolution is about populations, so many changes go on in parallel; selectable traits are usually the product of networks of genes, so there are rarely single alleles that can be categorized as the effector of change; and genes and gene networks are plastic or responsive to the environment. All of these complications make the actual story more complicated and interesting, and also, perhaps to your surprise, make evolutionary change faster and more powerful.

Think populations

Mutations are the root of biological variation, of course, but we often have a naive view of their consequences. Most mutations are neutral. Even advantageous mutations are subject to laws of chance in their propagation, and a positive selection coefficient does not mean there will be an inexorable march to fixation, where every individual has the allele. This is also true of deleterious mutations: chance often dominates, and unless it is a strongly negative allele, like an embryonic lethal mutation, there's also a chance it can spread through the population.

Stop thinking of mutations as unitary events that either get swiftly culled, because they're deleterious, or get swiftly hauled into prominence by the uplifting crane of natural selection. Mutations are usually negligible changes that get tossed into the stewpot of the gene pool, where they simmer mostly unnoticed and invisible to selection. Look at human faces, for instance: they're all different, and unless you're looking at the extremes of beauty or ugliness, the variations simply don't make much difference. Yet all those different faces really are the result of subtly different combinations of mutant forms of genes.

"Combinations" is the magic word. A single mutation rarely has a significant effect on a feature, but the combination of multiple mutations may have a detectable or even novel effect that can be seen by natural selection. And that's what's going on all the time: the population is a huge reservoir of genetic variation, and what we do when we reproduce is sort and mix and generate new combinations that are then tested in the environment.

Compare it to a game of poker. A two of hearts in itself seems to be a pathetic little card, but if it's part of a flush or a straight or three of a kind, it can produce a winning hand. In the game, it's not the card itself that has power, it's its utility in a pattern or combination of other cards. A large population like ours is a great shuffler that is producing millions of new hands every day.

We know that this recombination is essential to the rapid acquisition of new phenotypes. Here are some results from a classic experiment by Waddington. Waddington noted that fruit flies expressed the odd trait of developing four wings (the bithorax phenotype) instead of two if they were exposed to ether early in development. This is not a mutation! This is called a phenocopy, where an environmental factor induces an effect similar to a genetic mutation.

What Waddington did next was to select for individuals that expressed the bithorax phenotype most robustly, or that were better at resisting the ether, and found that he could get a progressive strengthening of the response.

The progress of selection for or against a bithorax-like response to ether treatment in two wild-type populations. Experiments 1 and 2 initially showed about 25 and 48% of the bithorax (He) phenotype.

This occurred over 10s of generations — far, far too fast for this to be a consequence of the generation of new mutations. What Waddington was doing was selecting for more potent combinations of alleles already extant in the gene pool.

This was confirmed in a cool way with a simple experiment: the results in the graph above were obtained from wild-caught populations. Using highly inbred laboratory strains that have greatly reduced genetic variation abolishes the outcome.

Jonathan Bard sees this as a powerful potential factor in evolution.

Waddington's results have excited considerable controversy over the years, for example as to whether they reflect threshold effects or hidden variation. In my view, these arguments are irrelevant to the key point: within a population of organisms, there is enough intrinsic variability that, given strong selection pressures, minor but existing variants in a trait that are not normally noticeable can rapidly become the majority phenotype without new mutations. The implications for evolution are obvious: normally silent mutations in a population can lead to adaptation if selection pressures are high enough. This view provides a sensible explanation of the relatively rapid origins of the different beak morphologies of Darwin's various finches and of species flocks.

Think networks

One question you might have at this point is that the model above suggests that mutations are constantly being thrown into the population's gene pool and are steadily accumulating — it means that there must be a remarkable amount of genetic variation between individuals (and there is! It's been measured), yet we generally don't see most people as weird and obvious mutants. That variation is largely invisible, or represents mere minor variations that we don't regard as at all remarkable. How can that be?

One important reason is that most traits are not the product of single genes, but of combinations of genes working together in complex ways. The unit producing the phenotype is most often a network of genes and gene products, such at this lovely example of the network supporting expression and regulation of the epidermal growth factor (EGF) pathway.

The EGF pathway (from www.sabiosciences.com/pathwaycentral.php)

That is awesomely complex, and yes, if you're a creationist you're probably wrongly thinking there is no way that can evolve. The curious thing is, though, that the more elaborate the network, the more pieces tangled into the pathway, the smaller the effect of any individual component (in general, of course). What we find over and over again is that many mutations to any one component may have a completely indetectable effect on the output. The system is buffered to produce a reliable yield.

This is the way networks often work. Consider the internet, for example: a complex network with many components and many different routes to get a single from Point A to Point B. What happens if you take out a single node, or even a set of nodes? The system routes automatically around any damage, without any intelligent agency required to consciously reroute messages.

But further, consider the nature of most mutations in a biological network. Simple knockouts of a whole component are possible, but often what will happen are smaller effects. These gene products are typically enzymes; what happens is a shift in kinetics that will more subtly modify expression. The challenge is to measure and compute these effects.

Graph analysis is showing how networks can be partitioned and analysed, while work on the kinetics of networks has shown first that it is possible to simplify the mathematics of the differential equation models and, second, that the detailed output of a network is relatively insensitive to changes in most of the reaction parameters. What this latter work means is that most gene mutations will have relatively minor effects on the networks in which their proteins are involved, and some will have none, perhaps because they are part of secondary pathways and so redundant under normal circumstances. Indirect evidence for this comes from the surprising observation that many gene knockouts in mice result in an apparently normal phenotype. Within an evolutionary context, it would thus be expected that, across a population of organisms, most mutations in a network would effectively be silent, in that they would give no selective advantage under normal conditions. It is one of the tasks of systems biologists to understand how and where mutations can lead to sufficient variation in networks properties for selection to have something on which to act.

Combine this with population effects. The population can accumulate many of these sneaky variants that have no significant effect on most individuals, but under conditions of strong selection, combinations of these variants, that together can have detectable effects, can be exposed to selection.

Think flexible genes

Another factor in this process (one that Bard does not touch on) is that the individual genes themselves are not invariant units. Mutations can affect how genes contribute to the network, but in addition, the same allele can have different consequences in different genetic backgrounds — it is affected by the other genes in the network — and also has different consquences in different external environments.

Everything is fluid. Biology isn't about fixed and rigidly invariant processes — it's about squishy, dynamic, and interactive stuff making do.

Now do you see what's wrong with the simplistic caricature of evolution at the top of this article? It's superficial; it ignores the richness of real biology; it limits and constrains the potential of evolution unrealistically. The concept of evolution as a change in allele frequencies over time is one small part of the whole of evolutionary processes. You've got to include network theory and gene and environmental interactions to really understand the phenomena. And the cool thing is that all of these perspectives make evolution an even more powerful force.

Bard J (2010) A systems biology view of evolutionary genetics. Bioessays 32: 559-563.

I'm entering this brief note on my iPad 3G, which I've found to be bit flaky with MovableType. This may manifest itself as a blank entry, in which case I'll be very frustrated and you won't even know it.

At least the sun is shining and there are mountains and trees and oceans around here, even if this Internet thingie is glitchy.

That climate fraud, Anthony Watts, has noticed Pepsigate. He's got a unique spin on it: the reason some Sciencebloggers were very upset at the inclusion of an unlabeled infomercial as a blog had nothing to do with the ethics of keeping advertising separate from content — it's because we don't like Pepsi. Then he goes off on a riff about how we're hypocrites because we probably eat Doritos and drink Mountain Dew.

Wait. That's not funny. That's just stupid.

This one is a little better. Crackpot right-wing physics goon Lubos Motl has also noticed Pepsigate, and of course he has his own distinct explanation. It's because we're all left wing socialist pinko commie stooges producing "stinky communist garbage".

These "thinkers" make Leonid Brezhnev look like Milton Friedman in comparison. The list includes the self-described "Godless ejaculating liberal" Paul Z. Myers, the top climatic Wikipedia censor and U.K. Green Party apparatchik William M. Connolley whose Stoat is "taking science by the throat" (his words!), Tim Lambert with his Deltoid, and many others whose names remain actively unknown to us - thank God. (I follow dozens of blogs but none of the SB blogs is anywhere in my bookmarks.)

Got that? Stoat and Deltoid are my comrades. Don't ever visit them. I repeat: Stoat and Deltoid. Together, we are the troika of evil.

One last tidbit, and this is really funny.

Your humble correspondent was offered to join the scienceblogs.com platform in 2006 and I had nothing substantial against it. The purely technical considerations such as the stability of the URLs and traffic and the control over the design - and independence in general - decided I would say no.

I remember that! Motl was considered, and his name was floated to the blogger community here, and after we all got done laughing, the consensus was that no, we'd rather not have Crazy Lubos in our company. And the fact that he wanted full control over his design…Lubos Motl is infamous for his tasteless and eyeball-busting scrambled layouts.

Last example of conservative conniptions, and this one is my favorite. I have been targeted by Conservapædia for their Article of the Week. Yay me!

My crimes are numerous and severe: cracker abuse, gate-crashing movie premieres, mocking creationists, riding a triceratops, and being "intellectually slothful". The most grievous crime, though, the one that deserved to be pulled out and highlighted with a figure, was this one.

I've been very naughty.

By the way, years ago there were several Conservapædia fanatics who did spam the site rather fiercely, trying to jam up conversations and presumably direct more traffic to their silly site. I had to add "conservapedia" to the list of filtered words here. If you want to comment on this, you can't link to Conservapædia, and you can't mention them by their preferred spelling either. You can use that effete European ligature, though: just write it out Conservapædia. Drives 'em nuts.

All of this is very annoying. I'm an atheist; how can Voltaire's prayer be working out so well for me? ("I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.")

After looking at the current explanations for origins and evolution; it is our view that the evidence available points to widespread evolution after an initial Creation by God. This is viewed as controversial by some and welcomed by others; but whether currently popular or not we believe the evidence supports a world-view somewhere between Darwinism and 6000BC Creationism and we encourage interested readers to look into the claims being made.

They are disavowing the strictly young earth creationist approach, so they reassure us that the world really is older than 6,000 years old. Ha ha, how silly — 6,000 years is far too short. Aren't those dogmatic creationists absurd?

So, you might wonder, how old do they think the earth is? And they cagily hem and haw and refuse to answer, although they do suggest that 4.5 billion years is just way too old, ha ha, goofy evolutionists. They do reference a creationist site that invents a new geology, and which argues, for instance, that the Cretaceous was a period that was actually 4,000 years long.

Real geologists, the ones who actually understand the science, say the Cretaceous was 80 million years long. So they're only off by about 4 orders of magnitude. I guess that means they think the earth is tens of millions of years old instead of a few billion, which makes them what? Adolescent Earth Creationists, instead of Young Earth Creationists? Maybe we can call them Tweenie Creationists. They're still wrong, though.

Anyway, this joke of a zoo that miseducates children (but apparently cheerfully and with colorful and interactive exhibits and stories!) has won an award from the Council for Learning Outside the Classroom. It's a peculiar gift — they're basically rewarding them for good, effective teaching of lies.

You can read about the award here. Apparently, one of the qualifications is supposed to be about providing "accurate information"; shouldn't this zoo have been instantly disqualified on that basis alone?

The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities. I say "generally" because there are exceptions. But in general, as I survey the ranks of those who are unemployed, I see people who have overbearing and unpleasant personalities and/or who do not know how to do a day's work. They are people who create either little utility or negative utility on the job.

Wait…Ben Stein is complaining about other people's overbearing and unpleasant personalities and bad work habits? The man who built his reputation on a voice like a strangled frog and the dullest personality imaginable thinks those are firing offenses? Very good, then, let him be unemployed.

I've known a few people who have been laid off — I grew up near Seattle, where every other year, Boeing would hiccup and mobs of people, including my own father, would find themselves fired and looking desperately to make ends meet. I had no idea that Boeing managed their personnel by firing only nasty unpleasant people.

Days later, the church and diocese received a complaint from one parishioner, who felt the church offended the sacred ritual. The bread and wine are meant to represent the body and blood of Jesus Christ and are only to be given to those who have been baptized.

It's a cracker. Come on. I'd rather make one dog happy than please all the dogmatists in the world.

And these speculations as rationalizations annoy me.

"In his email, the man's argument was that Christ wouldn't have liked it," said Needham. "But in my opinion, Christ would have thought it was neat. It was just being human. And it made everyone smile."

Face it, your god is simply a projection of your own personality and beliefs. He isn't there. If you like dogs, you'll imagine that your god likes dogs; if you think noisy smelly animals are a nuisance, your god bars the gates of heaven to them.

I'll watch that.

(via Skepchick)

Don't watch the video if the sight of scarred breasts bother you.

One in four girls in Cameroon are having this done. It seems to me that sex education and prophylactics would be the less destructive way to prevent pregnancies, and probably more effective, but…did you know that approximately 25% of the population of Cameroon are Catholic?

Here, though, are the forces of Comic-con madness across the street. They're much more entertaining. Click to zoom in!

Justin liked "Jesus was nailed to a cross. Thor has a hammer." I kind of liked "ODIN IS GOD. Read Mighty Thor #5". Thor is always good for a laugh in these sorts of things.

The story, as you probably all know, is that Shirley Sherrod gave a talk on her work assisting poor farmers hang on to their land, in which she confessed to being less enthusiastic about helping poor white farmers early on. Andrew Breitbart, professional pseudojournalist and teabaggin' hack, ran just that excerpt of her talk and made it sound as if she and her audience at the NAACP were flaming racist hatemongers who were chuckling over making Whitey pay.

He lied. He lied outrageously by editing out the context (or, as he claims, his source did the editing), and making it sound like racism when it was exactly the opposite, and Tom Vilsack, the Democrat at the Department of Agriculture rushed to appease Breitbart and had Sherrod fired.

Afterwards, the full video of the talk was revealed, and it's discovered that Sherrod was making the point that her early biases were wrong, and that she learned that it was important to get over the false barriers of racism and realize that this is a problem of the poor of every color. Then the farmers who she'd been initially reluctant to help came forward to say that Sherrod had been a wonderful person who'd saved the family farm for them. It's quite a story: it's the complete annihilation of a right-wing lie, and the emergence of a real hero, Shirley Sherrod.

I've learned a couple of things.

• Andrew Breitbart is beneath contempt. He's not a journalist at all: he's a partisan hack who will make up stories to fit his biases (he was also guilty of faking the ACORN scandal). I'm hoping the news media will recognize his name as purest poison from now on. I don't have high hopes, though; people seem to be swallowing Breitbart's excuses, lame as they are.

• Our Democratic leadership is spineless. They fired this woman at the command of right-wing attack dogs? For shame. They didn't even try to investigate and figure out if this was a genuine problem. Please learn: when the wingnuts bark, don't jump, because they are little yappy dogs who never shut up. Fire Vilsack and put Sherrod in his place — she seems to have a moral compass.

• Racism isn't dead, and the Republican party seems to be its bastion. This was an effort by Breitbart to punish the NAACP because it had been accusing the teabaggers of racism; it has soundly backfired, because trying to damage an organization working to end racism is simply another manifestation of racism. Sherrod is fighting back, pointing out what the right-wing media is actually trying to do.

  "They were looking for the result they got yesterday," she said of Fox. "I am just a pawn. I was just here. They are after a bigger thing, they would love to take us back to where we were many years ago. Back to where black people were looking down, not looking white folks in the face, not being able to compete for a job out there and not be a whole person."

• The right-wing political base is truly vile. I looked at a few of their blogs, and despite the thoroughness of Breitbart's credibility implosion and the way this story has blown up in their faces, they're still trying to defend it. I'm not going to link to them, but instead, look at this brief and effective deconstruction of one such apologia by John Cole. Are the teaparty promoters racist? Hell, yes. Either that or they're just brain-damaged idiots, I can't tell.

• There's another minor lesson to be learned here, too. Glenn Greenwald said something of Breitbart, who is still refusing to explain how he got this dishonestly edited tape:

  "Journalists" are supposed to expose their "sources" if they use the journalist to perpetrate a fraud.

  Oh, yes?

• The important lesson, though, is that this is about class politics and class warfare — not the phony kind the Republicans decry, which is all about the horrible way the obscenely rich are hindered from becoming pornographically rich, but the real one, the one fought in an America where children still go to bed hungry and everyone has to worry about the porous social safety net. This is a country where a middle-class person can be completely wiped out by a serious illness in the family, where the poor are kept paddling in place trying to make ends meet and never get an opportunity to advance themselves. Sherrod said that, too.

  Sherrod delivered an address on race, class, and government that wove together reflections of the murder of her father at the hands of white man, her early-life misgivings about the American South, her work organizing the community in the face of violent racism, and her eventual recognition as a government official working with local farmers that class, not race, was the dominant matter. "It's not just about black people, it's about poor people," Sherrod said. "We have to get to the point where race exists but it doesn't matter."

  That should frighten Republicans more than their phony race-baiting story: when Americans wake up to their common cause despite Republican efforts to sow divisions by race, then we might have some progressive politics again (beyond the weak and unprincipled of Democratic Republican-lite politics, that is.)

But most of all, we've got to treat the Republican hate machine appropriately: Drudge-acolytes like Breitbart, phonies like Beck and Limbaugh — all are pariahs that our news media must stop treating respectfully.

I'm one of those dreadful animal-centric zoologically inclined biologists. Plants? What are those? Fungi? They're related to metazoans somehow. Lichens? Not even on the radar. The first step in fixing a problem, though, is recognizing that you have one. So I confess to you, O Readers, that my name is PZ, and I am a metazoaphile. But I can get better.

My path to opening up to wider horizons is to focus on what I find most interesting about animals, and that is that they are networks of cells driven by networks of genes that generate patterned responses of expression by cell signaling, or communication. See? I'm already a little weird. Show me a baby bunny, and I don't just see a cute little furry pal with an adorable twitchy nose, I see an organized and coherent array of differentiated tissues that arose by a temporal sequence of cell-cell interactions, and I just wanna open him up and play with his widdle epithelial sheets and dismantle his pwetty ducts and struts and fibers and fluids, oochy coo. And ultimately, I want to take apart each cell and ask why it has its particular assortment of genes switched off and on, and how its state affects its neighbors and the whole of the organism.

Which means, lately, that I've acquired a growing interest in bacteria. If I were 30 years younger, I could probably be seduced into a career in microbiology.

There are a couple of reasons why an animal-centric biologist would be interested in bacteria. One is the principle of it; the mechanisms that animal cells use to build complex arrangements of tissues were all first pioneered in single-celled organisms. We have elaborated and added details to gene- and cell-level phenomena, but it's a collection of significant quantitative differences, with nothing known that is essentially new in metazoan cells. All the cool stuff was worked out by evolution in the 3-4billion years before the Cambrian, a potential that simply blossomed in the past half-billion years into big conglomerations of cells. Understanding how the building blocks of multicellularity work individually ought to be a prerequisite to understanding how the assemblages work.

But there's another reason, too, a difference in perspective. It is our conceit to regard ourselves as individuals of Homo sapiens, a body of cells clonally derived from a single human cell. It's not true. It turns out that each one of us is actually a whole population of species, linked by our evolutionary history and lumbering through the world as a team. Genus Homo is also genera Escherichi and Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes and many others.

Physiology

Let's begin with the most widely known factor: we're mostly bacterial in cell numbers, with about ten times as many bacterial cells as human cells. Most of these are nestled deep in our guts, where they are indispensible. In mammals, they help break down complex polysaccharides which we can then absorb through the wall of the digestive tract — these are compounds that would be simply lost without bacterial assistance. Even more dramatically, termite guts contain colonies of bacteria that produce enzymes to break down cellulose. Another insect, aphids, live in plant saps which have negligible protein components, and they rely on gut bacteria that can synthesize nine essential amino acids. One cool feature is that the bacteria can't complete the synthesis of leucine; the last step is carried out by aphid enzymes. The synthetic pathway is split acros two different species!

Another weird twist is that gut bacteria can affect morphology (or vice versa; physiology influences which gut bacteria thrive). Mice with a genetic predisposition to obesity were found to have a different distribution of gut bacteria; fat mice are full of Firmicutes, while lean mice are loaded with Bacteroidetes. Something in the genetics of the obese mice seems to favor the proliferation of that one species. Cause and effect is not so easily separated, though, since doing a fecal transplant and inoculating the guts of germ free mice with the bacteria from obese mice vs. lean mice has a surprising effect: the mice given obese mouse fecal enemas subsequently increased their body fat by 60%. The bacteria promoted more fat storage in the host animal.

So what, you may be thinking, it's mice. However, it turns out that obese humans tend to have reduced amounts of Bacteroidetes species in their guts than lean people, and weight loss is accompanied by an increase in Bacteroidetes. Fecal transplants are not recommended as a weight loss technique…at least not yet.

They have worked for some other problems. Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis are diseases that involve intestinal inflammation, and they're also associated with imbalances in the species distribution of gut bacteria. Some promising treatments have involved collecting feces from healthy individuals, and using a nasogastric tube to inoculate the guts of Crohn's patients with the stuff. Ick, I know, but it seems to have worked surprisingly well in a small number of patients.

Development

Bacteria are present in the gut from a very early age, and populate the digestive epithelia. There must be interactions going on, and it appears that the bacteria are actually regulating the growth of the gut lining.

Germ-free zebrafish lines have no gut bacteria, and they also have problems. The intestinal lining arrests its development and fails to fully differentiate; the lining also grows much more slowly. They also have difficulty absorbing some nutrients. Add bacteria, though, and growth and differentiation resume. This is a case where the developmental program and the bacterial influences are interdependent, and it makes sense — they've co-evolved.

It's not just fish, either — these are conserved interactions across the vertebrates. Mice exhibit the same dependence on gut flora for development of the intestinal lining.

The very best example of a developmental dependence on bacteria, though, is in squid. The bobtail squid has a light-emitting organ that relies on colonization by a luminescent bacterium, Vibrio fischeri. The animal gleans the bacteria from the water with a special ciliated epithelium and secreted mucus that seems to be just the right flavor for Vibrio, and the bacteria migrate deep into the light-emitting organ. Once colonized, the squid dismantles the harvesting cilia and downregulates the secretion of mucus. If no bacteria of the right species are present, it maintains the cilia. If the bacteria in the organ die, resumes mucus production.

Bacterial symbionts induce light-organ morphogenesis in squid. A Adult squid (E scolopes). SEM images of epithelial fields before B and after C regression of ciliated appendage. Scale bar, 50 mm. Ciliated appendages are marked by an orange dashed line.

Evolution

If something affects development and physiology, it affects evolution, so evolutionary importance is simply rather unavoidable. However, there's also one somewhat surprising observation (to me, at least — microbiologists probably expect it): different species of related organisms can have different microbial populations, even when raised in identical conditions. Different Hydra species in the lab under controlled conditions have recognizably different populations of bacteria living on their epithelia, and Hydra of the same species collected in the wild have similar distributions of species. The properties of each Hydra species uniquely favor different distributions of bacteria, and the bacteria are also preferentially colonizing particular species of Hydra.

Hydra are wonderful experimental animals in that one can ablate stem cells for a particular tissue type, and still get an animal that develops and lives; do the same thing to a vertebrate, for instance knocking out the mesodermal lineage in the embryo, and you get an aborted blob. In Hydra, you get a tissue that survives and is colonized by bacteria…but the kinds of bacteria populating it is different from the populations in the intact animal. The animal and the bacteria are swapping molecular signals that specify favored relationships. Again, these are coevolved populations that recognize molecular properties of the host and symbiont.

This is all getting very complicated. I'm used to thinking in terms of networks of genes: there are regulatory interactions between genes in a single cell that establish cell-type specific patterns of gene activity; all express a common core of genes, but different cell types, such as a neuron vs. a cell of the digestive epithelia, will also have their own unique special-purpose genes switched on. I'm also comfortable thinking of networks of cells: cells are in constant negotiations with their neighbors, mainting a common pattern of expression within a tissue, and defining interacting edges with other tissues. Cells are continually sending out messages about their state into the system and responding to local and global signals. All this is part of the normal process of thinking developmentally.

Now, though, there's another layer: we have to think in terms of networks of species that cooperate in the development and physiology of individual multi-cellular organisms. Purity is compromised. My precious animalia — they're inconceivable without bringing bacteria into the picture.

Fraune S, Bosch TCG (2010) Why bacteria matter in animal development and evolution. Bioessays 32:571-580.

The strike is over. We had a productive discussion with the Seed Overlords, and I think we've clarified issues, got some ideas for further progress, and will be working for a Better World in the Future. Don't expect any sudden changes here, though — we've got a Plan, but it will take time to implement, and the most important thing is that we're going to be holding certain people's feet to the fire on a regular basis. We could still explode and send little fragments of Scienceblogs hurtling outward into the greater blogoverse…but we've also got ideas to keep it all together. Stay tuned.

People who have been concerned about the financial stability of Scienceblogs should rest easier, too. We talked with the CFO, and Sb has its own organizational structure and is largely independent of other enterprises within Seed Media Group, and we're doing OK. We could be more profitable, but I think every CFO would say that.

We will be getting more tech support, starting next week. The only problem there is that we have a long list of stuff we want done, so it needs to be sorted and prioritized…but we should see steady progress on that front in the coming months.

Mainly, though, I'm just glad to have this nonsense over with. I've got things to do. That said, though, there will be a substantial slowdown in posting here for a while, not out of spite, but just because I'm going off to Seattle to hide in seclusion in my mother's basement and finish the damned book. You can still expect regular updates of stuff to battle over, though, never fear.

Oh, also, I might like this version of the song up top, too.

I expect the strike to be short-lived, which is good, because I have poor impulse control and my brain might explode if I have to keep it in check much longer.

It's come to this. We've been facing a steady erosion of talent here at Scienceblogs, with the loss of good people like Carl Zimmer and Ed Yong a while back, and with the very abrupt departure of 15 bloggers after the recent PepsiCo debacle — an event that damaged the reputation of this place. And now just yesterday we lost PalMD and Bora. Something is going rotten here. What could it be?

I don't think it's ultimately an ethical problem. I have every confidence that the management at Seed Media Group wants to do the right thing, and I think they have gotten many things exactly right: they've given us a platform and a lot of freedom to do what we want, and never once have they told us we can't write this or we must write that. The lapses have been real mistakes, not part of a pattern of malfeasance. The economy has put a serious strain on the publishing industry, everyone is short-staffed, and there's a constant struggle for advertising dollars to keep the lights on. Mistakes will happen. The test is whether the organization will act to correct them.

The key problem is one of communication. The bloggers here are almost entirely in the dark about what's going on behind the scenes, and we get news indirectly and by rumor. We've had almost no technical support for over a year; when we do hear what changes are being made, it's almost always trivial tweaks to support advertising. We report bugs, we get back silence. We see the ads that appear on site getting cheesier and cheesier. We don't know what's happening, and there is no mechanism and no effort made to enlighten us.

The problems go the other way, too. SMG doesn't know much about what we're thinking. The PepsiCo issue would have never happened if there'd been any discussion with the bloggers — we'd have pointed out that it was blurring the line between content and ads, and responsible changes would have been made before it went online. I can tell you that a lot of the bloggers here are very concerned about the departure of colleagues, and there has been much rightful concern about the future of this network, especially since Bora left. Yet management doesn't seem at all worried, or at least is not telling us about their concerns, or is completely oblivious to the fact that many of their bloggers are talking about leaving for less fretful spaces. We have no idea what's going on, and that makes the situation worse.

I've decided to light a fire under management and get some visible effort to resolve the problems. I don't expect instant easy answers, but I do expect to see positive efforts under way. I could just pack up my bags and leave — another thing that Seed has done right is that they do not treat us as captives — but then I would just be hurting an already hurting organization, and I really do like Seed and Scienceblogs and all my fellow bloggers. They've been good to me. So, to add more incentive to getting some action, I'm going on strike.

ON STRIKE!

This is going to hurt. I like blogging; I do this for fun, and because I want to get my message out there. I also know what effect it will have on my traffic if I stop posting, because you're all a sensible lot and you're not going to waste time reading a site that has nothing new to say. I just checked, and I'm in the midst of a bit of a traffic surge, with almost 190,000 page views yesterday alone…and that's going to decline precipitously. I get paid for that traffic, too, so it's going to hurt my pocketbook. My wife has already given me one of her long-suffering looks when I told her what I had to do, but then, I get those from her all the time, as you might expect. Sorry, my check will be smaller this month, on top of the salary reductions my university has announced.

So this is my last post for a while. I don't know how long; maybe SMG will contact me right away and surrender to my demands (which are pretty mild, so it's entirely possible). Or maybe the pattern of silence will continue, and with regret and exasperation, I'll have to find a new host somewhere else. Whatever happens, we can't keep going as we have.

Oh, right. Demands. You can't have a strike without some goal that will resolve it. Here's what I want from Seed:

1. Immediate formation of a mechanism for communication between management and bloggers. We're an unwieldy group, so setting up a small committee of bloggers with regular (monthly) conference calls, and the option for ad hoc calls when serious issues come up, such as the PepsiCo mess.

2. Prompt responses from management. When Bora left, that was a major event; there should have been a quick in-house response that would have involved scheduling a conversation within the week. No more long silences.

3. Regular updates on the status of tech support, and input from bloggers. We've got bugs, they get ignored, and the priorities are biased towards advertising opportunities. Ads are important, but who is going to want to advertise at a place that's falling apart? Or has big signs saying "ON STRIKE" out front? Throw us a bone now and then.

4. Transparency. Bloggers need to be informed about any problems in the parent organization, and we'd also like to hear more good news, too. Fly new plans by us so you can get feedback before they go live and blow up.

5. More trust. This may be an odd one, but the bloggers are dependent on the financial health of Seed, too. It's OK for management to suggest to us what they'd like to see more of on the blogs; I have no problem with suggestions, for instance, that we throw in more nutrition or food blogging this month, because we've got an advertising contract from PepsiCo, as long as our response is optional and as long as we're also free to criticize.

See? Those demands shouldn't be so hard to meet. Now the test is whether Seed can exhibit a little agility and respond to them expeditiously.

In the meantime, the comments are open, and I have some requests.

Make other suggestions for Scienceblogs. Assuming Seed actually does make an effort to repair the situation, what don't you like here? What should the priorities be for improving your experience on Scienceblogs? Can it be fixed?

If they don't, what next? People were already making suggestions in the previous thread: I need concrete information on setting up an independent server, technical assistance, getting ads to pay for the thing, etc. Seed has taken care of all of that painful work for me for so long, that it would be a bit of a shock to leave, and leaving is the least pleasant option for me. Hold my hand and tell me what to do.

Coffee and donuts on the picket line are also welcome.

ON STRIKE!

Just in the time it took me to write this up this morning, Superbug, Zuska, and Speakeasy Science have all announced their departures, and Casaubon's Book is considering it. We really are having a serious crisis of confidence, and Seed has to wake up and take action.

I'm hoping more blogs don't leave, but instead join in this strike. We need to publicize and organize and make Seed feel compelled to make changes, I'd rather not see it become a ghost town.

Add Mike Dunford to the list of departures.

I didn't know the Scientologists had a church on Tottenham Court Road. Just hurried past in case the stupid rubs off.

Oh, deary me. What a blistering attack, what an in-your-face, vicious, horrible, bloody, nasty bit of savagery that was. Surely it fully warrants the Church of Scientology making an official complaint and trying to get him fired? The church claims that being called "stupid" "impinges on the right to religious freedom".

No, it doesn't. Everyone has a right to believe in stupid things, and everyone has a right to call them stupid.

If you're on Twitter, practice your right to free speech and join in the fun: use the tag "#stupidscientology". It's Streisand effect time!

(Uh-oh. I'm being a dick again, aren't I?)

(via Jack of Kent)

Next time I give a talk, I'll have to try rubbing vaseline in my eyes before I get up on the podium.

(via Joe My God)

Who would do such a thing, and why? You will not be surprised to learn that it is a front for a vanity publisher. Hey, you write like Shakespeare — give me money and we'll publish your book!

Of course, there's a range of criticism, too. I think Rebecca Watson is hitting the problem about right: it's about picking your battles, and making a scene over trivial customs practiced with charitable intent is not a good idea. So, really, I don't have to punch Granny in the nose—I can just say "thank you!", and that's fine. But when Granny tells you to get down on your knees and praise Jesus right now or you're going to burn for eternity in a lake of hellfire, then some dickishness is not only justified, it's necessary.

The thing is, the dickishness practiced is not nose-punching, it's not even howling four-letter words at Granny…it's a flat statement of "That's crazy, I'm not going to do that, and here's why." That, apparently, is the New Dickishness.

One recent flashpoint in this argument was Phil Plait's talk at TAM 8, in which he asked a rhetorical question, "How many of you … became a skeptic, because somebody got in your face, screaming, and called you an idiot, brain-damaged, and a retard?" And the Pharyngula switchboard lit up. Lots of people wrote to me via email or twitter, some gloating, some just unhappy, stating that Phil had just called me out.

No, he didn't. He didn't mention me at all. He opened up against a strawman New Dick, which is unfortunate, because there isn't anyone who fits that description in the skeptical movement. There are people like that elsewhere: drill sergeants and televangelists come to mind.

A few people are speaking out against the talk. Stephanie Zvan points out that Randi is one of these 'dicks', that his willingness to sneer at charlatans was an important factor in her own acceptance of skepticism. Matt Dillahunty thinks Phil was making a bit of a dick move himself, which actually demonstrates the utility of the making people think with a little harshness. I also fear that one of the reasons for the popularity of Phil's talk (it did strike a chord with many) is that it reassured many that certain aspects of belief were going to be walled off from skeptical criticism in the name of politeness and tone and courtesy.

There is a fair point being made, that there are multiple strategies that work to convince people to rethink bad ideas, and they don't all involve punching people in the face…and many of the best strategies do involve politely listening and criticizing. But I think the best ideas involve a combination of willingness to listen and politely engage, and a forthright core of assertiveness and confrontation — tactical dickishness, if you want to call it that.

I don't, actually — it also seems like a dick move to try and associate a strategy with gender, since some of the most wonderfully dickish skeptics I know are female. But that's a separate issue.

A lot of the bloggers here are talking behind the scenes, and I can tell you what it feels like. Bora compares it to Bion's Effect, where the departure of a few people at a party triggers a sudden end to the event. He's wrong (Bora wrong? It happens sometimes). This is a situation rather more fraught. The ship is sinking. The Captain stands at the wheel, saying nothing, doing nothing. All of us on board are edging towards the lifeboats, completely baffled by the paralysis up top, and wondering when some action will happen, when the crew will show some life, when steps will be taken to address long-standing complaints amplified by the current crisis.

And the eerie silence continues.

At some point, there will be a loud noise, a sudden lurch (Bora's departure may even be it), and everyone will abruptly turn and run screaming for the lifeboats. I personally may trample a few women and children to get a good seat. There may be riots and recriminations. Shots will fired, flares will go off, people will be thrown overboard, boilers will explode.

This doesn't feel like a dinner party. It's beginning to feel like the goddamned Titanic.

Seed desperately needs to WAKE UP. And hope it's not too late.

This is extraordinary. We live in a culture where the terms fascist and racist are thrown about, if anything, too easily and too frequently. Yet here is a man whose every word and deed is easily explicable once you know the single essential thing about him: He is a member of a fascist splinter group that believes it is the salvation of the Catholic Church.

And then he follows up with damning examples from Gibson's father and Gibson's own actions.

It adds a fresh new perspective to all those fans of Gibson's labor of love, The Passion, a sadistic piece of bloody anti-semitism. What Gibson rages about in (imagined) private and what he put on the screen in that movie are awfully hard to separate. One of Gibson's most ardent defenders is right-wing Catholic kook Bill Donohue:

Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It's not a secret, OK? And I'm not afraid to say it. That's why they hate this movie. It's about Jesus Christ, and it's about truth. It's about the messiah.

And Donohue is still flogging this line against anyone who criticizes Gibson:

[Frank] Rich is particularly angry at anyone who dares to mention the role played by secular Jews in fomenting anti-Catholicism. I am one Catholic who will not run from this charge. It is painfully obvious, that most of the anti-Catholicism that exists today comes from two major sources: ex-Catholics (and those with one foot out the door) and secular Jews.

It's a disorder that isn't restricted to Catholicism, though; the other recent expression of these anti-semitic views is none other than Glenn Beck.

Jesus conquered death. He wasn't victimized. He chose to give his life. He did have a choice. If he was a victim, and this theology was true, then Jesus would have come back from the dead and made the the Jews pay for what they did.

Any day now they'll be talking about blood libel. Isn't it time now to stop pussy-footing around? These people are anti-semitic proto-fascists, their prejudices propped up by truly weird religious beliefs.

The terrorists really have been effective. They've turned us into bloated clowns stumbling over our own feet and doing ourselves far more damage than any hijacked plane could do.

Phil is bragging about his Bacon number of 3. Well, well, well. My Bacon number is…

2.

Everyone, please do the courteous, polite thing and overlook the fact that my connection is via the odious Ben Stein.

(Current totals: 10,663 entries with 1,061,738 comments.)

We support this amended version of the Copenhagen Declaration on Religion in Public Life. We invite other people and groups to also support it.

Personal Freedoms

• Freedom of conscience, religion and belief are unlimited. Freedom to practice religion should be limited only by the need to respect the rights of others.
• All people should be free to participate equally in public life, and should be treated equally before the law and in the democratic process.
• Freedom of expression should be limited only as prescribed in international law. All blasphemy laws should be repealed.

Secular Democracy

• Society should be based on democracy, human rights and the rule of law. Public policy should be formed by applying reason to evidence.
• Government should be secular. The state should be strictly neutral in matters of religion, favoring none and discriminating against none.
• Religions should have no special financial consideration in public life, such as tax-free status for religious activities, or grants to promote religion or run faith schools.

Secular Education

• State education should be secular. Children should be taught about the diversity of religious beliefs in an objective manner, with no faith formation in school hours.
• Children should be educated in critical thinking and the distinction between faith and reason as a guide to knowledge. Science should be taught free from religious interference.

One Law For All

• There should be one law for all, democratically decided and evenly enforced, with no jurisdiction for religious courts to settle civil matters or family disputes.
• The law should not criminalize private conduct that respects the rights of others because the doctrine of any religion deems such conduct to be immoral.
• Employers or social service providers with religious beliefs should not be allowed to discriminate on any grounds not essential to the job in question.

Give it time to load, and if you've got a slow connection, you might not want to bother; these are all animated images of 2-D slices scanned through MRIs of fruit and vegetables. The artichoke is my favorite.

• Require that a Biblical and Constitutional reason exist for the passage of any new laws

• Allow teaching of Christianity vs. evolution in schools

I guess there won't be any laws regulating GMO crops in Kansas, or prohibiting stem cell research, or funding the creation of any wind farms. Anything more recent than the 18th century is going to have to be neglected, along with anything not mentioned in the Constitution.

At least she's upfront about the conflict between Christianity and evolution.

Quick, somebody reassure me that she's a fringe candidate without a prayer of getting into office. Please. It's Monday, the day is painful enough.

Although I would think being an atheist would be even more effective. For that, here's a list of atheist comic book characters. It's short, and unfortunately, most of them aren't very memorable.

There is, apparently, a comic book called The Atheist. I've never seen it, but it sounds…interesting.

The storyline revolves around present day humans that are having their bodies being "possessed" by the souls from Hell similar to the possessions in the fifties horror movie "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers". The souls from Hell then begin an extremely hedonistic and malicious lifestyle that includes raves, drugs, self mutilation, murder, and other violence. The possessed bodies then start congregating in Winnipeg, Canada.

That's not very atheistic. But, yeah, it sounds exactly like Winnipeg.

I don't link to Huffington Post anymore, so you'll have to settle for Peter Lipson's deconstruction.

(Why no men? Because I unavoidably find women more sexy, of course!)

Which is forthright and honest and all that…but then I got a look at #15. I'm very disturbed now. I had no idea that my awesome sexual charisma was overwhelming even heterosexual men nowadays.

I'm also bothered by the premise. I think it's an excellent idea to promote the idea that scientists can be sexy, and women who are comfortable with that should be able to proudly present themselves as sexual beings. But the important concept is that women should have the choice, and their decisions should be respected. Men do not get the privilege of having the roving eye, of being able to pick individual women out of the crowd to tell them that here, they get to be object of sexual interest, especially not if they're going to then publicly display them as clever eye candy.

The worst possible way to handle this is to search the internet for photos of women scientists and make superficial decisions about who the male eye would find sexy. There's a process of judgment that went on behind the scenes, where many women scientists had to have been rejected because they were insufficiently 'hot', and then many of the women dragged into the spotlight had their "scientist" qualifications completely ignored for their literally biological qualifications. It's a reiteration of the same inappropriate judgmental attitude that pretty much every woman scientist suffers through.

Promoting 15 sexy scientists is a fine idea, if the choices are entirely voluntary, and if the qualifications are more than a photo. Common Sense Atheism should have asked first, and found something a little more interesting than appearances to explain why they're sexy. Or better yet, have the women explain what it means to be sexy, because men tend to be very poor judges of such phenomena.

I know, it would have been harder for me to make the cut if I'd had to qualify for my mind instead of my smokin' hot body, but I can make that sacrifice.

Food for Freethought is a food drive that also encourages freethought, freedom of expression, and free inquiry. We plan to accomplish this by giving "Banned" and Freethought books away in exchange for non-perishable food donations, that will be going to Food Bank of the Rockies, during "Banned Books Week", September 27 - October 2 (specific dates below). Our goal is to raise an enormous amount of food for those in need. Most food drives are done during the holidays and tons of food is raised and distributed. That is all well and good, but when about the majority of the time that it isn't the holiday season? The hungry don't stop being hungry after the holidays, they are hungery now too! Given the existing goals of Metro State Atheists, it is only natural that we would attempt to help the hungry by promoting freethought, freedom of expression, and free inquiry. With the proper support, we can have an immeasurable positive community impact!

They're collecting books now for the late September food drive — donate if you can!

I'll need a long summer break just to finish Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's dense but explosively exciting What Darwin Got Wrong (Profile). The celebration of the great scientist's bicentenary last year courteously sidestepped the fact that most cutting-edge biologists now regard natural selection as little more than cosmetic tweaking in the process of evolution. What's happening is far more philosophically thrilling: creatures are doing it for themselves. The authors show how ancient "managerial" genes, self-organising systems in cells and the inherent tendency towards symmetry in living structures all help to generate new organisms fully pre-adapted to their environments. Wings already pre-balanced for flight!

Say what? Who are these mysterious "cutting-edge biologists" who have these bizarre misunderstandings of biology?

I think Mabey has been overdoing the herbs.

Monckton replied in a foaming, frothing lather of noise and evasion. It didn't help his cause. The "response" is "magnificently bonkers", and it's mainly getting horse-laughs from the reality-based community. (The denialist community, on the other hand, thinks Monckton has Abraham trembling on the ropes, but then, they're nuts.)

One telling point from Monckton is that he is demanding that St Thomas University take down Abraham's talk and begin a disciplinary inquiry into Abraham. For what? I don't know. I guess it's just a desperate effort to silence his critics. Go ahead and leave a note in support, but right now, it's not a worry. St Thomas has replied to Monckton.

We received your email response to our June 25, 2010 letter. The University of St Thomas respects your right to disagree with Professor Abraham, just as the University respects Professor Abraham's right to disagree with you. What we object to are your personal attacks against Father Dease, and Professor Abraham, your inflammatory language, and your decision to disparage Professor Abraham, Father Dease and The University of St Thomas.

Please be advised that neither we nor the University of St Thomas will communicate with you any further about your decision to sully the University of St. Thomas, Professor Abraham, and others rather than to focus on the scholarly differences between you and Professor Abraham.

Signed: Phyllis Karasov, Moore Costellow and Hart, P.L.L.P.

Good work!