Sigh. McCain.

Posted on January 9, 2009 by Michael

So John McCain is at it again. Not satisfied with the sending of his inept running mate out into the big evil world of science and reality a few months back, McCain has decided to wade in to the pool himself – and he’s just as over his head as Palin was.

On Wednesday, McCain himself grabbed for the fruit-fly swatter at a press conference to unveil his new anti-earmark legislation.

After a long takedown of research into lobsters by the University of Maine that involves a “Lobster Cam,” McCain, a Senator from Arizona, turned on the fruit flies, saying, “also, there’s one in Paris that — yes — $212,000 for Olive Fruit Fly research in Paris, France.”

It’s pretty well established how important fruit fly research is in science. Given his lack of familiarity with the field, his election would have been as devastating to science as the past 8 years. But now he has decided to pick on lobster research, in my home state, no less. Personally, I’m not a fan of these sea cockroaches. However, I do enjoy the boost they give to the Maine economy. McCain apparently does not. He apparently believes citing a lobster cam shows how much of a MAVERICK!!! he is about pork-barrel spending. The truth is much more interesting.

This research by the University of Maine is done through its Lobster Institute, an organization devoted to the health of the Maine lobster industry. It is through this organization, not the $188,000 grant, that the lobster cam is funded. The grant money, on the other hand, goes toward “research of microbial diseases that devastate lobster stocks”.

I don’t know about any other readers, but I personally prefer politicians from Arizona to stay out of vital sectors of my state’s economy. More importantly, I prefer them to stay out of science if it is only utter ignorance they are able to profess.

Lobster Institute

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Artificial molecules

Posted on January 9, 2009 by Michael

Origins research is beginning to really heat up (hilarious pun intended). One team of researchers is working with RNA (but then again, who isn’t?)

A new molecule that performs the essential function of life – self-replication – could shed light on the origin of all living things.

If that wasn’t enough, the laboratory-born ribonucleic acid (RNA) strand evolves in a test tube to double itself ever more swiftly.

“Obviously what we’re trying to do is make a biology,” says Gerald Joyce, a biochemist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. He hopes to imbue his team’s molecule with all the fundamental properties of life: self-replication, evolution, and function.

By building a molecule that can self-replicate, Joyce’s team has shown a pretty solid principle of how scientists believe life began: begin with something simple which makes copies of itself, then…

Not content with achieving one hallmark of life in the lab, Joyce and Lincoln sought to evolve their molecule by natural selection. They did this by mutating sequences of the RNA building blocks, so that 288 possible ribozymes could be built by mixing and matching different pairs of shorter RNAs.

What came out bore an eerie resemblance to Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest: a few sequences proved winners, most losers. The victors emerged because they could replicate fastest while surrounded by competition, Joyce says.

As Joyce notes, this isn’t truly life. It’s a very promising experiment, however, and that’s where the excitement lay. By inducing mutations, evolution began to take place. It’s so simple a child can understand it.

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Have the Republicans done anything right?

Posted on January 8, 2009 by Michael

House to vote on pay fairness bills

Ledbetter, after 19 years on the job, sued her employer when she discovered she was the lowest-paid supervisor at the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co plant where she worked, despite having more experience than several male co-workers.

A jury found she was the victim of unlawful discrimination.

Seems reasonable. A person is discriminated against unlawfully, a jury finds that to be the case. Okay, so the business needs to pay up, right? Nope.

But an appeals court said she waited too long to sue.

In May 2007, the Supreme Court agreed with the lower court and gave businesses a win by ruling discrimination lawsuits must be filed within six months of the act of discrimination.

That’s right. Ledbetter should have known, nearly two decades ago, that her work was paying her less than they should have. It makes perfect sense – ya know, in the deluded minds of the Republicans.

The Lilly Ledbetter bill — blocked in the Senate last year by Republicans — has been a key project of U.S. labor unions, which played a big role in November in helping Democrats make gains in Congress and capture the White House.

Of course the Republicans blocked this bill. It went against the soulless corporations they love so much. We can’t possibly have a notion of humanity in a party devoted to sucking CEO dick, can we? Well, that isn’t entirely fair. When it comes to differentiated cells with no consciousness, the Republicans do well to arbitrarily impose a notion of humanity. Businesses that discriminate though? They’re a-okay.

The Ledbetter legislation would reverse the Supreme Court decision by saying that workers must file a discrimination lawsuit within six months of each new discriminatory paycheck.

“On Friday we intend to do two bills that deal with pay equity and also with the ability to address pay discrimination,” House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland told reporters in a briefing.

He said the Supreme Court ruled imposed “an unduly restrictive requirement on employees.”

He said the bill is based on the “very fair” idea that “every week that someone is paid in a discriminatory fashion, that is a new discriminatory event.”

It’s great and all that this injustice is being corrected. It’s just too bad it’s for some BS technical reason. People seem to forget that rules never matter; it is only the reasoning for the rules that is important. This bill shouldn’t become law based upon the idea that each paycheck is discrimination (though it is). It should be enough that it becomes law on the notion that it makes no sense to impose a six month limit: the discrimination often cannot be found in that period of time.

At least the Democrats are getting things right as we phase out the evil of conservatives – for the time being.

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A mystery? It must have been God.

Posted on January 8, 2009 by Michael

Astronomers have detected a lour roar from faraway space.

ARCADE’s mission was to search the sky for faint signs of heat from the first generation of stars, but instead they heard a roar from the distant reaches of the universe.

“The universe really threw us a curve,” Kogut said. “Instead of the faint signal we hoped to find, here was this booming noise six times louder than anyone had predicted.”

Detailed analysis of the signal ruled out primordial stars or any known radio sources, including gas in the outermost halo of our own galaxy.

Other radio galaxies also can’t account for the noise – there just aren’t enough of them.

“You’d have to pack them into the universe like sardines,” said study team member Dale Fixsen of the University of Maryland. “There wouldn’t be any space left between one galaxy and the next.”

The signal is measured to be six times brighter than the combined emission of all known radio sources in the universe.

For now, the origin of the signal remains a mystery.

“We really don’t know what it is,”said team member Michael Seiffert of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

…

“This is what makes science so exciting,” Seiffert said. “You start out on a path to measure something – in this case, the heat from the very first stars – but run into something else entirely, some unexplained.”

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The confusion over Steve Jones

Posted on January 6, 2009 by Michael

Steve Jones has, according to media reports, made the claim that human evolution has stopped, or is at least slowing down in the West. At times we see conflicting statements from Jones himself over this.

I really just know about snails, and the beauty of evolution is that it gives biology a structure, so the rules that apply to snails or to fruit flies to some extent apply to ourselves. Obviously there’s much more that applies to us. But if you ask the simple Darwinian question about natural selection, inherited differences in the ability to pass on genes (which is only part of the evolutionary argument) it’s pretty clear to me that at least for the time being and at least in the developed world, natural selection has stopped or at least slowed down.

First, snail evolution is quite beautiful. Second, we see here that Jones is referring to natural selection, not evolution. Some sort of argument can be made that there is much less selection pressure on humans in Western nations than there was in the past. Of course, that wouldn’t be a very satisfying argument since natural selection is still ‘weeding out’ people with certain diseases and predispositions. It’s just that some of them, depending upon their economic situation as well as their particular affliction, happen to have reduced overall selection pressure on their alleles. But even then, there are people with diseases which will kill them before they get a chance to reproduce.

At any rate, this whole argument becomes rather moot because Jones also goes on to specifically speak of evolution rather than just one of its mechanisms. In fact, his talk is titled “Human Evolution is over”. He is wrong. Even if we were to ignore all the problems involved with making an argument that natural selection is over in humans (in the West), the evolution-is-over argument still does not fly because evolution is not simply selection. Genetic drift and mutation are two other major mechanisms. While he seems to ignore drift, Jones does, however, argue that there are fewer mutations in the population. His argument goes like this.

Men are fathering children at far younger ages than they did in the past. Given the fact that mutations accumulate in a person over time, these young men have fewer mutations than older men. Thus, subsequent generations are inheriting fewer and fewer mutations.

Okay, the first question which comes to mind is “So what?” The mutation rate of younger fathers is still, by far, substantial enough to maintain the continuing of human evolution. There is no shortage of mutations in each and every person at birth. Jones probably was born with around 100 mutations. You, too.

The second thing which comes to mind is to wonder why Jones would first make this age-mutation argument, but then go on to argue this.

Similarly, child survival rates, abysmal in antiquity, have dramatically improved in much of the world, cutting natural selection pressures.

In other words, more people live to reproductive age. This means there are more people reproducing, which means more mutations. His argument is dreadfully weak.

One wonders why such a quality scientist would make such a poor proposition.

Filed under: Evolution | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Taking morality back

Posted on January 6, 2009 by Michael

There are far too many claims coming from atheists and humanists that the religious do not have the sole claim to morality. It’s true, of course, they don’t. But that argument is getting old. What’s more interesting is that the morality of the religious, if anything, is lesser than that of the secular.

As time marches forward, secular thought prevails more and more in public policy. The religious often claim credit for these things, but they’ve long been known as liars (see intelligent design). It’s merely a matter of time until a large roadblock to equal rights is quashed; homosexuals will have the right to marry in most parts of the country within the next two decades. It’s simply an inevitability. The religious zealots never win these arguments. Their basis is weak (i.e., belief in superstition). They have no good grounding for their bigotry. Interestingly, it will be discrimination on the basis of gender that actually falls. That is, the government does not make distinctions on the basis of gender in deciding who can enter into a contract. It’s clearly illegal. That is precisely what is happening with this “one man, one woman” bigotry that pervades the country, most notably the backward-thinking south.

It is with the secular that we see an increase in our morality as a nation. The secular progressiveness of Europe has shown itself with a strong repudiation of torturing. It has shown itself with its higher regard for animal rights. Perhaps most importantly of all, it has shown itself in the fact that the vast majority of the continent’s nations have outlawed the death penalty, a punishment based upon the desire for revenge, a petty and callous reasoning.

The argument atheists and humanists should be putting forth is not that the religious do not have the only say in morality. It’s that they have very little. They have a distorted view of reality. They are not interested in freedom, equality, and being good people. They wish to pursue their largely evil gods at the expense of everyone else. It is the religious who must present a case for why anyone should listen to their version of ‘morality’, not the atheists and humanists.

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Al Franken is the likely winner

Posted on January 5, 2009 by Michael

Great news. Al Franken is going to be declared the winner of the Minnesota Senate race today. That means one less backward-thinking Republican destroying the increasing morality of the U.S.

Now if only Rick Warren could go away.

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Defensive Protein Killed Ancient Primate Retroviruses, Research Suggests

Posted on January 5, 2009 by Michael

ScienceDaily (Dec. 27, 2008) — Retroviruses are the worst sort of guest. Over eons, these molecular parasites have insinuated themselves into their hosts’ DNA and caused a ruckus. The poor hosts can’t even be rid of the intruders by killing them, because they stubbornly remain after death.

As much as eight percent of the human genome is littered with a “fossil record” of extinct retroviruses that we have inherited from our ancestors — human and otherwise — who were the original victims of the viruses. That record allows scientists to study what may have killed these ancient viruses, providing clues for fighting those that plague us today, like HIV.

Now researchers from Rockefeller University have revived two groups of long-dead primate retroviruses to study whether defensive proteins that have rapidly evolved in humans and other primate species could kill them. They found that one protein, called TRIM5α, was disappointingly useless. But by scrutinizing the remnants of the extinct viruses found in the reference genomes of chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys, investigators discovered unmistakable signs that a different protein — APOBEC3 — was likely the exterminator. The research was published in PLoS Pathogens.

“It’s a little like finding a fossilized skeleton with a spear through its head. You can be fairly sure of how that individual died,” says Paul Bieniasz, an associate professor and head of the Laboratory of Retrovirology and a scientist at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center. “In this case, we can even do tests to show that the spear wasn’t put there after the individual died. The DNA evidence is clear on that point.”

The investigators reanimated parts of retroviruses that had worked their way into the DNA of old-world primates within the past few million years. They know the rough timeline because the viruses are not found in humans, who diverged from chimps about six million years ago. The goal is to explain why these ancient viruses did not cross over into humans as HIV has and to identify what in humans has defended against them.

Working with pieces of the extinct retroviruses preserved in primate DNA, the researchers compelled a related modern retrovirus, found in mice, to produce the same proteins as its ancient relatives. Bieniasz, postdoctoral fellow David Perez-Caballero and graduate fellow Steven Soll found that one defensive protein — TRIM5α — did not stop the hybrid viruses from infecting other cells, contrary to another lab’s recent findings. Analyzing many of the DNA “fossils” of the retroviruses, however, the researchers found unique mutations that would have caused the viruses to stop reproducing, mutations that are caused by APOBEC3. They showed that the mutations responsible for inactivating the retroviruses varied in both a virus- and species-dependent manner.

So far, the Bieniasz lab has established that APOBEC3 is involved in fighting the retroviruses but not that it singularly killed all of them, or that it is necessarily responsible for preventing the viruses from crossing into humans, who have APOBEC3 proteins of their own.

That’s what the researchers would like to show next, but it doesn’t come easy. “When you’re dealing with something that happened millions of years ago, it’s tough to demonstrate an extinction event in the laboratory,” Soll says.

From ScienceDaily.net

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John Lott is wrong again

Posted on January 3, 2009 by Michael

It has been well-documented that John Lott is a big, fat liar. He writes slanted pieces to pursue his own agenda, not truth. So it comes as no surprise that he would post an article on his blog which claims that an Obama advisor is “wacky” for being concerned about global warming. Okay, so no big deal. Just another ignorant mook that cites non-scientific sources in order to pursue lies. Sure, it’d be nice if he would just go and post at Conservapedia, FOX News, or WorldNetDaily, but the whole concept of free speech does allow for anyone to speak his mind, even if the thoughts within said mind are utterly ignorant. Ignorant how? As is so common (especially among conservatives – extra-especially among FOX News conservatives), John Lott is ignorant in science. In this case, it’s sun spots.

First let’s note how Lott cites an article from Investor’s Business Daily (that highly regarded scientific organizati…business newspaper). He excludes eight grafs on his blog. Three of the grafs are either introductory or conclusion grafs. The other five are as follows.

The Little Ice Age has been a problem for global warmers because it serves as a reminder of how the earth warms and cools naturally over time. It had to be ignored in the calculations that produced the infamous and since-discredited hockey stick graph that showed a sharp rise in warming alleged to be caused by man.

The answer to this dilemma has supposedly been found by two Stanford researchers, Richard Nevle and Dennis Bird, who announced their “findings” at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. According to them, man not only is causing contemporary warming. He also caused the cooling that preceded it.

According to Bird and Nevle, before Columbus ruined paradise, native Americans had deforested a significant portion of the continent and converted the land to agricultural purposes. Less CO2 was then absorbed from the atmosphere, and the earth was toasty.

Then a bunch of nasty old white guys arrived and depopulated the native populations through war and the diseases they brought with them. This led to the large-scale abandonment of agricultural lands. The subsequent reforestation of the continent caused temperatures to drop enough to bring on the Little Ice Age.

Implicit in this research is that the world would be fine if man wasn’t in the way. We either make the world too cold or too hot, a view held by many in high places.

Given the derisive nature of these grafs, it may actually may have made sense for Lott to publish them, but two of them contain some contradictory science to his silly dogma. That just doesn’t fly for these global warming denialists. I’m beginning to think Lott maybe does visit Conservapedia.

So now that we have Lott’s continued dishonesty out of the way, let’s tackle the main issue: sun spots. The unscientific, babbling article the unscientific, babbling Lott cites tries to stake a claim that all this hoo-hah about global warming is really just scientists misinterpreting data because they never considered sun spots.

When the sun is active, it’s not uncommon to see sunspot numbers of 100 or more in a single month. Every 11 years, activity slows, and numbers briefly drop near zero. Normally sunspots return very quickly, as a new cycle begins. But this year, the start of a new cycle, the sun has been eerily quiet.

The first seven months averaged a sunspot count of only three and in August there were no sunspots at all — zero — something that has not occurred since 1913.

According to the publication Daily Tech, in the past 1,000 years, three previous such events — what are called the Dalton, Maunder and Sporer Minimums — have all led to rapid cooling. One was large enough to be called the Little Ice Age (1500-1750).

(Don’t worry, Lott posted that part).

Okay, so because there are few sun spots to be seen toward the end of this current solar cycle and global temperatures have dropped in 2008, global warming is due to that. There are so many things wrong with this it makes me mad.

First of all, this horrific article cites the first seven months of this year. Guess what? Those months correspond to the end of the last solar cycle. It wasn’t until the past three months that the new 11-year cycle was detected (Hey, John, that’s a scientific citation; use it sometime).

Of course, it’s possible to go so far as to use the misleading information provided by this business newspaper and still show it to be wrong. Let’s assume this solar cycle does correspond with the change in global temperature. It would necessarily follow because there was a rise in temperature in the first seven years of this century that there was also a rise in solar activity. In truth, this past 11-year solar cycle peaked in 2000 and has been decaying ever since. Wow! The wonder of slight research and knowledge! Oh, how it destroys ignorance so quickly. It’s too bad John Lott isn’t interested in doing that.

What’s more, this article cites the Little Ice Age, as if it was entirely and decidely caused by solar activity. The issue is far more nuanced than that – and certainly too nuanced for such an unqualified business newspaper.

Global thermometers stopped rising after 1998, and have plummeted in the last two years by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius. The 2007-2008 temperature drop was not predicted by global climate models. But it was predictable by a decline in sunspot activity since 2000.

Wow. This is just so fucking wrong that it just made me go and fucking swear at its wrongness. Global temperatures have been rising since 1998. From 1995-2006, 11 of the 12 warmest years on record were recorded. As far as this past year goes, it was a decline over the first years of this century – of course, that doesn’t really matter when it was still the 10th warmest year on record. In fact, part of the reason it was cooler than other years was the moderation experienced from La Niña. As is well known (except by John Lott, in all likelihood), water is tremendously useful for retaining temperature. Since La Niña shrinks the warm pool of water in parts of the Pacific, it can make a noticable difference in global temperatures. Still, because of man-made pollution and deforestation, La Niña was not strong enough to prevent 2008 from being the 10th warmest year on record.

It’s unsurprising that John Lott would make a post like this. He has a history of making posts concerning things on which he has no knowledge. Take a look at his posts on evolution. They’re disparate, sometimes contradictory, often with no commentary to give some context. Granted, he shouldn’t be giving commentary on anything, but he also shouldn’t be making posts first concerned with human evolution accelerating and then subsequent posts concerned with human evolution slowing down. Bah. I don’t know why I continue to expect more out of these far-right, a-science mooks.

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Texas gets it right

Posted on January 2, 2009 by Michael

Texas actually managed to get something right.

The final proposal for the state’s science curriculum pleases scientists and watch groups, who say it will help protect Texas public school classrooms over the next decade from what they call “watered-down science” — specifically during the instruction of evolution.

Much of the concern over earlier versions of the proposed curriculum centered on a requirement that students be able to analyze the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories, a phrase which some say is being used by creationists — including some members of the State Board of Education — to subvert the teaching of evolution.

It’s high time this was settled. Creationists compose the most dishonest bunch of crazies we have running around in the world. They’ve never added anything of worth to the world that comes directly from creationism. Everything they believe is worthless garbage that deserves nothing but ridicule and derision. They explain nothing while taking the beauty out of the world. They want us to be satisfied with not understanding the Universe because doing so allows them to continue in their delusion. The fact that this group had a voice at all in a worthy process such as the creation of science standards for children shows a pathetic lack of education among those involved in the process.

The third and final draft says students should be able to analyze and evaluate scientific explanations. There is also a new requirement that students should be able “to evaluate models according to their limitations in representing biological objects or events,” but it would take a mind-boggling leap for anyone to interpret that as applying to evolution, Quinn said, particularly when viewed through the plan’s new definition of science.

The old definition — which included phrases like “a way of learning about nature” and “may not answer all questions” — has been replaced with a definition from the National Academy of Sciences. It states that science involves using evidence to form explanations and make predictions that can be measured and tested. It also warns that questions on subjects that cannot be scientifically tested do not belong in science.

Bam. Peace out, creationism. Magic cannot be used to make predictions, cannot be tested, and is unfalsifiable. Fail, fail, fail. There is no point where supernatural beliefs have any relation with science. Well, to be fair, that isn’t entirely true. I can imagine an SAT question that says “False is to true as creationism is to ____” with the correct answer being “science”. That relation works quite well, actually.

Don McLeroy, the state board’s chairman, has said that science should admit the possibly of the supernatural when natural explanations fail. But he has also said that he is not trying to put creationism in public schools.

There’s a pretty good explanation of some more creationist dishonesty. McLeroy (who is a dentist) wants nothing more than to sneak magic into public schools. It is his raison d’être. All he wants to do is find a point where science has yet to explain something and then institute something which can absolutely never explain anything. That is creationism. He may as well have said “I want creationism in our public schools, but I don’t want creationism in our public schools.” Jackass.

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