Well, I did a little homework after reading Mike's blog PZ Myers on Tenure and ID. There Mike cites PZ's assertions over on Pharyngula [Beckwith's tenure decision] and it turns out that the discrimination PZ brags that he will use in his position at UMM [University of Minnesota Morris] to deny tenure to people who support ID is a boast about breaking the law:

Civil Rights Act of 1964
Civil Rights Act of 1991
Updates on employment discrimination lawsuits
Judging the Future: First Amendment Concerns
Political and Religious Belief Discrimination on Campus

Opponents of ID often state that they view ID as religion. PZ Myers is one of them. ethel_merganser is another, as stated in her comment to Mike's thread:

The basic problem with ID is that it is religion…

Judge Jones ruled in the Dover decision that ID is religion too, thus for legal purposes one's views on ID must be considered religious. A candidate may not legally be denied tenure on the basis his or her position on ID.

Read the rest of this entry »

Liza Gross has an article in the May 2006 issue of PloS Biology entitled "Scientific Illiteracy and the Partisan Takeover of Biology." The primary source of the article is Jon D. Miller, who directs the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University Medical School. Miller is someone who "has devoted his 30-year career to studying public understanding of science and technology and its implications for a healthy democracy."

Since the essay was published in a scientific journal, the target audience is the scientific community. Gross's article spills a large amount of ink on the issue of scientific illiteracy in America. Yet the article provides a stunning example of turning good news into bad news.

First there is this observation:

Since 1979, he says, the proportion of scientifically literate adults has doubled"”to a paltry 17%. The rest are not savvy enough to understand the science section of The New York Times or other science media pitched at a similar level.

Did you see that? Scientific literacy has doubled since Jimmy Carter was president. Yes, 17% is a paltry number, but it is much better that 8.5%. Furthermore, such complaining is typically associated with tunnel vision. Yes, scientific literacy rates are paltry, but the same could be said about math literacy rates, geography literacy rates, spelling and grammar literacy rates, economic literacy rates, and history literacy rates. There is no reason to single out science education as if it alone is a victim of some mysterious insidious force.

This is then followed by this bit of news:

As disgracefully low as the rate of adult scientific literacy in the United States may be, Miller found even lower rates in Canada, Europe, and Japan"”a result he attributes primarily to lower university enrollments.

In other words, the scientific literacy among adults is even more paltry in the rest of the world!

So what do we have? Scientific literacy in America has doubled in the last generation and is higher than that of Canada, Europe, and Japan. Yet the theme of Gross's article is all "doom-n-gloom." I'll look more closely at Gross's article in the next installment.

rabbit

Time for another open thread. Feel free to argue about anything you want. Just don't kall me…..

From here:

This finding is informative because it shows that the wing pattern wasn't generated from scratch," said Carroll. "The fly didn't use naïve DNA that had no job and invent this pattern out of thin air. It used a gene that was already active in the wing, already drawing some kind of pattern in the wing, and modified that pattern. We think that is strong clue to how nature invents, which is by using material that is already available. This demonstrates how evolution is a tinkerer," he said.

Yes, yes, evolution tinkers with what it is given.

The findings also underscore an important role for pleiotropic genes in evolution. "For example, a fly's body has pigmented bristles, mouth parts, thorax and abdomen. These different features are controlled separately, so the same yellow gene can be used in different parts of the body. So this pleiotropy gives evolution an artistic freedom to play with the regulatory elements in specific regions without making mutations that would affect the gene throughout the body."

Very smart.

"And studies of phenomena such as fruitfly wing spots show how evolution is not some one-off process. It repeats itself over and over.
They show that there is more than one way to tinker with the same gene, and by extension, to independently evolve the same trait," Carroll said.

Very persistent. And resourceful.

Okay. Enough goofing around. It's time to outline an open-ended method that can help people gauge the strength of a design inference. There are several clues that might lead one to suspect intelligent design as a causal player behind biotic reality, but how can we proceed beyond the level of suspicion?
Read the rest of this entry »

From here:

The cell is understood to be highly organized, with specialized areas for different functions and molecular motors shuttling components around. Researchers from the University of Illinois' Chicago and Urbana-Champaign campuses now offer the first imaging evidence from live cells of ongoing organization and transport within the cell nucleus.

Genes that are active are located mainly in the central region of the nucleus, while inactive genes are at the periphery. But scientists have had no way to track chromosome movement inside the nucleus or to determine whether the location of the chromosomes was the result of random diffusion or if they are moved around by molecular motors.

In a study published in the April 17 issue of Current Biology, UIC and UIUC researchers show that chromosomes in the cell nucleus are capable of directed, long-range movement that depends on actin and myosin, the major molecular motor complex in the cytoplasm.

["¦]

"The movement following activation was radically different from the rapid, but short-range, diffuse movement previously observed in these nuclei," said Dr. Andrew Belmont, professor of cell and developmental biology at UIUC, principle investigator and co-author of the study. It was clear that this was directed movement that required a motor, Belmont said, because the chromosome was moving in a nearly straight line perpendicular to the nuclear envelope. The chromosome traveled further in several minutes than ever observed, even over several hours, in the absence of activation.
"It looked nothing like the random, but localized, bouncing around that had been previously observed," he said.

From here:

The octopus arm is extremely flexible. Thanks to this flexibility–the arm is said to possess a virtually infinite number of "degrees of freedom"–the octopus is able to generate a vast repertoire of movements that is unmatched by the human arm. Nonetheless, despite the huge evolutionary gap and morphological differences between the octopus and vertebrates, the octopus arm acts much like a three-jointed vertebrate limb when the octopus performs precise point-to-point movements. Researchers have now illuminated how octopus arms are able to form joint-like structures, and how the movements of these joints are controlled.

["¦]

The presence of similar structural features and control strategies in articulated limbs (for example, jointed vertebrate arms) and flexible octopus arms suggests that these qualities have evolved convergently in octopuses and in vertebrates, and it also suggests that an articulated limb–controlled at the level of joints–is the optimal solution to the challenge of achieving precise point-to-point movements by a limb.

Biologist and associate professor PZ Myers explains why Francis Beckwith does not deserve tenure:

I get to vote on tenure decisions at my university, and I can assure you that if someone comes up who claims that ID 'theory' is science, I will vote against them. If someone thinks the sun orbits around the earth, I will vote against them. If someone thinks fairies live in their garden and pull up the flowers out of the ground every spring, I will vote against them. Tenure decisions are not pro forma games, but a process of evaluation, and I'd rather not have crackpots promoted. Beckwith may be a nice fellow with a commendable publication record, but when it gets right down to it, his untenable position on intelligent design puts him smack in the middle of the tinfoil hat brigade. And that position on ID is a focus of many of his publications, so it is certainly a legitimate criterion for judging him.

Later in the comments section, Myers rationalizes his closed-minded position as follows:

It's a matter of whether it screws up their ability to do their job. People have a right to do any crazy damn thing that doesn't harm others outside the workplace…but when they're advocating lunacy in their profession, then it's bye-bye time.

This, of course, is muddled thinking.

Read the rest of this entry »

Are you a member of the New York Academy of Sciences? Then head over to the Creationism and Baraminology Research News blog. The author is interested in buying the book Molecular Strategies in Biological Evolution, and with you as the middle man, he can get it for a measly 15 dollars. See this post for contact information.

PS. Yes, I'm sure the book will be used to destroy science and democracy, turning the US into a theocracy. Initiate contact at your own peril.

Allen MacNeill has posted an update on his course on intelligent design. Apparently, some websites (such as World Net Daily) have portrayed the course as advocating intelligent design when, in reality, it was about making students think critically about the subject. But pay attention to this:

Most disconcerting to me were some of the early comments from evolutionary biologists, who asserted that ID should not even be mentioned in a course in evolutionary biology.

Let's repeat that: Intelligent design shouldn't even be mentioned in a course on evolutionary biology. Replies MacNeill:

In answer to some of my critics from evolutionary biology, therefore, I feel that it is very appropriate for this kind of discussion to take place in a science course, rather than just a history or philosophy of biology course. Students, including science majors, are far too often not given enough credit for their ability to both formulate and judge rational arguments in a free and open forum of ideas. Despite the fact that the topic is ostensibly the philosophy of science, the debate over the validity of ID versus evolutionary theory is fundamentally a scientific debate. If scientists refuse to debate the subject, we will leave the floor open for not-quite-science, pseudoscience, and (worst of all) anti-science to claim victory, and believe me that will be what the general public perceives the ID community has achieved.

My own impression is that this course is a good idea. This is something many students are thinking about anyway, and if a professor is willing to teach it, why shouldn't students have the option of exploring it within the confines of academic discourse? Yes, some students are probably going to change their minds because of this course. A pro-ID student might find the arguments against it persuasive, and an anti-ID student might accept the arguments for it. But having your preconceptions challenged is exactly what college is about.

Let's applaud Allen MacNeill's initiative, and hope that his attempt to discuss the issue isn't twarted by forces of discontent.

Update: Allen MacNeill, in the comments at Panda's Thumb:

And if I may compliment my loyal adversaries in the Cornell IDEA Club, by presenting a forceful and well-thought-out explanation and defense of their position they have made it easier for me to see how and why we differ on these issues. Contrary to what some people on both sides of this debate have been asserting, Cornell students are not weak-kneed, muddle-headed sheep who blindly follow the dictates of either their teachers or some distant institute.

Update II: Wow, check out the rest of the comments at PT! It looks like MacNeill's colleagues aren't the only ones who are opposed to his course.