Not an April Fool's joke

Jason South of Borneo Chela has posted an account of an 'Intelligent Design' lecture by a Dr Gunnar Dieckmann. It was basically the standard creationist jabber: microevolution, not macroevolution; quote-mining; straw men; polls; faulty definitions; and of course, the new weapon in the creationist armamentarium, Intelligent Design handwaving.

I've been to a few of these kinds of little talks by creationists, which are usually held in local churches before a friendly crowd, and they are something to experience, just to see what kind of crap is getting peddled. If you've never been to one, try it sometime—they are common, and there seems to be a whole crop of these guys on the low-budget church picnic circuit. If you don't think you could stomach it, read Jason's article to find out what they are like.

Obligatory April Fool's article

From Scrivener's Error:

THE GALAPAGOS ISLANDS (April 1, 2004) In a startling development, a Supreme Being held a press conference at these isolated islands, claiming that he had specifically created each and every creature and plant on those islands strictly to keep scientists so busy that they could not discover the single language that in ancient times united all of humanity. "There is no evolution—I made everything perfectly the first time," he said. He denied several assertions from reporters that he is really the entity known to Christianity as God. When asked how he explained the human appendix, he exclaimed that "If I told you everything, you humans would just find something more dangerous to do. You might even stop electing Texans to national office in the United States if you can pull your puny attention away from highschool textbooks."
The press conference ended when a reporter asked how the Supreme Being explained his uncanny resemblance to a picture from a Waco, TX Easter pageant in which a Baylor University professor played God. Attempts to reach the professor and one of his graduate students for comment proved unavailing; a secretary noted that the two men had suddenly gone on a trip to South America and would be back over the weekend.

Notice that those bigoted secular materialists don't even suggest the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the Supreme Being is currently employed as a professor at Baylor, and that the coincidence in the second paragraph does not necessarily contradict the divine explanation in the first. When the straightjacket of metaphysical naturalism that currently shackles academe, journalism, and society at large is discarded, the truth of this obvious explanation will be apparent.

(Note that the introduction of eternal, immortal beings into higher ed faculty is going to really cause problems in the tenure system, though.)

(Hmmm. I just realized—I know some apparently immortal tenured beings who have been on university faculties since the beginning of time. Has evidence for the existence of Gods been in front of me all along?)

(I hope I don't have to start worshipping Ernst Mayr now...)

UThink

To University of Minnesota faculty, staff and students: you now have access to a brand new free blogging service, UThink: Blogs at the University Libraries.

UThink is available to the faculty, staff, and students of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. All you need to login and start blogging is your U of M Internet ID and Password. You can create as many blogs as you want, and attach as many authors to those blogs as you want. A faculty member could have a blog for every class he or she teaches, and attach the students in those classes to his or her blogs as authors to encourage discussion and debate. A student could also have a blog for every class, or just use blogs to express opinions and viewpoints about world events. A student could also create a club blog, or a blog for his or her friends, and also attach as many authors to those blogs as he or she deems necessary. Faculty could also use the blogging system to track a research initiative, or even publish the drafts of papers they are working on.

Please note that although it says "University of Minnesota Twin Cities", that seems to be nothing but the unthinking parochialism of those UMTC rascals at the big, bloated campus, who routinely forget to mention us lean, agile, nimble branch campuses, where the students are strong, the faculty are good-looking, and the student/teacher ratios are all below average. It looks painless and easy to set up, and I hope more of us UMM people sign up. I'll link to any locals who start playing the game.

Yet another example of Republicans squandering the public trust

Speaking of must reads, check out Chris Mooney's latest piece in his series on "sound" science. He cites an 8-year-old report from Rep. George Brown that both shows that this problem has been growing for some time, and that really rips into a series of hearings held by the Republican congress on "Scientific Integrity and the Public Trust." Mooney has his favorite bits, and I happened to really like this particular section, where Brown dismantles several erroneous assumptions:

• Peer Review is Suspect and the Unconventional Scientific Fringe is Probably Right
• Sound Science is Empirical Science
• The Trial Can Follow the Hanging

Read these things. Brown is dead on, and the problem has only gotten worse since Bush came to power.

B. Assumption #1: Peer Review is Suspect and the Unconventional Scientific Fringe is Probably Right

The hearings displayed a fundamental distrust of government-funded science and the process by which scientific assessments are developed through open and peer-reviewed procedures. A number of the witnesses attacked the traditional peer review process as corrupt and politicized. The hearings appeared to bestow greater scientific credibility on the non-peer-reviewed views of individual scientists than on the peer-reviewed scientific assessments. In that regard, the hearings reflected a fundamental disregard for the scientific process itself and undermined the very credibility of science as a basis for making policy decisions. In his testimony rejecting the international scientific assessment of ozone depletion science, for example, Rep. John Doolittle expressed contempt for the "mumbo-jumbo of peer-reviewed documents" and expressed his preference for the views of the few "skeptic" scientists. 

Indeed, the "skeptic" scientists  were perceived to be all the more credible precisely because their views were contrary to the consensus of peer-reviewed science. Citing historical instances where unconventional theories successfully overturned conventional wisdom, some Members and witnesses suggested that scientific "truth" is usually more likely to be found at the scientific fringes than in the conventional center.  As the Subcommittee chair stated, "I am not swayed by arguments that 'here's a big list of scientists that are on my side and you only have a smaller group of scientists on your side.' I'm just not swayed by that at all."  A similar sentiment was echoed by the Chairman of the Science Committee: "My experience in 18 years of watching science policy being made is it is often those small groups of scientists, though, who differ with conventional wisdom that in fact are always producing the scientific judgments of the future." 

These comments from the members of the committee sound like something that ought to earn them a high score on the Crackpot Index.

C. Assumption #2: Sound Science is Empirical Science

One of the overall messages of the hearings - that Congress should act as the arbiter of scientific disputes - becomes extremely problematic if Members of Congress are consistently confused about the nature and the limitations of scientific knowledge. And, in fact, these hearings were a case study in confusion. One example was the oft-repeated view of "skeptic" witnesses and Republican Members that "sound" science is "empirical" science. In both the ozone hearing and in the global change hearing, for example, "skeptic" witnesses rejected the use of statistical analysis and models in favor of observational data - even when the use of uncorrected raw data was highly misleading.  The hearings reflected a systematic aversion to the use of theory, models, and other sources of scientific knowledge to provide a full understanding of observed data.

This inordinate reliance on a single source of scientific understanding is part of a broader view that the "sound science" needed before regulation can be justified is science which somehow proves a proposition to be "true." This is a totally unrealistic view both of science's present capabilities and of the relationship between data and theory in the scientific method. Not coincidentally, as the report discusses in later sections, this approach to science can lead to near paralysis in policymaking.

A more subtle point, but a good one. Theory represents the context, in that it is an accepted consensus built up on a foundation of many observations and experiments. Ignoring context makes it impossible to properly evaluate observations; it's similar to ignoring the observation of your controls in interpreting a single experiment.

D. Assumption #3: The Trial Can Follow the Hanging

As an exercise in the relationship between the hearings process and legislative action, the hearings were a prime example of "hanging first, trial later." Months before the hearings, the Subcommittee Chairman had already proclaimed his belief that the global change issue was "liberal clap trap." Without the benefit of hearings, the Science Committee in June, 1995 approved legislation, later passed by the House of Representatives, which included dramatic cuts in environmental research, particularly in climate change and energy research. Other Members introduced legislation to roll back the ban on CFCs based on their belief, unconfirmed by any open hearings process, that the scientific basis for the ban had been politically distorted.

Can anyone doubt anymore that this is the modus operandi of the current Bush administration, and by unfortunate extension, large chunks of the Republican party? They don't use science as a tool to make good decisions, it is a prop used after the fact to rationalize political decisions. Bad, bad, bad.

What ID creationists really want

This is necessary reading from The Panda's Thumb. When Intelligent Design creationists try to tell you that their ideas are based on science and aren't religiously motivated at all, they're lying: not only do we know this because there is no scientific foundation to the Intelligent Design movement, but we've also got their own words, direct from their own writings and speeches.

There are certain resources out there known to those of us who keep tabs on the antievolution movement, day in, day out, that deserve a wider readership. Brian Poindexter's The Horse's Mouth is one of these. Brian has collected in this two-page PDF a number of quotations from leading antievolution figures where they explicitly invoke God and religious purposes as their reason for doing what they do. The PDF format means that it makes a great way to print off a number of these as needed for taking along to school board meetings, public comment periods, and the like.

ID creationists tend to say one thing to to school boards and legislators and judges, and something completely different when they've got a friendly audience. Catch them at ID conferences and meetings of the faithful at the local church, and the tale they will tell is all about restoring god and religion to the public schools and government. That is their real purpose, not an objective scientific evaluation of the evidence.

Contradictions?

Some of you may have noticed that from time to time I talk about our foster cats here—I do a teeny-tiny amount of work with our local, new humane society, and take in kitties now and then and care for them until someone wants to adopt them. We had a monthly meeting last night, and I got elected to the humane society board, so now I suppose I'm going to have to start doing a little more work.

I also happen to be the author of the UMM Biology Discipline's policy on dissection and animal experimentation. I'm all for it, and think it's a necessary part of training in biology.

Is that a contradiction? I don't think so. I think it's nearly universally true that people who go into biology love and respect their experimental organisms. I work with little tropical fish, and I'm nearly obsessive about proper euthanization procedures, and worse, am guilty of keeping lots of old, unproductive animals going in my tanks just because I don't like the idea of killing them simply because they don't produce eggs for me anymore (although, as my colony is growing, I may have to get a bit more ruthless in the future—but as always, any necessary executions will be painlessly induced with an overdose of anesthetic).

I encompass other "contradictions" that aren't really, too.

I'm a liberal and I love my country.

I'm pro-choice and I love kids.

I'm an atheist and, while there's no way I can say I love religion, at least I enthusiastically endorse people's right to believe.

Sometimes, really caring about something means that you are willing to do what is responsible, necessary, and sometimes unpleasant. Supporting your country means you are ready to criticize it, caring about kids means supporting only the ones who will be loved when they are born, and favoring reason over superstition means letting people come to their own choices by rational thought rather than compulsion. And awful as it may sound, caring deeply about animals and the natural world means one has to be willing and enthused about knowing them from the inside out.

A challenge!

Crooked Timber issues a challenge!

Having John and Belle join us brings the CT roster to 15, which means we are now available for rugby matches against similarly-sized group blogs.

Having just joined a group blog myself, it's tempting. I have to caution the Timberites, though, since we're only a week old but already have 23 on our roster (and it seems to be growing...), we already outnumber them. Also, as good evilutionists, we firmly believe that it's not how you play the game, it's whether you win...so we tend to fight dirty.

On the negative side, we all seem to be a bunch of academics whose only exercise involves lifting flagons of yeasty byproducts of anaerobic respiration.

Oh, yeah...and what is "rugby"? Is it anything like Calvinball?

What's that whining noise?

Creationists often pretend that getting criticism that points out their ideas are completely invalid is a validation. It's enough that they can get a scientist into a debate; even if they are hopelessly outclassed, babble and lie and treat a scientific debate as if it were a tent revival, they will afterwards strut and preen and pretend that their participation alone makes them a legitimate member of the scientific community. Dawkins made this point in his essay, "Why I won't debate creationists",

Sometime in the 1980s when I was on a visit to the United States, a television station wanted to stage a debate between me and a prominent creationist called, I think, Duane P Gish. I telephoned Stephen Gould for advice. He was friendly and decisive: "Don't do it." The point is not, he said, whether or not you would "win" the debate. Winning is not what the creationists realistically aspire to. For them, it is sufficient that the debate happens at all. They need the publicity. We don't. To the gullible public that is their natural constituency, it is enough that their man is seen sharing a platform with a real scientist. "There must be something in creationism, or Dr. So-and-So would not have agreed to debate it on equal terms." Inevitably, when you turn down the invitation, you will be accused of cowardice or of inability to defend your own beliefs. But that is better than supplying the creationists with what they crave: the oxygen of respectability in the world of real science.

Well, now Francis Beckwith has now fallen squarely into that good ol' creationist tradition of crowing triumph where there is none.

Intelligent Design's Growing Importance?

Although the intelligent design movement (IDM) is small, certain recent events seem to signal its growing importance, though the verdict is still out: the controversy over the Harvard Law Review book note of my monograph, the creation (pardon the pun) of a blog by a group of serious scientists who disagree with ID, the publication of Creationism's Trojan Horse (Oxford University Press, 2004), God, the Devil, and Darwin: A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory (Oxford University Press, 2004), and Why Intelligent Design Fails (Rutgers University Press, 2004) (three books critical of ID) as well as the publication of the book edited by two ID advocates (which includes opposing views as well), Darwin, Design, and Public Education (Michigan State University Press, 2003) and the forthcoming book edited by Michael Ruse (ID opponent) and William A. Dembski (ID proponent), Debating Design: From DNA to Darwin (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Sorry, Francis, the verdict is in. Intelligent Design creationism is a load of horseshit. What has happened is that the movement has made some inroads solely in the political and legal arenas, where the absence of a scientific basis for the belief is little handicap, and now scientists are rousing themselves to point out its glaring deficiencies. This is not a sign of its growing importance. It's a sign of growing corruption that demands a response. Read the books. Scientists are not coming out and saying that there is something to this intelligent design idea; they are announcing, with near unanimity, that it is worthless crap, junk that has no place in the lab or the schoolroom.

This site and The Panda's Thumb are not indications of growing importance (except perhaps in a purely negative way) of Intelligent Design creationism. Their goal is to inform and educate about the importance of evolutionary biology; IDists are nothing but peddlers of lies and fantasies that we want to clear out of the public consciousness.

Look at it this way. In a few months, every time I step outside the door of my house, I am going to have to do battle with Minnesota mosquitos. That I trouble myself to swat them is not a sign that they have achieved intellectual legitimacy and have earned a place at the high table. It does not mean that they have joined the community of scholars and scientists. It means nothing more than that they are a damned nuisance. Intelligent design creationists are distracters, pests, and clowns, not co-participants in the pursuit of knowledge.

Oh, and Francis? Bubeleh? When you aspire to being a rational contributor to the scientific discourse, being a buzzing, annoying, disease-carrying, blood-sucking parasite instead is not something to be proud of, OK?

A very groovy brain gene

I've written a few articles in the past about the evolution of human brain size: Big brains, big genes (which followed up on an essay by Zimmer on The Genes Behind Big Brains), Brain size and allometry, More on ASPM and the evolution of brain size, and Adaptive evolution of ASPM. These describe a gene, ASPM, identified as causing human microcephaly. ASPM is interesting for several reasons; it's homologous to a gene in Drosophila that also regulates the amount of neural tissue in that animal, and it seems to operate by controlling the pattern of mitoses, regulating the number of cells allocated in early development of the brain for commitment to the formation of the cortex. This is pretty cool stuff—genes that define how much brain tissue we have are likely to be important in human evolution. As I mentioned then, though, there is much more to building a good brain than raw bulk.

Now, in a recent article in Science, Piao et al. (2004) have identified another gene important in building brains, GPR56, which plays a role in organizing the distribution of cells within the cortex.

GPR56 was identified by a genetic and molecular analysis of an unfortunate human congenital abnormality, called polymicrogyria (PMG). In this disorder, the organization of the frontal cortex is disrupted, and instead of large, deep folds with six well organized cortical layers, the affected individuals have thinner cortical layers thrown into numerous small folds. The problem is inherited as a simple autosomal recessive, and causes mental retardation and seizures, among other problems.

Sagittal MRI images of a normal patient (F) and one affected by PMG (C). Note the relative smoothness of the cortex to the left.

The paper demonstrates some impressive genetic detective work. They tracked down 22 affected individuals in 12 pedigrees, and identified 8 alleles that have in common the disruption of this one gene, GPR56; examination of 260 unaffected controls showed no mutations in the gene. They make a very solid case that changes in this gene are responsible for the phenotype.

So what is the gene? It's a G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR), part of a signal transduction complex. During development, cells must communicate, signalling one another by way of cell surface proteins, and those interactions are converted, or transduced, into a change in the way the cell acts. GPCRs are the most numerous, diverse, and sophisticated of the receptor proteins; approximately 1% of the genome is dedicated to GPCRs, and they not only function in development, but also in the neural activity of the brain. Basically, wherever you find two cells that are going to interact with each other in specific, sophisticated, and complex ways, you are likely to find them doing it via GPCRs.

This particular GPCR is expressed in populations of cells in deep, proliferative zones of the brain, not in the cortex itself. It's function seems to be to mark a subset of brain progenitor cells, flagging them for appropriate distribution to the frontal cortex. There are other GPCRs than GPR56 which are expressed in different subsets, and help segregate cells for other destinations, like the temporal or parietal cortex. While a gene like ASPM seems to work to set up a population of cortical progenitors in general, the pattern of expression of the different GPCRs is subsequently important in allocating those precursors to specific regions of the brain; mutations within the GPCRs can than cause differential growth of different regions.

Sequence analysis reveals some interesting evolutionary relationships. GPR56 is most similar to two other GPCRs, GPR97 and GPR114, which also happen to be located adjacent to one another on chromosome 16. This same trio of GPCRs are also found in the mouse in the same relationship to one another, so the order is conserved. However, the N-terminal region, the part of the protein that dangles into extracellular space and is presumably important in cell-cell interactions, has diverged significantly between mouse and human. This N-terminal region is also only present in animals that have a cerebral cortex. So, we have a gene that is a) essential for the development of a normal frontal cortex, b) found only in mammals that have significantly developed that cortex, and c) exhibits considerable specialization in humans, an animal with a particularly highly developed frontal cortex. It looks like one more small step in the process of puzzling out the molecular and genetic mechanisms responsible for the evolution of the human brain.

Xianhua Piao, R. Sean Hill, Adria Bodell, Bernard S. Chang, Lina Basel-Vanagaite, Rachel Straussberg, William B. Dobyns, Bassam Qasrawi, Robin M. Winter, A. Micheil Innes, Thomas Voit, M. Elizabeth Ross, Jacques L. Michaud, Jean-Claude Déscarie, A. James Barkovich, and Christopher A. Walsh (2004) G Protein-Coupled Receptor-Dependent Development of Human Frontal Cortex. Science 303:2033-2036.

What to do about those darn kids?

Liz Lawley is worried about safety vs censorship:

I walked into the room where he was typing the other day, and he quickly closed the IM window. My parental radar kicked in immediately."Who were you talking to?" I asked. "Just a friend," he answered, intentionally vague. We eyed each other. I told him I really needed to know who it was, but that I didn't have to see what was being written. . "Was it someone I know?" "No." "Who was it?" "He's a kid that T (a neighborhood friend) met online. He's 13."

I sympathize with this. My two oldest kids have their own computers, and the youngest uses the family iMac in the living room all the time—and I know they are much more into this newfangled IM thing than I am, and have their own favorite online forums that they putter about in. I worry a bit that they are too involved in the online world (Hah! Look who's talking!), but I've taken a different approach than Lawley: I'm completely hands-off. If the kids want to talk online privately with people, I don't feel that I can demand any details. I figure they're completely out from under my thumb 8 hours a day at school, and I know they are talking about and doing things that would give me the screaming heebie-jeebies if I knew about them, and IM and web forums are just more of the same.

I figure all I can do is tell them what common sense involves (and not trusting the claims of strange people on IM, as Lawley is telling her kid, is one of them), and let them go. I'll ask now and then what they've been up to, and if they don't want to tell me, that's OK. If I find out they've been downloading and reading libertarian political tracts, though, it will just break my heart.

Whatever would Scalia say?

Via Corsair the Rational Pirate, I find a very amusing cartoon parodying the "under god" nonsense in the pledge of allegiance. What tickled me in particular, though, was this evolutionist version of the pledge:

"Who used to be tadpoles"...I swear, next sporting event I'm at, I'm using it.

So go read the rest, already.

Stephen Baxter's Evolution

Just for fun, I read a novel the other day: Stephen Baxter's Evolution. I couldn't resist the title. Reading the author's bio, though, caused some trepidation—an engineer? I have not had good experiences with some hard science authors who have no training in biology trying to discuss biological issues: Greg Bear comes to mind. Urgh. This book could have been a major disappointment.

It wasn't at all bad, though. Baxter has a good grasp of the power of evolution and the possibilities of change over long periods of time, and seems to be commendably well-read in at least the popular literature on the topic.

The book is a broad-brush description of the history of humanity, from 65 million years ago to roughly 500 million years in the future. It does this with brief vignettes at umpty-million year intervals, describing dramatic moments in the lives of a few of our ancestors and descendants. If anything, it reminded me of those long Michener novels, like The Source, that describe events in the history of a place; in this case, though, we aren't dealing with a place, but a lineage.

The science in Evolution is reasonable, but the author is explicit in setting the story as science fiction. Right from the beginning, we're introduced to some overtly speculative species (a giant pterodactyl, the skywhale, and a flashback to intelligent ornithoraptor) that are not in any of the scientific evidence, but are within the bounds of possibility. It's good strategy on Baxter's part, since it makes me immediately disinclined to nit-pick over the details. The big picture is science, the fine-grained closeup is all fiction.

There were a few things that bothered me. Neandertals are portrayed as very slow, dull, and crude, little more than half-witted animal slaves to quick and clever Homo sapiens. That's at the low end of our regard for these cousins of ours, so in itself that can be seen as the author's prerogative...but at the same time, this is the author who portrayed a Purgatorius from 65 million years earlier as spritely, inquisitive, and interesting. It was disconcerting to then see much more sophisticated hominids sketched in as shambling stupid cows.

After the present day, we have an ecological disaster that leads to an adaptive radiation of the human stock—we get a range of new derivatives from humans, everything from naked-mole-rat-like burrowers to herbivorous elephant-men. This is cute and catchy and sort of fun to imagine, rather like those Dougal Dixon books about future evolution, but seems extremely far-fetched to me. People are just too specialized and slow-breeding to experience that, especially in competition with rodents and lagomorphs. My levitating disbelief was occasionally scudding along the ground as I was reading it.

What about the story and the writing? It's good, in a very general sense, but the book is in a niche that will definitely not be to everyone's taste. The source of the problem isn't in Baxter's lack of talent, but in the nature of the tale, which is perhaps a little too conscious of the issue of scientific realism to fit into a familiar dramatic mold.

Some of the stories get to be a bit repetitive. The description of individual species seems to follow a rough pattern:

• Predator/natural disaster makes life miserable for primate.
• "Hmmm, I seem to be experiencing novel thought process that presages future human cognitive abilities (first two thirds of book)/echoes lost abilities of my predecessors (last third of book)."
• Male struts, yells, flings poop.
• Female puts up with all the nonsense, has babies.

Mix those up in different orders, and you've got the structure of each story. That's not entirely a bad thing; I mean, face it, our history largely consists of generation after generation of baby-making and poop-flinging, so in a sense, that's all the author has to work with. Baxter does do a good job of making the accounts vivid, and personally I found them engaging and interesting, but not everyone is going to care for it. If you are the kind of person who can watch with interest an hour of Discovery Channel programming on antelope hinking at twigs snapping on the African veldt or voles burrowing on the tundra, then you're going to like this; if not, you're going to be bored.

The emphasis in the stories is on small, incremental change. There is no Martha Stewart of the Pleistocene who invents fire, the bow and arrow, domestication, agriculture, and pottery while wooing the handsome, sensitive Cro-Magnon hunk. The great triumphs of these characters consist largely of not getting eaten. Again, that may be more realism than many readers will find interesting.

One thing that may also put off many readers is that there is no grand story arc, no impressive destiny that we are working towards. This isn't Clarke's Childhood's End, where humanity is going to grow towards godhood, and it really doesn't have a happy or even particularly tragic ending. Good science, but perhaps not the most enthralling literary decision.

I am fussing over a number of odd attributes of the book, and the bottom line is that I really have to give it a mixed review. It's not for anyone who wants a fast-paced romp; but for a slow, quiet afternoon when you want to put your feet up and relax over a somewhat more thoughtful entertainment, it's about right. It was promising enough that I'll keep my eyes open for more books by Baxter, and the science is good enough that I can recommend it here.

Steal these buttons!

I'm just stashing a few widgets for the Panda's Thumb here. These are standard-sized banners, buttons, badges for the site—if anyone wants to steal them and put a nice Panda's Thumb microbadge on your weblog, help yourself. Promotion is good.

standard banner - 468 pixels wide x 60 pixels high

standard badge - 88 pixels wide x 31 pixels high

standard microbadge - 80 pixels wide x 15 pixels high

Or, if you want to be lazy and just cut&paste, here's some html you can use to put a microbadge link on your site:

<a href="http://pandasthumb.org/">
 <img src="http://pharyngula.org/images/PT_microbadge.gif" width="80" height="15" alt="Evilutionists!" />
</a>

Grad school was great! I recommend it to everyone!

Thinking about graduate school? Here's a little story, all true, about my very most unpleasant experiences as a graduate student—and they all revolve around one person. It is a fact that you will find honest-to-god flaming assholes in positions of considerable power in academia.

Imagine some quiet nebbish of an undergraduate, a bookish kind of guy who is naive and completely unaccustomed to asserting himself in a classroom. That's me. Maybe it was you, too—artlessness of that kind is endemic among college students. I traipsed off to graduate school in biology, not knowing much more than that I liked science and thought it would be a wonderful career (which it has been, so stop worrying; you already know this story ends well, so it can't be all that bad).

I was expected to take a few classes to deepen my knowledge of subjects in which I was going to do research, a plan with which I was comfortable. Taking classes was familiar, much more comprehensible than this independent research stuff I was also supposed to be doing, so I was taking a grad level course in physiology. It was terrific. The professor was a brilliant guy with an international reputation, someone even callow PZ had heard of in his undergrad days, and the subject was enjoyable. The labs were challenging, and we had to do a lot of writing, but that was all good. I was learning.

Then, one class day after we'd turned in a major term paper, I sat down near the front of the room as I usually did. The prof sat down with the stack of term papers in front of him, and made an announcement: he had just read the most ghastly paper ever turned in to him, and he read the first sentence aloud.

Yeah, it was mine.

This was cringeworthy enough. I was thinking that at least he hadn't made my personal humiliation public.

So then, of course, he turns to me and hisses, literally sneering at me, "Well, Mr Myers, what do you have to say for yourself?"

I didn't have anything to say for myself. My brain was busy trying to burrow its way out my cranium via the foramen magnum, and the compression as it was trying to squeeze by my spinal cord had shut down my speech centers. What little motor control I had left was dedicated to the task of keeping sphincters clamped shut.

Getting no satisfactory answer, and seeing only my rather impassive expression (entirely an artifact of the growing separation of my panicky cerebrum and my trigeminal ganglia, I assure you), he started to read my term paper. Every sentence. With scathing commentary, and the odd snide query spat out in my direction. It just went on and on.

I want everyone to know that I graduated with my Ph.D. in a fairly typical amount of time, 5 years. However, I think two of those five were spent in that classroom on that one afternoon, so I really ought to be credited with completing my degree in record time.

But wait, don't leave yet. The misery isn't quite over.

I made it through the term, although I really didn't find the class quite as much fun afterwards, and I was treated like some contemptible pariah. At the end, we all had to come back individually to his office to get our lab notebooks back, and to get his personal evaluation. You can imagine how much I was looking forward to that. I had to sit in a nice, comfy, low, cushioned chair, while he sat behind his desk, peered over his glasses at me, and gave me his assessment. At least it was in private.

It was no less unpleasant. Once he got on a roll, he really could dish out the venom. We started with the usual dry discussion of lab results, worked up to a solid, "you do not belong in science, I suggest you immediately leave graduate school and seek employment elsewhere", and wound up with a truly vicious declaration that he would make sure I did not complete my preliminary exams and that I would never, ever graduate from this university while he had any say in the matter. I dealt with it with a total loss of affect; my mind had long since given up on trying to run away and had just shut down.

And of course he ended up on my preliminary exam committee. I had resigned myself to that inevitable expression of unavoidable destiny, so it honestly left me unperturbed. He had succeeded in becoming such a pervasively inimical presence that it had become unimaginable that he wouldn't be there with the knives sharpened.

The exam didn't go as badly as I feared. It was an oral exam on a relevant topic of my choice; I was going with the cytoskeleton. My bête noir fired off the first question: "Enumerate for me the biophysical parameters that determine the spike rate of a bursting pacemaker neuron." If you aren't familiar with the subjects, I'll tell you that the question has pretty much nothing to do with the cytoskeleton.

I may have passed the exam with my answer: "No, I don't think so." I felt good about that reply. The committee just kept me there for the next four hours, grilling me on actin and tubulin and intermediate filaments, just for form's sake.

The poor man was mostly impotent against me for the next several years. I remember that every once in a while we might end up in the elevator together, and he'd always take the opportunity to make some malevolent remark about my research. I'd shrug.

The son-of-a-bitch actually died on me before my final Ph.D. defense, which I thought was terribly unfair of him. I half expected to see his rotting corpse pounding at the door of the seminar room, like something out of EC comics, and that he'd point a bony finger at me and demand that I derive the Goldman equation for him, or join him in hell. Didn't happen. I even kinda missed him. Oh, well.

Maybe this story doesn't sound so awful now. It could have been worse—I could have been a coalminer and had to struggle with firedamp and cave-ins and hard physical labor, after all! All I had to deal with was self-doubt and depression and intimidation and fear for four years, which are relatively small things, and fairly common in graduate school, and that's really my point. Grad school can be petty and demeaning and vicious, and most of the time you have to plug along with no encouragement of any kind (although I should say that I was also lucky enough to have a good and supportive advisor, which makes an immense difference). But I survived. I came out of it with a bit more independence than I probably would have without that mean old man hovering over me. My current students can also thank him for teaching me that public humiliation is probably not a good classroom management tool.

I should also mention that despite the cruelty, I actually respected and sometimes even liked the old bastard. Another thing he taught me was that you can value someone even if they aren't at all nice to you; it's a useful perspective to have.

I don't have an agenda!

Read this: the homosexual, feminist, and fundamentalist to-do list. I really feel left out. I've got to come up with some kind of over-arching, dramatic, world-changing goal.

"Clone army of psychotic squid-monkey hybrids."

Yeah, that might work...I think I've got 20 minutes free next Tuesday afternoon.

Never let it be said that Intelligent Design creationists are intelligent or creative

Unbelievable. The cover story in World magazine: How Design beat Darwin.

WORLD asked four leaders of the Intelligent Design Movement to have some fun: Imagine writing in 2025, on the 100th anniversary of the famous Scopes "monkey" trial, and explain how Darwinism has bit the dust, unable to rebut the evidence that what we see around us could not have arisen merely by time plus chance.

It's a very creepy wankfest. Why not also invite Carrot Top to rhapsodize about what it will be like after he is elected President of the World in 2025? It has about as much relationship to reality.

I read the entry by Jonathan Wells first, Whatever happened to evolutionary theory? It dissuaded me from reading the entries by Philip Johnson, Jeffrey Schwartz, and William Dembski—there is only so much self-congratulatory crapola one can stomach at a single sitting. Maybe my other cronies at the Panda's Thumb will deal with it. I'll just say a few words about the self-indulgent vacuum at the heart of Wells' essay.

Much of it is the usual mush we expect from the Discovery Institute: there is no evidence for Darwinism! This is stated as a bald assertion, despite the masses of text documenting its existence in libraries everywhere. Just the fact that he calls evolution "Darwinism" is clue enough that the repellent Mr Wells is talking out of his hat; it's like someone protesting the perils of modern transportation by cussing out people for wielding buggy whips. It rather dates him, and shows that he hasn't actually looked at any of them new-fangled veee-hickles.

Where it gets interesting is in his declaration that one reason for the ascendancy of Intelligent Design in 2025 is because it has been so successful in explaining biology and providing new tools for medicine. For instance, one major bugaboo for ID creationists today is junk DNA. They dwell on it quite a bit, and seem deeply offended by its existence. In 2025, though, no problem: they've found a reason for it, and it isn't junk after all!

Although biologists occasionally stumbled on functions for isolated pieces of "junk," they began to make real progress only after realizing that the DNA in an intelligently designed organism is unlikely to be 95 percent useless. The intensive research on non-coding regions of human DNA that followed soon led to several medically important discoveries.

If you're like me, you expected that after reading those sentences, you'd next see some speculative examples of what functions it might have, and what great medical breakthroughs might emerge from it. Like me, you are probably disappointed: that was it. End of paragraph. End of thought. You might also be wondering how finding function for major chunks of the genome would lead to the destruction of evolutionary biology; you're going to be disappointed again. You might next wonder, if the function of junk DNA holds such promise, how much research effort the Discovery Institute is investing in this subject, and what wonderful, testable theories they have proposed. Sorry. The answer is nada. This is what ID creationists do all the time, promise you the world and never follow through. You'd think people who spend all their working hours fussing over this theory would at least have the capacity to engage in a little creative, imaginative speculation about it...but noooo.

The next promise from the deceitful Mr Wells is even more tantalizing to us developmental biologists.

Another insight from intelligent-design theory advanced our understanding of embryo development. From a Darwinian perspective, all the information needed for new features acquired in the course of evolution came from genetic mutations. This implied that all essential biological information was encoded in DNA. In contrast, intelligent-design theory implied that organisms are irreducibly complex systems in which DNA contains only part of the essential information. Although a few biologists had been arguing against DNA reductionism for decades, biologists guided by intelligent-design theory in 2010 discovered the true nature of the information that guides embryo development.

Oooh. Oooh. I swoon. "The true nature of the information that guides embryo development." What I wouldn't give to know the answer to that question. Please. A hint. Just give me a teasing little whiff of a glimmering, oh you spiteful Mr Wells. I'll even stop prefixing your name with rude adjectives if you do!

Sadly, no. That is all he tells us—it's yet another full stop, carriage return, on to the next completely different idea. What could this true guiding principle possibly be? I'm not sure what ID would imply. He's suggesting that it isn't simply the pattern of instructions in DNA (good for him, I agree with that bit), but what source, that is only suggested by Intelligent Design 'theory', could it be? Is he really trying to imply that the Intelligent Designer is actively manipulating the development of our children right now? I mean, I'm used to hearing these guys talk about Behe-like ideas of designers programming in potentially useful biological widgets, like the flagellum, into early precursors, but that's just DNA reductionism again. This little declaration by Wells is something very different. Too bad he has left it hanging.

I challenge any Intelligent Design proponents who read this to be a little braver, a little more imaginative, than the sadly plodding Mr Wells. What novel mechanisms, that are something more than the typical naturalistic explanations of us establishment types, do you suggest might guide embryo development? Where are the mysterious chasms in the process of development that are unbridgeable by materialism, requiring some extra intervention from currently unexplainable forces?

It is true that many biologists have been arguing against the excesses of molecular reductionism. However, they've been thoroughly co-opted by the Evolutionist (the odious Mr Wells would certainly say "Darwinist") Machine, and are finding productive satisfaction in evo-devo, eco-devo, and developmental systems theory, rather than in the empty fantasies of Intelligent Design. We tend to talk about interactions between genome and environment, and even of such things as intrinsic pattern forming properties of complex regulatory systems. We do all that without mentioning a designer, a hypothesis of which we have no need. Where are the promising hypotheses that should spring forth from the premises of Design? It's clear that this crop of Intelligent Design creationists at the Discovery Institute are not even up to the task of imagining an answer.