Got Some Dumb Ideas? Make A Wiki!

In the comment section over at Pharyngula (and in his own post at Unscrewing the Inscrutable), Jim Downey points to one of the recent examples of creationist idiocy: the CreationWiki. Downey calls it a “self-organizing black hole of stupid.” No one can deny that the know-nothings in the creationist crowd are passionate about their never-ending battle with reality (see also Conservapedia).

I’m just too busy to have the energy to fight these fools. That’s a bad sign, because the science on this issue is settled, so we have a lot of ammunition on our side. This is a political fight that must be fought, but recently I’ve wanted no part of it. I just hope my energy returns.

If your fighting spirit needs a little pick me up, try this gem from CreationWiki’s first page on for size:

The theory of evolution (or general theory of evolution) is a philosophical perspective that stems from an atheistic worldview.

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The Super Bowl, Monster Brawls, And Your Brain

This was my favorite of the Super Bowl ads. I've seen funnier/more interesting/more useful ads in my time, but this one had me smiling. I liked the giant monster and robot man-in-suit rumble. The music was fun. Oh, and it reflected my deep malaise and discomfort about the violence of the Iraq war.

Wait, no it didn't. Yet the New York Times today has a ridiculously over-reaching analysis of the Super Bowl commercials which claims just that. The headline says it all: "Super Bowl Ads of Cartoonish Violence, Perhaps Reflecting Toll of War." Every little hint of slapstick humor in last night's commercials is seen as embodying feelings about the war. Although the above ad seems most clearly aimed at a nerdy demographic of greasy dudes who like Grim Reaper and Godzilla, Stuart Elliott, the NYT writer, decides the ad was "reminiscent of a horror movie." Sure, if you're willing to massage the evidence to fit your preconceived conclusion.

Keep reading for a discussion of your brain on Super Bowl ads.

Here's a more interesting analysis of some Super Bowl ads: hook viewers up to a NMRI machine and see how their brains react to the different commercials. I'm not sure about the actual scientific relevance of this. I seriously doubt that you can read too much into these NMRI results. But I found it interesting that one ad that Elliott singled out for praise, a General Motors ad about a assembly line robot with mad Johnny-Five-is-alive stylee, elicited anxiety in viewers.

The researchers behind the NMRI study say people noticed the ad, but their brains showed fear. Particularly, the subjects has increased activity in their amygdala (a brain region associated with anxiety and fear). The researchers guess that the fear is related to people experiencing job anxiety and economic insecurity. Exactly. As I watched that ad with my brother, I said to him, "Remember when we were growing up around Detroit, and everyone was talking about how those robots were stealing people's jobs? Now we're supposed to empathize with them?"

Apparently, the Federline burger-flipping ad had the same effect. I didn't feel anxious watching that one, though. My amygdala must have been hypnotized by his insane flow.

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Hobbit Brains: !La Lucha Continua!

Carl Zimmer discusses yet more research on the hobbit, the possibly-new species of Homo (H. floresiensis) revealed in bones found a few years ago in Indonesia. Last time I touched on the subject, the research was suggesting that the bones were a microcephalic human.

But new research (PNAS paper not yet online) on a collection of microcephalic human brains indicates that they all share traits that are absent in normal human brains. Features on the H. floresiensis skull suggest that the traits were also absent on H. floresiensis brains. Does this mean the hobbits might actually be a new species? The back-and-forth of the research is really quite exciting, although I wish it could happen in intervals shorter than six months.

Zimmer also mentions research that answers a critical question I had. Sadly, researchers have so far been unable to extract DNA from the bones. But there is still reason to hope. As Zimmer points out, new information about H. floresiensis could be just around the corner, involving new analyses and the hunt for new fossils. New analyses of known bones will probably just draw out the back and forth of the microcephalic/not-microcephalic debate. But new fossils could possibly offer a decisive answer. I’m re-crossing my fingers and hoping for some DNA results, which seem to me to be the surest way to settle the issue.

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More Amazing Sea Life From Japan

More news of weird sea creatures from Japan (another beast here). This time, it’s a frilled shark, an animal normally found in the deep sea. Frilled sharks have very rarely been seen doing their thing in the wild. They have been pulled up in bottom trawls, but this NOAA report on a 2004 deep-sea submersible dive to around 3,000 feet claims video from the dive shows the “first time anyone had ever seen the rare species in its natural habitat.” So this is truly a rare sight. Here’s the brand new footage from Japan.

Reuters reports that the animal was spotted by a fisherman and then captured by workers at a marine park, and that the video was taken in a shallow sea-water pool. The shark doesn’t seem to be doing so well. It looks bent out of shape, swollen around the gills, and cloudy in the eyes. Maybe that is why it was so near the surface? The Reuters story says that the animal died a few hours later.

Nevertheless, it is nice video of an awesome creature. As I noted in the squid post, though, I wonder about the music in the background. Is this normal Japanese news procedure? Not knowing any Japanese myself, I have no idea where this video comes from.

[Aside: To follow up on an idea from another previous post, it has been suggested that the long, eel-like frilled shark could be responsible for old reports of sea serpents.]

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The Pol Pot Of Global Warming

I accept the idea that human-mediated changes in the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are partly responsible for the fact of global warming. Like all scientific theories, this is provisional. But I trust the data I’ve seen and the collective wisdom of the mainstream climatologists who argue that some causes of climate change are anthropogenic. I see very little to be gained from belligerent skepticism in this case. But not everyone is like me. Check out the reactions to the calmly-worded Weather Channel blog about global warming. Their blogger, Dr. Heidi Cullen, defends the Weather Channel’s acceptance of anthropogenic climate change and attempts to distinguish the scientific data from the political argument. The angry-as-hell anti-warmers ain’t having it! [via SciAm Observations]

Continue reading to catch some rhetorical highlights and examples of reasoned debate that would shame Socrates.

Anonymous says: We have very good evidence of cooling and warming of the enviroment over the past without human involvement. Why many people are so intent to "Blame the human race for Armagedon" always surprises me.

Me, too! People also die sometimes without human involvement. Why many people are so intent to suggest that some people are murdered always surprises me.

Faxis says: Man Made Global Warming is the new religion. It's exactly the same situation as the when Ugg the Caveman watched his buddy Kronk get hit with lightning and tried to understand what Kronk had done to deserve it. Ugg created religion in order to feel like he had a hand in things he couldn't understand and thus, could avoid getting fried by lightning. Same thing today with Global Warming only now we've got grant money funding the priests

Good point, but I think you made a small error. Last May, scientific priests demonstrated that Kronk wasn’t killed by lightning; he was eaten by a tyrannosaur.

Larry Giraradi says: You must be aware that every erupting volcanoe spews more greenhouse gasses and poions into the air that all of the cars and factories ever built or operated in the history of the world. Maybe we should have a volcanoe tax to study this problem and find a way for the U.S to be blamed, thus pay the rest of the world for volcanoe pollution.

Hmmm, interesting proposal. But you must be aware that volcanoes are notorious anti-tax conservatives who think public monies should only be used for invading Muslim countries and helping corporations pay their taxes.

Dave z. says: I hope everybody listens to the weather channel and reverts back to the day when we didn't cause all this climate change - have you seem my horse?

Ah, I remember that day fondly. And maybe you should take a look at those freedom-hating socialist Frenchies. They might have eaten your horse.

Randy says: Heidi Cullen, The Weather Nazi.....believe what I tell you or lose your certification and then we'll ship you off to the gulag. You're an embarrassment to use what is simply supposed to be an informational forum and turn it into Air America.

C’mon, Randy. You’re being a little extreme here. Everyone knows Al Gore is the Weather Nazi. Dr. Cullen is more like the Weather Mussolini.

Hoo-boy. This is fun. I could go on all day. And there’s plenty of material. In the time it took me to type these, the comment total on this Weather Channel post climbed from 152 to 200. Some wingnut sites must be linking to it.

One last comment quote before I stop, though. I like this one because it illustrates how hard it is to tell the difference between actual right-wing ignorant fury and a parody of it.

Anonymous says: Heidi's the POL POT of Global Warming!!!!

I'm sure that everyone noticed that the Learned Dr. Heidi did not respond factually to the logical and scientific rejoinders to her STALINOID, FASCISTIC suggestion that people who disagree with HER lose their jobs??

And I'm sure that EVERYONE noticed that the Learned Dr. Heidi did not ONCE respond "on the merits" to those who challenged her facts and reasoning with facts and reasoning of their own.
Apparently this give-and-take is foreign to her.

Let's face it: this person is to Science what O.J. Simspon is to Truth.

What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is the science version of Seinfeld's "Kramer's" racist tirade. Heidi can explain away, seek wriggle room, try to convince us that our position is " spin" but everyone knows the truth.

SHE IS FINISHED.

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Meteorite in tha hizzouse!

True story: when I was little, I used to keep myself up at night worrying about meteorites crashing into my house. Then I would panic and call out to my parents, who would come to my room and assure me that we were safe from such a catastrophe. Well, what do you say about THIS, Mom and Dad?

Better true story: A woman living with her adult son in Freehold Township, NJ, heard a thud on Tuesday afternoon. That evening, the son found a hunk of metal, about 3-and-a-half inches long and weighing three-quarters of a pound, lodged in a bathroom wall. They discovered that the object had crashed through the roof of the two-story house, through the ceiling of a first-floor bathroom, bounced off the tiles, and then got stuck in the wall.

Experts say it could be a meteorite. The object apparently has a smoother appearance than other meteorites, but what else could it be? A piece of a satellite? I'll update when the results of analyses are announced over the next couple days.

My adult fears are much more prosaic than my childhood worries, and recently involve money and a bun in the oven. But I can't argue with a woman quoted in this Newark Star-Ledger story, "I don't like things falling from the sky."

[UPDATE: 1/6/07 Sure enough, it's a meteorite, straight outta the asteroid belt.]

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I'm Happy Because Of The Squid (Not Christmas)

I'm travelling for Christmas, so postings might be a bit sparse. But in the airport this morning I saw on the waiting-lounge TV that scientists in Japan pulled a live giant squid to the surface. I felt excited and awed by the world in a way that I have become increasingly out of touch with as an adult.

Last year, the same Japanese scientists took pictures of a live giant squid at close to one kilometer below the surface. I thought that was exciting. Here, the many-tentacled creature is right at the surface! See for yourself here.

Unfortunately, it died soon after it was captured.

[UPDATE: Here's some video from Japanese news--note the stirring music.]

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Awesome Dolphin Gone Forever

The baiji, a species of river dolphin native to the Yangtze River, has been declared "functionally extinct" after a six-week expedition set up to find one of the animals failed, according to an AP report and the expedition's official website. Another story about the expedition appeared in the Wall Street Journal last week (in syndication here). Scientists put the blame on overfishing and shipping traffic.

River dolphins are amazing creatures. First, they look awesome. Second, they inhabit this curious little niche--relatives of ocean-going dolphins that evolved to life on the lazy river. Third, according to scientists, baiji are "shy and nearly blind." Finally, around the world they inspire some cool legends, often sexual in nature. According to the WSJ, the baiji is featured in an old Chinese "love story, where it turned into a beautiful woman like a mermaid." The pink river dolphins of the Amazon have inspired folk tales in which the dolphins turn into men at night, seduce human women, and impregnate them. (Interesting gender differences between those myths.)

Enough fun, though. I was really sad to read this news. Such a great, interesting animal gone forever because of what people do. Even if one or a few individuals turn up over the next few decades, the baiji is effectively lost. There are certainly not enough to constitute a sustainable population.

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Planes On A Treadmill

Boingboing has a post up that gets the pedantic science nerd in me going. I’ll need to reproduce it almost in full so you can understand. It begins:

David Pogue at the NYT has presented this classic airplane on a giant treadmill problem, and people are arguing about whether or not the plane would take off or not.

Here’s the set-up from Pogue, quoting someone else:

”Imagine a plane is sitting on a massive conveyor belt, as wide and as long as a runway. The conveyer belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction. Can the plane take off? I say no, because the plane will not move relative the the ground and air, and thus, very little air will flow over the wings. However, other people are convinced that since the wheels of a plane are free spinning, and not powered by the engines, and the engines provide thrust against the air, that somehow that makes a difference and air will flow over the wing.” (Here’s Pogue’s original post.)

Continue if you like such thought problems.


Boingboinger Mark Frauenfelder has his say:

I say yes. Let's assume the friction in the wheel bearings is negligible. Putting a plane on a treadmill is like putting it on an icy lake. When you fire up the jets, the plane is going to shoot down the lake and take off just like it would on a runway.

Some commenter then disagrees. But I have to say I’m a bit surprised this is a problem for anyone, really. Jets generate thrust by expelling hot air, which pushes back on the plane in a simple demonstration of Newton’s third law of motion. It shouldn’t matter what’s happening with the wheels; they don’t supply any power in our example. They just let the plane roll.

Now, if the plane sped up via power from the wheels, like a car with wings attached, sitting on a treadmill that matched the rotational speed of the wheel would be a problem. But the plane speeds up by pushing air out. Maybe the wheels would be spinning twice as fast as they would be if the plane were not on treadmill, but so what?

Think of it this way: the plane could be disconnected from the ground all together. Say it has a rotor blade like a helicopter’s that suspends it above the ground. The jets will still push the plane forward. To me, this doesn’t seem hard to understand at all (see? pedantic nerd), so I am surprised this issue generates a lot of online discussion.

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The Sky Was Not Falling

Andrew Revkin, a science reporter at the New York Times, writes about a new analysis of the recovery of ocean life following the Permo-Triassic extinction 251 million years ago. This extinction is often called the “Great Dying” because more species winked out then than in any of the other great extinctions that have walloped life on Earth. As Revkin writes in his lede:

At least five mass extinctions, most presumably caused by asteroids that struck the earth, have transformed global ecology in the half-billion years since the emergence of multicelled life, lopping entire branches from the evolutionary tree and causing others to flourish.

The problem is, apart from the end-Cretaceous extinction that killed the dinosaurs, no mass extinction has lots of evidence to support an impact-killer theory. In fact, in the case of the Great Dying, the impact theory is more of a minority opinion, albeit one with some very vocal supporters. I’m surprised that a reporter like Revkin would gloss over this. I have NEVER seen it suggested anywhere nor talked to any evolutionary biologist or geologist that felt most mass extinctions were related to asteroids. Many are willing to entertain the hypothesis, but acknowledge that the data don’t support it.

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Dog Humps Cat, Cogs Born?

C'mon. What the hell is this doing on Reuters? Sure, it's a cute picture: a cat between two puppies.


But read the caption. The owner claims that those puppies are really half-cat, born after a dog humped that cat. Not possible. At least the caption uses scare quotes to say that the owner "claims" those are the offspring of a dog-cat mating. Still, I'm surprised Reuters gave it any play. I can't understand why a geneticist would even bother testing this. Those are either cats that just happen to look dog-like, or puppies that are mixed in with a cat litter. Those two animals can't hybridize.

Oh, here's another cool interspecies-fucking story, with a super twist: dude FUCKED A DEAD DEER!

You may need to register, so if you don't want to bother, here's the nut from the Duluth News Tribune:

Bryan James Hathaway, 20, of Superior faces a misdemeanor charge of sexual gratification with an animal. He is accused of having sex with a dead deer he saw beside Stinson Avenue on Oct. 11.

A motion filed last week by his attorney, public defender Fredric Anderson, argued that because the deer was dead, it was not considered an animal and the charge should be dismissed.

[Thanks, Carlin!]

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Has Freud Really Fallen?

Writer Denyse O'Leary, a specialist in religiously-motivated critiques of established science, has started a new blog, the awkwardly titled Mindful Hack. She had recently teamed with William Dembski on Uncommon Descent, the blogospheric home of Dembski's religiously-motivated attack on evolutionary biology. Her new blog promises the same quality "science journalism" in the realm of neuroscience.

O'Leary's first post is a premature celebration of the "fall" of Sigmund Freud. Creationists love to group Freud, Darwin, and Marx as some imaginary super-team of materialists. According to their logic, Marx and Freud have been discredited, and Darwin will soon join them. Any educated, reasonable person would of course object to this. Darwin is unimpeachable today. Furthermore, although every nominally Marxist country is truly a mess, Karl Marx the political philosopher is by no means discredited. And certainly Sigmund Freud is alive and kicking in the world of psychology. Please read on.

Freud-haters love to point to excesses that have been committed in his name, things like the recovered memory movement, and gleefully declare Freud is dead. The problem is, they are simply wrong. I know plenty of working psychologists, both in hospitals and private practice, who trace their theoretical orientation directly to Freud.

Of course, many of Freud's theories have been changed over time. He even tinkered with his ideas over his lifetime. Personally, I feel like Freud erred in being too explicit in his theories. He really felt like he was coming up with a universal science of the self. Most psychologists now consider things like penis envy to be silly elaborations of Freud's own fixations.

Yet Freud laid the foundation for a theory of personality that has yet to be surpassed. Does anyone really doubt that our emotional reactions to people and situations come from a mess of internal conflicts, some of which we are unaware of at the time? Does anyone doubt that infants approach the world and in particular their parents with a tangle of needs and desires, and that their early experiences with having these desires met or not met create expectations--again, many of which are unconscious--that shape a personality for life? These are contributions from Freud's thinking.

Psychology, practiced as such, is not a science as much as a working philosophy based on a practical understanding of the brain, namely that any process of mind is rooted in the biological brain and what happens to it. Religious people, of course, hate this because it conflicts with their absolutely unsupportable belief in god-given spirit. So, like O'Leary, they latch on to straw-men arguments, blaming Freud for excesses like the satanic-abuse/recovered memories hysteria (which, ironically, was very popular in populations suffering from the god delusion).

I wonder: do religious types have any viable alternative theory about how personalities form and develop? And would those believers in the immaterial spirit really be happy if neuroscience, the real academic challenge to Freud, were to replace social/developmental approaches with a more genetically-based one?

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Why Is It Raining Rain Men?

What causes autism? TV? Havin’ smart parents ‘n’ stuff? A couple of crazy new theories dropped this month to explain the spike in autism diagnoses we’ve been seeing over the past couple decades.

On his relatively new Discover-based blog, John Horgan covers the hypothesis that the qualities that make successful science-y types can lead to autistic children. In Slate, Gregg Easterbrook says TV might turn kids autistic.

As for the first idea, first reported in IEEE Spectrum, a British researcher hypothesizes that autism is an extreme version of a normal human trait called systematizing, the tendency to focus on grouped things and patterns in the world. Scientists and engineers have this trait, and they are meeting and mating more than ever, suggests Simon Baron-Cohen.

In the Slate piece, Gregg Easterbrook—who can always be counted on for a blood-pressure-raising crazy piece of science journalism—trumpets new research suggesting that watching TV before age three is linked autism. However, a quick glance at the new research reveals that it is a non-peer-reviewed work by some economists. This is not immediately damning, but raises those red flags. I’m no fan of Easterbrook, so I did appreciate the wild take-downs in the Slate comments. Actually, many of the comments rip into what seems like pretty shoddy research. I’m not surprised Easterbrook is giving high-profile attention to such problematic stuff. He’s a quite poor science writer.

For my part, I’m still not convinced that autism is one thing, biologically speaking. As I say in the comments section of Horgan’s blog:

Autism seems to be a bit of a trash-can diagnosis. I've often thought that so-called high-functioning autistic people were just extreme types of normal human ways of being. This would be consistent with the systematizer theory. However, some people classified as autistic seem to be so disabled, unable to talk, unable to live independently, that I wonder if their "disease" has different underlying causes than the higher functioning individuals. It is harder for me to see the more severely disabled folks as just being outliers in a normal distribution. This is a problem I have when trying to understand possible causes for all sorts of spectrum disorders.

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A Connecting Principle Linked To The Invisible

The end of last week found me investigating the large extra dimensions model of the universe for work. Then in my internet ramblings I stumbled as a Sally-come-lately into the cryptozoological phenomenon of rods. Next, I was paging through Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World, again for work. Finally, yesterday morning on the train I read H.P. Lovecraft’s “From Beyond.” Clearly, I am in the midst of a full-blown synchronicitous event, directing my attention to considerations of the reality of things we can’t see. Join me in ruminations on unobservables after the jump.

• The large extra dimensions model, or ADD model, is an attempt to understand the relative weakness of gravity compared to the other four fundamental forces. It posits extra dimensions, folded up very small, which are filled with gravity. We can’t see or feel these dimensions because they are so small, but the high-energy Large Hadron Collider may test the model when it starts up next year.
• Rods, also known as skyfish, are cryptozoological entities that can only be seen with video cameras. Enthusiasts suggest that rods move too fast to be seen without these tools. The pictures are real, believe it or not. But critics make an utterly convincing argument, suggesting the rods are motion-blurred insects captured mid-flight with long exposure times.
• The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark is Sagan’s defense of scientific rationality against all forms of superstition, religious and otherwise. He charts the fine line good scientists must trace between skepticism and acceptance of new ideas.

  We humans have a talent for deceiving ourselves. Skepticism must be a component of the explorer’s toolkit, or we will lose our way. There are wonders enough out there without our inventing any.

• Lovecraft’s short story “From Beyond” involves a mad-scientist-type who invents a machine that stimulates dormant senses in human beings, allowing people to see normally-invisible entities in the world. Quoth the mad scientist:

  You see them? You see them? You see the things that float and flop about you and through you every moment of your life? You see the creatures that form what men call the pure air and blue sky? Have I not succeeded in breaking down the barrier; have I not shown you worlds that no other living men have seen?

Interesting, no? But I’ll admit right away that I’m enough of a skeptic to doubt the reality of synchronicity. I would subscribe to a soft version of the idea, one in which we give synchronicitous events meaning, one in which our behavior patterns create a pattern in events in our lives. But a harder version of the theory, in which we tap into a dynamic that is bigger than ourselves and directs history, seems impossible to me.

Skepticism, as Sagan points out, is a necessary tool for people trying to understand the world. Too little, and people will end up thinking that blurry insects on video are a life form that is all around us but has never been detected in the thousands of years of recorded human history. Simple logical exercises fail these people in their desperate wish to believe (Where are the dead skyfish?).

Maybe they were sucked into extra dimensions?

Seriously, though, some very smart scientists do suggest the world is queerer than we had previously imagined, and may include invisible dimensions. I’m less comfortable saying these ideas are BS, but I’m still inclined to doubt. Sure, I accept other things no one has seen, like electrons, but those entities are based on innumerable experimental observations. Extra dimensions seem to pop up as predictions of equations nestled in often-untestable models. But maybe the LHC will test at least the large extra dimensions model. I just expect this model to fail.

So, considering this flood of skepticism and my doubt of deep synchronicity, I’m content to simply wonder why these events struck me now. Obviously, science deals with a lot of unobservable phenomena, so the fact that I work in a science-related field means I’m going to encounter a lot of this. As a committed materialist, I’m convinced my experience is just coincidence. But I think that, as is the case with Lovecraft, my materialism spawns a fascination with supernaturalism. Part of me wishes the world was a bit more magical than it seems to be, and yet another part of me delights in putting the smack down on magical thinking.

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New Book For Religious Ignoramuses

Jonathan Wells, a Moonie tool in the religious conservatives’ war on science, has written a new, ridiculous, and quite retarded book about evolution. Wells is a notorious creationist ideologue who used Moonie funding to attend graduate school in biology, earn a PhD, and then use those credentials to bash evolution. (Read that link above, my developmental biologist friends. Just be ready for a spike in blood pressure. And yes, the “Father” he refers to is Sun Myung Moon.)

Wells’s previous book, Icons of Evolution, is a well-refuted collection of misrepresentations and outright lies that is endlessly parroted in creationist/fundie/intelligent design arguments. Panda’s Thumb is organizing a smackdown of the new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. PZ Myers has suggested a google bombing campaign, so here’s Apsy’s volley in the war.

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Now The Hobbit's A Deformed Human Again

A story from The Sunday Times in Britain covers new research on the Hobbit, the hominin discovered a couple years ago in Indonesia that was orginally claimed to be a new species of Homo. The research, to be published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, claims the bones, previously categorized as a new species related to Homo erectus (called Homo floresiensis), are really a Homo sapiens that suffered some form of microcephallic disorder.

The PNAS research paper doesn't seem to be available yet, so there hasn't be too much online commentary. But I wonder: can anything short of a genetic analysis settle this question definitively? If there are morphological characteristics that are distinctly sapiens or erectus, why haven't they resolved this issue yet?

[UPDATE 8/21: News reports are starting to appear. Check out NYT.]
[UPDATE 8/23: The paper is finally available. Get the pdf here.]

After the break, read the PNAS announcement that followed the Times story.

Homo floresiensis Remains Appear to Be Homo sapiens

A skeleton uncovered in Indonesia in 2004 does not represent a separate hominin species but is a Homo sapiens individual who had developmental deformities, researchers report. In 2004, skeletal material was discovered in Liang Bua Cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. One nearly complete specimen’s odd shape and small skull led some researchers to believe that these remains were from a distinct hominin species. An early interpretation was that Homo erectus reached Flores 840,000 years ago and, living in isolation, evolved to a species distinct from Homo sapiens, termed Homo floresiensis. A joint Indonesian, Australian, and U.S. research team questioned this interpretation and showed that the remains are of a H. sapiens and not a distinct species. Geographically, Flores had at least two migrations of ancient elephants from nearby islands, making it highly unlikely that hominids arrived only once and evolved in isolation. Also, the island was not large enough to have supported isolated hunter-gatherers with a population adequate enough to maintain genetic diversity for long-term survival, the team says. The Liang Bua skeletons’ structures appear to fall within the range of H. sapiens variation. The only known skull simply had signs of a developmental abnormality, including microcephaly, according to the researchers.

Article: “Pygmoid Australomelanesian Homo sapiens skeletal remains from Liang Bua, Flores: Population affinities and pathological abnormalities” by T. Jacob, E. Indriati, R. P. Soejono, K. Hsü, D. W. Frayer, R. B. Eckhardt, A. J. Kuperavage, A. Thorne, and M. Henneberg

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America Is Full Of Religious Idiots

Positive Posting Week is ending a couple of days early. Here’s why: some just-released research from the journal Science about the acceptance of evolution in a number of countries. You may need to scroll down a bit to find our enlightened nation.

Witness the crumbling of Positive Posting after the break.

Here's a bit more detail on some of the countries involved, showing degrees of certainty. Allowing that some religious fundies consider evolution only "probably false" rather than "definitiely false" does little to change my mind: they are wrong either way.

Shit. Where do I start? I’m not going to get in to anything elaborate. I just don't have the energy. Read full coverage at Pharyngula or Panda's Thumb. At Pharyngula, PZ Myers points out some interesting discussion in the research about the politicization of science in the U.S.

You know, I'm sick of going over these sorts of things again and again. I'll just put up a quote from Richard Dawkins that gets a lot of religious people mad. Dawkins can say some things that seem designed simply to provoke religious people, but this quote is 100 percent true. If fundies get hurt feelings, that's their problem. They should stop being such ignorant fools.

It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).

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For Tappie, In Praise of Mysterious Beasts

On Monday, I saw TV news reports claiming that a manatee was swimming up the Hudson River. The New York Times also covered the story on Monday (probably where the TV news got their info), although a little research turned up smaller, local papers that were covering the story last week.

Manatees are wonderful creatures, not so much because they seem all blissed-out and gentle, but because I find them exotic and a bit mysterious. A big part of this is that manatees have been considered a possible cause of mermaid sightings among early colonial-period sailors.

Fortunately for grown-up monster nuts like me, our NY manatee, which is being called "Tappie" for the Tappan Zee Bridge that spans the river, is even a bit mysterious because no one has taken a picture of it yet. A follow-up “color” story in the Times certainly included a lot of hand-waving in its coverage as to what Tappie actually is, although I can’t tell if this was to inflate the mystery or to cover journalistic behind.

More on the wonderful world of monster-hunting after the jump.

Creatures like manatees still excite the 11-year-old in me precisely because they connect the familiar world of zoology with the more exciting world of cryptozoology (the study of creatures whose existence is uncertain). Please, if you have anything like that monster-loving kid in you, check out the super-excellent cryptozoology blog Cryptomundo.

Mermaids were never exciting monsters for me, but I did like the angle that we might have an explanation for what caused sightings: Mermaid sightings weren't total fantasy, they were a combination of human imagination and this exotic creature. Manatees are like lenticular clouds that way.

Yet I still wish all those monsters that fascinated me in my youth were real: aliens (of course), Bigfoot, the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, the Jersey Devil, the Dover Demon, Champ, Ogopogo. That’s just off the top of my head. The list could go on if I just refreshed the memory some with Google.

Yes, I also like vampires, ghosts, wolfmen, and the like, but even as a kid they seemed too supernatural to me. I think it was because they are all very people-like. I knew people and didn’t see any way they could become vampires or ghosts. I preferred monsters that hovered just at the edges of biological understanding. Maybe if we just explored the world a bit more we could find these beasts, I hoped.

So manatees still excite me because they are emblems of a time when the world was full of monsters, when the Americas seemed to hold beasts to terrify the European imagination. And they keep me in touch with that boy who just wanted life to be a little more exciting and mysterious than it seemed to be shaping up to be.

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But How Do You Feel? Part 2: The Kookiness of Qualitative Calculations

Think the 102ºF temperature in Queens on Wednesday was hot? Well, that may have been the actual temperature but my weatherman told me it really “felt like” it was 115ºF.

I hate TV weather forecasts. Like most people, I watch them almost every day so I know what to wear, but a few things about them enrage me all out of proportion. 1) Endless talk about “what the temperature should be today” when they mean average. 2) Hyping weather extremes; how predicted snowfalls, for example, become less and less as a storm nears. 3) Eyewitness weather. If we’re getting lots of rain or snow, I can see it from my window. You don’t need to hustle your reporters to seven local communities to show me the weather there.

And, the subject of this post, 4) Wind chills and heat indices. That is, “what it feels like,” according to the weather folks. These distortions of the temperature just drive me fucking crazy. I suppose they are just a special case of point 2, but they are so common and so aggravating, that I am giving them their own special category.

Smack the link for the smackdown. GRRRRR!

I understand the point of these hand-waving distortions of the outside temperature. Both are designed to capture some of the effects related to the dynamism of the weather system, particularly as it relates to moisture. When the cold wind blows, it strips away the insulating layer of air that surrounds us, bringing new, cold air into contact with our skin; the wind also speeds up evaporative cooling. When the heat that surrounds us is extra-steamy, the humidity slows down that evaporative cooling.

But the fact remains that they don’t change the objective temperature. The wind can whip up as high as it wants, but that air is the same temperature as it would be if it was still. Really, wind chill is an indicator of rate of heat loss; windy days just reduce the temperatures of things faster. But those things can never go below the ambient temp. Likewise, humidity doesn’t change the air temperature when it is hot, it just slows down how your body cools itself.

My biggest gripe is that these measures are so subjective. Let’s say it is 15ºF outside. Like anyone, I cringe when the teeth of a cold blast of air bite into my cheeks and they feel like they are in 0ºF weather. But maybe then the gust dies down, and my cheeks feel—still cold, mind you—a bit better. Then maybe the clouds part, and the sun warms my face, and I find it “feels like” it is warmer than the actual air temperature. Yet the only measure of subjectivity we gravitate to is the scary extreme one.

My second complaint is that these measures are unnecessary. When the temperature is either really hot or really cold, a reading of the air temperature contains enough information. Pulling down the low or pushing up the high doesn’t really matter. In the above example, 15ºF is still damn cold. No one should go into that weather without some attention to protecting themselves against it. Dramatizing the cold by making it seem colder helps no one.

Finally, I simply hate that drama, the self-importance of the weatherman who tells you that, although it is 95ºF, [now looking into the camera with concern in his eyes and authority in his tone] it really feels like it is 100ºF. So be careful out there, in that complicated world that has just been simplified into a hype-tastic extreme.

[/grumpy old man mode]

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But How Do You Feel? Part 1: the Limitations of Looking at the Local

Yesterday, it was reported that Pat Robertson has accepted global warming. Why he and so many Christian fundies were opposed to global warming research results in the first place is a bit of a head-scratcher, but it gets crazier. Apparently, he was not convinced by any of the science, you know, the data showing anomalous rising temperatures for years. No, it’s been hot for a couple weeks where Robertson lives so he now has the proof he needs to say that the globe is warming.

This got me thinking: where is the critical faculty? Just consider what we hear every day on the TV weather report. Hottest day records are falling. It has been hot as hell in NYC this week. Could it be global warming? Here’s a little test: when were the previous records set? If it is so hot where you live because of global warming, then all the records of that heat that bothers you so much should be within the last few years. Maybe you’d hear the weatherman say something like, “this tops last year’s record of XYZ degrees!”

But that’s not what we hear. It was 102ºF at LaGuardia airport (close to Comstockville) on Wednesday. Record heat indeed, smashing the previous record of 100ºF set in… 1955! If the heat wave convinces someone of global warming, why weren’t they complaining about a hotter planet in the fifties?

What the scientifically illiterate folks like Robertson don’t realize is that global warming is detectable as an average of the whole globe. That’s where scientists can find a signal. All the heat waves and cold snaps and rainy weeks you experience at a local level are just noise. The real, long-term differences are only apparent when looking at lots of local data points together.

And what scientists see when they look at averages is what should have been convincing people last year, and the year before, and the year before, regardless of how it felt outside. The hottest six years ever recorded by humans were in the last eight years, with last year as the single hottest. But why let that convince people like Robertson when it feels cozy enough near the 700 Club studios?

I hate to say it, because really advocates of science should be happy that another voice of irrationality on the GW topic has been quieted, but the totally nonscientific basis of Robertson’s embrace of a scientific fact gets my blood boiling. It’s not too different than: I’ll never believe in evolution because I’ve never seen an ape give birth to a human (actual fundie logic).

Stay tuned for Part 2. It’s hot outside and Comstock is venting. I got a real pet-peeve post about the heat coming up.
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