Waffle

A while ago, Adam suggested to me that I should have done Professor R?sdondr's testimoney in the style of Nineteenth-Century biologist Ernst Haeckel. At that time, I'd already finished the work on that section but in case I ever need a reference for that style again, here's a collection of Haeckel's drawings, mostly of marine invertebrates. Found on the ever-interesting Boing Boing.

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Respectful of Otters discusses a documentary shown recently by the BBC in which it was claimed that "that HIV+ children in foster care were used in horrific drug-testing experiments without the consent of their parents." The story as relayed to her set off all her bullshit detectors:

I read the BBC article a couple of days ago, and it didn't sound right to me. Too much is missing - including anything that could be used to check the veracity of the story, such as the names of the experimental drug compounds or the names of scientists running the trials. Another detail that didn't ring true: the drugs were "supplied by major drug manufacturers including Glaxo SmithKline." Glaxo SmithKline is a major manufacturer of HIV drugs - I have several of their pens - but why the lack of specificity?

The language used in the BBC piece also seemed familiar. A vocal contingent of people oppose HIV medications, and they favor certain turns of phrase. "Human guinea pigs." "Experimental." "Toxic." They focus on side effects and subjective sensations to the exclusion of clinical or lab data. It's hard to pin down exactly, but when you've read enough of their writings you begin to recognize the tone. I heard that tone in the BBC article.

The story also broke my plausibility meter. Severely. I do research with human subjects for a living, and I have an excellent sense of the regulatory tangles and layers of oversight surrounding any research with human beings. For "protected classes" of research subjects, including children and institutionalized people, the rules are even more stringent. What happens when research protections are violated? Banner headlines and regulatory Armageddon....

So I did some poking around, and instantly hit pay dirt. The documentary filmmakers state that:

We asked Dr David Rasnick, visiting scholar at the University of Berkeley, for his opinion on some of the experiments.

He said: "We're talking about serious, serious side-effects. These children are going to be absolutely miserable. They're going to have cramps, diarrhoea and their joints are going to swell up. They're going to roll around the ground and you can't touch them."

He went on to describe some of the drugs - supplied by major drug manufacturers including Glaxo SmithKline - as "lethal".

Dr. David Rasnick is an AIDS denialist. He doesn't believe that HIV causes AIDS. He doesn't believe that AIDS is contagious or sexually transmitted. He doesn't believe in protease inhibitors, the class of drugs which, since 1997, have caused a dramatic decline in AIDS diagnoses and deaths in the developed world. He thinks HIV drugs are the problem, not the solution.

Read the rest if you don't like being bamboozled.

Via Peteychap:
Someone at Swarthmore University has created a batch of counter-disclaimer stickers to put in science textbooks.

This book discusses heliocentrism, that the earth orbits around a centrally located sun. Because astronomers still disagree over the details of the heliocentric model, this material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.

They forgot to do stickers for gravity, Mendelian genetics and the germ theory of disease, though.

When I'm not webcomicking or fuzzballing, I study cuttlefish for my Honours project.

This is what my cuttlefish look like. Cuttlefish are relatives of squid and octopus (they're cephalopod molluscs).

This species, Sepia plangon, is about 10cm long and lives around Sydney, but no work has been done on it before now.

What I'm doing at the moment is making an inventory of all the behaviours they display. This includes some fantastic colour/shape and posture changes: they can go from completely black with knobbles all over them and kinked-up arms to nearly white, with black spots like eyes and a black rim around the margin, they can have a kind of black latticework pattern, or show up their pattern of white stripes against a dark background as in the photo.

Then I'll do some more serious experimenting on their reaction to stimuli from prey. Except there's a bit of a hiccup with that right now owing to them being more inclined to run away from the crabs than attack them...

I think they like to be in pairs, otherwise they get lonely and scared and eventually die.

Poor things. But they're very cute. You can watch a little video I made of them catching a fish here.

Not exactly breaking news at this moment, but something I'd very much like to read more about - in print, say, a full National Geographic special - so I'll blog it for future reference:

Dwarf Human Ancestor Lived on Pacific Island. The fella shown at left, as imagined by Peter Schouten is one of them, a Homo florensiensis. They were only about 1 meter tall with a grapefruit-sized but apparently quite efficient brain. According to this Guardian article, they may have existed even later than the already staggeringly recent 18,000 years ago that the fossils have been dated at. That sounds more than a bit fanciful to me, but you never know.

Spike:

Yes, it can be observed in the laboratory. Shut up.

Yes, there is fossil evidence. Shut up.

No, no one claims we evolved from present-day apes. Shut up.

And yes, it's just a theory. And so is that whole "the Earth orbits the Sun" thing. Time out to look up the scientific definition of the word "theory," okay? Go on. I'll wait here.

Got it? All done?

Good. Shut up.

The article didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, but I don't think it was written for me. It was written for the 44 percent of Americans who, through force of will, misinformation, or simple ignorance, don't actually understand evolution, or refuse to understand it. It's for the special class. This issue's for that kid who shit in the study hall garbage can. It's for the Young Earth Creationists among us going through their homeschooled kid's textbooks with black Sharpies, crossing out the blasphemy. This one's for the snake-handlers picketing the Harvey Milk school in New York, and the hysterical Baptists rolling around on the cement in front of courthouses while Ten Commandments monuments are jackhammered out of the lobby floor.

What's she referring to?

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Note when identifying mushrooms: if the guide book asks: "is the mushroom easy to push in?" the next sentence may very well be: "this mushroom is extremely toxic."

Pictures taken by me. Book: Readers Digest veldgids voor de natuurliefhebber paddestoelen van west- en midden-europa.

Evolutionblog has a series of entries forming a single article about the bruhaha over Robert Wright's interview of Daniel Dennett. I'm sorry I can't give a single permalink for the whole article, but here's the conclusion:

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A few days ago, Andrew Sullivan gleefully exclaimed:

AN ATHEIST RECANTS: Philosopher Daniel Dennett, author of the influential 1995 book, "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," now says he sees a higher purpose in the universe. Bob Wright breaks the news.

Well, not quite. Timothy Sandefur looks at the evidence for Dennet's "recantation". Read the whole post, but here's his conclusion:

In philosophy as in all other scholarly pursuits, conversation is the least likely to lead to an important statement on a subject. Conversation is not peer reviewed, it’s not very carefully weighed before it’s uttered; people frequently misspeak, or concede points they don’t very clearly understand. Yet Wright is willing to declare on the basis of this statement alone, despite the nine or ten books that Dennett has published, that Dennett believes that evolution has a direction that upholds the concept of a conscious Designer.

This sort of “gotcha” argument is, to say the least, childish. When I was a kid, I would sometimes get in arguments on the playground, and perhaps I would misspeak—I would say the ball belonged to Rob instead of Tom—whereupon Rob’s friends would snatch my error as if it were some sort of subconscious confession of the truth, rather than a simple misstatement or error. What Wright has done here is similar. Hammering Dennett with terms like “design” and so forth, he has extracted from Dennett the most lukewarm of responses (“Yeah, I guess”) and takes the lukewarmness as evidence that Dennett is either scared of being caught or is embarrassed at how wrong his career has been all this time. At the least, Wright’s device here is the sort of exaggeration which makes for children’s playground conversation, not for science.

It's not exactly the first time creationists/ID'ers (for reasons why I can't be arsed to make any fine distinctions between the two, I refer to The Panda's Thumb and Dispatches from the Culture Wars in toto — Short version: closer examination of their statements when they're among themselves reveal their agendas to be identical).

They tried to pull a trick like this with Richard Dawkins way back when. Then, it was a hesitation from Dawkins that was taken as proof that he was stumped by whatever damn fool question they'd asked him, and therefore, that Arrogant Science Had No Answers, and therefore, that the answers the Creationists had must have been correct. In reality, Dawkins paused because it was at that time that he realised his questioners were not the unbiased reporters he was led to believe they were.

Update: Man, the blogosphere is fast. Even as I type the above, I find that Ed Brayton, via Sullivan again (much to the guy's credit), has Dennett's response. Expect much hairsplitting debate to follow, but the bottom line is that Dennett's philosophical positions are as they were in his 10 or so books, not as they were in one spoken response.
Update #2: Doing Things With Words has more.

Scott Martens at A Fistful of Euros gives us the lowdown on the controversy in Germany over spelling reforms:

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