I haz been violated!

January 25, 2011 • 9:19 am

Heading back to Chicago, I’ve just passed through security at Logan Airport in Boston.  And although I’m conscious of the need to intercept terrorists, what I just experienced was RIDICULOUS.

I’ve travelled a lot, and so am prepared: I take out my laptop and my toiletries (in the requisite one-liter plastic bag), take off my metal belt buckle (which unsnaps from my belt), remove my shoes and any change in my pocket, and put it all in the plastic containers.  That used to be good enough.

Not this time.  I also had to undergo this:

1.  They sent me through the NEW FULL BODY SCAN SEE-YOU-NAKED X-RAY MACHINE. You have to face the wall of the machine, put your feet in the imprints on the floor, and raise your hands.  And you have to stand there for about 25 seconds while they shoot a sublethal dose of X-rays though you.

2.  They then saw that I had a (buckle-less) belt on. They made me remove the strip of leather around my waist and send it through the conveyer belt.

3.  Then they spotted my wallet.  Out with that, too, and through the conveyer belt. I have never before had to take out my wallet when passing through security.

4.  After I had passed through the See-You-Naked machine, the uniformed TSA agent informed me, “Sir, I’m going to have to pat you down on the left forearm and buttocks.”  Which they proceeded to do.  Now I can MAYBE understand the left forearm, where my watch resides, but the buttocks?  There’s nothing there, since I had already removed my wallet and been completely x-rayed. And, sure enough, I got goosed by the agent.  I didn’t like it at all, and felt like saying something to him.  I restrained myself only because I knew I’d get into trouble if I mouthed off.

5.  Was that enough? Nope.  They then swabbed my hands for explosives, and put the swabs through the sniffer machine.

I passed.

Here is what was ludicrous about this episode.

  • making me remove my belt, a leather strip with only a small metal snap
  • making me remove my wallet
  • patting down my tuchus, for chrissake—when the X-ray machine presumably had already told them that there was nothing there
  • taking off my shoes, which were New Balance sneakers with no metal.  Yes, I know the shoebomber used his shoes, but this shoe-removal (which they don’t do in much of Europe) is simply post facto Security Theater.
  • and I do object to the hand swab, since there’s nothing I can detect that would make them think I was a terrorist (granted, I don’t know all the subtle cues the TSA uses to spot potential terrorists).

There’s nothing we can do about this, except perhaps ask for a humiliating full-body pat down in lieu of the Naked Body Scan. We are powerless before the impresarios of the Security Theater.

But thank goodness for the awesome Southwest Airlines, which provides comfy leather chairs with plugs—and for Logan Airport, which has free wi-fi. (It’s hidden on their site, but all you need to do is watch a short commercial).  And I have a bagel with cream cheese.  Life is tolerable again.

From Bruce Schneier’s TSA logo contest

Chris Mooney on birthers

January 24, 2011 • 10:31 am

UPDATE:  The comments at the Intersection—normally only one or two per post—have swelled by an order of magnitude on the “birther post”.   Many commenters point out, as I did below, that Mooney advocates firm and uniform rejection of birther claims but a kinder, gentler treatment of equally specious claims about religion.

When pressed in these comments, Mooney simply denies that unsupported birther claims have anything to do with unsupported Jebus claims, and takes the opportunity to once again flog Unscientific America. He also pulls a Fermat, saying, “I have a marvelous answer, but the margins of my computer screen are too small to contain it.”:

I want to thank everyone for the comments, but I must say, I’m a bit dazed by this thread…it just never occurred to me that we’d have a birther/totality of religion analogy. To address the questions being raised under this heading would be tantamount to redebating all the issues that were debated after Unscientific America came out in 2009…e.g., mega time consuming, and probably not productive, I’m afraid.

Sorry, but evidence is evidence, and what’s good for the birthers is good for the faithful.

I would not have thought this possible in the fractious blogosphere, but I’m pretty sure that the decline in readership at The Intersection mirrors its readers’ recognition that there’s little intellectual integrity—but a lot of self promotion—to be found at the site.

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At the Intersection, Mooney discusses—and agrees with—House Majority leader Eric Cantor’s stand that Obama’s citizenship is a stupid issue that should be dropped. Mooney says:

I’m growing increasingly convinced that outside of true mental illness, people believing weird things–or even being in denial about certain facts–is not craziness or insanity. Rather, it’s very normal, even if often lamentable. It’s human nature to convince yourself of things that humor your prior beliefs. In this case, the prior belief is a certain strain of Obama hatred, but it could be pretty much anything.

And that’s why Cantor’s stand is important–because as Brendan Nyhan explained on Point of Inquiry, the more we see a uniform rejection of birther claims across the punditariat and political world, and especially on the Republican side, the more they will become simply untenable. At that point, many birthers will still cling to their beliefs–but their wrongheaded view, much like the view that cigarettes don’t cause lung cancer, will no longer trouble serious discourse.

I agree!  But isn’t there another set of beliefs that is just as untenable, but even more harmful, than the claim that Obama is an alien? And shouldn’t we start uniformly rejecting those claims, too, knowing that that strategy will eventually purge them from serious discourse.

I refer to religion, of course, which Mooney thinks should not be rejected, but respectfully engaged.

I’d love to see Mooney also call religious belief “untenable” and “wrongheaded,” but I’m not holding my breath.

Are Western biologists imperialistic?

January 24, 2011 • 9:57 am

A few days ago I posted a photo of an über-cute monkey, a juvenile snub-nosed golden monkey (Rhinopithecus roxellana). The species lives in the mountains of central China and is endangered because of habitat loss.

Fig. 1.  A male golden snub-nosed monkey (from NYT article, photo by George Wong/European Pressphoto Agency).

Curiously, in today’s New York Times’s Opinionator column, Richard Conniff details a tiny controversy about this very beast.  The question is who gets credit for “discovering” the species.  Conniff says:

Not long ago, for instance, I wrote that a 19th-century French missionary and naturalist in China, Pére Armand David, had “discovered” the snub-nosed golden monkey. A reader sent me this somewhat testy comment: “The answer to the question ‘who discovered it’ is actually the Chinese.” Père David had merely “observed it and introduced it (and many other animals) to the West and into the Western zoological system.”

There has increasingly been talk, in these postmodern times, about who gets credit for “discovering” stuff.  And there is a point: it now rankles a bit to hear that Columbus “discovered” America when, after all, people had been living there for over ten thousand years.  How far does this apply to “discovering” species?

Conniff continues:

David himself may never actually have seen these mountain-dwelling monkeys in the wild. Instead, his Chinese hunters brought him six specimens in the course of a long and productive expedition into western Sichuan province. David shipped the specimens back to Paris, along with more than 100 other mammal species. There, in an act of blithe cultural hodgepodgery, a French naturalist described the golden monkey in a scientific journal and gave it the species name roxellana to commemorate the Ukrainian wife of an Ottoman Turkish sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, because monkey and wife both had distinctive up-turned noses. You can see how this might leave people in China feeling a little left out.

Indeed. Some countries, such as Brazil, wary of “biological imperialism,” have passed strict regulations about what kind of material can be taken out of the country by foreign biologists.  The species of a country are not simply a resource to be plundered by—or used to advance the careers of—biologists from other places.  And we’re becoming more sensitive to this: scientists from more biologically-savvy nations are involving locals (who, after all, often help them find the species, and know an enormous amount of natural history) in the scientific descriptions of new discoveries. You will often see strange one-word names, for example, on papers describing new species from New Guinea or Indonesia: those are the locals who helped find the species or made other contributions to its discovery. I rarely saw that when I was in graduate school thirty years ago.

Do read Conniff’s column, for he describes a nearly forgotten chapter in the history of zoology:  how skilled but amateur naturalists, such as the missionary Pére David, made significant contributions to natural history. You may have heard of another species he discovered, the rare and eponymous Pére David’s deer, Elaphurus davidianus:

(Pére David’s deer is another interesting story. It has been extinct in the wild for a thousand years due to overhunting, and was discovered by Pére David in one place: The Emperor’s hunting park near Beijing.  It was exported to Europe, where it was bred in zoos, and subsequently disappeared completely from China. It was reintroduced to China in the 1960s.)

Conniff concludes that we shouldn’t stigmatize early Western naturalists as imperialistic, because their work

. .  continues to save lives and protect resources today. The best evidence of its value is that every country from China to Gabon to Colombia now employs this scientific system of discovery and classification as a better way to understand not just our world, but theirs.

Well, I’m not sure whether the use of Linnaean taxonomy is the greatest contribution of these naturalists.  After all, research has shown that indigenous peoples generally recognize the same species (although, of course, giving them different names) as do Western taxonomists.  In Speciation, Allen Orr and I describe Ernst Mayr’s observation (made in the 1920s) that the tribesmen of the Arfak Mountains of New Guinea had 136 vernacular names for the 137 Linnaean species of birds they encountered, so even before Western taxonomists “invaded” the country, the distinct forms of bird life had already been correctly distinguished.  The names are just a way of formalizing new species and placing them in relationship to others already described.

It’s not so much the nomenclature that Western biologists contributed to the countries they explored, then, but the calling of the world’s scientific attention to new species (their description does involve nomenclature, of course).  This immerses them into mainstream biological research—and, when species are endangered like Pére David’s deer, helps bring them to the attention of people who can save them.

Tuataras and the species problem

January 23, 2011 • 11:14 am

by Greg Mayer

Tuataras are very interesting animals: endemic to New Zealand, and the sole survivors of an ancient and once more widespread order of reptiles, the Sphenodontida, whose closest relatives are the squamates (lizards+snakes). I noted some of their distinctive traits in an earlier post. When a friend went to New Zealand for a visit during the holidays, I asked him to get a picture of a tuatara if one came his way, and he obliged.

Tuatara at a North Island, NZ, zoo.

Tuataras are also of interest with regard to the ” species problem”, which Jerry recently addressed with respect to how many species of elephants there are (with follow-ups here and here). Ernst Mayr defined species in 1942 as

Species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations, which are reproductively isolated from other such group.

This definition, known as the biological species concept, is the one Jerry argued in favor of in his posts (and more extensively in Speciation, his book with Allan Orr). Through most of the 20th century, a single geographically variable species of tuatara, Sphenodon punctatus, was recognized. In 1990, on the basis of morphological and, primarily, allozyme differences, Charles Daugherty and colleagues argued that a second species, S. guntheri, occurring on islands in eastern Cook Strait (see map), should be recognized. (Allozymes are proteins which are different alleles at the same genetic locus, and which are usually distinguished by protein electrophoresis.)

Distribution of tuataras, from Wikipedia. Circles, Sphenodon punctatus; squares, Sphenodon guntheri.

At the time, this bothered me, as I saw it as an application of the old morphological species concept, extended to genetic data: if you can tell them apart, they are different species. This is also what Jerry argued against in the case of elephants: an arbitrary amount of morphological or genetic difference, or inferred time of separation based on the amount of genetic difference, is not a sound basis for a species concept.

Recently (2010), however , further studies of tuataras have been made, including study of their DNA, and the authors of this work conclude that, as had been held earlier, a single geographically varying extant species of tuatara should be recognized (the status of the extinct tuataras from the New Zealand mainland is still up in the air). So we’re back to S. punctatus as the sole surviving species in the Sphenodontida.

This turnaround in tuatara taxonomy is also a nice example of something Jerry considered in a previous post: scientists changing their mind in the light of new evidence, and not being shy about saying so (something which, of course, should not be rare). Two of the authors of the 1990 resurrection of S. guntheri, Charles Daugherty and Jennifer Hay, are also authors of its 2010 sinking.

If you would like to sample more things tuatara, Hillary Miller, a post-doc at the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology & Evolution in New Zealand, has been running, unbeknownst to me at the time of my initial post, an interesting series of posts on tuataras at her blog, The Chicken or the Egg.  (Allan Wilson a New Zealander who was a graduate student and later professor at Berkeley, was a pioneer in the application of biochemistry to evolutionary questions.) See also Victoria University of Wellington’s Tuatara Biology page.

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Daugherty, C.H.,  A. Cree, J.M. Hay & M.B. Thompson. 1990. Neglected taxonomy and continuing extinctions of tuatara (Sphenodon). Nature 347:177-179. (abstract)

Hay, J.M., S. D. Sarre, D.M. Lambert, F.W. Allendorf & C.H. Daugherty. 2010. Genetic diversity and taxonomy: a reassessment of species designation in tuatara (Sphenodon: Reptilia). Conservation Genetics 11:1063-1081. (abstract)

Accurancy

January 22, 2011 • 12:39 pm

by Greg Mayer

On a recent visit to Arkansas, I came across the following sign in a fast food restaurant.

I’m not sure what a “Mystery Shop” is, or what “Key Drivers” are, but  I would refudiate any offer to have their sign maker work for me.

More Templeton-funded nonsense

January 22, 2011 • 8:13 am

Update: Eric MacDonald deals with Part 2 of Wilkinson’s essay at Choice in Dying.

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I really don’t understand why BioLogos spends so much time attacking me and my new partner in crime, Eric MacDonald.  We’re hardly big-draw bloggers like P.Z. (though I bow before Eric’s superior knowledge of theology and philosophy), and our audience is largely the choir.  Or at least so I think.  But they continue, and Loren Wilkinson has now put up the second section of his critique, “One world: science and Christianity in respectful dialogue. Part II: A response to Denis Alexander, Jerry Coyne, and Eric MacDonald.”

Wilkinson’s point is strange: there are not two nonoverlapping magisteria, as Steve Gould and many accommodationists have maintained, but just a single magisterium—one way of knowing—that encompasses both science and religion. I’ll call it Science, Truth, and Faith United (STFU).

Does this mark a sea change in accommodationism, in which their long-beloved NOMA philosophy—the idea that science and faith deal with completely different issues using different “tools”—is rejected in favor of a new philosophy of COMA (“Completely Overlapping Magisteria”)? So it seems:

Both science and theology are interpretations of texts, and neither can confidently be elevated as “eternal infallible truths.” The “texts” themselves have a more exalted status.

And this:

This is one world in which we live: an elusive, tantalizing, terrifying and beautiful world of facts, always humanly, humbly grasped. I honor Denis Alexander’s “white paper” working at bringing some parts of that world together (though I disagree with his main conclusion), as I honor Jerry Coyne and Eric MacDonald in their criticism of it. But I beg them (and all of us) to move away from the language of scorn and derision and at least grant the possibility that the worlds of science and the worlds of religion are ultimately one world, not two.

I’m sorry, but I don’t see a good reason to engage in “respectful dialogue” with Christianity, any more than I can engage in respectful dialogue with astrology or homeopathy.  After all, there is empirical evidence supporting the claims of science; there is none for the major claims of Christianity.  Why can’t BioLogos understand this difference?

I don’t want to waste more time discussing Wilkinson’s screed.  The only good thing about it is that Templeton is wasting its dough paying someone to go after us.  But it is amusing to see how many fallacies you can spot in bits like the following:

MacDonald sums up the [anti-accomodationist] attitude by saying that when Alexander tries to speak of Biblical truths as though they were in some way parallel to scientific truths he is not really saying anything at all but “merely making marks on paper.”

Such language reflects and reinforces the old “warfare” image of the relationship between Christianity and science. And perhaps that image would be appropriate if in fact science did deal only with the world of uninterpreted facts, and Christianity only with leaps of faith, dogmatic pronouncements, and endlessly flexible interpretations. Then the scientist and the Christian would live in separate worlds indeed, and there would be no possibility of “integration”. However, Coyne and MacDonald (along with Christians equally dismissive of science) have to deal with two awkward and intertwined facts (“a data set”). On the one hand, a very great many Christians (like Alexander himself) are good scientists. On the other hand, the statements of all scientists (including those, like Coyne, who make their public statements within the faith position of a-theism), stand, without acknowledging it, on a great mountain of belief, authority, and passion, the very things which they decry in religion.

In claiming that, in the end, science is just another form of religion, BioLogos is coming perilously close to the position of traditional creationists.  But Wilkinson and his sponsors should think carefully before adopting COMA as their official position, because I’m pretty sure that scientists—even Christian ones—aren’t going to buy it.

Caturday felid: Bafftime!

January 22, 2011 • 4:58 am

Dave Webster has figured out the trick to washing your kitteh without getting yourself shredded to hamburger and your bathroom inundated with water. It starts with getting the beast stoned. . .

I used to do this by putting on my bathing suit and getting into the tub with my cat. He could stand on my body while I was soaping him, reducing the cat’s helpless feeling (but giving me extensive lacerations on my thighs!).

The sad thing about bathing a dirty cat, or taking it to the vet, is that it doesn’t ever realize that you’re trying to help it. . .