Fun with critters

June 13, 2009

Here we have a Ten-lined June beetle (Polyphylla s.) that my uncle found at work and thought I might like to have. What is fun about these critters is that they make a defensive hissing noise when touched. And that is beetle and not “bug” as I mistakenly say in the video.

Here’s a nice close up picture of a Polyphylla by Derrick Ditchburn on a site called “Whispers in Nature” (looks like they’ve got lots of nice critter pics):

Ten-lined June beetle (Polyphylla)

Ten-lined June beetle (Polyphylla)

Anyway, the poor little guy (actually I don’t know the sex of this individual), goes into the freezer to be dispatched. Later I will thaw it out, pin it up, and add it to my small insect collection.

Leave a Comment » | Biology, Personal, Zoology | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Troy Britain

Excuses, excuses…

June 8, 2009

Well, while working on the house/yard over the last couple weeks I managed to hurt my shoulder to the point where I have trouble even siting and typing at the computer or even concentrating on things (AKA Hell).  I finally broke down and went to the doctor (lost my med. insurance when my work hours got cut) and was told that I am developing some arthritis in my shoulder which I apparently exacerbated by over-working it.

The Doc prescribed some pills which after a week don’t seem to have done much. Of course he also suggested that I take some time of work, however that is not an option.

So, yeah, this is basically a whine-fest, poor me post.

3 Comments | Personal | Permalink
Posted by Troy Britain

Apologies

May 20, 2009

No, I’m not dead, nor have I abandon blogging. I’ve simply been busy as of late with work and misc. house chores, trying to prepare another one of our extra rooms for a border. Times are tough and we need the money, what can I say.

I do have a post in process on Ernst Haeckel and his embryo drawings, please be patient.

Thanks

3 Comments | Personal | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Troy Britain

Small World

April 25, 2009

P. Z. Myers, who lives in Minnesota,  posted a peice on his blog Pharyngula about a pro-animal testing/pro-science rally held at University California Los Angeles. In his post he included a link to a video of a local So. Cal. (where I live) TV news (KTLA) report on the rally.

But that isn’t the only thing that makes it a small world. What really does it is that at 1:06 into the video there is a shot of some of the Pro-Testers carrying a white banner that reads:

“UCLA Pro-Test

Animal Research

Saves Lives“.

I helped to make that banner, two of them actually, at the print shop where I work last week and wondered what they were going to do with them.

So P. Z. in Minnesota, writes a blog that I happen to read regularly and in one of his posts he points his readers (including me) to a video  from a Southern California TV channel that has a shot of a banner I made a week ago.

Small world.

Oh, and I agree with P. Z. and the Pro-Testers on the issue of animal testing.

Leave a Comment » | Biology, Personal, Science, Science in the media | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Troy Britain

A (slightly embarassing) Darwin day at USC

April 20, 2009

This past Wednesday (4-15-09) I attended an interesting set of ‘Darwin Year’ lectures at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (Darwin Today: Evolution and Scientific Thought). The lectures were moderated by USC anthropologist Craig Stanford and the speakers included: Donald Johanson (paleoanthropologist and discoverer of the famous Lucy fossil), USC paleobiologist/ecologist David Bottjer, USC microbiologist Steve Finkel and last but certainly not least was my friend Eugenie Scott, director of The National Center for Science Education.

All the talks were interesting but the most entertaining was probably Dr. Finkel’s which focused on bacteria. In addition to all the fascinating stuff on evolution in prokaryotes his talk contained lots of amusing gross-out trivia about such things as how there are 300,000,000 bacteria per gram of fecal material living in the average persons colon (that’s about the same as the number of people living in the U.S.).

The talks wrapped up with an interesting round-table discussion of sorts between the speakers and the audiences (which contained several other USC faculty members), mostly revolving around the subject of Genie’s talk, which was of course on K-12 science education and the effects of antievolutionists on it.

I’ll be kicking myself for months because of Genie though (it’s not her fault though). Within the first minute of her talk she put up a slide of the NCSE’s logo and asked if anyone recognized the image. When no one spoke up she quickly said “tell’em Troy”.

Deer in the headlights.

I wasn’t expecting to be put on the spot, at least not that soon, I mean Genie has asked me questions during her talks before, which is normally fine, but this time my brain locked up. Fortunately she quickly let me off the hook and told everyone that it was based on a drawing from one of Darwin’s notebooks.

NCSE's logo

Of course this sort of thing happens to all of us, especially when we are surprised and under pressure, but in this case I have little excuse. You see just a few months ago I went to a special Darwin exhibit at the Huntington Library (San Marino, CA) and contained in that exhibit was the very notebook of Darwin’s in which appears the drawing which the NCSE’s logo is based upon. I even remember saying to myself, “oh look, there is the drawing the NCSE is using for their logo.”

The original from Darwin's notebook.

Flash forward to last Wednesday, and it’s “ah, uhm, ah, I don’t remember exactly where that’s from…”. Arrrrgh!

Ah well, as a consolation prize I was able to get a photograph of myself with Don Johanson to add to my collection.

Donald Johanson and yours truly.

Donald Johanson and yours truly.

[slapping self in head, "Darwin's notebook, Darwin's notebook..."]

1 Comment | Education, Evolution, History of Science, Personal, Science | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Troy Britain

Iowa Supreme Court Upholds Gay Marriage

April 7, 2009

This is via my friend Ed Brayton over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars:

The Iowa Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Friday that the state must allow same-sex couples to get married. See full ruling here. Long excerpt from the ruling below the fold:

We are firmly convinced the exclusion of gay and lesbian people from the institution of civil marriage does not substantially further any important governmental objective. The legislature has excluded a historically disfavored class of persons from a supremely important civil institution without a constitutionally sufficient justification. There is no material fact, genuinely in dispute, that can affect this determination.

We have a constitutional duty to ensure equal protection of the law. Faithfulness to that duty requires us to hold Iowa’s marriage statute, Iowa Code section 595.2, violates the Iowa Constitution. To decide otherwise would be an abdication of our constitutional duty. If gay and lesbian people must submit to different treatment without an exceedingly persuasive justification, they are deprived of the benefits of the principle of equal protection upon which the rule of law is founded. Iowa Code section 595.2 denies gay and lesbian people the equal protection of the law promised by the Iowa Constitution.

Bravo.

Bravo indeed.

And queue the shrill cries of “unelected judges” followed shortly by vague, unsubstantiated claims that Iowa families are somehow in danger because of this ruling in 3, 2, 1…

Leave a Comment » | Civil rights, Law, Politics | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Troy Britain

A good primer on skepticism and “open mindedness”

April 4, 2009

Learn it, know it, live it!

[Via Pharyngula]

Leave a Comment » | Antievolution, Education, Pseudoscience, Religion, Science, Skeptical inquiry | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Troy Britain

“If Atheists Ruled the World”

March 30, 2009

And now, a little bittersweet humor.

All the comments in this video are said to be taken verbatim from Christian fundamentalist online discussion boards. I tend to believe that this is true.  Most of it is actually about creationist attacks on evolution.

Leave a Comment » | Antievolution, Creationism, Humor, Religion | Permalink
Posted by Troy Britain

Ray Comfort’s appalling ignorance

March 6, 2009

Both P.Z. Myers and Larry Moran have commented on this but I want to get my own licks in. Ray Comfort (AKA Banana-Man) has squatted down and grunted out a fresh piece of “literature” attacking atheists (whatever) in which he also goes after evolution (which he mistakenly considers to be synonymous with atheism). Apparently his tripe isn’t selling as well as he thinks it should and so he gone on a whine-fest about how this is due to some sort of atheist conspiracy in a posting over at WorldNutDaily.

The article quotes him on one of his reasons for believing that evolution is an “unscientific fairytale”:

“I simply expose atheistic evolution for the unscientific fairy tale that it is, and I do it with common logic. I ask questions about where the female came from for each species. Every male dog, cat, horse , elephant, giraffe, fish and bird had to have coincidentally evolved with a female alongside it (over billions of years) with fully evolved compatible reproductive parts and a desire to mate, otherwise the species couldn’t keep going. Evolution has no explanation for the female for every species in creation,” he said.

Ye gods! Folks, this is a discussion stopper. It is beyond the pale. It is stupidity squared.  If you are someone who thinks that evolutionary theory requires that the origin of new species involves the separate, independent, origination of each sex of said new species, that this must happen each and every time a new species evolves, and further that this is to happen by coincidence, then you are far, far, too ignorant of the subject to even think about criticizing it.

Let me try and reformulate this in theological terms for anyone out there that might harbor some misguided sympathy for Mr. Comfort’s views.

Imagine if someone came into your church (to put it specifically in Christian terms) and said, with all seriousness, that they thought Christianity was a fairytale: “Because I can’t believe in this Jesus guy with his blue skin and eight arms. Nor can I accept his teaching that the only way to get to heaven was to die bravely in glorious combat.”

How seriously would you take such a persons critiques of the Christian faith?

Well that’s exactly how Comfort comes across to anyone with even a basic understanding of evolutionary theory when he utters nonsense like this. He either has absolutely no clue as to what he’s talking about, or he is deliberately misrepresenting things (lying) to score rhetorical points.

Either way he has disqualified himself from participation in any serious discussion of the subject (not that anyone was taking him seriously to begin with).

9 Comments | Antievolution, Creationism, Defending evolution, Evolution, Religion | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Troy Britain

Wilkins on Darwin and race

March 5, 2009

John Wilkins, philosopher from down under, has written a nice blog post on Darwin and race, “Myth 7: Darwin thought that Australian aborigines were closer to apes than to Europeans“:

Actually, this one is better called “Darwin was a racist”, but as the text concerned is from the same source as those claims, I thought it might be easier to evaluate a single claim and generalise from that.

Our gospel for today is chapters V and VI of The Descent of Man, published in 1871.

If you read Darwin sloppily, or to find evidence that he really was a Very Bad Man for rhetorical – usually religious – purposes, you soon come across this statement. In fact, you can find paraphrases of it in literally hundreds of creationist documents and sites. Here is the offending passage, from towards the end of chapter VI of the Descent:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla. [p201]

Many folk read this to be making the following claims:

1. It is right that civilised races should exterminate the savage races

2. It is right that the great apes (which Darwin calls “anthropomorphous” or “humanlike”) will be made extinct.

3. When this happens the gap between humans and apes will be wider because the intermediates, apes and negroes or Australian aborigines, will be gone.

Hence: Aborigines and negroes are more apelike than Caucasians.

Let’s look at a bit of context here. I do not propose to defend Darwin from his biases, but let’s be quite clear on what they are first (and note, if Darwin turned out to be a baby eating white supremacist, it no more makes evolution false than the fact that most baby eating white supremacists are Christians discredits Christianity).

Check out the rest over on Evolving Thoughts.

Leave a Comment » | History of Science, Science, Systematics, history | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Troy Britain

« Previous Entries