atheist news feeds

"Filthy Dreamers" Film Fundraiser

The Panda's Thumb - December 3, 2013 - 1:32pm
The Honors program at the University of Central Florida has a documentary film class whose previous projects have been well-received. Now, they are crowdsourcing funding for their latest project, “Filthy Dreamers”. This one is about antievolution efforts in Florida following the 1925 Scopes trial. In the late 1920’s a controversy sparked about the teaching of evolution to women students at Florida State Women’s College. Nearly 100 years later, public figures and activists are still trying... Wesley R. Elsberry http://www.antievolution.org

Morton Grove Park District returns donation to atheist blogger - Morton Grove Champion

"Atheist" in google news - December 3, 2013 - 12:17pm

Morton Grove Park District returns donation to atheist blogger
Morton Grove Champion
The Morton Grove Park District returned a $3,000 donation from an atheist blogger this week who raised the money to replace $2,600 in lost funding from the local branch of the American Legion, which revoked its donations because a park board member ...
Morton Grove Park District Returns Atheist's CheckPatch.com
Pledge of Allegiance fight costs Chicago parks money, embroils American ...The Huntsville Times - al.com (blog)

all 9 news articles »
Categories: Atheist News

How (and Why) I Went From Google Glass Atheist to 'Explorer' - CIO (blog)

"Atheist" in google news - December 3, 2013 - 10:21am

CIO (blog)

How (and Why) I Went From Google Glass Atheist to 'Explorer'
CIO (blog)
How (and Why) I Went From Google Glass Atheist to 'Explorer'. In his first two days as a Glass Explorer, CIO.com blogger James A. Martin visited Google's San Francisco Glass showroom, had an unfortunate incident with a sunglasses clip and learned ...

and more »
Categories: Atheist News

Prezzy!

Pharyngula - December 3, 2013 - 10:12am

It’s not even Christmas yet, and Mary and I got a present in the mail.

It turns out it has magical properties, too. All morning, this cat we’re fostering (want her?) has been pestering me, clambering about and digging her claws into me and nagging me to feed her, and I sat down next to the pillow, and she fled. I think she had presentiments of her fate if she persisted.

Thanks, Caine!

Categories: Our friends

Media bias!

Pharyngula - December 3, 2013 - 9:36am

OK, so that Daily Mail piece that talked about my refutation of the MFAP hypothesis — the idea that humans are ape-pig hybrids — has been getting a fair amount of attention. The article actually did quote me tearing into the idea fairly thoroughly, although it did also give far too much attention to a crackpot, but here’s the thing: the media doesn’t care that much what I said, it’s all the kook nonsense driving the reporting.

For example, Jennifer Raff heard it on Alex Jones’ radio show. Jones is a wacky, hateful, loud-mouthed conspiracy theorist, and what is he talking about? Not that there are good explanations for human evolution, but that a kook with a ridiculous idea has demolished the theory of evolution.

What really drew my interest in the subject was the way Alex Jones discussed the news article. He called Eugene McCarthy a “top geneticist” and an “expert”, and while rightly dismissing the hypothesis as idiotic, he implied that it was in line with the current scientific consensus on human origins: that evidence was increasingly disproving evolution as an explanation. Instead, alternative ideas, such as an Intelligent Designer (Jones kept calling it “aliens” and mentioning the movie “Prometheus”) were becoming mainstream explanations for human origins, and this chimp-pig hybridization idea was yet another example. Framing the story in this way, he went on to say that “They (scientists) have no idea what they’re doing” (quote paraphrased from my memory), and therefore evolution is nonsense. And he’s not alone. The creationist/Intelligent Design site Uncommon Descent also dismisses McCarthy’s hypothesis while simultaneously dismissing “neo-Darwinism”

Raff goes on to list all the red flags thrown on McCarthy’s loony hypothesis, which ought to get any reasonable journalist to immediately question and reject the idea. But the lesson I’m seeing from the differential attention given to my explanation and McCarthy’s is that I clearly did not throw enough red flags.

So I’m pointing out that a Christian, conservative, dominant minority is conspiring to suppress my radical idea that evolution, a natural process, has generated all the diversity of life on earth, and that as a top expert authority I plan to lead a revolution in scientific thinking. I know that’s a wild claim and that I’ll probably be pilloried by the mainstream establishment, but I’ve just got to get past the scientific gatekeepers to bring this secret knowledge to the masses.

Alex Jones, call me. We’ll talk.

Categories: Our friends

Higher order thinking

Pharyngula - December 3, 2013 - 9:17am

The one thing you must read today is David Dobbs’ Die, Selfish Gene, Die. It’s good to see genetic accommodation getting more attention, but I’m already seeing pushback from people who don’t quite get the concept, and think it’s some kind of Lamarckian heresy.

It’s maybe a bit much to ask that the gene-centric view of evolution die; it’s still useful. By comparison, for instance, it’s a bit like Mendel and modern genetics (I’ll avoid the overworked comparison of Newton and Einstein.) You need to understand simple Mendelian genetics — it gives you a foundation in the logic of inheritance, and teaches you a few basic rules. But once you start looking at real patterns of inheritance of most traits, you discover that it doesn’t work. Very few traits work as Mendel described, and one serious concern is that we tend to select for genes to study that behave in comprehensible ways.

And every geneticist knows this. Mendel was shown to have got some things wrong within a decade of his rediscovery: Mendel’s Law of Independent Assortment, for instance, simply does not hold for linked genes, and further, linkage turns out to hold important evolutionary implications. But I still teach about independent assortment in my genetics course. Why? Because you need to understand how to interpret deviations from the simple rules; it’s an “a-ha!” moment when you comprehend how Morgan and Sturtevant saw the significance of departures from Mendel’s laws.

Most of genetics seems to be about laying a foundation, and then breaking it to take a step beyond. Teaching it is a kind of torture, where you keep pushing the students to master some basic idea, and then once they’ve got it, you test them by showing them all the exceptions, and then announcing, “But hey! Here’s this cool explanation that tells you what you know is wrong, but there’s some really great and powerful ideas beyond that.”

That’s what’s fun about genetics: compounding a series of revelations until the students’ brains break, usually right around the end of the term. Over the years I’ve learned, too. Undergraduate genetics students usually collapse in defeat once I introduce epistatic interactions — the idea that the phenotype produced by an allele at one locus is dependent on the alleles present at other loci — but it’s always great to see the few students who fully grasp the idea and see how powerful it is (future developmental biologists identified!).

And that’s how I see the gene-centric view: absolutely essential. You must understand Mendel, and Fisher, and Wright, and Hamilton, and Williams, and once you’ve mastered that toolkit, you can start looking at the real world and seeing all the cases where it’s deficient, and develop new tools that let you see deeper. The new idea that Dobb’s describes, and that is actually fairly popular with many developmental biologists, is that phenotype comes first: that organisms are fairly plastic in response to the environment in ways that can’t be simplified to pure genetic determinism, and that the genes lag behind, acting to consolidate and make more robust adaptive responses.

I’ve written about genetic assimilation/accommodation before, and have given one lovely example of phenotypic change occurring faster than the generation of new mutants can explain. It’s always baffled me about the response to those ideas: most people resist, and try to reduce them to good old familiar genes. It’s a bit like watching students wrestle with epistatic modulation of gene expression when all they understand is Mendel, and rather than try to grasp a different way of looking at the problem, they instead invent clouds of simple Mendelian factors that bring in multi-step discrete variations. They can make the evidence fit the theory — just add more epicycles!

I’m seeing the same responses to Dobbs’ article — it’s still all just genes at the bottom of it, ain’t it? Oh, sure, but the interesting parts are the interactions, not the subunits. We need to take the next step and build tools to study networks of genes, rather than reducing everything to the genes themselves.

Categories: Our friends

Atheist Display Marks Pagan Winter Solstice, Bill of Rights at Daley Plaza - DNAinfo

"Atheist" in google news - December 3, 2013 - 8:39am

NBC Chicago

Atheist Display Marks Pagan Winter Solstice, Bill of Rights at Daley Plaza
DNAinfo
... of the year, occurs Dec. 21, while the Bill of Rights was ratified on Dec. 15, 1791. While this is the first year for the atheist display, a Nativity scene has been erected each year at Daley Plaza for nearly three decades after surviving legal ...
Atheist Display In Chicago Marks Pagan Winter Solstice, Bill of Rights at ...Huffington Post
Atheist Group Adds Holiday Display to Daley PlazaNBC Chicago

all 6 news articles »
Categories: Atheist News

Former Atheist Works to Convince Godless Europeans to Accept Christ - Charisma News

"Atheist" in google news - December 3, 2013 - 8:00am

Charisma News

Former Atheist Works to Convince Godless Europeans to Accept Christ
Charisma News
“Unapologetic” prompted The Times Literary Supplement to predict that Spufford's bravado could win him as much public attention as has been showered on Christopher Hitchens and other atheists. Spufford's testimony serves as a kind of wise antidote to ...

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Categories: Atheist News

Now you too can pretend you were at Skepticon this year

Pharyngula - December 3, 2013 - 1:36am

Here’s my talk on the Cambrian from Skepticon 6.

Oh, hey, I just realized I could post the content of that text-heavy slide I flashed, showing the sources I used. So here you go:

Web reviews from Donald Prothero, Nick Matzke, Larry Moran.

Briggs, D.E.G.; Fortey, R.A. (1989). The early radiation and relationships of the major arthropod groups. Science, 246(4927), 241-243.
Budd, G. E., and S. Jensen. 2000. “A critical reappraisal of the fossil record of the bilaterian phyla.” Biological Reviews 75:253-295.
Erwin D and Valentine J (2013). The Cambrian explosion : the construction of animal biodiversity. Greenwood Village, CO, Roberts and Company Publishers.
Marshall, Charles R. (2006). “Explaining the Cambrian ‘explosion’ of animals.” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences. 34: 355-384.
Smith MP, Harper DAT (2013) Causes of the Cambrian Explosion. Science 341:1355.
Long M, Betran E, Thornton K, Wang W (2003) The origin of new genes: glimpses from the young and old. Nature Rev Genet 4:865.
Knoll AH, Carroll SB (199) Early Animal Evolution: Emerging Views from Comparative Biology and Geology. Science 284:2129.
Erwin DH, Laflamme M, Tweedt SM, Sperling EA, Pisani D, Peterson KJ (2011) The Cambrian conundrum: early divergence and later ecological success in the early history of animals. Science. 334(6059):1091.
Peterson KJ, Dietrich MR, McPeek MA (2009) MicroRNAs and metazoan macroevolution: insights into canalization, complexity, and the Cambrian explosion. Bioessays. 31(7):736.

Categories: Our friends

Why sequence the manatee genome?

The Panda's Thumb - December 3, 2013 - 12:04am
By Gaylen Rathburn, via Wikimedia Commons I was excited to learn today that there is genome sequence for the West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus)!! A friend wondered why I was so excited, asking, “Is it evolutionarily interesting?” Well, first off, I’ve always been fascinated with manatees: they are so defenseless, and yet grow so large that they are rarely predated on. They are, however, especially susceptible to human-made water vessels. I am excited for... M. Wilson Sayres http://mathbionerd.blogspot.com

Texas adopts science textbooks – without much fuss

The Panda's Thumb - December 2, 2013 - 6:06pm
I am a little bit late reporting this, but Josh Rosenau reported on November 26, It’s a joy to be able to report on a sweeping victory for science education in Texas, and to be able to give an eyewitness report of the fight over the textbooks that will be used in that massive textbook market for years to come. The 2009 battle over Texas science standards made it quite possible that the textbooks adopted... Matt Young http://www.mines.edu/~mmyoung

Atheist Group Erects Sign at Ill. Capitol Claiming 'There Are No Gods, Angels ... - Christian Post

"Atheist" in google news - December 2, 2013 - 3:32pm

Christian Post

Atheist Group Erects Sign at Ill. Capitol Claiming 'There Are No Gods, Angels ...
Christian Post
Atheist Group Erects Sign at Ill. Capitol Claiming 'There Are No Gods, Angels, Heaven or Hell'. 0. Tweet · Sign Up for Free eNewsletter ››. Freedom From Religion Foundation's Winter Solstice message posted at the Illinois Capitol in Springfield on Nov.
Evangelizing for Atheism | Commentary by Joe MessinaSCVNEWS.com

all 3 news articles »
Categories: Atheist News

Manitoba Tory leader wishes 'infidel atheists' all the best for the holidays - CTV News

"Atheist" in google news - December 2, 2013 - 3:31pm

CTV News

Manitoba Tory leader wishes 'infidel atheists' all the best for the holidays
CTV News
WINNIPEG -- Manitoba's Opposition leader has offered his holiday wishes to groups of people including "infidel atheists," leaving online commentators divided as to whether the phrase was insulting or an awkward attempt at humour. Brian Pallister gave ...
Manitoba Opposition leader has a holiday message for 'all you infidel atheists'The Globe and Mail
'Infidel atheists' comment was misrepresented: PallisterWinnipeg Free Press

all 67 news articles »
Categories: Atheist News

Alligator mississippiensis

The Panda's Thumb - December 2, 2013 - 2:00pm
Photograph by Rick Duhrkopf. Photography contest, Honorable Mention. Alligator mississippiensis - American alligator, Anahuac National Wildlife Preserve, Anahuac County, Texas.... Matt Young http://www.mines.edu/~mmyoung

[Lounge #443]

Pharyngula - December 2, 2013 - 1:06pm

This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly.

Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread

Categories: Our friends

Sacramento-area atheists launch 'Out of the Closet' billboard campaign - Sacramento Bee

"Atheist" in google news - December 2, 2013 - 1:26am

Modesto Bee

Sacramento-area atheists launch 'Out of the Closet' billboard campaign
Sacramento Bee
Alexander is an atheist who will be featured on one of 55 billboards that will start going up around the greater Sacramento area this week as part of the “Out of the Closet” campaign for atheists. The billboards will stay up for a month. “It's a good ...
Why Atheist Billboards Are an Effective Way to Promote Acceptance Of Non-beliefPolicyMic
Atheist Billboards To Flood California City As Non-Believers Make Holiday Push ...Huffington Post
Atheist Group Erects 'Good Without God' Billboards in CaliforniaCharisma News
Visalia Times-Delta
all 24 news articles »
Categories: Atheist News

Noah's drunken stupor and the Biblical origin of slavery - ChicagoNow (blog)

"Atheist" in google news - December 1, 2013 - 11:49pm

ChicagoNow (blog)

Noah's drunken stupor and the Biblical origin of slavery
ChicagoNow (blog)
Just something to think about next time atheists are deemed unethical for not adhering to a Biblical source of absolute morality. -James Kirk Wall. Note - There are apologists who argue that the Bible is against slavery and only advocates indentured ...

Categories: Atheist News

This Winter Solstice buy stuff via our links to Amazon!

Sapient's Blog - December 1, 2013 - 10:27pm

Want to help support online atheism while buying Grandmom a necklace for the Winter Solstice?  Shop at Amazon through our affiliate account!  This really works and it's a huge help.  This is a great way to help the cause while buying cool stuff.  The customer service at Amazon is incredible, they won't let you down. 

Please make your purchases by clicking any of these links and starting your Amazon shopping experience there.  If you are concerned about giving us credit, you can strip the amazon link to it's simplest form and add this code to the end after a slash: ?tag=httpwwwration-20

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Blog of Sapient: This Winter Solstice buy stuff via our links to Amazon!

MargaretDowney.com - December 1, 2013 - 10:27pm

Want to help support online atheism while buying Grandmom a necklace for the Winter Solstice?  Shop at Amazon through our affiliate account!  This really works and it's a huge help.  This is a great way to help the cause while buying cool stuff.  The customer service at Amazon is incredible, they won't let you down. 

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