Goodbye, Anonymous, It's Been Nice Knowing You

There are very few anonymous comments these days and those few that persist will not be missed. I've stopped accepting comments from people who won't identify themselves in some way.

I'd prefer if your identifier leads me to an actual name but for now I'll tolerate posting under a pseudonym as long as it's unique.

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I Have the Least Stressful Job!!!

According to Careercast.com, I have the least stressful job of all jobs.¹ Here's how it's reported in Forbes magazine by web staff writer Susan Adams: The Least Stressful Jobs Of 2013.

University professors have a lot less stress than most of us. Unless they teach summer school, they are off between May and September and they enjoy long breaks during the school year, including a month over Christmas and New Year’s and another chunk of time in the spring. Even when school is in session they don’t spend too many hours in the classroom. For tenure-track professors, there is some pressure to publish books and articles, but deadlines are few. Working conditions tend to be cozy and civilized and there are minimal travel demands, except perhaps a non-mandatory conference or two. As for compensation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median salary for professors is $62,000, not a huge amount of money but enough to live on, especially in a university town.

Another boon for professors: Universities are expected to add 305,700 adjunct and tenure-track professors by 2020, according to the BLS. All of those attributes land university professor in the number one slot on Careercast.com’s list of the least stressful jobs of 2013. The ranking comes from an annual best and worst jobs list that began in 1995 under the auspices of the Wall Street Journal.

Ironically, this article comes out just as some of my colleagues are getting the bad news about their grant applications. Those who weren't funded face the end of their research career while they are still in their 40s. It also comes out at a time when two of my colleagues are starting to think about their applications for tenure. If they are unsuccessful, they will be out of a job in their late 30s with a family to support.

None of my colleagues took a month off at Christmas and I can assure you that all of my colleagues are here for almost the entire summer running a lab full of graduate students, post-docs, technicians, and summer students. The stress of running what amounts to a small business and getting papers published on things that nobody else has ever discovered is a lot more than most people could stand.

Read to the end of the Forbes article to see how the author responds to the many comments she received. The real problem here is that a prominent journalist could actually believe what she wrote in the first place!

I love the comment from Thomas Epps ...

Given your comment above indicating that you realize the source of your article was poor at best. I think you should consider retracting this article. I know that I would be severely sanctioned for writing this type of article with such questionable sourcing in my academic job. If the same is not the case in your job, then clearly your career is not a terribly stressful one. Maybe, "web staff writer" should be on the top of the "least-stressful jobs" list?

See ...
Do College Professors Have Less Stress?
Top 10 Reasons Being a University Professor is a Stressful Job
Before Professor comes Postdoc: Lower career rung, just as much job stress

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1. I have no intention of supplying specific information about MY job but I'm happy to explain why every one of my younger colleagues is under a tremendous amount of stress every single day.

Proof of God #42: Laminin

No comment is necessary except to say that this man, Louie Giglio, was all set to deliver the benediction at Obama's upcoming inauguration until it was discovered that he hates homosexuals. For me, this video would have been enough to disqualify him.

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[Hat Tip: Hermant Mehta at Friendly Atheist: Louie Giglio, Who Thinks Laminin Molecules Prove Christianity is True, Will Deliver Obama’s Inauguration Benediction]

A New Era at Centre for Inquiry Canada

The Board of Directors of the Centre for Inquiry, Canada has mailed out the following press release. Unfortunately, nothing has been posted on the website [The Centre for Inquiry].

The Board of Directors would like to thank Justin for launching CFI Canada, growing it from one location in Toronto to across the country in short order. There are few individuals who possess the dedication, passion and tenacity to accomplish this. Justin was instrumental in making CFI the premier voice for reason, secularism and skepticism in Canada. We were fortunate to have him. Justin leaves CFI in good hands with our National Director, Michael Payton, and our incredible branch leaders and volunteers who are committed to continuing our growth and influence.

Justin, we look forward to watching you make further positive and lasting contributions to society, as no doubt you will.

Board of Directors, Centre for Inquiry Canada

I'm delighted that The Board and Justin were able to reach agreement on a new direction for CFI and usher in a new era under new leadership. I agree with the Board that Justin did an excellent job of creating CFI Canada and leading it through its formative years. I was happy to work with Justin and support him during those early years of building an organization (see photo).

In the past year I've been very critical of the CFI Board of Directors because I think they mishandled the firings and re-hirings that took place in 2011 and 2012. This time I think they've done the right thing during recent negotiations. Congratulations to Kevin Smith (President) and all the Board members for working hard to ensure the future success of CFI.

The email announcement also contained a letter from Justin Trottier to the Freehthinker members of CRI. It begins ....

Special Note from Justin Trottier, Founding National Executive Director, Centre for Inquiry Canada
To My Fellow Freethinkers,

It is with mixed emotions that I take this opportunity to announce the upcoming end of my leadership role with CFI Canada. March 15, 2013 will mark the end of my full-time position as National Communications Director; however, I will consider, if I am asked, continuing in part time or other status until no later than July 31. I am immensely proud of the contributions I've made to the organization over the last six years and plan to continue as a volunteer and active participant in CFI events and initiatives, but now it is time to start making the transition from CFI and pursue other interests and employment.

It has been a pleasure working with so many amazing people to form a unique Canadian educational charity and expand it into a national voice for atheists, humanists and skeptics from coast to coast. Leading CFI as it came to establish itself as the most visible, active and professional freethought organization in Canada, with employees, infrastructure and a growing budget will stand as one of the most important and certainly, matchless accomplishments of my life.

...

I'm looking forward to rejoining CFI Canada in just a few months.

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Science vs IDiots: My Talk at Eschaton 2012

Here's a video of my talk at Eschaton 2012 in Ottawa (Dec. 1, 2012).

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Jumping for Joy

Jerry Coyne has posted a video of a happy young antelope jumping up and down in a style called "pronking" or "stotting" [Antelope pronking].

If you're a certain type of evolutionary biologist you will immediately ask yourself what kind of selective advantage could have led to the fixation of stotting alleles in antelopes? Here's a list of possibilities that Jerry offers ...

• It allows an animal to jump out of high grass to look for predators
• The behavior startles the predator, giving the gazelle more time to escape
• It’s an alarm signal (like bird alarm calls), alerting herd members that a predator is nearby. This would probably evolve only if herd members were closely related, so the behavior could evolve via kin selection (assuming it’s individually maldaptive, which isn’t proven).
• It’s simply play behavior. But not only the young do it: adults pronk too when they’re chased by predators.
• It’s a way, in young gazelles, of letting the mother know the baby has been disturbed. This may be one function, but doesn’t explain stotting in adults.
• It confuses the predator. Presumably a herd of gazelle, all pronking, would puzzle a pursuing cheetah or wild dog, making it hard to pick out a given individual to chase. I don’t believe this for a second; predators aren’t that dumb, and in fact a predator would probably either learn to or evolve to concentrate on the stotting individuals because they might be easier to catch. (This “confusion” explanation was once used to explain zebra stripes: it might be hard to single out one zebra in a mass of fleeing stripey equids. But see my earlier post on another explanation for stripes.)
• It’s a way to attract mates, possibly by showing how fit you are. Sage grouse in the western U.S. form “leks” in which males group together and jump up and down for hours (making loud noises at the same time) while the females watch from nearby. Invariably it is the males who jump the longest that are chosen as mates. Females want a fit father for several reasons. This doesn’t wash for gazelles since both sexes do it, and not in a sexual context.
• This is a favored hypothesis: the “honest signal” theory. This posits that the behavior is saying to potential predators, “Don’t bother trying to catch me as I can bounce really high, so imagine how fast I could run if I wanted to!” In other words, the behavior deters the predator from attacking that individual.
• This is the hypothesis I find most credible: stotting warns the predator that it has been seen, thus discouraging it from pursuing the stotting animal. (Predators like to sneak up on a prey, getting as close as possible before they’re detected.) That is, stotting evolved via individual selection. Remember that predators often don’t go after a whole pack of quadrupeds at once, but single out certain individuals—often young or weak ones—to pursue.

Here's another example of animals jumping up and down in a stylized manner. Surely there are specific alleles that make them behave this way? And the alleles must have become fixed in the Maasi population by natural selection. In other words, it has to be an adaptation, right?

How many just-so stories can you think of?

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Beat Australia!

The Atheist Census is a project of Atheist Alliance International. You have to answer a few questions but it won't take more than a minute or two.

Please fill out the form if you are Canadian because the reputation of our country is at stake. So far the top ten countries are ...

1. United States of America: 51,541
2. Brazil: 10,971
3. United Kingdom: 10,683
4 Turkey: 9,795
5. Australia: 7,593
6. Canada: 6,852
7. India: 3,100
8. Italy: 2,948
9. Iran: 2,797
10 Poland: 2,679

Do you see what's happening? Some upstart British colony from the bottom half of the world is beating Canada! We can't let that happen. If you are Canadian get yourself over to Atheist Census right away. If you're from Australia you can get your vote counted at Atheist Census for Australians. (Agnostics need not apply.)

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[Hat Tip: Veronica at Canadian Atheist: Canada Versus Australia.]

Scientific American Chooses ENCODE Project as One of the Top Ten Science Stories in 2012

It's pretty hard to ignore the ENCODE papers if you're selecting the top ten science stories of 2012. This doesn't mean it's a "breakthrough" as Science magazine claims [Science Magazine Chooses ENCODE Results as One of the Top Ten Breakthroughs in 2012]. And it doesn't mean that the results overthrow Darwinian evolutionary theory as implied by the Intelligent Design Creationists [Intelligent Design Creationists Choose ENCODE Results as the #1 Evolution Story of 2013].

The Scientific American article was written by Bora Zivkovic, a long-time blogger who knows the difference between hype and reality. He apparently knows which scientists to believe and which ones to ignore [The Top 10 Science Stories of 2012: Publication of the ENCODE Encyclopedia: A Milestone in Genome Research].

Unfortunately, much of the discussion surrounding the publication of ENCODE failed to focus on the usefulness of the catalogue and the techniques that built it. Instead, much of the debate centered on the failure to understand that transcription does not necessarily imply meaningful biological function. Cells are messy biological entities, with lots of gunk and goo floating around, so mistakes happen all the time. Many DNA sequences get translated into RNA, only to have the cell degrade that RNA. Much, perhaps most, of the DNA in our genomes—despite being occasionally transcribed, and thus recorded in ENCODE—is still functionless “junk DNA.” That is actually not surprising; it is in fact expected from evolutionary theory. Thanks to ENCODE, though, we should eventually learn which sequences are the junk and which are the gems of cell activity.

This is a very different take on the subject than that published by the editors of Science and the Intelligent Design Creationists.

I wonder why?

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Intelligent Design Creationists Choose ENCODE Results as the #1 Evolution Story of 2012

The folks over at Evolution News & Views (sic) have selected the ENCODE papers as the Number 1 evolution-related story of 2012. Naturally, they fell for the hype of the ENCODE/Nature publicity campaign as you can see from the blog title: Our Top 10 Evolution-Related Stories: #1, ENCODE Project Buries "Junk DNA".

Most of the article is just the reposting of an article by Casey Luskin but some anonymous editor has added ...

Editor's note: For the No. 1 slot among evolution-related news stories of 2012, this one was an easy pick. The publication of the ENCODE project results detonated what had been considered among the sturdiest defenses that Darwinian evolutionary theory could still fall back upon: "Junk DNA." Casey Luskin's initial reporting is featured below. See also our response to the ensuing controversy over ENCODE ("Why the Case for Junk DNA 2.0 Still Fails").

Normally I would make fun of the creationists for misunderstanding the real scientific results in the papers that were published last September but, in this case, there are lots of real scientists who fell into the same trap.

Even Science magazine selected the ENCODE results as a top-ten breakthrough and noted that 80% of the human genome now has a function [Science Magazine Chooses ENCODE Results as One of the Top Ten Breakthroughs in 2012]. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to be content to point out that many scientists are as stupid as many Intelligent Design Creationists!

I can still mock the creationists for claiming that "Darwinian evolutionary theory" supports junk DNA.

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Science Magazine Chooses ENCODE Results as One of the Top Ten Breakthroughs in 2012

Science magazine (published by AAAS) was one of the major news sources that fell hook, line and sinker for the ENCODE/Nature publicity campaign last September [Science Writes Eulogy for Junk DNA]. It even published a laudatory three page profile of Ewan Birney, the man responsible for misrepresenting the ENCODE results as evidence that most of our genome is functional [Ewan Birney: Genomics' Big Talker].

I was somewhat apprehensive when I saw that the editors of Science had picked the ENCODE results as one of the top ten breakthroughs [Genomics Beyond Genes]. Would the editors continue to promote the idea that most of the human genome is functional?

Carnival of Evolution #55

This month's Carnival of Evolution is hosted by Suzanne Elvidge at Genome Engineering. Read it at: Carnival of Evolution #55: New Year’s resolutions 2013 – evolution, evolution, evolution

Welcome to 2013 and to Carnival of Evolution #55, and Happy New Year to everyone from Genome Engineering. Have you made any New Year’s resolutions this year? Apart from the oft repeated ‘This year I will write my novel’, here are some of my New Year’s resolutions for 2013.

New Year’s Resolution number one: Deliver Carnival of Evolution on time

Okay – broken that one already – sorry. Hope it was worth waiting for. Now onto the rest.

There's no host yet for the next Carnival of Evolution (February, 2013). If you want to volunteer to next month or for March, April, or May, contact Bjørn Østman. Bjørn is always looking for someone to host the Carnival of Evolution. He would prefer someone who has not hosted before but repeat hosts are more than welcome right now! Contact him at the Carnival of Evolution blog. You can send articles directly to him or you can submit your articles at Carnival of Evolution although you now have to register to post a submission.

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This Is Why Christians Want Guns

I'm sure you've heard that Americans need guns so they can overthrow the government whenever it infringes on their personal beliefs. Many Americans believe they have a "right" to commit treason whenever they feel like it and, furthermore, that "right" must be protected by allowing them to bear arms, including assault weapons.

Here's what could happen. This is an interview by Janet Parshall of Mathew Staver. Believe it or not, Mathew Staver is Dean of the School of Law at Liberty University. He is also the Chair and Founder of a right-wing extremest group called Liberty Counsel. Mat is worried that the Supreme Court of the United States—the ultimate source of what's legal and what's not—could actually allow same-sex couples to get married!!!!

The consequences would be devastating, according to the Dean of Law. He says,

This is the thing that revolutions literally are made of. This would be more devastating to our freedom, to our religious freedom, to the rights of pastors and their duty to be able to speak and to Christians around the country, then anything that the revolutionaries during the American Revolution even dreamed of facing. This would be the thing that revolutions are made of. This could split the country right in two. This could cause another civil war. I’m not talking about just people protesting in the streets, this could be that level because what would ultimately happen is a direct collision would immediately happen with pastors, with churches, with Christians, with Christian ministries, with other businesses, it would be an avalanche that would go across the country.

I'm sure it's a great comfort to most Americans that these people have the weapons they need to start another civil war over legalizing gay marriage.

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[Hat Tip: Hermant Mehta: Christian Right Leader: Legalizing Gay Marriage Will Result in Another Civil War.]

The National Rifle Association: Part of the Problem

According the Toronto's Globe & Mail [NRA's call for armed guards in U.S. schools a warning for politicians].

The NRA is offering to help with the effort to put guns in schools. Mr. LaPierre named former Arkansas Republican congressman Asa Hutchinson to lead a National School Shield Program to help design security plans for every school in the country.

Because, as Mr. LaPierre put it: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

If there is a one statement that sums up the political divide in America, that may be it.

Here's the video of the NRA press conference.


And here's part of the transcript ...

With all the foreign aid, with all the money in the federal budget, we can’t afford to put a police officer in every school? Even if they did that, politicians have no business — and no authority — denying us the right, the ability, or the moral imperative to protect ourselves and our loved ones from harm.

Now, the National Rifle Association knows that there are millions of qualified active and retired police; active, reserve and retired military; security professionals; certified firefighters and rescue personnel; and an extraordinary corps of patriotic, trained qualified citizens to join with local school officials and police in devising a protection plan for every school. We can deploy them to protect our kids now. We can immediately make America's schools safer — relying on the brave men and women of America’s police force.

The budget of our local police departments are strained and resources are limited, but their dedication and courage are second to none and they can be deployed right now.

I call on Congress today to act immediately, to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school — and to do it now, to make sure that blanket of safety is in place when our children return to school in January.

There are about 130,000 schools in America. Let's say we find 130,000 people who are willing and able to use a gun to kill anyone who tries to get into the school. Imagine that many of them are "patriots" who belong to the National Rifle Association. They'll probably be working for close to minimum wage. A bored, underpaid, cowboy with a loaded gun in every school.

What could possibly go wrong?

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Michael Ruse Defends the Cosmological Argument

Here's a video of Michael Ruse criticizing Richard Dawkins for being too simplistic in his attack on belief in god(s). What Ruse is saying is that theologians have a much more sophisticated view of religion than Dawkins admits. It goes without saying that really good philosophers, like Ruse, understand the sophisticated version of Christian apologetics so they would never write a book like The God Delusion.

Ruse gives us an example of the worst form of accomodationism. Beginning at 2:11, Ruse treats us to a defense of the cosmological argument for the existence of god. Here's his (Ruse's) brief description.

1. Everything has a cause.
2. The world is a thing therefore the world must have a cause.
3. Call it god.

This is somewhat simplistic (), a more sophisticated version can be found on Wikipedia (above) or at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Cosmological Argument.

IDiots at Evolution News & Views Defend Ann Gauger's Video

I few days ago I posted a video by Ann Gauger where she criticizes population genetics. Sandwalk readers recognized right away that she doesn't understand population genetics, or phylogenetics. Read the comments on: Ann Gauger Describes the Intelligent Design Creationist Version of Population Genetics.

I've been waiting for a response from Ann Gauger or any of the other IDiots. I've been waiting to see how they twist the meaning of "population genetics" to fit what she says in the video. I've been waiting to see how they defend her words on tree-making given the criticism on Sandwalk and elsewhere.

Incidentally, it turns out that the "laboratory" in the background of the video is a stock photo from Shutterstock and not an actual lab where Ann Gauger works. Here's the video so you can see what I'm talking about.

David Klinghoffer has finally responded to the criticism in a post on Evolution News & Views: Scandal! Gauger Filmed in Front of Green Screen. As you can see from the title, he is most upset about the use of a fake lab ... or rather he's upset about being discovered and exposed by Richard B. Hoppe at Panda's Thumb and Casey Johnston at Ars Technica.

But what about the scientific criticism of what Ann Gauger is actually saying in the video?

Klinghoffer has an answer ....

It's hard to believe that Miss Johnson, who writes for Ars Technica ("a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, breakdowns of the latest scientific advancements"), is unaware of these things. So too Richard Hoppe. The most likely explanation for their posing at the game of "Gotcha!" is that they can't answer Dr. Gauger's arguments, which are given in full in a recent brief book co-authored by Gauger, Doug Axe and Casey Luskin, Science and Human Origins. We would be happy to send a review copy to Ars Technica.

Gauger, a PhD in developmental biology who was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, has the science on her side. It's a typical Darwinist feint: When you don't have the arguments and you don't have the science, change the subject and pile on the red herrings. Casey Johnson, who dismisses our little video as a "nonsensical rant," can't reply to Dr. Gauger on the merits. If she could, she would.

David Klinghoffer reads Sandwalk so he knows how real scientists deal with the nonsense being spouted by Ann Gauger. I suspect he would rather focus on the "red herring" than defend the bad science in the video.

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