Nice case of evolution observed in the lab

Richard Lenski of Michigan State University used a single cell of E. coli to start 12 lab populations, which he observed for more than 44,000 generations. At the 31,500th generation, one of the populations suddenly developed the ability to metabolize citrate. He had saved frozen samples of each 500th population, and found that only that one of the twelve populations would re-evolve this ability, and then only when he started at the 20,000th generation or later, leading him to conclude that something had developed around the 20,000th generation of that population that provided the necessary foundation.

As New Scientist reports, "the experiment stands as proof that evolution does not always lead to the best possible outcome. Instead, a chance event can sometimes open evolutionary doors for one population that remain forever closed to other populations with different histories."

UPDATE (June 11, 2008): Michael Behe has written a commentary on this result, which Ed Brayton criticizes at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

UPDATE (June 13, 2008): Science writer Carl Zimmer has written a nice summary of this research, and the primary author of the research shows up in the comments to answer questions at comment #80.

UPDATE (June 18, 2008): Lenski responds to a letter from Andy Schlafly of Conservapaedia.

UPDATE (June 24, 2008): In a further exchange with Schlafly, Lenski politely shows Schlafly to be an idiot and a jerk. (The link edited out by Conservapaedia is to RationalWiki's article on banning at Conservapaedia.)

Venezuela moves closer to a police state

The June 7, 2008 issue of The Economist reports that Hugo Chavez issued a decree late last month which:

authorises police raids without warrant, the use of anonymous witnesses and secret evidence. Judges are obliged to collaborate with the intelligence services. Anyone caught investigating sensitive matters faces jail. The law contains no provision for any kind of oversight. It blurs the distinction between external threats and internal political dissent. It requires all citizens, foreigners and organisations to act in support of the intelligence system whenever required--or face jail terms of up to six years.

Though my employer operates in Venezuela, I think that's one South American country I'd rather not visit at the moment... I hope November's elections reduce Chavez's power and he steps down from power in 2013 as he's previously said that he would.

And Daniel Ortega has suspended elections in Nicaragua... another country to avoid.

McCain thinks the Constitution establishes a Christian nation

McCain continues to demonstrate mind-boggling ignorance of the U.S. Constitution, for someone who has already sworn numerous times to uphold it. He's clearly unfit to be president--he's either ignorant of U.S. history or being dishonest in order to pander to the religious right. (I previously reported similar remarks by McCain last October.)

The Bible and the Christian tradition do not support a limited constitutional republic--if you got your politics from the Bible or Christian tradition, you'd argue for a monarchy with virtually limitless power. That's probably part of the reason that the Bush administration has argued against any limits on executive power.



(From Atheist Media Blog by way of Pharyngula.)

Abstinence-only sex education is good for something

No, it doesn't reduce the amount of adolescent sexual activity--it merely reduces the likelihood that teens who have sex will use condoms, and thus increases the prevalence of teens with sexually transmitted diseases. This is not merely useless, it's actually harmful and counter-productive, like the Office of National Drug Control Policy's anti-drug advertisements.

But empirical evidence is irrelevant to those who are pushing their programs due to religious fundamentalism. For such people, the fact that they not only don't work but have the opposite of the desired effects just means they need to be pushed harder.

Richard Cheese concert

Einzige, Kat, and I attended the Richard Cheese show tonight, and he put on a great crowd-pleasing performance. The recorded versions of his songs don't give a complete picture--his performance is filled with a lot of audience interaction and humor, and he had quite a few special bits tailored to his hometown audience, such as the theme from "Alice" dedicated to the folks at Mel's Diner (the fictional restaurant that the TV series put in Phoenix, rather than Tucson as in the Scorsese film "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore"). After the show, Richard Cheese and the band spent about an hour signing autographs and having pictures taken with people in the first seven rows, and then there was a short period of time for him to talk to friends from grade school (me) and some friends from high school who came to his show and managed to stay up late.

He'll be performing at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas on August 29 and 31, and I recommend seeing his show if you get the chance.

Why it's dangerous to put a cell phone in the microwave

(Via jwz's blog.)

An accurate creation story

This video gives a five-minute plain-language summary of the origin of the universe that is scientifically accurate, which any actually existing God should have been able to author instead of Genesis.



(Via Pharyngula.)

Phoenix Trustee's Sale Notices for May, 2008

After I counted up May's 6416 notices of trustee's sales in Maricopa county I took a look at the graph for May of 2007 and I just had to laugh. If you'll recall, May of 2007 was Phoenix's break-out month for pre-foreclosures. It was the month when the real estate bubble showed us that it wasn't an also-ran, trouncing the dot bomb's NTR record by almost 300. Yet here we are a year later and last May's 2009 notices seem almost like something to pine for.

Notice also the Gaussian descriptive statistics I was naïvely including with my posts back then. If we were to take those number seriously - in particular the standard deviation - then we'd be forced to conclude that May 2008's number should essentially be impossible. Clearly foreclosure statistics are not Gaussian.

Liberaltarianism

Will Wilkinson has an interesting post about how his market liberal views are very like the views of Hayek, Friedman, and Buchanan, and that the libertarian-conservative alliance against a slippery slope to socialism isn't justified by what's actually occurring in the world today.

In a subsequent post, he writes about how economic regulation and tax/transfer policies are logically separable, but most people think about them as if they aren't; a comparison of levels of inequality and poverty across the EU shows that the common thought that less regulation and taxation goes hand-in-hand with higher levels of poverty and inequality (of the sort seen in the U.S. and UK) doesn't hold. Thus you could have a regime with very low levels of regulation yielding more wealth, combined with more redistribution for a better safety net and less poverty and inequality.

And in another post, he calls for greater empirical grounding for proposals in political philosophy, of the sort that has started to yield fruitful results in moral philosophy:

But shouldn’t it impossible to take seriously an argument to the effect that, say this or that policy is required in order to secure the conditions for the development of some capacity, in the absence of (a) a well-empirically-grounded theory of the nature of that capacity and its development, and (b) some kind of actual evidence that this or that policy in fact has the kind of effect on it that one hypothesizes? I wouldn’t mind so much if political philosophy arguments were more often in the form of “Hey, here’s a conjecture! I suggest somebody competent to do so try to find out if it’s true.” I would be quite happy if I saw more “Hey, here’s a conjecture, and here’s a my attempt to honestly synthesize the relevant literature in a first pass at getting the answer.” That would be terrific. But usually, the argument aims to establish something substantive with an armchair, a Joe Stiglitz op-ed, and something remembered from the Tuesday Science Times.

Let's hear it for empiricism.

An update to the pledge of allegiance

Tom W. Bell proposes the following update to the pledge of allegiance:

I pledge allegiance to the laws of the United States of America, on condition that it respect my rights, natural, constitutional, and statutory, with liberty and justice for all.

That's a pledge I could make, despite my skepticism about the use of the term "natural rights." I do think there are moral rights entailed by the combination of certain common human values and empirical facts. (This conversation between Will Wilkinson and Shaun Nichols about Nichols' book, Sentimental Rules, suggests one way of getting to moral rules I find far more plausible than the natural rights/natural law tradition.)