So I’ve been extremely busy the last few weeks trying to get everything wrapped by the deadlines that always come with the end of the semester. I just completed working on a paper for Molecular Biology about cystic fibrosis. Before I go any further, let me define just a few genetic concepts using the analogy of shoes, so that I don’t have to worry about readers being completely lost. Thirty seconds of biology won’t kill you, I promise.

• allele - alternative version of gene. If shoes are a gene, then cowboy boots, sandals, and tennis shoes would be alleles. For any given gene, you’ve got two alleles - one from mom and one from dad.
• homozygous - you’ve got the same two alleles for a given gene. You’re wearing matching tennis shoes.
  • homozygous dominant - both of your alleles make the same working protein. You’re wearing matching tennis shoes.
  • homozygous recessive - both of your alleles either don’t make a protein or make a protein that doesn’t work. You’re not wearing any shoes and have two bare feet.
• heterozygous - you’ve got different alleles for a given gene. You’re wearing one cowboy boot and one sandal, or one cowboy boot and one bare foot.

Cystic fibrosis is a homozygous recessive trait. You’ve got to get two CF alleles that don’t work right to get the disease.

Enough of the background information. I was focusing on one thing in particular. The allele that causes CF is a lot more common in European populations than one might expect for such a seemingly detrimental allele. In fact in Caucasian populations, the frequency of carriers can reach as high as 1 in 25 people! That’s pretty darn high when you consider that if two copies of those alleles end up in a child, that child’s dead before they’re three years old. How do you explain that? The likely explanation is what’s called heterozygous advantage, where heterozygous are better fit for their environment than homozygotes.

The classic example of this is sickle-cell anemia and malaria. It turns out that heterozygotes are much less likely to get malaria than homozygotes. I was looking on the internet for a reference to the scientific literature that discusses heterozygous advantage with sickle-cell anemia, when I came across this page from the website of a medical doctor at Harvard. (Incidentally, it’s a nice lengthy discussion if you want to learn more about natural selection favoring a detrimental allele through heterozygous advantage.) But it contained one little illustration that immediately caught my eye and made me laugh out loud.

Figure 2. Schematic representation of the effect of the sickle cell hemoglobin gene on survival in endemic malarial areas. People with normal hemoglobin (left of the diagram) are susceptible to death from malaria. People with sickle cell disease (right of the diagram) are susceptible to death from the complications of sickle cell disease. People with sickle cell trait, who have one gene for hemoglobin A and one gene for hemoglobin S, have a greater chance of surviving malaria and do not suffer adverse consequences from the hemoglobin S gene.

Oh, okay. I get it. But still, it’s a rather odd and comical choice for the illustration. It tickled my funny bone so much that I had to share.

So getting back to cystic fibrosis, the main evidence for heterozygous advantage comes from a study1 which showed that the bacteria which cause typhoid fever use the protein that the cystic fibrosis gene creates. Thus, if you’re heterozygous (one good copy, one bad) then you have less of that protein on the surface of your cells lining your digestive tract. Using mice as a model, they showed that typhoid bacteria are 86% less successful at infecting cells of heterozygotes. They also showed that mice containing two bad copies of the CF gene were not infected by any typhoid bacteria. Thus typhoid are using that protein as their entries into the cell.

As typhoid is a disease that has ravaged Europe for many years in premodern time, it now becomes understandable why selection would increase the frequency of the CF allele in European populations.

It’s been too long, hasn’t it? I’ve got friends asking me to write again, friends that are hilariously cajoling me into writing again, and absolute nutjobs that leave the craziest comments on old posts.

This latter comment is especially hilarious for it’s illiterate ramblings against evolution, repetition of the belief that no one is required to pay income taxes, and then a sudden divergence into the necessity of vitamins and seed eating to prevent cancer. The list of seeds we should eat are apple, peach, and apricot seeds, which as any good biologist can tell you are filled with cyanide. If you’re skipping the fruit and going straight for the seeds, it doesn’t take but a handful at once to provide a lethal dose. But hey, you don’t get cancer! I especially liked the National Cancer Institute’s description of a drug name Laetrile based on these seed products. “Laetrile has shown little anticancer effect in laboratory studies, animal studies, or human studies. The side effects of laetrile are like the symptoms of cyanide poisoning.”

Yes, it’s been too long since I’ve blogged.

Why did I stop blogging?

The short and sweet answer is that I suddenly got tired of it. It felt more like a chore than it did fun. As the amount of time I poured into school skyrocketed (and so did the amount of writing for school), it was hard to enjoy blogging.

I’m also completely done with these eternal debates about evolution and creationism. At least online anyway. Like the above comments shows, the number of people who froth at the mouth and show up to leave comments far outweighs those interested in learning how science works. We live in the age of Google. In 30 seconds you can get more information about a subject than you can read in 30 days. An understanding of evolution and how it works is not lacking because of a lack of information. Therefore, I’m much more interested in having real conversions with people, face to face, who actually want to learn how things work, not just argue. The time I’ve spent at church talking with people about it on a number of occasions is just so much more fulfilling than blogging about it.

I also face the problem of being a fairly good but extremely slow writer. One story in particular illustrates this better than anything. Not long after we got married, my wife was working on this very lengthy paper for a class. She called me in to ask for help with wording a single sentence. I spent 30 minutes and finally came up with wording that we both liked. So out of 10 pages, I wrote one sentence. When she got the paper back (with a good grade of course), the professor had underline that single sentence and written in the margins, “Nicely worded!” (I’ll smile about that for the rest of my life). But the problem you see is that I can’t spend that long writing a post to Ocellated. There’s not enough hours in the day.

So What Comes Next?

I didn’t want to post again until I really knew what I wanted to say. I think where I am right now is that I would love to post about science. There’s just too many cool little things that I learn to not share them with anyone. And I have fun whenever I can taking pictures, so there’s no better medium than the web for sharing the fruits of that labor.

I promise nothing. I certainly won’t be posting every day. Maybe once a week. Maybe once a month. We’ll just have to see how it goes. But I’d definitely like to get back to talking about science, birds in particular, and I’ve got a few papers that are worth sharing due to their general “cool factor.”

I can’t just leave you with nothing

So for all three of you still checking the blog, I’ll leave you with a few pictures. I have been busy working at photography when I have the time, and I’ve posted many of these quite some time ago, but never wrote a post announcing them. Here’s a list of the recent galleries. Some of the pictures are of course better than others.

• San Antonio Lakes, 12-27-06
• Marfa, TX 12-18 to 12-19-06
• Christmas Bird Counts 2006
• San Angelo State Park, 12-8 to 12-10-06
• OH Ivie Reservoir, 12-2-06
• Forth Worth Nature Center, 11-25-06
• San Angelo Birding, Nov. 2006
• S Tx Birding Festival 2006
• Davis Mountains and Lake Balmorhea, 10-2006

The trip to Marfa, TX (which is in deep southwest TX north of Big Bend National Park, was probably one of the most enjoyable though. I managed to get a couple of incredible pictures of a juvenile Red-tailed Hawk.

There’s more in that album too. And speaking of pictures, I’ve got lots more to process from recent trips which I’ll be posting shortly.

For those still reading Ocellated, sorry for the lack of blogging goodness lately. Grad school has officially consumed my life, and I love it.

This week shows absolutely no signs of letting up either. A test today (bird orders of the world - which I’ll ace) and one tomorrow (advanced genetics — I’ll be beaten and disfigured to the point of being barely recognizable) will keep me snowed under. I also leave for a weekend in the Davis Mountains this Friday! I haven’t been back since I left this summer from thesis research.

What’s really been sucking up my time though is the Wednesday bible class lessons I’ve been doing over evolution. When I’m not working on school or other business jobs I have on the side, I’ve been working on those lessons.

Last week (the second lesson) was large scale evolutionary change. Cool things like the reptile-mammal transition, theropod dinosaur - bird transition, biogeography, adaptive radiations, vestigial traits, and the 2000 pound elephant in the room all along, human evolution. The audience (with a conservative evangelical background) did quite well, and took in stride human chromosome number 2 being the combination (fusion) of chimpanzee chromosomes 12 and 13. Indeed you can read a little about that evidence yourself here.

I have been spending much of the week since that lesson though struggling with a desire to feel merciful and forgiving, and a sense of righteous indignation. I expected some people to be upset. I mentally prepared myself for it and was (and am) fully determined to be polite and gracious in my conversations that ensue.

What’s frustrated me so was a conversation that I overhead as I made a beeline to the kitchen to grab liquid refreshment to quench the cracked and burning surface that was my throat after an extended period of talking with no breaks. One person in the class was talking to another and “refuting” everything they’d just seen. I completely stayed out of the conversation. But as I thought about it, what troubled me so was that this person was wasting an opportunity. At the front of the room, two biology grad students who’d just taught the class, both Christians, were available to answer questions. But instead of taking the opportunity to ask further questions and reflect on what they’d just heard, this person instead cornered someone to gripe about the class.

The irony is ripe here. The very creation story some cling as having to be literal teaches much about the dangers of pride and the virtues of humility. Yet pride and a lack of humility rear their ugly head when the evolution / creation issue gets discussed.

Oh well. That’s why I’m teaching the class. And at least for some people, I have little doubt they’ll find it worthy of their time and consideration.

… as the famous line from Monty Python goes.

Though I’ve recently felt close. I survived a test on Monday, with another one this afternoon.

In addition, tonight I start a 5 week series in the university class at church on the evolution / religion issue, and I’ve been spending a lot of time getting that prepared.

Here’s how the schedule looks to be shaping up.

• Week 1 — What is Science (briefly), natural selection, sexual selection.
• Week 2 — Large scale evolutionary change, the fossil record, genetics, biogeography, human evolution.
• Week 3 — early Genesis, nature of science, nature of religion, history of the church’s response to the theory of evolution.
• Week 4 — Christian frameworks for interfacing with science and religion — youth earth creationists, old earth creationists, intelligent design creationists, and evolutionary creationists.
• Week 5 — discussion. You can bet I’ll come prepared with plenty of open-ended questions in case the audience needs some prompting.

Not to leave you without something to look at though, I’ve put up some pictures of an outing a couple of weeks ago to a local ranch, where my university’s biology department hosts an annual Bioblitz, identifying every species regardless of taxa they possibly can.

I managed to get one picture in particular that I just really like.

Another highlight of the weekend was this Hoary Bat, a species I had previously only seen in pictures. They are arguably the most beautiful of bats found in the U.S.

More from me if I survive today.

My wife is a second grade teacher. The other day, she was teaching a cause and effect lesson to the little ones. You flip the light switch and what happens? They all grasped that example.

But why is there snow on the top of the mountain? They were baffled, and a hush fell over the class. Finally one little boy spoke up. “God put it there.” My wife responded with something along the lines of “That may be true, but we don’t study God in school” and then continued to explain cause (high elevation) and effect (snow doesn’t melt).

The little kid looked at her like she’d run over his puppy.

Amazing isn’t it? Here’s a second grader who deftly asks about a theology of nature. True, the phrase theology of nature won’t be in his vocabulary for many years to come, but he’s hit upon the subject nonetheless. And he’s quite unhappy that his answer — God did it — wasn’t accepted. I can only speculate that it’s an answer that’s worked very well for him in his prior experiences with adults.

I don’t know the little boy, his parents, or the family’s religious background. But it seems that the kid has already learned the false dichotomy. Either God put snow on the mountain, or He didn’t. Explain the snow by other means, and you’re attacking his belief system.

I find it sad but interesting because it seems to parallel the thinking of many adult Christians. They resist natural explanations for natural things because to them, it removes any room for God. (I’ve commented before on the irony that Creationists are in effect agreeing with atheists on this matter).

What would happen if we lived in a world where the little boy learned both at home and in his culture that the two beliefs do not have to be contradictory? That mountains, snow, and high elevation can yield their own secrets, but that one can, if one wishes, believe in a deeper underlying meaning to the world and people around us.

It seems to me that by the time our children added theology of nature to their vocabularies, they would be well on their way to having one.

It’s Saturday (Sunday now that I’ve published it), but I feel like doing a little Friday Cat Blogging. I didn’t get to yesterday, though not for a lack of something to say.

I’m taking a graduate level genetics course this semester and low and behold what did we study Thursday night but the genetics of domestic cats… A whole evening spent talking about alleles, incomplete dominance, and epistasis. And looking at dozens of cat pictures.

Now I’ve mentioned before that The Bruce’s unique characteristics come in part from his Scottish Fold looks, namely a mutation which made his ears fold. I tend to talk less about his being half Siamese, since of course everybody knows what a Siamese looks like.

What I didn’t know until last night is that Siamese get their distinctive color because of mutations of their own. The dark areas of their fur are caused by a mutation in the gene that makes an enzyme necessary in the production of melanin. Melanin as you probably know serves as a dark pigment. (It’s the complete lack of it for example that results in albinism).

Here’s what’s so cool about this mutated Siamese enzyme. It’s temperature specific. The reason the extremities (legs, tail, and muzzle) are darker in Siamese is that they’re cooler than the trunk of the body. Were you to take a Siamese and put him in a refrigerator at 33 degrees for 6 months, you’d come back to find a black cat. If you left him outside the entire summer, his extremities would become much paler.

Interestingly, this same phenomenon occurs in other animals, like the Himalayan rabbit. Studies on this animal were what determined the temperature specific nature of this trait. You can fit the animals with a long term ice pack and get a black spot of fur underneath.

Pretty cool stuff.

There’s an article up on Fox News by John Gibson that’s just striking for it’s tone. It’s not the kind of ignorance that one just stumbles across in life. No, it’s the kind of ignorance that one must work really hard to cultivate, waking up each morning to seek out opportunities to display this level of stupidity. His grasp of ignorance is almost masterful.

Now scientists say Pluto isn’t a planet. It isn’t big enough. It’s something, but not a planet exactly.

My attitude is: Who says?

It’s been a planet my entire life. I learned that in the third grade. Might be the only thing I remember from the third grade.

It’s the cold one, the farthest from the sun and, yes, it’s the small one.

But no, you can’t unmake Pluto as a planet.

Long ago I learned it was a planet and I see no reason to unlearn it. Why should I? [emphasis mine]

Somebody somewhere, some mysterious person who answers to no one and seems to have dictatorial power sets new standards for planets and all of a sudden one of the original nine is dropped?

Now as a disclaimer, I don’t particularly care how the solar system is classified. I would like scientists to be consistent, and use all the information at hand (which naturally changes as the years go by). I trust that they do nothing less, though no doubt it’s a contentious process. (See here on why that’s a good thing). In short, I won’t get my undies in a twist if we’ve got 8, 12, or 30 planets.

But John Gibson’s point of not having to unlearn something just because he’s learned it is about the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. Where would that line of thinking take us? We would have ignored bacteria as the cause of ulcers. Reducing stress and staying away from spicy foods would still be the way doctors handled it. After all, that’s what many of them learned in school. Why should they unlearn it just because some stupid scientists come up with a different idea?

How about marriage. Anybody “learn” how to do something that just didn’t seem to work? Why should you have to unlearn it just because a different approach works better?

Religion. I learned some cool stuff as a kid. I think I’ll put the good book away and forgo church. I already know what I need to. Why should I revisit it again?

His attack on scientists (answering to no one with dictatorial power) is also breathtaking for it’s gross mischaracterization and slander. Whatever the politics and contention of planetary classification, I’m quite sure there’s no planetary physicist in an underground bunker stroking a white cat and smoking a pipe, deciding one day to use his unbounded power to blight Pluto.

Is there any area in life where we shouldn’t learn with a touch of humility, with the acknowledgment that we might be wrong and that new information might change the way we understand something?

Oops. I just thought of one… Apparently being a journalist for Fox News.

(Hat tip to John Hawks on the quote)

Liang Bua 1’s asymmetrical skull

In 2004, scientists announced the discovery of a new species of small hominid which lived on the island of Flores (Indonesia), which they dubbed Homo floresiensis. The media, ever the bastions of scientific truth and accuracy, immediately popularized the discovery by calling H. floresiensis hobbits.

Recently however, a debate has flared up on what H. floresiensis really is. In particular, one of the specimens has a very asymmetrical skull which some scientists are now claiming is the result of disease. Other features of the skull, which were originally reported to be distinct from modern day humans, are now being challenged as falling within the range of modern day and prehistoric humans from that region of the world.

I don’t have anything to add to that discussion. Anthropology and human evolution are hardly my area of specialty. For a quick read about the situation though, MSNBC has the details. For a thorough but technical account, John Hawks’ anthropology blog provides (as always) a great deal of information on the controversy.

Here’s what I find so terribly interesting about the whole thing. It’s a beautiful example of how science works! Some scientists find some data, put the pieces together, go through the process of peer review, and publish a claim — “hobbits” on Flores! Some other scientists review their data, find that they may be a better explanation than “hobbits on Flores” and publish a rebuttal. A skirmish begins. People take sides and scientists take their best shots at each other in trying to explain these finds. Egos are perhaps bruised and battered along the way, but in the end, what we learn about these fossils is far more robust because of the scrutiny they receive.

In short, this is a beautiful example of science at work. This controversy and debate is not a sign that there’s something terribly wrong with science or the original researchers, but rather it’s exactly what healthy science is supposed to do.

Yet, I would bet everything I own on the predictable creationist rejection of this find. Whatever the consensus comes to be, creationists will use this debate, this robust discussion, to say to their followers, isn’t science sick. Science is damned if they get it wrong — that the fossils turn out not be a new species, H. floresiensis — because creationists will forever use it as an example of incompetence. But even worse, if science decides that H. floresiensis really is deserving of classification as a unique species, creationists will point to the controversy as proof that we’re wrong.

Does anyone doubt this? When creationists commonly go back 80 and 100 years to point to controversies or hoaxes (piltdown man, Nebraska man, etc) that existed in the past, and completely ignore that science has long ago fixed its mistakes, I have no doubt they’ll do exactly the same with H. floresiensis.

It’s really sad to me. At it’s highest levels, it’s incredibly dishonest — which is something that creationist leaders should know better than. For the most part though, it’s simply a matter of ignorance. Many people don’t understand how science works. They don’t understand that the controversy is a good thing, not a bad thing.

This debate on how exactly to classify H. floresiensis is a great teaching moment for those willing to learn. We should all sit back and be content to see what happens. Whatever direction it takes, the answers, as well as the process, will lead us closer to the truth.

Most of the time that I speak of intelligent design, Dembski, or his blog Uncommon Descent I’m highly critical. There’s lots not to like. But several days ago he posted a picture that was really quite nice — a “fire rainbow”.

fire rainbow over Idaho — click for larger picture

Once I stopped looking at the pretty picture and read the content, the feeling of appreciation quickly dissipated though. Dembski writes:

It’s the gratuitousness of such beaty that leads me to rebel against materialism.

Science, as a way of knowing, seeks materialistic explanations. That is, it seeks to explain the natural world solely by seeking natural explanations. This is what Dembski is referring to as materialism.

Now for what it’s worth, I (and probably all Christians) reject absolute materialism. That is to say that science is the only way of knowing something, that matter and nature are all there are, and that humans are simply an accidental byproduct.

But, is it a fair criticism to condemn science for seeking materialistic explanations? Should Christians (or for that matter others) be demanding that we seek more than just natural explanations for what we study? In one word — NO!

Let’s take the case of the fire rainbow. Snopes.com reports the precise conditions under which they form.

In general, a circumhorizontal arc (or “fire rainbow”) appears when the sun is high in the sky (i.e., higher than 58° above the horizon), and its light passes through diaphanous, high-altitude cirrus clouds made up of hexagonal plate crystals. Sunlight entering the crystals’ vertical side faces and leaving through their bottom faces is refracted (as through a prism) and separated into an array of visible colors. When the plate crystals in cirrus clouds are aligned optimally (i.e., with their faces parallel to the ground), the resulting display is a brilliant spectrum of colors reminiscent of a rainbow.

Far from being a mystery or a miracle, we know exactly how and under what conditions “fire rainbows” form. So, because this picture is beautiful, do I need to reject the naturalistic explanation that explains it? Better yet, for those of you with children, I’ll assume you find them beautiful too. Do you need to reject the theory of fertilization in order to be a good ChristianTM?

Clearly not. A Christian need not reject natural explanations for the natural world. Indeed it is the spectacular success of natural explanations that makes them so convincing. All a Christian must do is understand the place of natural explanations — that they explain the natural, observable world. Are there people who base their absolute materialism on naturalistic materialism? Yeah, sure. Are Christians free to disagree? Yeah, sure.

Dembski, like always, is creating a false conflict. It is the gravest of mistakes to lay the foundation of one’s faith on the belief that science can never explain something. I don’t care if it’s a fire rainbow, embryonic development, or even the origins of life. We can safely say that we live in a world governed by the laws of nature. Christians simply accept that God is the originator and sustainer of such laws.

A few days later though, it gets even more bizarre though in this post of predictions titled “If naturalistic materialism is true…“. I’m going to quote the first bit, and I’d like you to read it and carefully think about its implications.

If naturalistic materialism is true:

1. We are nothing but the sum of our parts. Our bodies are wholly explicable in terms of nature, and there is no aspect of our bodies that cannot be described in purely naturalistic terms, nor any means of describing ourselves other than naturalistic ones. Human beings are simply organic beings and nothing more, composed of organs which are composed of cells which are composed of molecules which are composed of atoms which are composed of sub-atomic particles (and, if string theory is valid, the particles are composed of various strings of energy), and that’s it. We are thus material beings and not spiritual ones. We have no souls. Consciousness is therefore nothing but a curious offshoot of biochemistry, a higher reasoning function of our brains that has arisen from the natural advantage afforded to us by both the size of the human brain and its level of complexity. It is NOT evidence that Man is a creature imago dei, but rather evidence of the power by which natural selection operating in tandem with random genetic mutation can operate.

THEREFORE, I PREDICT that scientists will one day construct a device capable of transporting a human body across vast regions of space–a device comparable to the “teleporter” as portrayed in the “Star Trek” TV series. It will disassemble a living human body at a molecular or sub-molecular level, transport those small bits of living organic material at high speed across great distance, and reassemble them to their original macroscopic configuration, with no ill effects to the body it has transported.

IF, HOWEVER, after several hundred years of scientific advance no such a device will have been formulated, this fact should be taken as an indication that naturalistic materialism is not true.

Consider what they’re really saying. The complexity involved in this “Star Trek” transportation device would be more than immense. It just might be impossible. For example, one source I came across suggested that a 150 pound person would contain ~7×1027 atoms. Simply put, that’s 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms. (Don’t ask me how to say that number). Furthermore, 99% of them are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. Thus, taking the number of electrons that each of those elements have and doing a little math, 99% of the body’s atoms contain ~2.3×1028 electrons.

Why did I bore you with the numbers? Simply put, if you know anything about quantum mechanics, then you’d know that every single one of these atoms and electrons would have to be “transported”, with all of their quantum properties intact. From what I understand of quantum mechanics (not much) — we can only deal with these properties statistically and in fact, if we’re right, we’ll never be able to predict exactly how an electron (or any of the other subatomic particles) behave.

Yet Dembski’s post would have us believe that this is a reasonable test of science’s validity. Now Intelligent design makes no predictions and has generated no research — despite vociferous claims to the contrary from prominent ID supporters. Thus the incredible irony in using the word predictions has not escaped the attention of this writer. Instead of falsifiable predictions highlighting the utility and explanatory power of intelligent design, we get bold “predictions” about what science will or will not be able to do several hundred years from now. If science does not live up to the expectations outlined in Dembski’s post, then it is found to be wanting, and presumably intelligent design wins by default.

Follow the logic? I didn’t think so.

The rest of the post is just as amusing: Claims such as

• We should find other life within the universe — The universe is something like 150 billion light years wide. That means that the vast majority of the universe may lie well outside our ability to detect life. That said, life may well exist. Who knows if or when we’ll find it. What we don’t know about other planets doesn’t change what we do know about our own.
• We should observe speciation — here the writer is simply ignorant, as we have every reason to believe we have.
• If Darwin was right, then morality is purely subjective — Crap! I’d better go cheat on my wife and have sex with animals. If I want to, why wouldn’t I? Here’s the most vile claim in the book and one that I will fight my whole life against. One can be a “Darwinian” and a Christian. I’m hardly the only one.

These two posts represent the age old battle. Pitting science and religion against each other and creating false dichotomies which insult a person’s intelligence, designed to steer them away from science by playing to their fears and prejudices. To borrow Dembski’s word, it’s the gratuitousness of such criticism that angers me.

In my week long break, there were a bunch of things that I should have blogged about. Hardly having the time to cover any of them in depth, I’ll simply include a list with some links for your perusal.

• Perhaps the biggest story I missed in my week off was Kansas. The state board of education got an “anti-science” cleansing in the primary elections. Several republicans that were vehemently opposed to properly teaching science were replaced by moderate republicans, most notably Connie Morris. MSNBC covers the details and describes just how crazy life in Kansas is.
  

  Control of the school board has slipped into, out of and back into conservative Republicans’ hands since 1998, resulting in anti-evolution standards in 1999, evolution-friendly ones in 2001 and anti-evolution ones again last year.

  And for more on the political math in the election, see this post on Red State Rabble, a good source for Kansas politics as they relate to education.

• NASA has joined the search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker by using air planes and “lasers” to map vegetation and identify potential habitat. While I lean on the side that the bird is extinct, it may be very interesting to see what they can learn about the habitat through techniques like this. I think every grad student studying ecology should get their own laser equipped NASA aircraft.
• In a new study, Sooty Shearwaters have been found to migrate over 40,000 miles in a single year. There are a couple of great write-ups on this story from the BBC and The Australian, as well as this site, which also included a nice picture gallery. At these distances, the birds would easily claim the title of longest migration in the world from Artic Tern. However, I might slightly quibble with how we define migration. Shearwaters and other tube-nosed birds (like Albatross) are ideally suited to cruise the open oceans. It is their habitat. It doesn’t mean this isn’t impressive. Just that perhaps it’s still impressive when a bird like the Arctic Tern makes the trip between poles to find favorable habitat.
• I had no idea that high polar latitudes and temperatures lower than -176°F could cause psychedelic clouds. Here’s the story, some really nice pictures, oh and leave it to the British to ruin the moment and kill the beauty.
• The latest edition of Carnival of the Spineless (all about invertebrates) was held over at Words and Pictures. There were a number of very interesting posts, including (I would like to think) two (here and here) from yours truly.