What I learned about me when I started reading novels again

A few years ago, I somehow realized that I wanted to read more stories.

My work as a journal editor involved hours of intense scientific reading every day, and my insatiable interest in biology meant that my recreational reading was almost exclusively about science. But I could remember how much I loved stories as a kid: Tom Sawyer, The Black Stallion, all the Roald Dahl things. I read almost no fiction at all as a high schooler, then as a young Christian adult I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy and (urp) the Chronicles of Narnia. As a dad, I read (aloud with the family) all of the Harry Potter books, and that was great memorable fun. Somehow about 15 years ago I decided to read The Poisonwood Bible. (Unforgettable.) But my extensive reading habits were largely focused on science and Shakespeare.

To be sure, I derive both enjoyment and inspiration from science and from Shakespeare, but in retrospect it seems I needed to feed a part of me that finds inspiration in stories. In novels. And so I started collecting novels, specifically from female authors. I put a few on my Christmas list, and my loved ones obliged, and there they were on my shelves. Unread.

Then for some reason, not even two years ago, I decided to do it. I had a trip coming up: my annual journey to New York to co-lead the Scientific Writing Retreat at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. We had moved to Arizona, so the journey had evolved from a 4-hour ride on Amtrak to an all-day trip across the continent. I don't remember why, but I picked The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix Harrow, and started reading on the plane.

An extrovert's response to the nightmare of remote work

March of 2020 seems a very long time ago. The coronavirus pandemic was roaring to life in the US, and it had arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I lived and worked. I was leading an international team of editors, half of whom worked in the Cell Press office in Cambridge near the MIT campus. That month, the goal was to flatten the curve, so that our great hospitals and their heroic staffs would not be overwhelmed by COVID patients. There were no vaccines, and we were still wiping down grocery bags because we knew so little about the transmission of the virus. What we knew was that if we stayed away from each other, we would give the virus fewer opportunities to spread. So, early that month, I asked the team to start working from home. About a week later, the whole company moved to working from home.

My bike at Deer Island in Boston

Long before March 2020, I knew I was something of a unicorn in the world of professional editorial work. My colleagues were (and are) generous and committed and brilliant. I think we all had those things in common. But one thing I didn't share with them was my extroversion. I'm a true extrovert, and as near as I can tell I am one of less than a dozen extroverts in the world who work as a journal editor. I'm joking, but I'm serious when I say that when I became a journal editor more than 10 years ago, I stood out immediately among scores of serious introverts. (True story: our open-concept office had "zones" based on noise level, and I was banned from the quiet area. Not just discouraged. Banned.) And so in March 2020, when there were cute jokes going around about how we could be "heroes" by working from the sofa (Google "couch potatriotism"), I was unamused. Working from home meant that I lost my daily bike ride through Cambridge to a bustling workplace full of my friends and colleagues.

Do you ever have this nightmare?

I think I stopped having this dream sometime when I was a postdoc. Or maybe I didn't shake free till I got a real job... Mine was always a language class, so everyone was jabbering away in Spanish or something, just to magnify the horror.

Weekly sampler 22

It was a week of celebration and remembrance. There was a major birthday. And celebrations of that day of the first fruits of bigger things, in unlikely places like Florida and Arizona. It's all very exciting.

1. So... you're tired of reading about why Darwin is [God/Satan/Abe Lincoln/Howard Stern] or whether Darwinism is [Nazism/Atheism/True religion/ID codeword]. You'd rather read about what evolutionary biologists are doing today, and what real scientists think of Darwin and his ideas, but you don't have access to most academic journals. Take heart! There are some very good free resources that have been posted in celebration of Jason Varitek's signing, and here are some that I think are worth a visit:

• An entire issue of Heredity devoted to the topic of speciation
• A section of Current Biology devoted to reflections of various scientists upon reading (or perhaps re-reading) the Origin
• A series of very nice posts on evolutionary biology at Not Exactly Rocket Science, one of the best science blogs out there
• A new issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach, with excellent articles by Ryan Gregory (on artificial selection and domestication) and Michael Majerus (on the peppered moth story), among others. (Professor Majerus died last month; you can read a lot more about him at a tribute page at the University of Cambridge.)
• A special issue of Science devoted to Darwin and speciation, with some features freely available
• A special section at Nature devoted to all things Darwin
• A superb article at National Geographic by David Quammen on Darwin's first fossil clues to common descent

2. Randy Isaac (executive director of the ASA) has been providing reports from the AAAS annual meeting in Chicago, focused on topics of interest to ASA folks. He attended a symposium on human origins and posted comments on the ASA email list.

3. The Vatican will be holding a conference on evolution next month, and reports indicate that ID will get a very critical eye. Via John Farrell.

4. At the end of the month I'll be in Dayton, Tennessee to participate in an interesting Darwin-themed event at Bryan College and to hang with my friend Todd Wood. (Ted Davis is another speaker.) I hope to have a Scopes trial-centered tour as well. And in June I'll be giving a talk in a symposium at the North American Paleontological Convention in Cincinnati. I'll post the abstract here once it's accepted.

5. Siris on why Jerry Coyne should either stick to genetics or take a high school-level philosophy course.

6. More amazing illusions, again at Scientific American and again via Very Short List, but this time we have sculpted illusions of "impossible figures."

7. Gordon Glover has posted some lectures by Dennis Venema at Beyond the Firmament. Dennis is a professor at Trinity Western University in British Columbia and a fellow evolutionary creationist and ID skeptic.

And I don't even eat mooseburgers

In case your local news hasn't picked up the story yet.

First blogiversary for Quintessence of Dust

Actually, my first post went up 3 August 2007, a little more than a year ago, but my first real article wasn't posted till 19 August, so I guess today is as good a day as any to celebrate. It's been a fun year, coinciding with my sabbatical, which ends [sniff] in 3 weeks. Once I'm back in my professor routine, I expect that my posting will be less erratic, especially since I requested a new office that's a bit removed from the beaten track. We'll see.

Thanks to all for reading and commenting. (I think I'll do better at responding to comments when my schedule calms down.) I'm especially thankful to Steve Martin at An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution for being the first to find me and welcome me to the blogosphere. John Farrell was an early encouragement, and Panda's Thumb linked to one of my first journal club articles. The high point was the teosinte article, which was linked at ERV, Pharyngula and PT and which was honored with a place in The Open Laboratory 2007. The blog has about 240 subscribers and gets roughly 100 hits a day. Room to grow, but it's nice to have enthusiastic readers.

To Mike Beidler: thanks for the compliment; it's my favorite link in the one-year life of the project. To Gordon Glover: keep up the fantastic work; your book is a precious gift.

Here's to Year 2 of Quintessence of Dust. More journal clubs, more developmental biology, a little less bitching about lame creationist claptrap. Or your money back.

Weekly sampler 18

1. A nice new Tangled Bank went up yesterday at The Beagle Project Blog, which is a cool site worth visiting at other times, too.

2. Last week saw the unveiling of the Evangelical Manifesto, "an open declaration of who Evangelicals are and what they stand for," which seeks "to rally and to call for reform." The document has sparked some pretty intense discussion among Christians I know. Some of my colleagues at Calvin have denounced it fairly strongly, at least in part due to frustration with evangelical politics. Jamie Smith (another Calvin colleague) has some interesting remarks in three parts (II and III) at Generous Orthodoxy Think Tank, and profitable discussion ensued. Here's one excerpt of clear relevance here:

All too often we have disobeyed the great command to love the Lord our God with our hearts, souls, strength, and minds, and have fallen into an unbecoming anti-intellectualism that is a dire cultural handicap as well as a sin. In particular, some among us have betrayed the strong Christian tradition of a high view of science, epitomized in the very matrix of ideas that gave birth to modern science, and made themselves vulnerable to caricatures of the false hostility between science and faith. By doing so, we have unwittingly given comfort to the unbridled scientism and naturalism that are so rampant in our culture today.

All well and good, but it's the last sentence I don't like. It's certainly true that evangelical credulity and ignorance are potent fuels for New Atheist engines, but in my opinion that's not the primary danger of the malignancy of obscurantism. Evangelical buffoonery on scientific matters betrays a deep and latent gnostic infection – North American evangelicals, in my experience, too frequently veer right to the brink of outright Gnostic heresy. "False hostility between science and faith," it seems to me, is actually real hostility toward the natural world, as evidenced by a pervasive preference for supernatural action as "God's work." I would have written something very different at the end of that paragraph – something sort of like this:

By doing so, we have unwittingly given comfort to the unbridled gnosticism that is so rampant in Christendom today, a great and ancient heresy that cleaves the creation in two, inviting the open degradation of God's good work by those who mistakenly assume that what is natural or material is worthless.

But I do like the document overall, and I agree with one commenter at the Generous Orthodoxy Think Tank who pointed out that it's the discussion of the document that makes it come alive.

3. I'm currently engaged with a discussion on the ASA listserv with one pseudonymous Mike Gene. He's recently published a book, and blogs at a site promoting that book. But wait...he's one design proponent who seems to be swimming clear of the Discovery Institute wreckage, by virtue of uncharacteristic intelligence and intellectual integrity. It's still ID, and I'm not enthused about the pseudonymity, but if you're looking for a pro-ID thinker who actually acts like an adult, Mike Gene is someone to check out. James McGrath gives the book a strongly positive review over at Exploring Our Matrix.

4. ORFans are genes that seem to exist in isolation, say in one or only a few closely-related species. They seem to have just popped into existence in those species, amid a huge common collection of genes shared by, say, all animals. If this sounds weird or interesting to you, go to Panda's Thumb to learn more. (Yes, of course, ID fellows have seized on this as another piece of ignorance on which to build.)

5. Check out someone's illustrated list of the world's 25 weirdest animals. I'm pretty sure I saw Dobby in there.

6. Gordon Glover is continuing his excellent series on science & Christian education. What do the Antipodes have to do with evolution? Are they anywhere near the Antilles or the Galapagos? Well, I'm not going to tell you; Gordon does it better.

7. Publishers Weekly online has a little interview with Ken Miller. He mentions his part in the intriguing new Templeton effort in which they've gotten a collection of big-brained white men (and one woman) to address the question "Does science make belief in God obsolete?" Included is a debate between Miller and Christopher Hitchens.

8. On the ASA web site, Jeffrey Schloss of Westmont College has an extensive review essay on Expelled, "The Expelled Controversy: Overcoming or Raising Walls of Division?" A blog was set up to allow discussion among ASA members (I'm not a member, dang it); not much there yet, but maybe that will change soon.

Weekly sampler 17

It'll be a breakout week after a slow month on the blog. To the Edge of Evolution – and beyond!

1. Ian Musgrave over at Panda's Thumb provides a nice summary of the evolution of clotting systems and some new genomic data that could be used, by ID proponents like Michael Behe, to bolster their claims regarding the "irreducible complexity" of the clotting system. I've been saying it since the beginning here at QoD: genomic data has already made it nearly impossible to respectably doubt common descent, and it gets much worse every day.

2. Massimo Pigliucci gibbers on the Problem of Evil and Francisco Ayala. Not that I'm buying Ayala's theodicy either...

3. Dale Purves is an eminent neuroscientist whose work I've followed for two decades. In the last several years, he's expanded from developmental neurobiology into cognitive neuroscience. His lab's web page is loaded with good stuff, which is probably why it was recently honored by The Scientist. The resources page includes a bunch of interesting illusions and the full text of two of his out-of-print books.

Ebola virus, electron micrograph. Image from PHIL, ID# 1835.

4. The CDC (Centers for Disease Control & Prevention) has a free online image library called PHIL (Public Health Image Library). Now you know where to go to get your pictures of Ebola Virus for when you make your own Get Well Soon cards. Don't miss this little disclaimer:

WARNING: This library includes subject matter that might be unsuitable for children. Viewing discretion is advised.

Yikes!

5. Get to Gordon Glover's Beyond the Firmament blog for a superb series on "Science and Education" focused on questions surrounding natural science (mostly origins) and Christian education. He's covering folk science right now, in his excellent style. And you don't even have to pay.

6. Last week saw the unveiling of the platypus genome, and it included lots of interesting surprises. The media coverage has been typically spotty (with regard to accuracy); to get well-grounded, start with the brief piece at the New York Times then check out Ryan Gregory's thoughts (at his new blogging home) and perhaps the usual clarity dispensed by the cuddly PZ Myers.

Now this is a documentary you don't want to miss!

Via John Farrell.

Weekly sampler 15

Last quiz on genome size, with animals chosen at random. The first quiz post explains what this is all about, the second one has additional commentary, and the answers to both previous quizzes are in previous Weekly samplers.

Which organism has the larger genome?
	This one?	Or this one?
1
2
3
4

Here's some help for you. These are the C-values (amount of DNA per cell) for those animals, in ascending order:

0.23 -- 1.50 -- 2.24 -- 2.72 -- 2.91 -- 3.00 -- 3.29 -- 5.87

And here's a hint: the biggest number does not go with the biggest animal. Good luck!

1. We're living in the postgenomic era, and comparative genomics has already made it impossible to be an intellectually fulfilled anti-evolutionist. I've written before about genome sequencing and the imminence of large-scale and inexpensive sequencing. Well, the first super-fast (4 months vs. more than a decade for the Human Genome Project), super-cheap ($1.5 million vs. billions for the HGP) human genome sequence is now official. It's Jim Watson's genome. Blecch. Someone should use BLAST to search his coding sequences for this amino acid sequence:
Alanine - Serine - Serine - Histidine - Glutamine - Leucine - Glutamic acid
Don't get it? Think about this guy's conduct, then check out the amino acid code.

2. If you think I'm never nice to Reasons To Believe, check out the discussion this week at the ASA listserv. The topic: RTB's statement in which they distance themselves from Expelled.

3. Speaking of Expelled, which I will do infrequently, here's a good reason to avoid the movie and its cynical attempt to enlist and co-opt evangelical Christendom: its indefensible linkage of "Darwinism" with Nazism. If that's not bad enough, check out John Lynch's examination of the diabolical credentials of one "expert" interviewed in the film.

If you're a Christian who thinks that the Nazis are a useful polemical tool against evolution, then maybe you should read about some of Hitler's best-known influences. In my view, if you can read Luther's words and still think there's any moral high ground surrounding the Holocaust that can be claimed by Christendom, then you're crazy. The Holocaust is an unspeakably abhorrent stain on the Church, if you ask me, and it's not Darwinists (whoever they are) who have hard questions to answer. I, for one, believe that Christians should be overwhelmingly humbled by the occurrence of the Holocaust, and not because of the Problem of Evil.

Christopher Heard has several recent posts on Expelled that are worth checking out. Just promise me you won't give any money to these chowderheads.

I say: skip Expelled. Send the money to Compassion International. Or give it to a library or school. Say no to the minions of the Discovery Institute who have given up the pretense of "scientific" explorations of "design" and have lustily embraced full frontal culture war. [spits]

3. [Deep breath] So, were you alive in the 1980's? Remember Bloom County? It's my favorite comic strip of all time (apologies to Calvin & Hobbes). The strip often tracked current events; during the 1981 Arkansas creationism trial, Bloom County presented the famous "penguin evolution" trial in which "scientific penguinism" was being advocated by certain characters. Some classic excerpts from that brilliant series are illicitly available in the blogosphere; don't miss the one (second from the bottom) in which the scientific expert states, "Penguin evolution is a fib." You can find some similarly scintillating examples on Berkeley Breathed's site. My favorites: the first and the next to last.

4. Kevin Corcoran writes this about a recent piece by Stanley Fish on deconstruction:

John Searle said it first, but it applies here: it’s stuff like this that gives bullshit a bad name.

Now that's funny.

5. The online repository of Darwin's works at the University of Cambridge announced this week that they were making available a gigantic collection of Darwin's private papers, including "the first draft of his theory of evolution" and notes from the Beagle voyage. One little tidbit: apparently they sold tickets to lectures at the University of Edinburgh. Hmmmm. [rubs chin]
Via my brilliant brother, who works at HP and helps his wife run her cool small business.

6. There was a lot of cyberspace snickering when Answers Research Journal started up, and some of the articles there are pretty lame (the metaphysical piece would, I think, do poorly in a 200-level philosophy course at Calvin). But have a look at the new article on peer review; the authors are worth listening to, and their discussion of peer review from a Christian perspective is worth considering. I'm not crazy about the occasional proof-texting, and the authors frequently address the YEC community specifically. But here's the type of clear-headed wisdom you'll find in their paper:

By striving for excellence, we also love our neighbors. In our modern, western culture, many people view scientific pronouncements as authoritative. Christians who are also scientists therefore have an even higher duty to speak with excellence than the average Christian, simply because of the perceived authority that they possess. Errors made by Christians speaking in the name of science, no matter how well intentioned, can become “common wisdom” and thereby very difficult to correct. Even greater responsibility lies upon the scholar who professes ideas to the general public rather than just scholarly colleagues. In doing so, the scholar becomes a teacher, with all the attendant responsibilities (e.g., Matthew 5:19, 18:6; James 3:1). We therefore love our neighbors by striving to present the excellence of God in our written work and avoid the dangerous alternative of leading them into error.

I probably don't need to explain why that passage rang true. You might notice, by the way, the links take you to the New King James Version. What is it with the conservative/fundamentalist fondness for 400-year-old prose bearing the name of an English monarch?

Diagnosed...at last.

I thought it was the coffee, or maybe the Scottish buttheadedness. But no: it's a real live syndrome. Note that this newly-described malady, SIWOTI syndrome, sounds a bit like 'snotty' or 'so what-ee', so please be careful not to offend sufferers by mispronouncing the name, or by oversimplifying the affliction with crude cartoons. Via Pharyngula, a silly little blog written by one of the syndrome's most severely-affected victims.

Probability, miracles, and baseball

It's Opening Day, and it mustn't pass without mention here at QoD, especially since probability, randomness and the supernatural are such central topics around here.

Manny connects, game 2 in Japan. Image from Boston Globe online.

I've already confessed that Stephen Jay Gould is one of my favorite authors, and some of his essays I mark for repeat visits. ("The Most Unkindest Cut of All", in Dinosaur in a Haystack, is worth a trip to the library right now.) Gould was an avid baseball fan, and though he was happy to be a minion of the Evil Empire, his reflections on the National Pastime were always memorable.

Well, Gould's favorite ballplayer was Joe DiMaggio, who holds one of the most extraordinary records in all of sports. Gould wrote about this record in a 1988 book review, reprinted as an essay in Bully for Brontosaurus.

In 1941, as I gestated in my mother's womb, Joe DiMaggio got at least one hit in each of fifty-six successive games. Most records are only incrementally superior to runners-up; Roger Maris hit sixty-one homers in 1961, but Babe Ruth hit sixty in 1927 and fifty-nine in 1921, while Hank Greenberg (1938) and Jimmy Foxx (1932) both hit fifty-eight. But DiMaggio's fifty-six-game hitting streak is ridiculously and almost unreachably far from all challengers (Wee Willie Keeler and Peter Rose, both with forty-four, come second). Among sabremetricians — a contentious lot not known for agreement about anything — we find virtual consensus that DiMaggio's fifty-six–game hitting streak is the greatest accomplishment in the history of baseball, if not all modern sport.

So how should we understand this almost unbelievable feat? Gould claims that the streak is "both the greatest factual achievement in the history of baseball and a principal icon of American mythology." A great achievement because, unlike hitting a lot of home runs, or even hitting for a high average, the streak requires "unfailing consistency every day":

...a streak must be absolutely exceptionless; you are not allowed a single day of subpar play, or even bad luck. You bat only four or five times in an average game. Sometimes two or three of these efforts yield walks, and you get only one or two shots at a hit. Moreover, as tension mounts and notice increases, your life becomes unbearable. Reporters dog your every step; fans are even more intrusive than usual (one stole DiMaggio's favorite bat right in the middle of his streak). You cannot make a single mistake.

Okay, so that's why it's a great achievement; but what about the whole 'mythology' thing? Gould goes on to demonstrate the silliness of believing that DiMaggio's achievement was "better" than other (much shorter) streaks, that DiMaggio's streak was longer because of his greatness. Gould claims that we make this mistake because we just aren't wired to understand randomness and 'clumping' in random patterns.

We believe that long streaks and slumps must have direct causes internal to the sequence itself, and we have no feel for the frequency and length of sequences in random data. Thus, while we understand that DiMaggio's hitting streak was the longest ever, we don't appreciate its truly special character because we view all the others as equally patterned by cause, only a little shorter. We distinguish DiMaggio's feat merely by quantity along a continuum of courage; we should, instead, view his fifty-six-game hitting streak as a unique assault upon the otherwise unblemished record of Dame Probability.

Now, it seems to me that Gould is saying that DiMaggio's streak was well-nigh miraculous, meaning that it is so improbable that it really shouldn't have happened. Consider his (now bittersweet) coda:

DiMaggio's hitting streak is the finest of legitimate legends because it embodies the essence of the battle that truly defines our lives. DiMaggio activated the greatest and most unattainable dream of all humanity, the hope and chimera of all sages and shamans: he cheated death, at least for a while.

That's romantic stuff. And just as we're wiping the tears from our eyes, a couple of smart-ass mathematicians walk up and say, "Pull it together, dreamboat."

Yesterday's New York Times, presumably in celebration of Opening Day in the doomed House That Ruth Built, included a fascinating reexamination of the streak, in true Gouldian fashion. Meaning that the authors ran the kind of thought experiment that Gould made famous – they "replayed the tape," not of evolution but of baseball, and examined the likely outcomes. They re-created virtual baseball worlds, using the actual statistics from the history of baseball. Specifically, they created "parallel baseball universes" – 10,000 of them – and looked to see how improbable a super-streak really is.

And the answer is: not very improbable at all. Here's their punch line:

More than half the time, or in 5,295 baseball universes, the record for the longest hitting streak exceeded 53 games. Two-thirds of the time, the best streak was between 50 and 64 games.

In other words, streaks of 56 games or longer are not at all an unusual occurrence. Forty-two percent of the simulated baseball histories have a streak of DiMaggio’s length or longer. You shouldn’t be too surprised that someone, at some time in the history of the game, accomplished what DiMaggio did.

If you find this outcome disappointing, or if you feel I've robbed baseball of one of its supernatural episodes, take heart: the authors did uncover some eerie facts. First, 1941 was an exceedingly unlikely year for such a streak to occur. The vast majority of virtual streaks occurred in the decades before 1940. And there's this:

And Joe DiMaggio is nowhere near the likeliest player to hold the record for longest hitting streak in baseball history. He is No. 56 on the list. (Fifty-six? Cue “The Twilight Zone” music.)

Now, do you suppose the Discovery Institute fellows have read any of this stuff? For their sakes, I hope they like baseball. Their team, unlike their challenge to evolutionary theory, has a reasonable likelihood of success.

Weekly sampler 12

Shall we play a game? Recall Hugh Ross' fictional tale about the "team of physicists" that remade molecular genetics. Ross claimed, falsely, that:

They noticed that the quantity of "junk" in a species' genome was proportional to that species' degree of advancement.

The biological truth is the opposite: amount of DNA, "junk" or otherwise, is so uncorrelated with other aspects of biology that the situation was termed a paradox when it was first uncovered. Well...let's see the paradox in living color. In the next few Weekly samplers, I'll present you with some organisms (all animals) and we'll see how well you can guess their relative amounts of DNA (per genome) based on their "degree of advancement." Good luck! (Hint: use a quarter; it's easier to catch, and easier to find on the floor if you drop it.)

Which organism has the larger genome?
	This one?	Or this one?
1
2
3

Answers are here. Explanation can be found on the superb blog of one of the world's leading experts on genome size.

1. This story is 6 years old, but I never heard it till this week. A 52-year-old woman gets DNA testing to determine whether she can serve as an organ donor for her son. The tests reveal that she is apparently not the mother of two of her children. But...she is the mother of all of her children. How can this be?

She's a tetragametic chimera, meaning simply that her body is composed of cells descended from two genetically distinct embryos which evidently fused very early in development. Her ovaries are descended from one of those embryos, but her blood descends from the other. The result: she conceived children with gametes derived from one embryo, but her blood (which was used for the genetic tests) comes from the genetically-distinct other. Each of her cells has just one "parent", but as a whole she is derived from two distinct embryos, each of which arose from two distinct sperm/egg pairs; thus she, as a whole, is derived from four gametes instead of the typical two. Wild! And lots of fun for certain friends of mine who (like me) enjoy reflecting on human personhood and personal identity.

2. The newest issue of The Economist has an interesting piece on a large new European scientific collaboration.

“Explaining Religion”, as the project is known, is the largest-ever scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of disciplines from psychology to economics. And it is merely the latest manifestation of a growing tendency for science to poke its nose into the God business.

Bring it on!

3. This View of Life is a nice-looking site that aims to be "a beginner's guide to a science-based understanding of evolution." I'd love to hear some feedback from anyone who's checked it out. (Via the ASA listserv.)

4. Read Ryan Gregory on the much-abused concept of Just-So Stories.

5. Earlier this week, I heard an interesting story on MarketPlace about "video games that are good for you." I think I'll ditch Text Twist and try this instead. The games "reduce stress and boost self-confidence." Do they have any that add time to the day?

6. At the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), a site called BioInteractive is crawling with "free resources for science teachers & students." Lectures, animations, "virtual labs." It's a mixed bag, but very much worth a stroll. (Via Panda's Thumb.)

What I would do with a time machine

I'd go here. I'm sure I could trade my time machine for a ticket.

The city's a flood
And our love turns to rust
We're beaten and blown by the wind
Trampled in dust

I'll show you a place
Where there's no sorrow and there's no shame
Where the streets have no name.

Sometimes these guys make me cry. It's all I can do.

You should get college credit for reading this blog.

By way of the blessed Sandwalk, I present evidence that my blog is challenging (or that I should write shorter sentences containing less jargon):

PZ's mutating meme

About a week and a half ago, I was infected with an evolving blog meme, and I think the only way to get better is to pass it on. Brian over at Laelaps tagged me; maybe he's annoyed about my suggestion to his profs that they assign him more homework, or maybe he's indignant at my mention of the RU Screw. I know he wants to be a transitional fossil, but I doubt he wants to be an evolutionary dead-end, so I'll help him out just this once.

The meme started over at Pharyngula, where you can read about its origins. Here are the rules:

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
* You can leave them exactly as is.
* You can delete any one question.
* You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is...", or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is...".
* You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...".
* You must have at least one question in your set, or you've gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you're not viable.
Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.
Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is
going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

First, my phylogeny:
My great-great-great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite
My great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock
My grandparent is The Anterior Commissure
My parent is Laelaps

And my contributions to the meme pool:

The best scary movie in sociopolitical dystopias is:
Children of Men

The best sexy song in pop rock is:
"With or Without You" by U2.

The best scary story in romantic short stories is:
"The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe

The best B-movie in 1980's horror films is:
Alligator
I'm leaving this one in, but I've never seen this fine piece of cinematic art, or any other B-movie in the horror genre, and I've already used up my two mutations. I think this is a blow to my viability, but we'll let God PZ decide.

Now I get to infect some other bloggers. I'd like to infect ERV, but she's already been kissed, and she's a busy grad student, so I'm going to target Christians for infection. I tag:
Siris
John Farrell
Steve Martin at An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution
The Fire and the Rose

Now we'll see whether this expansion into a new niche will result in an adaptive radiation or a mass extinction.