The marketing people at Quark Expeditions have a contest going to send a blogger on one of their Antarctic expeditions next year. They will send a blogger along simply based on votes, a straight-up popularity contest. This seems like an opportunity that I shouldn’t miss. I’m eager to compare my sartorial style with the resident penguin colonies down there, and I’m sure that dodging crabeater or Weddell seals should simply add a certain zest to the adventure for someone of my diminutive stature.

Unfortunately, there is some speciesism involved, and I’ll have to make do with using my designated Sherpa for the trip, Wesley Elsberry, as my proxy in the voting process. We’re still discussing which one of us gets smuggled along in the luggage. I’ve told him that that is what duffel bags are for. Wesley makes for a pretty good Sherpa, what with his interdisciplinary background in marine biology and computer science. He’s also handy with a camera and acoustics gear, and does some wicked blogging himself. Of course, it’s not a patch on my own set of qualifications, including the B. Amboo Chair in Creatoinformatics at the University of Ediacara, a J.D.-M.D.-quintuple Ph.D., and being a seven-time Nobel nominee. As the Izaak Walton of information theory and the Ulysses S. Grant of drinking contests, I can recognize talent for myself and exploit it. Sorry, the new word is collaboration, isn’t it? We did well working together at the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, and I’m looking forward to some more, er, collaboration in the cold.

So, Freeze Me, Please! Voting runs through September 30^th, so please pass this on. Here’s an 88x31 pixel badge you can use by copying the code below:

<a href="http://echothis.info/V0">
<img src="http://pandasthumb.org/images/pss/pss_freeze_me_badge_88x31.gif" />
</a>

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the 9^th North American Paleontological Convention in Cincinnati. ’Twas a grand old time, mingling with a lot of seriously excellent scientists.

Besides the excellent science, a highlight was the panel I sat on. This session was held over lunch on Thursday, and the subject was “Countering Creationism”. I was joined by Panda’s Thumb contributors Richard Hoppe, Jason Rosenhouse, and Art Hunt.

Some new polling data on the lack of acceptance of evolution.

The Discovery Institute is touting a poll that they commissioned from Zogby which claims that 52% of the American public believe that “the development of life was guided by intelligent design.”

An Ipsos/Mori poll in the UK shows that only 33% of the American public thinks that “scientific evidence for evolution exists”. This compares with 51% in Britain and 8% in Egypt. While the poll considered additional countries, over at a simple prop I’ve tabulated results for Britain, the US and Eqypt (as a representative Muslim country) and made some comments on the issue of theistic evolution. Leave comments there or here (though I will probably not be reading the thread here).

No.

We don’t normally do altie meds on PT, but I can’t resist Dr. Boli’s homeopathic cure for thirst.

Firefox 3.5 is out. To celebrate, I’m going to try out the new video tag.

And all the peasants rejoiced!

PNAS has put the proceedings of the Sackler Colloquium on 200 years of Darwin online. Nineteen papers, all free!

Via John Lynch.

I was recently interviewed by the blog Paw-Talk, as were Evil Monkey of the blog Neurotopia and Bug Girl, of Bug Girl’s Blog. Paw-Talk seems to be a blog for pet owners or self-described animal lovers, but the proprietress (known to me only as Ava) says she wants to include more science articles and interviews with scientists. Aside from the somewhat corny introductions, I was impressed by the quality of Ava’s questions, which clearly showed that she had done her homework before she requested the interviews. I did not notice any comments on the blog, but the Website also features a discussion board that looked well-attended.

This week is the ninth quadrennial meeting of the North American Paleontological Convention in Cincinnati, and Thursday the 25^th is “Evolution and Society” day. There are plenary talks in the morning by several people including Genie Scott and Ken Miller, and several parallel discussion panels around noon. One of the discussion panels is “Countering Creationism” with Jason Rosenhouse, Art Hunt, me, and Professor Steve Steve from the Thumb all free associating to the topic title. If you’re at the convention we invite you to participate: we need all the help we can get! Public school educators in the area have been specially invited to the day’s talks and discussions, and we enthusiastically welcome them.

The Darwin exhibit organized by the American Museum of Natural History in collaboration with the Museum of Science, Boston; The Field Museum, Chicago; the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada; and the Natural History Museum, London, England that is currently touring North America will be at the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland from June 27 through September 18, 2009. From all reports this is a magnificent exhibition, well worth the drive to Cleveland. In addition, several Cleveland institutions will have related programs through the summer, including showings of Galapagos at the Omnimax theater in the Science Center.

How can anyone resist an article titled “Sexual Intercourse Involving Giant Sperm in Cretaceous Ostracode”? You can’t, I tell you. It’s like a giant brain magnet, you open the journal to the index, and there’s that title, and you must read it before you can even consider continuing on to anything else.

Some organisms have evolved immensely long sperm tails — Drosophila bifurca, for instance, has sperm cells that are about 60mm long, or 20 times longer than the length of the entire adult body. The excessively long sperm tail is obviously not a structure that has evolved for better swimming; instead, it is thought to act as a tangled barrier in the female reproductive tract to prevent other males from fertilizing the female, and there is also some very interesting evidence that sperm coevolves with the female reproductive tract, so some sexual selection at the level of the gametes is going on.

At the same time, sperm morphology is extremely diverse, and seems to evolve very rapidly. Perhaps these mega-sperm are a transient fad? Not all species of Drosophila exhibit the phenomenon, and those that do vary considerably from species to species. What we’d like to know is if there are any lineages that maintain these patterns of giant sperm over long periods of evolutionary time…so what do we need to do? We need to go spelunking for sperm in fossils!

Future Evolution (SSE+SSB+ASN) Meetings:

2010 Portland, Oregon (Portland State University)

2011 Norman, Oklahoma (University of Oklahoma)

2012 Ottawa, Ontario

Future SMBE Meetings:

2010 Lyon, France

I wonder if the politicians in Oklahoma will try to ban the evolution meeting like they tried to ban Dawkins. I bet you will see some bills trying to ban state funds for being used for the conference and others that demand an equally sized creationism conference. Good luck with that.

John Freshwater’s termination hearing was scheduled to resume tomorrow, June 18, but it has been postponed. Two Board of Education members, Ian Watson and Jody Goetzman, were subpoenaed by R. Kelly Hamilton, Freshwater’s attorney, but have refused to testify on the ground that if they testify in the hearing they’d have to recuse themselves from voting on the recommendation of the hearing referee. Hamilton has asked the Common Pleas Court in Knox County to compel their testimony and the judge has not yet ruled on that request.

I am reminded of James Hutton’s 1788 remark on the age of the earth:

The result, therefore, of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning - no prospect of an end.

And yes, I still have those 50 pages of notes on the two days in May in my backpack.

Prof. Steve Steve and I are currently wandering around the University of Idaho waiting for Evolution 2009 to start. And we are not alone.

The latest issue (July/August, 2009) of Discover Magazine had a handful of splendid articles, but what really caught my eye was a remarkably detailed image of a 100-million-year-old wasp that had been fossilized inside an opaque piece of amber (p. 39). I could not find the picture on the Discover website, but I easily tracked it to here, where you may see it along with a number of other images.

According to the Discover article, Paul Tafforeau and colleagues at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility used a beam of x-rays to probe the interiors of bits of amber that are opaque to visible light. They found hundreds of fossilized beetles, ants, wasps, flies, and bits of plants, and made tomograms (or 3-dimensional reconstructions) of some of them. None of the trapped insects was bigger than a few millimeters, presumably because larger insects were not so easily trapped by the resin.

Discover notes that the team found more than 600 insects, none of which appears to be a modern species. It is not clear how many different species those insects represent, but Tafforeau says, “Each scan is a new discovery,” so I infer that they have discovered a great many new, ancient species - and that is among small insects only.

If you believe, with Lucretius and certain of our creationist colleagues, that species are not born but only die out, then all I can say is there must have been at one time one helluva lot of species.

PZ Myers has the video. Quick and dirty summary: Casey Luskin is interviewed on Fox; a critique using footage from the Fox interview is posted on Youtube; the Disco Dancers claim copyright violation for material they don’t own. DMCA fail!

‘Course, it’s consistent with the no-comments policy on their site and the modding policies on Uncommon Descent. I once mis-stated that as Uncommon Dissent, which more and more I think is the appropriate title.