As some of you may recall I wrote that I was experimenting with laboratory propagation of volvariella volvacea (Chinese Straw Mushrooms). Recently, among several other lines of R&D, I was experimenting with hydrogels as a nutrient media. So far I’ve been using them as an agar replacement with mixed results. I think the mixed results are due to uneven moisture distribution in the fine powder form I was using but that’s neither here nor there. Since the hydrogels can be loaded with nutrients at room temperature (the big advantage over agar) I decided to play around with another sterilant that would decompose at temperatures required to melt agar. I’ve been extremely successful using ampicillin at 1mg/20ml to prevent bacterial contamination in agar cultures – haven’t had a single bacterial infection in hundreds of agar plates. Ampicillin however breaks down quickly at temperatures over 60C so it must be added to agar at a critical stage after it’s cooled down (agar melts at 95C) some but before it solidifies (about 40C). This requires pouring fast and keeping a 60C water bath on the bench. However, ampicillin is so inexpensive it can be considered free of cost compared to wide spectrum antibiotics that survive pasteurization and autoclave temperatures. Once poured, ampicillin plates must be refrigerated until use as ampicillin in solution breaks down quickly at room temperature (a matter of days).

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A student of mine heard second-hand about anti-ID bumper stickers being handed out at a creationism conference. Unfortunately, my student didn’t have any details. Does anyone have any information about this conference or the actual statement on the bumper stickers?

Any of you that might be wondering what happened to John may get a glimpse of it at his new blog New Prescribed Evolution.

In the last 48 hours we’ve had almost 1000 comments attempt to be posted from sources in Europe (“Ripe Network” ISP in Amsterdam to be precise). They’re all promoting different kinds of insurance. This is at least an order of magnitude greater than the normal rate of spam (for perspective we’ve only had 10,000 spam comments total in the last year) and it’s too time consuming to sort through looking for legitimate comments so for the nonce I won’t be doing any more recovering of user comments from it – they’re simply being deleted en masse. For most of you this will have no impact.

here is a quote mine:

A Wakeup Call for Science Faculty

I believe that intelligent design should be taught in college science classes…

-Bruce Alberts, December 2, 2005

Apparently, the critics of ID are taking Albert’s words to heart because 36 universities as reported by ID at the Academy have courses with ID content in them. Joseph Campana at ResearchIntelligentDesign.org is trying to track ID content in various courses at universities in the United States and elsewhere. The list I linked to was gleaned from news sources and word of mouth. If anyone is aware of corrections or additions to the list, feel free to post them here and/or contact the authors of the list.

Unlike the public schools, the universities are viewed even by critics of ID as an appropriate place to discuss ID. Niall Shanks, Eugenie Scott, and even Bruce Alberts are favorable to the idea of ID being discussed in the universities. So “ID in the Academy” is something both sides want (albeit for opposite reasons)!

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A colleague of mine posted this on list to which I subscribe. It raises some interesting questions about the limits of adaptability, the limits to preadaptation/exaptation, and the extent to which selection presupposes adaptability. I’m not sure I buy the entire argument here (see the post on this blog about the evolution of nylonase), but I would like to see the insights below vigorously discussed on this blog. Are organisms simply more adaptable than can ever be explained on a purely evolutionary basis? For example, we’ve all heard of the experiments where human subjects wear goggles that flip their visual experience upside down. After some period of time the brain/mind/soul flips things upright. Since never in evolutionary history could anything Read More ›

Arthur Asuncion sends some links about the recent University of California, Irvine ID colloquium. I had the opportunity to attend, and reported on the event in a previous UD blog posting. Gil Arthur’s informal summary: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~aasuncio/2006/05/colloquium-on-origins-was-success.htm Arthur’s colleague’s informal summary: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~aasuncio/2006/05/thoughts-on-wednesdays-origins.htm The New University Article (campus newspaper): http://www.newu.uci.edu/article.php?id=4742 Daily Pilot Article (affiliated with LA Times, and more pro-evolution): http://www.dailypilot.com/education/story/45788p-69359c.html Perspective from Robert Camp (a skeptic): http://litcandle.blogspot.com/2006/05/what-if-they-held-colloquium-on-id-and.html

Nanotube bundles could be used as motors for nanodevices from PhysOrg.com
Even the smallest devices, assembled at the molecular level, need motors and oscillators. UC Riverside Mechanical Engineering Professor Qing Jiang thinks bundling groups of carbon nanotubes together could make an ultra-efficient and accurate nano-oscillator.
[…]

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Good news Haeckel lovers and everyone else who is fascinated by morbid 19th century charlatans. We all know Ernst Haeckel’s ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny/ embryonic recapitulation/doctored drawings. But one of his lesser known contributions to literature is a book called The History of Creation (this is the short title; the long title is set forth below), in which he divides people up into different species. The book was on most Nazis’ “must read” list. Dr. David C. Bossard has graciously scanned in both volumes of the massive work. It is very interesting reading. Here’s the full title of the book Dr. Bossard has scanned in: Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation: Or The Development of the Earth and its Inhabitants by Read More ›

J.B.S. Haldane first described the ‘cost of substitution’ and its limitation on the speed of evolution. That gave rise to a problem (see, for example, Dodson), known today as Haldane’s Dilemma. The problem is more severe in organisms with low reproduction rate and long generation time, such as the higher vertebrates: elephants, whales, apes and humans, etc. Evolutionary geneticists saw this as a compelling issue. Maynard-Smith and Kimura each cited it as the main reason for their revolutionary new views of evolutionary process.

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This weekend I received the following letter (reprinted here in its entirety) as a pdf file from Kevin Padian: Dear Bill, The May 10 posting on your weblog makes a vicious, false, and defamatory accusation against me based on factual errors and a thorough distortion of my actual statements. Your smear of my character demands an immediate retraction and apology. In the first place, you completely distorted what I said by quoting out of context. The contrast that I drew between the demographics of your audience and mine made a point completely different than your insinuation. What I said (in toto, not simply in the isolated snippets that you distorted) is that your audience – which I described accurately and Read More ›

Question: What is a sure sign that a scientific methodology has a big problem?
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“Quote Mining” is a pejorative term used to refer to the practice of compiling quotations, often from one’s opponents. As anyone who has studied evolution for any length of time knows, one need not quote ID proponents or creationists for authority against evolution or Darwinism. The Darwinists themselves can be quoted for practically every proposition that an ID proponent or a creationist would advance. When this is done, however, Darwinists often level the charge of “quote mining,” and accuse their opponents of taking the quotations out of context. For example, in his 1973 article “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote:

Their [i.e., creationists’] favorite sport is stringing together quotations, carefully and sometimes expertly taken out of context, to show that nothing is really established or agreed upon among evolutionists. Some of my colleagues and myself have been amused and amazed to read ourselves quoted in a way showing that we are really antievolutionists under the skin.

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May 2006, Scientific American, Letters

Assessing Deadly Certitude

In “Murdercide” [Skeptic], Michael Shermer is once again dead-on (forgive the pun): it is inapt to think of suicide bombers as typical suicide victims. Rather than succumbing to despair and depression, they are committing what they consider affirmative acts of faith. In short, they are religious fanatics, hardly different from the murderers of abortion doctors, except that the latter zealots don’t kill themselves as well.

Shermer cites Princeton University economist Alan B. Kreuger’s finding that some countries that have spawned many terrorists (Saudi Arabia and Bahrain) are economically well off yet lack civil liberties, whereas poor countries that protect civil liberties are unlikely to spawn terrorists. That might be a good correlation, but a better factor than civil liberties is probably the degree of fundamentalist religious extremism present in a country. The murderers of 9/11 were Islamic jihadists first, citizens of their various nations second.

Kevin Padian
Kensington, Calif.

It appears Kevin hates and fears religious fundamentalists of all stripes and considers them murderous fanatics. Note how he equates suicide bombers with those who kill abortion doctors saying only killing themselves afterward is what separates the two. Kevin Padian is one sick puppy with an irrational hatred of religious fundamentalists.

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The Biological Frontier of Physics Rob Phillips and Stephen R. Quake PHYSICS TODAY May 2006, page 38 http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-59/iss-5/p38.html … The cell’s nanometer-scale machines are mostly protein molecules, although a few are made from RNA, and they are capable of surprisingly complex manipulations. They perform almost all the important active tasks in the cell: metabolism, reproduction, response to changes in the environment, and so forth. They are incredibly sophisticated, and they, not their manmade counterparts, represent the pinnacle of nanotechnology. Yet scientists have no general theory for their assembly or operation. [AND YET …] It is surely one of the triumphs of evolution that Nature discovered how to make highly accurate machines in such a noisy environment.