Freethinker’s Asylum

While a debate between presidential candidates concerning the scientific issues facing our country seems unlikely, at least until a Democratic nominee is chosen, a poll by the Science Debate 2008 team shows that 85% of Americans want to hear the candidates’ positions on science and technology.

Additional poll results are available here.

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Image credit: Science Debate 2008 Poll (May 2008)

If you’re interested in the real story behind the new ID movie, Expelled, the NCSE has set up the Expelled Exposed website, with links to reviews and other analysis.

Scientific American also has a series - Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed - Scientific American’s Take, with commentary from Michael Shermer.

Update: One of my fellow grad students has a review of the film in our student newspaper. Kudos, Mark!

Daniel Dennet, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins in a discussion of religion and science. This is the first 10 minutes of a two hour program, the rest of which is available online or on DVD. Food for thought.

There’s a new piece of creationist propoganda making the rounds. Expelled is a “documentary” which several prominent figures in the scientific community were conned into appearing in under false pretenses.

Last weekend, at a premier at the Mall of America, Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers attended a screening. Well, Dawkins did. Myers was escorted out by the theater manager and a security guard.

They filmed this piece shortly afterward.

PLoS ONE has a article this month titled The Phylogeny of the Four Pan-American mtDNA Haplogroups: Implications for Evolutionary and Disease Studies. There are several points of interest:

1. The authors make use of data that is publicly available, either through GenBank or other DNA databases.
2. Complete mtDNA sequences (ie., all 16568 bases) were used for phylogenetic reconstruction.
3. Among 265 “novel” mtDNA sequences reported among Hispanics and African Americans in a recent addition to GenBank, 101 were of Native American origin.
4. All four Native American founder lineages (A2, B2, C1, D1) date to between 18,000-24,000 years ago.

Their results suggest that human expansion into the Americas coincided with the decline of the Last Glacial Maximum (Ice Age), knocking another hole in the “Clovis-first” hypothesis. Given that all four lineages give similar coalescent times, this study may also contribute to the “waves of migration” debate.

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Achilli A, Perego UA, Bravi CM, Coble MD, Kong QP, et al. (2008) The Phylogeny of the Four Pan-American MtDNA Haplogroups: Implications for Evolutionary and Disease Studies. PLoS ONE 3(3): e1764 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001764