30 Years Ago Today

If you are following me you probably have already read multiple stories about this and already know what I am going to say. 30 years ago today was the eruption of Mount St. Helens. While I was not alive at the time of the eruption I am a geologist by training so this eruption is studies in depth because of all the data we got from it. We have learned not just about the eruption itself but, as National Geographic points out, we also learned how wildlife responds. Life returned to the area much faster than was expected and although some of the ecosystems were changed, see Spirit Lake.

My one personal antedote to add is that at the time of the eruption my parents were living in Laramie, Wyoming and they remember the ash coming down. While the ash was not as intense there as it was closer to the volcano they still had darker days and travel was severely restricted.

I'll leave you with an image from the eruption:

Why Dinosaurs are not just big lizards, Part 3

Part 1, Part 2

So last time I talked about the stance of dinosaurs and how that differs from that of lizards. Well I am sure that people were saying how do we know this, or humans just set them up to look this way. That leads to the next point:

Hip

So when we look at mammals, another group of animals that have their legs positioned under their body seen below in a specimen of a florida spectacled bear (Tremarctos floridanus) from the Florida Museum of Natural History (see story about my visit here).

photo by author

So this is a typical ball and socket joint that mammals evolved that allows us to position our legs under our bodies but it also allows some side to side (abduction and adduction) of our legs as well. This trait probably evolved to help us move over less than smooth terrain.

So I kind of implied that mammal hip bones differed from those of the dinosaurs and we will see why here in a minute but first lets look at the hip of a lizard:

Modified from here

So you can see that there is some similarity but the way the femur is formed it prevents the legs of the lizard from being able to sit directly under the body giving it a more sprawling posture (note to self: take more pictures of lizard skeletons).

So finally what did the dinosaur hips look like:

Modified from Holtz and Brett-Surman (1997)

So what is the first thing you probably notice about the dinosaur hips, hint there is a red arrow pointing to it? That's right there is a hole in the center of each one, called the acetabulum and in dinosaurs we say it is perforated. This takes a femur that has been modified from that of the earlier reptiles and actually puts the head of it inside of the hip itself. This characteristic allows them to position the legs directly under the body but unlike the way that mammals developed a more upright posture dinosaurs had less flexibility when it comes to the ability of them to move their legs side to side over uneven terrain.

Again but those aren't fossils alright lets look at some actual fossils:




And just to point out something not entirely unrelated check out the hip structure on this bird skeleton he clearly shares something with dinosaurs:


Part 1, Part 2

Source

Holtz, T.R., Jr., and M.K. Brett-Surman. 1997. The osteology of the dinosaurs. In J.O. Farlow and M.K. Brett-Surman (eds.), The Complete Dinosaur, pp. 78-106. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

The Pill for Men

So with the semester just ending I should have a little more time to blog, the next few weeks might be an exception since I will be out of town. It also means I will be busy doing research and spending most of the day locked away in the basement so there maybe many days I just need to get away from the computer so I am not going to make any promises right now. But enough about me lets get onto the post.

Apparently earlier this week was the 50th anniversary of The Pill. Yes the birth control one. Well that is a pretty major accomplishment and there is no doubt that the pill has changed the way that sex is viewed in most of the western world, for good or bad (I am not going to argue that point but you can probably guess how I feel). Well talk has been going for at least the last 10 years about working on a male version of the pill. Now as with all medicine the past versions have problems that are currently unacceptable to get it through but now they are saying one will be ready within the next decade.

Now as a guy myself I feel that a male version of contraceptive would be another huge leap forward. So you can imagine how I felt when I saw a headline that read A Birth Control Pill for Men? In Your Dreams, but I figured I would hear out what the author had to say.

She starts with a basic history of the pill and then goes on to say this:

"Probably most women would agree that the Pill heavily contributed to the achievement of that aim," Dr. Djerassi wrote, "but at the same time the convenience of the Pill and its wide acceptance by women gave many men the excuse to abandon their own responsibility." Only the threat of HIV/AIDS and other virulent STDs jolted men from their happy contraceptive slumber.

This is a good argument against giving men the pill. We [men] are not always thinking about what is right a lot of times with think with our penis and not with our heads. So this argument bases off of the rise of STDs after women first started using the pill. When it finally got into every one's head that maybe the spread of STDs were due to this unprotected sex and that not only can men give it but they can get it too. So it became beneficial for women to not admit that they were on the pill to help prevent the spread of STDs by still making the man put on a condom. There is a chance that women would say they aren't on the pill the guy would say, "That's alright I am!" Yes this is a good argument against it, too bad that isn't the way the author went. The very next sentence she says:

And yet, disease is not a pregnancy.

Yeah you are right I would so rather have HIV/AIDS and die young than to get a woman pregnant. And then to wrap it up she ends it like this:

And if it does, as promised, finally finally make it to market? If we finally convinced Big Pharma to invest and the FDA to approve, would women even trust men to take it while the consequence of forgetting remains our bodies that get pregnant? With just a handful of particularly fertile exceptions, men can't gestate babies. Until they can, it's hard to imagine women handing that responsibility over to a man, who might forget to take his Pill or change his patch. Shudder.

Seriously the argument that you choose to use is that you don't trust men to take their pill on time. Yes not all men are responsible but you want to know how best to take that worry out of your mind? Simple stay on the pill yourself! As is most Doctors recommend that you don't rely on the pill or the patch but you also use a condom. What harm would a third level of protection do? Look I am all for a woman's right to choose but why not a men's right to choose. If a pill for men came out and I could get even closer to shoulder even the amount of the contraceptive control that my significant other shoulders than how does that harm her right as a woman to choose.

Now normally I don't discuss what people say in the comments but I saw a lot of arguments similar to this one:

I have to agree on a few points. A birth control pill for men is just asking for trouble. Imagine, a rapist male, he buys this. What happens next? Should be obvious. A birth control pill for males is an invitation. Not a good one. Some males would disagree but it is a bad thing to have something like that around. Some would take advantage of it and the results, less about actually love and just "what chick can I nail next." I don't like to say this since I'm a male, but, Most guys think about sex alot, and some get in a relationship for that reason. A pill like this like I've said is an invatation that's not wanted or good natured.

Your concern is for a rapist using the pill and then raping someone. It does not seem to me that rapist care now. They could care less if the woman they rape has a kid or gets an STD and I doubt a pill for men would prevent DNA tests from being useful in finding the rapist. The next comment about what chick can I nail next pleads a bigger question. You think guys don't do that now? Go to any bar or party near a major college in the US and I think you will find that same mentality in "some males."

I don't know let me know how off base I am if you think I am wrong/crazy.

Book Review #4

I have been working on this book for probably about 6 months now and finally decided that if I was ever going to finish another book I wanted to read it was going to have to be by reading a chapter or so a night right before I go to bed. The book that I read for this review was Why Darwin Matters by Dr. Michael Shermer.

This book is very much a dismantling of the intelligent design community saying that what they practice is science, the fact that the subtitle is "The case against Intelligent Design" should have been a dead give away for that. While many people have written books about it (see Only a Theory here). Dr Shermer takes on ID by not just showing what they believe is a religion and how all of their main claims are wrong, but he also shows how evolution is the correct theory. The back cover reads:

In Why Darwin Matters, Michael Shermer, the bestselling author of Why People Believe Weird Things and the publisher of Skeptic magazine, decodes the facts of evolution and shows how natural selection achieves the elegant design of life. Shermer, once an evangelical Christian and a creationist, argues that Intelligent Design proponents invoke a combination of bad, science, political antipathy, and flawed theology in their new brand of creationism. He refutes their pseudoscientific arguments and then demonstrates why conservatives and people of faith can and should embrace evolution. Why Darwin Matters is an incisive examination of what is at stake in the debate over evolution.

I really did enjoy this book it was an easy read and when I set myself too it I got through it very quickly. The data he presents is well supported and he handles the situation including the victory in Dover very humbly. He also shows why those who present themselves as Christians and Conservatives should really accept evolution. The book tends to strive away from the technical and lays out the case in a way everyone should be able to understand it.

Dr. Shermer is a very strong Atheist but it did not come off in this book. In fact if you were just a casual reader you might even be inclined to think that he is a Christian, although this might come from his devout Christian up bringing. I would recommend this book to anyone who might be questioning evolution, I only limit because those devoutly religious who already outright deny evolution probably won't read this at all. Read it see why science is important, the real questions in evolutionary theory currently (and how they are being solved), and how science and religion tackle very separate questions.

Book Citation
Shermer, Michael. Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design. 2006. Holt: New York

Book review page

Dinosaur blood and polystrate trees

So Potholer54debunks (a subsidiary of Potholer54) has a new video out in which he debunks the common creationist claims about dinosaur blood found in fossils and polystrate trees, trees that "cut through multiple sedimentary layers."



As always this is another good video by him and he makes a good point. If you hear a scientific claim in the common press, or from your creationist friends, go to the actual source. Google has this thing called Google Scholar it is good for finding scientific papers. I recently blogged about why it was important to read the original source, wow I don't know how to phrase that sentence so I don't sound like an arrogant ass.

Pterosaurs are pterosaurs

Recently a paper was published on a new pterosaur from the Dallas region of Texas (Myers, 2010). While an interesting find, I suggest you find the paper to read about it, I think the paper speaks for itself I wanted to blog about something else. I have read two different public articles about the paper and they both get it wrong.

The first one (found here) is a blog post from Scientific Blogging. Now I have stated in the past that I do enjoy the blogs on Scientific Blogging (see here, here, here, and here) but in this case they said something that made slap my own face.

The rare pterosaur — literally a winged lizard — is also one of the youngest members in the world of the family Ornithocheiridae, and only the second ornithocheirid ever documented in North America.

[emphasis mine]

Come on this is a scientific blog you are supposed to get this right. Lizards fall within the order Squamata and are more specifically within the Suborder of Lacertilia. While they are closely related to lizards, at least more so than they are to mammals, pterosaurs are not lizards. Pterosaurs are an order within the Archosaurs which actually puts them more closely related to crocodiles and dinosaurs than lizards.

So if a scientific blog can't get it right what chance do the nonscientific sources have? This next write up is from Fox News and was sent to me by my father. You don't have to get past the headline to see what is wrong with this article:

New Toothy, Flying Dino Discovered in Texas

Yes they call them dinosaurs and it gets better:

Evidence of these flying creatures has been rare in North America -- the newly identified Aetodactylus halli is only the second such dinosaur ever documented here, although toothed pterosaurs like it were common at the time elsewhere in the world.

Argh, come on people. While yes both dinosaurs and pterosaurs are members of Ornithodira they differ from there in many ways, not going to go in depth here because it would take to long, and some scientists say they shouldn't even be related this far down. This particular paragraph also makes it seem that pterosaurs, or worse yet dinosaurs, are rare in North America. If you read the actual paper neither one of those statements are what is argued in fact it they are just arguing that the ornithocheirid pterosaurs are rare in North America, in fact this is the second one of that clade found in North America. If they are arguing that dinosaurs are rare in Texas they are also wrong, also see Jacobs (1995).

So what conclusion can we draw from this? Scientists need to make sure that when interviewed we make sure to stress things like pterosaurs are not dinosaurs or lizards. We also need to make sure we do educated the general public when given the chance to point out things like this, because I am sure that most kids could tell you that pterosaurs are not dinosaurs nor are they lizards so we need to make sure we keep stressing this!

Sources

JACOBS, L. 1995. Lone Star Dinosaurs. Texas A& M University Press, College Station, 160 p.

MYERS, T. S. 2010. A new ornithocheirid pterosaur from the upper Cretaceous (Cenomanian-Turonian) Eagle Ford group of Texas. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 30(1):280-287.

Why Dinosaurs are not just big lizards, Part 2

Part 1, Part 3

So last time we talked about the obvious differences between dinosaurs and lizards in this one we will talk a little more in depth about these differences.

Stance

So we have all probably seen alligators and lizards walking if you haven't check out the videos below:



You will probably notice that they way that they are walking has their feet in a position that is not directly under their body. Now look at the way you or your dog/cat/other mammal walks you will notice that the feet of the mammals are placed directly under the body. This allows these organisms to better support their own body weight with less muscle work while at the same time extending the stride length of the animal so you increase the speed without lengthening the legs. So what does this have to do with dinosaurs? Well lets look at dinosaur's closest living relatives, the birds:



Look at where those legs are located, they are right under the body of the bird. If you want to do more just do a google image search for bird legs. Some of you might be saying, "Wait birds are very derived," or, "You are assuming evolution to be correct." The answer to both statements is yes, you will notice that all that we see of the bird leg is actually from the knee down, and yes, so lets just look at dinosaur stance itself.



So what do we notice in those two images? The first thing, and the one most important to this post is the location of the legs they are directly under the body of the dinosaurs. This is a drastic change from that of the lizards and represent a huge improvement in the way that these organisms moved and may have been one of the reasons they were able to conquer the world during the Mesozoic. You be asking why their legs are under them or how do we know this? We will talk about that next time. I can also hear the complaints now, well those are drawing/recreations they aren't proof! True so here try this:







There better?

Part 1, Part 3

Why Dinosaurs are not just big lizards, Part 1

Part 2, Part 3

So with the semester winding down I figured I would take the time to explain the why the common young earth creationists (hence forth known as YEC) use to explain the lack of dinosaurs on the planet now but exist in the fossil record:



Kent is the main person who proliferates this fallacy, although I am sure that Ken Ham does as well, but now that he is behind bars it hasn't been getting quite as much press. He does get one thing right and that is reptiles continue to grow their entire life but he is wrong that dinosaurs are just big lizards and over the next few day/weeks we will discuss why. I will link all of these together so you can pick up from any part of the series and get to any other part. This first one should be pretty obvious to all parties concerned:

Physical Apperance

So while there may be some dinosaurs that happen to look like lizards the majority of them look nothing like lizards. Tell me if you have ever seen a lizard that looks like any of these:



Ok so maybe some people have seen the last one:



Lizards or snakes or crocdiles would have to do some major changes during growth in order for this to happen and since the lizards are able to reproduce without these changes it should be pretty obvious that these are not in fact just big lizards.

But even if you exclude dinosaurs and talk about other prehistoric reptiles you might have somethings that are similar to modern lizards and crocs, not counting ancient lizards and crocs,(see here among others) the more famous prehistoric reptiles look nothing like what we have today. So what looks like these YECs:



Although this one some people might say still exists:



Part 2, Part 3

Satire at its finest

So while trying to accomplish the general truck load of stuff you have to accomplish at the end of every semester add too that trying to get Thesis proposals finalized I have found very little time to do much else. So I daily take a coffee break and read the school newspaper, as I am sure you have figured out by now. Well today I came across this article and while I recommend you read the whole thing let me point out one section that really got my attention, let me preface this by saying that for the whole month of April we are supposed to get 1.29 inches of rain and as of writing this article we had received 4.56 inches and most of that was over a 4 day period (source):

Thirdly, they proclaim the rest of the civilized world has it. Clearly not, as Lubbock has not implemented them.

One Lubbock resident obviously disagrees as well. “Real American cities don’t need such tomfoolery like science on our roads. The internal combustion engine in my Hummer, powered by foreign liquids found under the Earth’s crust only needs a flat stretch of formulated asphalt to work. Science has its place: where I’m not.”

I’m also skeptical. Anything that uses the laws of physics to move water from a dangerous spot to a basin seems like it could be witchcraft, which is why I call upon whoever is in charge of the Tech roads to ban these contraptions from our university’s streets. They should continue to do important things, like arresting that bicycle for not parking on a university-approved bike rack, regardless if there are no open spots or ticketing that car that has been parked in the 30-minute zone for 32 minutes.

I was still unsure, although I was leaning toward it being, if it was satire or not till I reached this point. After reading this it took everything in me to not just start cracking up. This is how a lot of America feels and that is what makes this funny. This opinion has been taken on publicly by Gov. Sarah Palin when she was addressing global climate change and said that we [Americans] don't need, "this snake oil science stuff" (source).

Satire at its best should make us think about ourselves and our surroundings but do so in a slightly funny way that points out how funny some of what we believe actually is. Unfortunately many people become so ingrained with a belief system that even when you point out some of the more ridiculous parts of it, and every system has them, people accuse you of trying to offend them. I don't know that this piece was aimed at the right audience some will get it some won't for sure but the people who will see it probably won't get that it isn't just saying that we need drainage here in Lubbock, we do, but will miss the broader point he is trying to make. I agree this is far from a great piece of literature that will be studied for years to come but the point still comes across pretty darn well.

For a good satirical YouTuber who angers a lot of Christians go here!

Under God in the Pledge

So while reading the school paper yesterday I came across an opinion article written by one of the more liberal writers for the paper (typically the antithesis of Mr. Long). Well apparently in West Texas even the liberals are pretty freaking conservative. The article (found here) discusses why the "under God" portion of the pledge should not be removed. Originally I was going to break this down point by point but the commenters on the article did it pretty well already so I will just address one thing that drew my ire more than the rest. After discussing how the pledge was originally written to be used by any country that wanted it he says this:

Still, identifying with Christian beliefs myself, I’m sure some of you who do not are saying, “Well of course you see it that way.” My response to those people is quite simple: At any time you are free to leave the United States.

Despite my religious views or those of the next man, I think some have failed to realize this isn’t an issue of religion; it’s an issue of patriotism. The pledge was not designed to pay tribute to God or any other higher power. It was adopted with the intentions of its use being to express pride and support of our country. When the pledge is said, we face a flag, not an alter [sic].

This issue is far from an issue of patriotism. I love this country and am always grateful to those who have sacrificed so I can live here in peace and drink excess of coffee and do what I want, to a certain extent obviously. But your God and my God may very well difference this country was founded on freedom of religion (regardless of what the Texas School Board thinks). In fact the First Amendment to the Constitution in what we call the Bill of Rights says this:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;[...]

There have been court cases to back this up since then including Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet, 512 U.S. 687 (1994) in which the Justice David Souter when writing the opinion of the majority said, "government should not prefer one religion to another, or religion to irreligion." Even as recently as 2007 court cases have supported this, see Inouye v Kemna. So Mr. Irby if you would prefer to live in a country that has an established religion then you are currently living in the wrong one. This is a democracy as you point out but we have rules in place to prevent:

Nor should a country founded on the basis of democracy be made to deny the wishes of the majority given that accommodating these wishes hurts no one, but denying them is in essence denying our country’s foundation and principles upon which it was built.

We have these rules to prevent this majority or mob rule from interfering on the rights of the minorities!