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Yesterday Talking Points Memo pointed out that several of Alaska Governor Palin’s earmark requests were for… science. Specifically:

Palin’s office requested $2 million in federal monies to study crab mating habits; $494,900 for the recreational halibut harvest and $3.2 million for seal genetics research.

Most of the blogospheric attention on this has been focused on the scandal of Palin’s love of earmarks or the inconsistency of her positions. But there has also been some implicit criticism of spending so much money on something as preposterous as research on seal DNA. Josh Marshall of TPM redirected the discussion by addressing the issue head-on, explaining, along with the fact that his father was a marine biologist, that he did not mean to imply that spending money on such research is wasteful just because it sounds funny. This point was motivated by several substantive comments, which included the declaration that while spending taxpayer dollars on ecologically important issues is good, doing so through pork barrel initiatives is not. For example:

good science is funded through peer review, not via earmarks and lobbying.

we don’t want science funded this way, it leads to croneyism and misuse. give the money to NIH and NSF and don’t do by congressman trading favors.

earmarks are lousy way to fund science, bad, bad, bad.

The Evolution Directory posted this announcement today:

NCSE and The Panda’s Thumb are recruiting scientists named Steve, or Stephanie, or Stephen, or Esteban, et al. to join Project Steve, a tongue-in-cheek response to creationists. All members of Project Steve agree with the following statement:

Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences, and the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that all living things share a common ancestry. Although there are legitimate debates about the patterns and processes of evolution, there is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence. It is scientifically inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible for creationist pseudoscience, including but not limited to “intelligent design,” to be introduced into the science curricula of our nation’s public schools.

But you can only sign it if you have a doctorate and are named “Steve” or some variation thereof. At last count they had 895 members and are pushing to cross 900 so they can make new t-shirts that say “more than 900 Steves support evolution”. So please pass this message to any scientists or academics that you know named “Steve” (et al.) and urge them to join up.

For more information, go here!

Tiktaalik visiting the Leidy Biology building at UPenn during the filming of The Tiktaalik Song music video.

The University of Pennsylvania conducts something called the Penn Reading Project each fall for incoming first-year undergrads. Each student reads (or is supposed to read) an assigned book, and faculty from all different departments in the university host small-group discussions.

This year the book is Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, by (former Penn professor!) Neil Shubin. Shubin co-discovered Tiktaalik, a 375 million year old amphibious fish.

Spicing up this year’s reading project is… a music video about Tiktaalik! The Ohio band The Indoorfins was commissioned to write a song about this transitional fossil, its discovery by Shubin, its participation in the Penn Reading Project… The whole thing is pretty wild. Check out the video here. Warning: the refrain is really catchy.

Governor Tim Pawlenty defends intelligent design on this morning’s Meet the Press

This morning on Meet The Press, Tom Brokaw interviewed Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty to discuss the McCain campaign. And, to my surprise, they talked about evolution.

McCain running mate Sarah Palin’s support of creationism has been picked up by the national media and I’m totally enthused by the idea that the Republican campaign may be forced to address this issue head-on and produce a coherent stance on evolution and creationism in public schools. Of course, there was absolutely no coherence in Governor Pawlenty’s response to Brokaw’s question about whether Palin was right to promote teaching creationism:

I saw her comments on it yesterday, and I thought they were appropriate, which is, you know, let’s–if there are competing theories, and they are credible, her view of it was, according to comments in the newspaper, allow them all to be presented, or allow them both to be presented so students could be exposed to both, and–or more, and have a chance to be exposed to the, to the various theories and make up their own minds.

As tipster commenter Andrew pointed out, Pawlenty begins by calling it “creationism” but then drifts into calling it “intelligent design.” (Just more proof that the Dover prosecutors got it right: intelligent design is just religious creationism dressed in an ugly labcoat.) He dodges the real issue of what should be enforced in school curricula by arguing for local power at each school district, but he happily outs himself as an anti-evolutionist:

Intelligent design is something that in my view is a plausible and credible and something that I personally believe in.

So there’s another one for the list. You can read the transcript or watch the Netcast of today’s Meet the Press here.

Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska and John McCain’s just-announced running mate in the current presidential race, supports creationism.

Her position was made clear in her 2006 gubernatorial campaign, when she said it should be taught alongside evolution. Creationism, unlike intelligent design, is an openly religious ideology and is prohibited from being taught in public schools by the First Amendment. Palin later soft-pedaled her statement, explaining, “I don’t think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn’t have to be part of the curriculum.” But the Republican Party of Alaska’s position is that “Creation Science be given equal representation with the other scientific theories in the classroom.”

Regarding her personal views, she has said: “I believe we have a creator,” and was unable to explain whether she accepted evolution: “I’m not going to pretend I know how all this came to be.”

Senator Joe Biden, announced yesterday as Obama’s running mate, is unequivocal about his support of science.

Not only does he oppose teaching creationism and intelligent design in schools, he has expressed exasperation at how many Americans accept those ideas: “I refuse to believe the majority of people believe this malarkey!”

In an earlier conversation with blogger John Logsdon, Biden said he would support a doubling of the NSF and NIH budgets. He has voted to expand embryonic stem cell research and claims an aggressive stand on addressing global climate change. Read more about Biden’s positions at On the Issues.

Lots of people don’t believe in evolution, and some of them are pretty influential. Here’s an update to the previous list of famous people who… you know.

Got a tip? Leave a comment!

Ron Paul, Congressman (R, Texas)

Video of the Spartanburg (SC) GOP Executive Committee meeting, November 1, 2007

Thomas Robb, national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan

“The Trap is Set,” blog post by Thomas Robb, April 24, 2008

Ben Stein, actor (Famous line: “Bueller? …Bueller? …Bueller?”)

“Ben Stein to Battle Darwin in Major Film,” World Net Daily, September 28, 2007

Claude Vorilhon, founder of the Raelian Church

Raelian Movement website

John Boehner, House Minority Leader (R, Ohio)

Judd Gregg, Senator (R, New Hampshire)

Rick Santorum, former Senator (R, Pennsylvania)

Letter to the Discovery Institute (PDF) asserting Congress’ position that students should learn about theories other than evolution, in reference to their support of the Santorum Ammendment to the No Child Left Behind Act

Ronald Reagan, former President of the United States

“God, Satan and the Media,” The New York Times, March 4, 2003

Reverend Sun Myung Moon, Founder and leader of the Unification Church

Chapter 1: The Principle of Creation, from the Divine Principle, the main theological text of the Unification Church

Ted Nugent, musician

“Vegans, Keep Out: It’s Hunting Season,” The New York Times, September 27, 2005

Grover Norquist, lobbyist

“Conservatives and Evolution,” The New Republic, July 7, 2005

Pat Buchanan, politician and The American Conservative co-founder

“Conservatives and Evolution,” The New Republic, July 7, 2005

Sherri Shepherd, The View co-host

The View television clip

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A photo of a starling by Coen Elemans, lead author in a new PLoS One paper about superfast songbird muscles.

There’s another point about PLoS One that I wish I’d made in my earlier post: it’s the only journal publishing scientific articles on a broad range of topics that doesn’t have the extremely competitive acceptance rate of Science or Nature. An author submitting a manuscript chooses a journal based on more than just impact factor, of course. A well-respected subject-specific journal is often the best place to send work, especially if you’ve published related results there before and it’s regularly read by colleagues in your discipline. But what if your manuscript characterizes something that crosses multiple fields? Something of unusual or quirky significance? Maybe it’s not earth-shattering enough for Nature, but it would be a shame to leave it underexposed in a subject-specific journal.

Suddenly, PLoS One is perfect.

And in the spirit of the thing, let me tell you about new research published in PLoS One. Coen Elemans, from the University of Utah, and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania provide the first direct evidence of superfast muscles in songbirds. They found that the syringeal muscles in starlings can produce twitch contraction halftimes of 3.23±0.44 ms, the fastest isometric twitch kinematics ever measured in vertebrates. Superfast muscles are a special type of muscle and appear to have evolved multiple times in different vertebrate taxa (rattlesnakes shake their rattle with superfast muscles, for example). These findings have already earned mentions in The New York Times, National Geographic, MSNBC.com and many newspapers both stateside and international. They’re relevant to multiple subdisciplines, and publishing them in, say, a muscle physiology journal would have left them overlooked by the birdsong community. Fortunately, PLoS One enjoys high exposure: in the New York Times alone, ten reports on PLoS One articles were published so far this year, almost a third of the number of reports on PNAS articles. Not bad for a journal with an entirely different editorial and publishing process.

My friends from college and I have a reunion vacation every year in a cabin in the Adirondacks, and there is this turtle that lives in the pond on the property that keeps joining us. It is a massive snapping turtle. It looks just like the picture and it is terrifying.

Two years ago we tried to catch it. The reptile specialist in my department recommended a reinforced cardboard box and some sort of lasso on a very long stick. The advice was imparted reluctantly; he actually recommended staying away from it altogether and showed incredulity when I explained about the skinny dipping. As a somewhat fearsome individual himself, this was a shock, and it justified the alarmist attitude that was already preventing the boys from lounging in the inner tubes. Some impatient internet research had convinced me that snappers, while vicious and aggressive and sure to snap off your digits if you disturb them on land, are of a diffident and temperate personality underwater. Our empirical evidence only partially supported this claim: it did bite one of us on the foot; the foot, like the turtle, was in the water; the leg and all the rest was on land. (Amputation was avoided, and no one died of Salmonella poisoning.) This was, if I recall correctly, our introduction, and that first impression may have instilled an unreasonable level of antagonism between us.

Anyway the year we brought the relocation equipment, we couldn’t find the turtle. This year, with short memories and fresh enthusiasm for a splash in the lake, we saw it again. It likes hanging around the dock, and provides plenty of opportunity for ogling. So grotesquely prehistoric! I love it, but it scares me. It’s quite the summer thrill.

I am really interested to see how PLoS One, the multi-trick, lowborn pony in the open-access PLoS stable, turns out.

PLoS One was launched two years ago by the Public Library of Science, an organization that promotes open access science publishing. (Open access means the articles are totally free and accessible online, to any old person who wants to read them and may have paid tax dollars to fund them.) PLoS also publishes PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine, two highly esteemed journals that rival the best long-established, limited access journals, and four other well regarded subject-specific publications. There are a couple things that make PLoS One different. It only publishes online, it publishes weekly, and it publishes on any topic in science or medicine—this makes it very high volume. It also permits blog-style reviews, comments, ratings and trackbacks. But most importantly, it doesn’t reject papers for lack of significance. Papers are reviewed for integrity, but not for “impact.” The articles of a diligent but uninspired graduate student who unwisely chose to study a boring and essentially irrelevant corner of science might find a home here, for example.

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