Kansas Guild of Bloggers is here!

Getting cold outside so curl up with some comfort food and the best of this week's Kansas blogging! First up from emawkc over at Three O'Clock in the Morning comes Flight Delay which provides a fine comparative civics lesson between the our voting system and that used in Malaysia and emawkc finds that some features of the Malaysian system might be useful here.

Some Kansans myself included are basking in the state's color change from Republican blue to a decidedly moderate purple and I don't mean K-State purple. Josh over at Thoughts from Kansas discusses how Boyda beat Jim Ryun. I want to point out that my wife was quite dismayed to find that she was not able to cast a vote against Mr. Ryun since we live to the east of Iowa St in Lawrence and hence are in Dennis Moore's district. I also recommend Josh's report of a recent poll showing that Kansans back embryonic stem cell research.

John B. Over at Blog Meridian reports a happy voter experience for a change and one that did not hinge on the outcome of the election just that some one got to vote.

Pat Hayes at Red State Rabble keeps up the political commentary with a summary of a correspondent "SC" who thinks the State Board of Education system is broken inspite of the 6 to 4 moderate majority.

I notice that Whole Wheat Blogger has been revived in a new form, Pencil Nub which will focus less on the news and more as Steve puts it "on the religious realm. Hope to see more from this blog.

Happy in Bag has a brief but evocative post about one of my favorite sounds. You also might check out the Weekend Photo and brief commentary over at BitterSweetLife.

Joel Mathis is in a funk about the state of popular culture and wonders if there is anything new that we can do, that hasn't been done. He opines:

The advent of realistic computer special effects means there’s no scenario that can’t be convincingly depicted on screen: monsters fighting each other, spaceships careening through the void. In pop music, most of the variations on rock and hip-hop seem to have been explored decades ago. Not coincidentally, that’s about the time the term “old school” became words of praise.

Oh I don't know if he is right. This sounds suspiciously like the scientists who in the early part of the 20th century confidently proclaimed that we knew pretty much how the universe operated only to then be over run with quantum mechanics and relativity. This relates to my own submission having to do with a cyber crime involving the virtual universe, or metaverse, Second Life which I also play in from time to time.

Well, that's it for this week, and since it is 11:43 pm and I teach genetics at 8:00am I am going call it quits. So remember if you are not in KGB, and are a Kansas related blogger just go on over to http://3oclockam.blogspot.com/ and look for the kgb map in the right hand column and join!

Next weeks KGB will be at Blog Meridian.

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Second Life Crime

As a sporadic player in Second Life, I was of course interested in this excellent article in yesterday's Lawrence Journal World. The article concerns a second life player who was swindled of the equivalent of about $180 worth of Lindens, the Second Life currency. Apparently the player, Carissa Hill, was swindled in a real estate deal by someone who had stolen another players identity for a pay pal transaction. I have never met Carissa or her Second Life Avatar, but she claims to make money at Second Life.


What I find fascinating is less the swindle, but the reactions of people in the discussion who say inane things like "fantasy is nice but get a real life" or "...take the energy, ambition and smarts and apply it to the first life. I think that would make you happier and more successful in the long term."
















Nice sentiments, or so it seems; but what makes Second Life any different other aspects of what Richard Dawkins terms the extended phenotype?

After all, Second Life may be based on bytes and pixels, but is it really that different than other sorts of fantasy that we spend lots of money on? Consider in Second Life, designers and scripters are constantly coming up with new games and designs, some of which are making their way to the "Real World" and there are some really talented designers.

Indeed, businesses such as IBM, Scion and Sun are setting up shop in Second Life trying to hawk real life news and products by taking advantage of Second Life's 3 dimensional interactive universe. Second life requires imagination and vision to "play", especially since there are few rules. Sometimes the results are banal such as the shopping center by my SL home, but others are quite stunning.

One thing is for sure, Second Life sure aint Kansas!

Other links:

How to Get a Second Life

Living a Second Life

Performing a Play in Second Life(youtube)

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Kansas Guild of Bloggers arise!

Arise from your torpor and send your best Kansas related posts here for the KGB carnival. Don't make me come and get you! You can either e-mail me at pdecell at sunflower dot com, or respond to this post with a link or send your submission via the kgb's submission page. However you do it, I will get your posts.

Probably the carnival will not post until Tuesday night to accommodate any prestidigitating procrastinators.

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Gender Identity Proposal in NYC

As astute readers of my blog know, I have a strong interest in gender and gender related issues and a recent proposal in New York City, reported in the New York Times recently caught my eye. The proposal would allow people born in NYC to formally switch their gender on their birth records without having gone through the usual requirements of sexual reassignment surgery.

The article states:

Under the rule being considered by the city’s Board of Health, which is likely to be adopted soon, people born in the city would be able to change the documented sex on their birth certificates by providing affidavits from a doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be considered members of the opposite sex, and asserting that their proposed change would be permanent.

Usually a person must have gone through a process of transitioning to the other sex for a period of time and then have had or be close to having sexual reassignment surgery, or at least be on hormones. Indeed there is a whole standard of care called the Benjamin Standard of Care (also see this summary) lays out a sequence of hoops through which transgendered individuals should go through as part of the transitioning process.

This proposal eliminates the need for any sort of physiological change requiring only that the person have done a name change and provide evidence that they have lived as a member of their chosen gender for at least two years.

Again from the article:

The move to ease the requirements for altering one’s gender identity comes after New York has adopted other measures aimed at blurring the lines of gender identification. For instance, a new shelter policy approved in January now allows beds to be distributed according to appearance, applying equally to postoperative transsexuals, cross-dressers and “persons perceived to be androgynous.”

You might think that this sort of proposal would enjoy broad support in the transgender community, but a transsexual friend of mine, "Sue" wrote to a group that we both belong to that she thought this proposal was a bad idea because:

This is fine for the Transgender/Queer movement to want. What these
groups must understand is that they don't have a lot of support in
the population in general. Nor will they gain a lot of support by
trying to tie their agenda to the needs of transsexual persons in
transition and of intersex people.

Where the latter have a legitimate, medically recognized, condition
the former have a lifestyle. This is a huge difference.

"Sue" wrote that comment in response to another poster who noted that the transgender/queer community is moving beyond the binary notion of gender.

In another post "Sue" says:

A person is non-op for one simple reason. That reason is because they
chose to be non-op. The others fall into a surgery-tracked group that
I have come to think of as "Not Yet OP" for lack of a better term.

Don't yet have the money? NYO. Obligation to family is a priority to
your doing it? NYO. Medical condition that science has not yet found
a way to handle? NYO. Boyfriend took your money (Again?)? NYO.

The others are fetishist transgenders.

This was in response to a comment that a transgender person may not want to have sexual reassignment surgery for a number of reasons. Sue also feels that this proposal as written would link those who have gone through SRS or legitimate reasons not to transition but are planning to with gender benders and (gasp) fetishist transgenders. Now to be fair, she seems to have nothing against gender benders and others who see themselves perhaps as gender out laws but her rhetoric seems a bit extreme to me.

From my way of thinking, Sue forgets that transgendered, even narrowly defined to be those who are transsexual are not well accepted by society at large and treated as disordered. Changing one's gender assignment is a serious step and it is entirely possible that people for whom the proposal is not designed might slip through and Sue is right to raise questions about implementationtion. But can't this be done without such fearful sounding rhetoric?

To my non transgender readers this whole thing probably seems very strange and maybe trivial. But think-if gender and gender identity is so unimportant than why do people spend so much time acculturating our kids to the "appropriate" gender and why do people get bent out of shape when they encounter someone who doesn't quite fit their preconception of gender? Why is that? It's precisely because gender and social signals related to gender are important to our social biology, so people who don't seem to fit make others uncomfortable.

The flip side of course is that someone who is transgendered and who does not fit well with their socially assigned gender is often highly uncomfortable in "normal" society and uncomfortable with the discordence between their appearence and gender identity. Hence the expense and risk of hormones and surgery and hence the fear "Sue" seems to feel that the NYC proposal might create a backlash that could affect her as a transsexual just at the time when society is beginning to accept her.

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Mendel's Garden #9 host and date.

Mendel's Garden will be going to once a month, and the next edition to be posted on Monday December 4, will be hosted by that hive of geeky graduate students otherwise known as Salamander Candy.

So you can send your submissions directly to the hive at tennessj at science dot oregonstate dot edu, or use the Blog Carnival submissions page.

There have been several submissions to me and I will get them to the hive; so don't worry they will appear.

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Eugenie Scott at JCCC

Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education gave a very nice talk at JCCC titled Politics, Education and Evolution. Her talk, summarized her thoughts on why education has become so politicized in America. Her analysis centered on several basic areas. First the settlement patterns in America tied to the frontier led both to a decentralized educational system and to a variety of home grown religious traditions.

Next she gave a brief review of the meaning of evolution in a very general sense, dividing biological evolution into three big ideas. First is the notion of common ancestry-the genealogical approach to evolution. Next are the processes of evolution including Darwin's core idea of natural selection and finally the patterns of evolution. She noted that creationists often times make category errors, namely concluding that arguments about the mechanisms of evolution mean that evolution is wrong and she contrasted the genealogical approach to the great chain of being. She clearly explained that the great chain of being namely that fish evolved into amphibians which evolved into reptiles which evolved into mammals etc, is wrong since the common ancestors did not closely resemble their modern counterparts.

From my way of thinking the confusion between the genealogical notion of evolution and the great chain of being probably relates to a question I am often asked about humans, namely if humans evolved from apes why are there still other apes? My response is usually that modern apes and humans are descended from a common primate ancestor who doesn't exist any more. Modern apes and humans are adopted to their particular modern environments so that there is really no reason to ask why apes still exist.

She next discussed the history of the creationist movement in the United States focusing on "scientific creationism" and its current incarnation namely intelligent design. She traced the modern intelligent design movement to a book by Thaxton Bradley and Olson(1984). These authors argued that the origin of life categorically cannot be explained. From this developed the modern intelligent design movement, which she quite correctly I believe, categorized as old wine in new bottles and she defended evolutionary biologists from the charge that they are refusing to investigate other ideas. Scientists have investigated the claims of intelligent design carefully before rejecting them.

So why is intelligent design so popular inspite of the lack of scientific credability? In part she attributed this to Intelligent Design marketing around what she called the three pillars of creationism: evolution is weak science; evolution and religion are incompatible; and finally the fairness argument. Now the rhetoric of intelligent design is shifting language again to a mention of critical thinking, teaching the controversy or all theories. Of course as she noted, science is not some sort of democracy and "cheerfully discriminates against those ideas that don't work.

Another aspect of the staying power of intelligent design is public confusion over the way science defines terms such as theory, law and hypothesis are used in science versus the every day use of these terms. In science these terms have specialized meanings as "terms of art". Finally Intelligent Design advocates conflate the methological naturalism of science and its limitation to natural explanations, with atheism.

She also attributed the recent upsurge in antievolution activity to the demands of the No Child Left Behind Act and the notion that what is in curriculum standards will be tested, hence a demand for teaching the controversy and analyzing the weaknesses of evolutionary theory. She exhorted her audience, especially the students present to learn about the issues and candidates and vote, reminding the audience that we do get the officials we deserve.

It was a real treat to have her visit us given her schedule and I want to again thank her for coming, Kansas Citizens for Science especially Jack Krebs and Keith Miller for helping arrange her visit. She had given a lecture on Friday at Kansas State's Center for Origins and will next be in Kansas on November 16th speaking at Kansas University's series "Difficult Dialogues at the Commons".

Other Links:

National Center for Science Education

Kansas Citizens for Science

Kansas City Star Editorial on Kansas Board of Education

Evolution Resources from the National Academies

Darwin online

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Fall Leaves

In the soft light of afternoon
The pear leaves glow like glints of opal
And I have been told these crimson colors
Are made by the leaves at the end of their lives
But no one knows why.
One day we will know
And those leaves will glow in the soft light
Even more marvelously because we know.

Commentary: I had been reading an ongoing discussion on The Loom about why leaves turn color. Often we are told that the colors arise from other pigments that are rendered visible when the chlorophyll breaks down. That seems to be true for some pigments but not the bright red pigments present in some leaves such as these pear leaves. These are produced in the fall by the leaves and may have some sort of adaptive significance. You might want to visit the discussion at the Loom and get the details.

I hope a little reflection will yield what the poem is really about.

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Eugenie Scott this Saturday(Nov 4) at JCCC!

Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science
Education, to speak on "Politics, Education, and Evolution" at JCCC.

Saturday, November 4 at 7:30 PM
Johnson County Community College, Carlsen Center Room 211

Many topics in the curriculum of American schools are controversial,
but perhaps the one with the longest tenure is evolution. Politics
plays a role in this controversy in a number of ways. Politicians
have keen antennae for cultural values, and the "fairness" argument
(i.e., it is only "fair" to "balance" evolution with creationism)
regularly is exploited, regardless of the appropriateness of its
application to science education. Variants of the fairness argument
such as balancing evolution with "scientific alternatives to
evolution" or balancing evolution with "arguments against evolution"
have in fact become the current predominant antievolutionist
strategy. In addition, legislators and school board members may take
advantage of public interest in the creationism/evolution controversy
to pander to voting blocks -- whether or not the legislation or
policy ever is passed, or even is intended to be seriously considered.