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Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at the National Center for Science Education. He is also a graduate student at the University of Kansas, completing a doctorate in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. When not modeling species distributions or battling creationists, he writes about developments in progressive politics and the sciences.
The opinions expressed here are his own, do not reflect the official position of the NCSE. Indeed, older posts may no longer reflect his own official position.
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August 31, 2007
Category: Biology
At Billy Dembski's blog, Granville Sewell wonders What if we DID find irreducibly complex biological features?: In any debate on Intelligent Design, there is a question I have long wished to see posed to ID opponents: “If we DID discover some biological feature that was irreducibly complex, to your satisfication [sic] and to the satisfaction of all reasonable observers, would that justify the design inference?”No, at least not necessarily. It isn't clear why we should make that immediate leap....
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 2:56 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Biology
Reposted from the old blog. Last week we discussed endosymbiosis, the hypothesis that mitochondria and chloroplasts originated as free-living bacteria captured by another cell and essentially enslaved. This week's Science has evidence of this process at work today. A Secondary Symbiosis in Progress? -- Okamoto and Inouye 310 (5746): 287 -- Science. The figure labeled A shows the normal adult Hatena. It has a flagellum, an eyespot (the arrow), and all that green chlorophyll. Turns out, as shown in figure B, the eyespot is inherited by only one daughter cell, as is the green. All that stuff is from a...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 2:15 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 29, 2007
Category: Physical Sciences
Last night I didn't get to bed until 4 am. Along with a couple hundred other people, I hung out at the Chabot Observatory, watching the Earth slide in between the Sun and the Moon. One of the Observatory's telescopes was open, and several people brought their own 'scopes, some homemade. The viewpieces were big enough to allow me to take some pictures through the telescopes. The focus is a bit off there, but you can see the craters and plains of the Moon's surface, and at the lower right corner, you can see the surface starting to darken as...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 3:17 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 27, 2007
Category: Physical Sciences
At around 3:37 am, Pacific time, the moon will be entirely swathed in Earth's shadow. If you live in the right areas, and are prepared to stay up late, you can watch it happen. Oakland's Chabot Space and Science Center and Wichita's Lake Afton Observatory are both holding special events all night long. You can watch the eclipse through their telescopes, listen to presentations about what you're seeing, and stay up way too late (or get up way too early) with a bunch of other science nerds. What's not to like? Those of you not in Kansas or the Bay...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 6:06 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Policy and Politics
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Resigns - washingtonpost.com: Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales announced his resignation today, ending a controversial cabinet tenure that included clashes with Congress over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys and over the use of warrantless wiretaps in the war on terror. … Gonzales will step down on Sept. 17. In a brief statement, he called his 13 years in public service a "remarkable journey," but he gave no explanation about why he chose to resign now after resisting months of pressure to quit.However, persistent reports over the last several months have indicated that he was not...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 11:31 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 20, 2007
Category: Chatter
After much planning and coordinating, our munificent overlords at Seed arranged to bring a substantial fraction of the gang here at Scienceblogs together in New York last weekend. Beyond the drinking, the carousing, and the karaoke, it was a great chance to see the other Sciblings and talk science, blogging, and to trash the Sciblings who didn't show up. I'll have pictures online in a few days, but for now, Bora has some photographic evidence that I moderated a discussion about science and politics. Rob Knop and PZ Myers sat at a table and got along marvelously. The word "framing"...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 11:13 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 14, 2007
Category: Culture Wars
The Dallas Morning News observes: North Texas didn't have a single charter school with the state's top academic rating two years ago. Now there are four. But those campuses remain outnumbered by low-performing charters: 11 this year across the region, up from eight a couple years ago. The same trend holds for the rest of the state: 51 of Texas' 317 charters were rated "academically unacceptable" based on 2007 test scores, while only 15 received the top rating "exemplary," according to data released this month by the Texas Education Agency. … The 16 percent of charters labeled unacceptable compares to...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 2:00 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 13, 2007
Category: Policy and Politics
Kansas State GOP Chairman Kris Kobach is a busy man. He's running around the country, trying to keep children some who've graduated from public high schools in a given state from getting in-state tuition at public universities. He's also been working hard to make sure the state Party spends more than it takes in, doesn't pay its staff, and, in his spare time, created a Loyalty Committee, dedicated to rooting out sedition within the state Party. This committee is charged with carrying out Chairman Kobach's fatwa against any Republican officeholder helping any Democrat getting elected. This, of course, a...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 11:12 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 10, 2007
Category: Chatter
Break from heat not expected soon: Lawrence’s high temperature reached 100 degrees Thursday for the second day in a row, and triple digits are expected to stick around. Wednesday’s rainfall accumulation, .77 of an inch, wasn’t enough to ward off a heat advisory that is in effect in Douglas County until 7 tonight.It is currently 65º and sunny in Oakland, and they expect a high around 78º. That is slightly warm for the area; the average temperature for early August is 73º. I'm wearing long pants, and no one seems to have air conditioning in their homes. Yesterday was about...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 12:01 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 9, 2007
Category: Culture Wars
Not content to mangle science, the DI's Logan Gage declares war on the English language. After Time states that ID is "a stealth creationist theory," Gage quotes a definition of "stealth" stating that it involves proceeding "furtively, secretly, or imperceptibly," and then furtively observes that some people do not perceive the link between creationism and ID (or keep it secret): First of all, ID is not creationism—and no one is more vociferously insistent about this than the major creationist organizations like Answers In Genesis. We’ve heard this charge before. But stealth? Stealth...like black helicopter stealth?`I don't know what you mean...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 10:49 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
