razib
Posts by this author
July 14, 2008
Well, I never thought I'd watch a film with the title, Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy. The "star" of the Sizzle is Randy Oslon, a contributor to Shifting Baselines here at ScienceBlogsTM. In fact, Randy is a major contemporary interpreter of the term shifting baselines. I assume that most…
July 14, 2008
A profile of E. O. Wilson in The New York Times, Taking a Cue From Ants on Evolution of Humans:
Dr. Wilson was not picking a fight when he published "Sociobiology" in 1975, a synthesis of ideas about the evolution of social behavior. He asserted that many human behaviors had a genetic basis, an…
July 11, 2008
Dave Appell at Quark Soup has a jeremiad against blogging up. It's fine, but I have to add that I was reading Dave's original blog in early 2002 (the first science blog I ever read), and he would post his frustrations about how crappy it was being a writer and how blogging was unsatisfying. As it…
July 10, 2008
I've posted on general scientific literacy broken down by demographic groups in the GSS. I've also pointed to data which suggested that the lower scientific literacy of church goers vis-a-vis non-church goers is an due mostly to the influence of Young Earth Creationism. Finally, I put up a post…
July 10, 2008
I've already posted on GSS results on science knowledge. But what about the international context? Th working paper Civic Scientific Literacy in Europe and the United States has some interesting data which has international comparisons. Here's an interesting fact regarding "scientific literacy…
July 10, 2008
This is a follow to the previous post focusing on which demographics know scientific facts. One of the major differences was between those who were very religious and those who were not, with more scientific literacy among the latter. Inductivist looks into the question that many have asked:
...I…
July 9, 2008
I don't post much about "politics in the news" because I almost never (OK, never) have anything value-added to say. That being said, I do want add something to the Jesse Jackson comment about wanting to cut off Barack Obama's testicles. Many people are framing this at Jackson's irritation at…
July 9, 2008
Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
It's been a while since I blogged Stephen Jay Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. I haven't forgotten it, but once I finished the historical preamble, nearly 600 pages, I was in the mood for a breather. My hunch was that despite Gould's emphasis on…
July 9, 2008
Most Americans are not aware that Herbert Hoover's Vice President, Charles Curtis, was 3/8 Native American and spent time on the Kaw reservation as a youth. He was also a Kansan. NPR has a piece up which looks back at this historical footnote.
July 8, 2008
The always fascinating Inductivist takes a look at science comprehension of Americans via the GSS. Here's his methodology:
In 2006 the General Social Survey asked 437 respondents eleven basic science questions. The first one, for example, was whether the earth's center is hot. I gave each person…
July 7, 2008
Flyby of Mercury Answers Some Old Questions:
Mercury, the smallest planet, bakes in the heat of the Sun, but it has water in some form. It has volcanoes. It appears to have an active magnetic field generated by a molten iron core. And it has shrunk more than scientists thought.
July 7, 2008
Most of you who read this weblog know that one of my primary preoccupations is how to invest my marginal time in terms of reading to optimize whatever it is I want to optimize (i.e., to "know stuff"). Life is short. So I recently began reflecting on the choices I make in terms of reading "…
July 6, 2008
I was looking at poll results for Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO). Internationally the results are all over the place, but within nations the data suggest a pretty strong notional resistance to "playing God," with a rank order of aversion spanning plants (least averse) to humans (most averse…
July 5, 2008
This is a follow up to the post yesterday, Religion is good for your health? Conservative Christianity bad?. I finished reading the paper. It's not a bad one really, but its plausibility will be strongly conditioned by theoretical priors. It is a work in the tradition of Emile Durkheim, and…
July 4, 2008
Prevalence Of Religious Congregations Affects Mortality Rates:
....Blanchard found that people live longer in areas with a large number of Catholic and Mainline Protestant churches. He offers two key reasons for these findings.
"First, these types of churches have what's known as a 'worldly…
July 3, 2008
They say that to understand the present you need to understand the past. This seems likely to be true, but when it comes to understanding human affairs in their historical and sociological detail I have to admit that I'm skeptical of much genuine positive insight. That being said, I do believe…
July 3, 2008
David continues his series on the thinking of the great evolutionary geneticist Sewall Wright. Today's post, Notes on Sewall Wright: Migration. First, the general:
Continuing my series of notes on Sewall Wright's population genetics, I come to the subject of migration. This is important in…
July 3, 2008
Jonah pointed me to this artice, The '60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire, which chronicles the shift toward political moderation among the professoriate. That moderation seems to be less about changes in views toward the center of the American political distribution than it is a…
July 2, 2008
The Political Mind, Part III (Chapter 2), Chris sayeth:
Anyway, now on to that part I promised you about how real conservatives don't exist, or at least not in great numbers. Towards the end of this chapter, Lakoff gives us the concept of "biconceptualism." This means that some people have both…
July 2, 2008
Nature came out with a piece today, PLoS stays afloat with bulk publishing: Science-publishing firm struggles to make ends meet with open-access model. The title basically says it all. There have already been some negatives responses, see Mike Dunford, Alex Holcombe, Living the Scientific Life,…
July 2, 2008
Mike the Mad Biologist has a post up, A Biologist Confuses Artificial and Natural Selection:
There's a really interesting article in last week's NY Times magazine about global warming and the spread of weeds....
...Artificial selection occurs when the fitness criterion--that is, what trait or…
July 1, 2008
If you have ever used the Perl programming language then you have heard the name Larry Wall. But, you might not know that Larry Wall is an active member of the Church of the Nazarene (the "bless" function anyone?). According to the Religion in American Culture survey 63% of Nazarenes accept a…
July 1, 2008
Hilarious review of chapter I of The Political Mind over at Mixing Memory.
July 1, 2008
You probably know that Carl Zimmer has moved to Discover Blogs. Coke always needed Pepsi to step up its game....
July 1, 2008
From page 33 of Brian Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy from Plato to Popper:
I came to realize, then that what matters above all else in politics is what happens, not what people say about it. And for the most part what happens is independent of my…
June 30, 2008
PZ Myers outlines synteny. RPM says he's kind of wrong. Check out the definition in Wikipedia. Since RPM came down on me for confusion on this term I knew he would bring this up. I don't really care much about which definition is "correct," but I thought I'd point interested readers to the debate…
June 30, 2008
Chris of Mixing Memory is doing us the service of a chapter by chapter review of George Lakoff's The Political Mind. This should be fun! I told Chris that reading Lakoff talking about the minds of conservatives is kind of like me opining with supreme confidence as to the deep motivations behind…
June 29, 2008
A few weeks ago I read Brink Lindsey's The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture. One strange thing is that because I've watched Brink on BloggingHeads.TV on occasion could hear the prose with his particular cadence and delivery. Really weird. In any case,…
June 29, 2008
Baby to be born free of breast cancer after embryo screening:
The couple produced 11 embryos, of which five were found to be free from the gene. Two of these were implanted in the woman's womb and she is now 14 weeks pregnant.
By screening out embryos carrying the gene, called BRCA-1, the couple,…