Can Science Funding Be Improved

If you're following the ongoing discussion Tim Sandefur and I are having on whether or not the federal government should fund science at all, there's a new article you should really go read.  Stanford Professor Steve Quake has a guest column up at Olivia Judson's blog that talks about the way we currently fund science and makes some suggestions about how things can be improved.

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How do new kinds of bodies evolve? It's a question that obsesses many scientists today, as it has for decades. Yesterday, Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist and book author, published a blog post entitled "The Monster is Back, and It's Hopeful," in which she declared that these transitions…
This is my reply to a post by Coturnix called The Hopeless Monster? Not so fast! First, the phylogeny of the discussion. Olivia Judson wrote this: The Monster Is Back, and It's Hopeful Which was responded to here: Hopeless Monsters--A Guest Post from Dr. Jerry Coyne That dyad of posts was passed…
A hopeful monster is a mutant born with a genetically determined and large novel trait (compared to its parents) which confers enhanced fitness on that individual. This enhanced fitness increases the likelihood that the new mutant gene that determines this trait will be passed on and spread…
A bit o' squabble has broken out about hopeful monsters. As paleontologist evolutionary geneticist Jerry Coyne notes in a guest post at The Loom, Carl Zimmer's blog, hopeful monsters are the products of ... well, there's the problem: They were either the product of sudden large evolutionary forces…