Social Sciences
revere | November 29, 2006The "father" of epidemiology is a nineteenth century doctor, John Snow. He had more than one disciplinary child, since he is also considered the "father" of anesthesiology, having popularized the use of chloroform in obstetrics by using it on Queen Victoria in the 1850s. That distinction aside, Snow is famous for his pioneering studies showing cholera was a waterborne disease. I've been thinking about this in relation to bird flu. Here's the connection.
In Snow's Victorian London, the predominant scientific theory on cholera's etiology was from miasmas, a general term for noxious elements in…
clock | November 28, 2006I wish that, many many years ago when I was becoming a biologist, that I could have read this wonderful little book - On Becoming a Biologist by John Janovy! What a little gem!
On the surface, or by looking at the Table of Contents, this slim volume appears to be just yet another in a long line of books giving advice to people who are interested about joining the profession. And sure, it does contain important information about getting accepted into a program, choosing one's project, teaching, research, publishing, getting funded, giving talks etc. But it is also much more than that. The…
razib | November 27, 2006Orac has a rather thorough post on eugenics, and what Richard Dawkins has recently had to say on it. Here is the dictionary.com definition of eugenics:
...the study of or belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population, esp. by such means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits (negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits (positive eugenics).
First, in a historical context Dawkins' addressing the question of…
clock | November 27, 2006
A short-but-sweet study (March 18, 2006):
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I remember from an old review that John Palmer did a study on the diurnal pattern of copulation in humans some years ago. You can see the abstract here.
Now, Roberto Reffinetti repeated the study and published it in the online open-source Journal of Circadian Rhythms here.
The two studies agree: The peak copulatory activity in people living in a modern society is around midnight (or, really, around bedtime) with a smaller secondary peak in the morning around wake-time.
Dig through the papers yourself for…
tfk | November 24, 2006I haven't weighed in on the Larry Moran/Ed Brayton/etc. squabble over the different motives people have in the creationism wars. My feelings are well known, I'm in Ed's camp, and I frankly don't see why the Moran camp cares so much about what people believe. And I'm glad that I haven't written anything, because Stranger Fruit said what I would have said:
to set the record straight, I am not a Theistic Evolutionist and never have been. I am an agnostic ... due to intellectual humility as much as anything else. I was an atheist for a good period, and earned my stripes baiting the believers,…
razib | November 20, 2006Wow, wow. Lots of chatter around the ScienceBlogs about religion and evolution, etc. etc. Ed Brayton starts it off, drawing a line in the sand against those with an "anti-theist agenda." John Lynch tends to side with Ed. Our resident Ozzie, John Wilkins has been getting into it with Jason Rosenhouse. Josh at Thoughts from Kansas has criticized Dawkins. And of course P.Z. Myers has his own views on these topics.
A few points.
1) This isn't a two-faced coin. I think in Ed's post he overreaches a bit. Some people who are militant atheists are pretty nuts. Other people aren't. Some people…
clock | November 17, 2006Another one on psychology of political ideology (form April 08, 2005):
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Ezra Klein, Majikthise and Revere of Effect Measure are having another round of discussion of the Lakoff's scheme.
One of the problems in this discussion, I think, is the confusion between Conservatism Vs. Liberalism as Systems of Government on one hand, and Conservatism vs. Liberalism as Personality Traits on the other.
Going back in history and arguing for or against the two archetypes by invoking Nixon, Reagan, McCarthy, Stalin, Hitler, Clinton, Carter, whoever...misses the…
purepedantry | November 15, 2006On The Colbert Report last night, Stephen Colbert talked about an article about uterine transplants for The Word. Scientists now claim that there is nothing technically to prevent us from performing a womb transplant, even to the point that you could put a uterus in a man:
Scientists claim that the first human baby could be born from a transplanted womb within three years.
Animal experiments have dismissed many of the concerns that womb transplants could not produce healthy babies.
The Swedish expert behind the research says that one of the best candidates to be an organ donor would be the…
evolvingthoughts | November 14, 2006
So, in an obvious case of Scibling Rivalry, Jason Rosenhouse has taken me to task about my comments on Dawkins and agnosticism. Indeed, I have been fisked. Obviously one can decide about whether God exists or not, and agnostics are just inadequate atheists...
Let's set the scene with some philosophical definitions. A scientific question is one that evidence can tell for or against. All else is a philosophical question, or as it is popularly known, navel gazing. What is at issue here is whether or not evidence can tell for or against the notion that God exists. Atheists (and theists) say…
cortex | November 7, 2006This is great news. As an animal lover, I can certainly see how the Humane Society has tremendous political potential. From the WSJ:
For the first time in its 50-year history, the Humane Society is trying to elect candidates to Congress who support its animal-welfare agenda. After a series of mergers with other animal-welfare groups, the Humane Society counts 10 million Americans as members, an average of 23,000 in each of the 435 House districts. That's more than twice the membership of the National Rifle Association, which is considered one of the most effective single-issue campaign…
cortex | November 6, 2006Over at the National Review, David Klinghoffer tries to argue that the Haggard affair "confirms some truths of the worldview he defended." (If so, it's hard to imagine what an evangelical preacher would have to do to not confirm the truths he preaches. Murder? Rape? Incest? Apparently, buying meth from a male prostitute isn't enough.) But here's Klinghoffer:
Gay advocates reason that because a man has a temptation to homosexuality, he has little moral choice other than to obey it. This view of morality goes back to Darwin, who reduced behavior to biologically determined instincts. In The…
pharyngula | November 6, 2006My university doesn't subscribe to the journal, but I'd really be interested in reading this paper by Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics. Even better would be if someone else would critique it so I wouldn't have to waste my time on it.
Mind the gap...in intelligence: Re-examining the relationship between inequality and health.
Kanazawa S.
Interdisciplinary Institute of Management, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.
Wilkinson contends that economic inequality reduces the health and life expectancy of the whole population but his argument does not make sense…
oracknows | November 3, 2006There are times when the struggle to keep cranking out Your Friday Dose of Woo every week starts to get to me. No, it's not because I don't enjoy putting together these little light-hearted but pointed analyses of some of the strangest woo that I've come across. Believe me, many times it's the highlight of my blogging week. It's just that, now that I've been doing this a while, no matter how hard I try to put something together the weekend before, so as to be ahead of the game, somehow I almost never quite manage to do it. Thus, all too frequently I end up writing away late Thursday night…
thusspakezuska | November 2, 2006Ask a Science Blogger asks:
UPDATE:
THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE THE OCT. 27TH ASK A SCIENCE BLOGGER ANSWER
What's the most underfunded scientific field that shouldn't be underfunded?...
I can't presume to know the definitive answer. But I can give you one answer: a field that's not even on the radar screen for nearly everyone. We all know women routinely go to see their gynecologist, and women's reproductive health is an important issue. What's the equivalent for men? Do you hear of men routinely going to see their andrologist? The closest thing they have is a urologist, and that's just not…
pharyngula | November 1, 2006But only a start. A new poll finds an encouraging level of doubt among Americans.
Nearly half of Americans are not sure God exists, according to a poll that also found divisions among the public on whether God is male or female or whether God has a human form and has control over events.
The survey conducted by Harris Poll found that 42 percent of US adults are not "absolutely certain" there is a God compared to 34 percent who felt that way when asked the same question three years ago.
Among the various religious groups, 76 percent of Protestants, 64 percent of Catholics and 30 percent of…
jrosenhouse | October 31, 2006Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Marilynne Robinson wrote this lengthy review of The God Delusion for Harpers Magazine. She was unimpressed.
The review weighs in at 4599 words, but you'll find yourself almost a thousand words in before hitting anything substantive about Dawkins' book. Prior to that it's just a lot of snideness about how seriously Dawkins takes himself, about how he's preaching to the choir, and about what a crazed Darwinian fundamentalist he is. In this portion of the review, Robinson seems more interested in showing off how well she writes than in making actual points.…
apalazzo | October 31, 2006Some people have asked me why I haven't written anything about Richard Dawkins' new book. To be honest, it's just another manuscript arguing that religions preach ignorance and can promote other societal evils. We've all heard this before. On the other hand, Marc Hauser's book, Moral Minds, is a trully original book, discussing the latest ideas from cognitive science. Just as Chomsky argued that we are endowed with a language instinct, Hauser proposes that we all have a morality instinct. In today's NY Times there is an article on his book:
The proposal, [that people are born with a moral…
stcynic | October 30, 2006Sometimes I give away a Robert O'Brien Trophy to some mouth-breathing imbecile only to find, a few days later, an even more ridiculous example of human stupidity. And I'm afraid it's happened again. And frankly, I can't imagine finding anything any dumber than this column by Craig Smith at the Worldnutdaily. Who is Craig Smith? Well, his little bio at the end of the article announces him as "an author, commentator and popular media guest because he instantly engages audiences with his common-sense analyses of local, national and global trends." And then it says he wrote a book claiming that…
cortex | October 30, 2006If the polls are accurate, Senator Rick Santorum is about to lose his re-election bid. That's a good thing. Santorum is a bad cliche of the culture wars, a powerful politician who actually believes that the earth is 6,000 years old, that abortion is tantamount to murder and the Catholic church scandal began in Massachusetts because Boston is a "liberal bastion". In recent months, he's also gotten rather deranged on the topic of foreign policy, arguing that what we need is more pre-ememptive action against Iran, because our aggressive war in Iraq worked out so well.
And yet, when Rick Santorum…
evolvingthoughts | October 28, 2006Courtesy of Mixing Memory comes the announcement of a conference at AlphaPsy on methodology and the social sciences, which raises an interesting thought. Is the use of scientific methodology and the naturalising of the social sciences a threat to those disciplines?
This is an old debate, though. It has been claimed for yonks that the human sciences have their own special methodology, usually called "hermeneutics", in which knowledge of the meaning of human institutions and mindsets is irreducible to physical, psychological and biological causes that might be investigated using the standard…