Social Sciences
tetrapodzoology | August 8, 2008
Of course - sorry - it was not a living thylacine, and I'm both impressed and dismayed that the real answer - Zebra duiker or Banded duiker Cephalophus zebra - had been posted within 20 minutes of publication [adjacent photo of C. zebra from the Zebra duiker page on the outstanding Ultimate Ungulate]. Well done Chris (of Catalogue of Organisms) for getting there so quick. I saw the Zebra duiker photo (taken at Sapo National Park in Liberia by a team gathering data on pygmy hippos), on the EDGE blog (here) and thought it would be fun to use for this purpose. And of course now I have a good…
edyong | August 8, 2008
Social lives are delicate things. We've all had situations where friendships and relationships have been dented and broken, and we're reasonably skilled at repairing the damage. This ability to keep our social ties from snapping relies on being able to read other people, and on knowing a thing or two about what's normal in human society.
For instance, we appreciate that cheating fosters ill-will, while generosity can engender trust. So cheaters might try to win back their companions with giving gestures. These little exchanges are the glue that bind groups of people into happy and…
sporte | August 7, 2008"Did you know," my friend whispered, "that the Humane Society funds terrorists?"
I was stunned. What? That's crazy! I've adopted pets from there. No way! How could those be the same people??
My friend and I were suffering from "brand confusion." In business, this happens when different companies use similar names for their products in order to confuse the marketplace. In the animal rights movement, brand confusion is used to misdirect the funds that would otherwise help groups who do genuine humanitarian work.
As I learned in "The Animal Research War" by P. Micheal Conn and James Parker…
clock | August 6, 2008Duck-billed Dinosaurs Outgrew Predators To Survive:
With long limbs and a soft body, the duck-billed hadrosaur had few defenses against predators such as tyrannosaurs. But new research on the bones of this plant-eating dinosaur suggests that it had at least one advantage: It grew to adulthood much faster than its predators, giving it superiority in size.
Massive Numbers Of Critically Endangered Western Lowland Gorillas Discovered In Republic Of Congo:
The world's population of critically endangered western lowland gorillas recently received a huge boost when the Wildlife Conservation Society…
neurophilosophy | August 6, 2008
The Science Blogging Conference will be held at the Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BS, on August 30th, 2008.
According to the organizers, the event has now reached its attendance capacity, but if you'd like to be placed on the waiting list, send an email to network[at]nature.com, with the subject line 'Science blogging conference', stating your job title, affiliation and a link to your blog if you have one.
Here's the conference programme, and below is a list of registered attendees, along with links to their Nature Network profiles and blogs/websites.
Registered…
worldsfair | August 5, 2008
Yesterday, Ben threw out the following question:
What does a scientist actually think the history of science offers?
To be frank, I don't think it's necessarily a tough question to answer, but I do think that my answer, and other answers presented will be a challenge to enact in the real life workings of scientific research.
So why is the historical context important? From an empirical standpoint, what it provides is another form of data - data that arguably has a huge impact in how science is done, and perhaps, how science should be done.
In my world, the world of biological scientific…
bcohen | August 4, 2008Historians and some scientists argue that it is a relevant and important pursuit to understand more about the history of science. I agree; in part this is what my day job is. But why exactly does it matter? To whom is it important? In what way? What will they get from it? How do historians know those reading the history of science get what they (the historians) think they should get? These are generations-old questions, to be sure. (I suppose one would have to know the history, though, to know that they are generations-old questions.) It could be relevant for students in the sciences…
oracknows | August 4, 2008It's happened again, only this time it's escalated. Sadly, this escalation was predictable.
Remember back in February, when I discussed how animal rights terrorists had been harassing a researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC)? At the time, protesters attempted a home invasion of a researcher, leading to a police response where a home was searched by the police. This time around, however, these thugs have turned violent:
SANTA CRUZ -- The FBI today is expected to take over the investigation of the Saturday morning firebombings of a car and of a Westside home belonging to…
pharyngula | August 4, 2008It actually feels kind of good, considering that my job is secure, and that these critics are looking increasingly rabidly insane. I just sit back and watch their hysteria grow. Case in point: Rod Dreher, who seems to be crawling the walls and screaming right now. In his 'review' of the desecration issue, nowhere does he mention the cause: the violent over-reaction of Catholics to a student in Florida walking away from Mass with a communion wafer, and the subsequent uproar calling for expulsion and punishment from Bill Donohue.
His parting shot to believers: "Nothing must be held sacred."
He…
oracknows | August 4, 2008I've lamented time and time again how much woo has managed to infiltrate academic medicine, even to the point where prestigious medical schools such as Harvard and Yale have fallen under its sway. I've even gone so far as to lament that resistance is futile when it comes to the rising tide of woo threatening to wash over academic medicine, although lately I've been in a more pugnacious mood.
But what good is a pugnacious mood when denialist pseudoscience starts popping up credulously reported in news sources tailored for physicians and other health care professionals? That's exactly what…
jlynch | August 3, 2008PZ has a post up discussing some abject stupidity over at WorldNetDaily. Sign #1 of stupidity is that the WND columnist (a lawyer, no less) refers to "Origins [sic] of Species" as being Darwin's 1859 work which legitimized "a pagan, anti-God worldview rooted in fascism, socialism and eugenics and to propagate these diabolical ideas throughout the world." PZ notes:
What logically follows from Darwin's theory is that fit individuals are those that survive and have offspring. There is no presumption that there is only one possible strategy to accomplish that survival: if we maintain a state that…
jlynch | August 3, 2008The preliminary program for the History of Science Society's annual meeting (November in Pittsburgh) has been placed online and it looks like the best series of sessions in a long while with the organizers managing to avoid scheduling sessions on similar themes at the same time. It's a three-day meeting but I'll only be around for the Friday & Saturday. Here's what my preliminary schedule looks like:
Friday
9:00 - The Hard Parts: Paleontology and the Evolutionary Synthesis. Some nice papers here on Sewall Wright, species concepts, Osborn, random drift, and ID.
12:30 - lecture by Gar…
evolvingthoughts | August 3, 2008
Social organization is not peculiar to men. Other societies, such as those constituted by bees and ants, have also arisen out of the advantage of cooperation in the struggle for existence; and their resemblances to, and their differences from, human society are alike instructive. [T . H. Huxley, Prolegomena to Evolution and Ethics, IX.]
Just because John Lynch mentioned that work...
pharyngula | August 2, 2008The Center for Inquiry has put together two letters on the Webster Cook affair, one to be sent to UCF president John Hitt, and the other to the Catholic League. I've put both below the fold.
Dear John C. Hitt:
We are writing in response to the recent controversy surrounding University of Central Florida student Webster Cook. Countless people have publicly proclaimed that they are sending letters to your University demanding the expulsion of Webster Cook.
Let us quickly recap the events in question. Webster Cook went to a communion ceremony on campus, not at a Catholic Church, and was given a…
purepedantry | August 1, 2008There is an interesting discussion going on at the Becker-Posner blog about obesity abatement. Richard Posner talks about the NY ordinance requiring that calorie counts of food be prominently labeled fast food restaurants:
The significance of the New York City ordinance lies in its requiring that calorie numbers be printed next to the food items on menus and menu boards and in large type. The purpose is less to inform than to frighten. Psychologists have shown (what is anyway pretty obvious) that people respond more to information that is presented to them in a dramatic, memorable form than…
grrlscientist | August 1, 2008tags: sex, abortion, feminism, family planning, medicaid, Department of Human and Health Services, contraceptives, birth control pills
This morning, I heard an astonishing interview on WNYC that discussed a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) draft document that was just leaked. This document proposes to redefine nearly all forms of birth control, especially birth control pills, as a form of abortion and allows any federal grant recipient to obstruct a woman's access to contraception [PDF]. Considering that roughly half of all American women use birth control pills, I think this…
gregladen | August 1, 2008 Photograph of anthrax
Do you remember the Anthrax Scare? Envelopes with strange notes and mysterious white powder were showing up in various mailboxes. In many cases the white powder was "weaponized anthrax" ... anthrax (bacterial) spores processed in such a way to enhance the spread of the spores by air and infection via lung tissues.
A total of five people died in that incident, which occurred shortly after the September 11th attacks.
US Government Scientist Bruce Ivins had been under suspicion for a number of reasons, and on learning that prosecutes were about to charge him with…
worldsfair | August 1, 2008The other day I was having a conversation with a number of scientist types, and specifically the topic of movies like Sizzle or Expelled came up. This, of course, led to the whole "framing" thing, which to be frank is a little confusing to me generally.
It was here, that one of my colleagues mentioned that an old creative non-fiction piece of mine, about science communication, might actually make a good narrative for a movie on big science issues. In particular, the ones that desperately need communicating and clarification to the public at large, but also those that are more meta in nature…
cmcclain | July 28, 2008Rick points out that Planktos is back. Planktos is one of those groups who wanted to fertilize the oceans with iron to sequester C02 out of the atmosphere. Both Rick and I were skeptical. Of course we weren't the only ones.
This group feels it is premature to sell carbon offsets from the first generation of commercial-scale OIF experiments unless there is better demonstration that OIF effectively removes CO2, retains that carbon in the ocean for a quantifiable amount of time, and has acceptable and predictable environmental impacts. As with any human manipulation of the environment, OIF…
evolvingthoughts | July 27, 2008
Lately there has been a rediscovery on the blogia of C. P. Snow's Two Cultures - which initially was the divide between those who understood the Second Law of Thermodynamics and those who don't, but is now, it appears, between those who know math and those who don't, and the respective attitudes. In Chad's initial post, the discussion turned to the Sokal hoax and what it is supposed to prove. So what I want to do here is a little "compare and contrast" between what is usually thought to be the main themes of postmodern philosophy (not being an expert, I may be... no I certainly am…