Social Sciences
tetrapodzoology | April 29, 2008
Welcome to the third and final part of my write-up of the CEE functional anatomy meeting: for part I go here, and for part II here. Here's where we wrap things up, but let's get through the last of the talks: those on tuataras, and yet more on primates...
Marc Jones discussed his work on skull shape and feeding behaviour in rhynchocephalians (the extant tuataras and their Mesozoic relatives: adjacent image, from Marc's UCL page, shows Marc with a live tuatara). It is generally agreed among herpetologists that Sphenodon is not, as used to be thought, an archaic relict; a sort of poor relation…
neurophilosophy | April 29, 2008My exams begin on Friday, so things are going to be pretty quite around here until around mid-May. I will post various bits and pieces over the next couple of weeks, but in the meantime, here are some interesting links that I've found recently:
In the New York Times Magazine, Gary Marcus discusses the possibility of memory chips - future generations of neural implants which use algorithms inspired by Google to augment the retrieval of information.
The author of the above article is interviewed by Carl Zimmer on bloggingheadsTV. Marcus is a professor of psychology at NYU, and the author of a…
scientificactivist | April 28, 2008Now that the Chinese ship An Yue Jiang--which was delivering arms from China to Zimbabwe--has been turned away for good, there are two significant aspects of this story upon which we should reflect. The first is that the true heroes of this tale are the unionized dockworkers, who catalyzed this turn of events by their initial refusal to unload the cargo. The second is that there are deep political ties between Zimbabwe and China, which make this picture much less black and white than it would appear to be on the surface.
It was reported on April 16 that a Chinese ship slated to dock in…
drorzel | April 28, 2008Inspired by the suggestion of a pro-science film festival, the Seed editors have launched a poll asking about science movies. They've narrowed it to four, all with both pros and cons:
Contact Pro: Arecibo is way cool. Con: woo-woo ending is even less compelling than in the book.
Gattaca Pro: Believable human interactions between characters. Con: Implausible dystopian setting. Also, it's about biology.
An Inconvenient Truth Pro: An important message for society and a mountain of supporting evidence. Con: It's Al Gore giving a PowerPoint presentation.
Jurassic Park Pro: CGI dinosaurs! Con:…
nisbetmc | April 28, 2008
Two weeks ago, as Expelled premiered in more than a 1,000 theaters across the country, I went with several friends and graduate students for an early Friday evening screening at the Regal Cinema located in the Chinatown neighborhood of Washington, DC. The medium sized theater was about 80% full. In attendance was what appeared to be the typical urban professional crowd for the surrounding arts and entertainment district, an audience on a Sunday that is more likely to read the New York Times at a coffee house than to attend church.
As I watched the film, I noticed how effectively Expelled…
razib | April 28, 2008Over @ Stranger Fruit John Lynch points a section from a paper which recounts the Christian assocation with eugenics:
On the whole the evangelical mainstream in the decades following the turn of the century appeared apathetic, acquiescent, or at times downright supportive of the eugenics movement. In this article, I argue that the evangelicals often accepted eugenics as a part of a progressive, reformist vision that uncritically fused the Kingdom of God with modern civilization.
In Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity the…
esiegel | April 27, 2008Dear Reader(s):
This is Ethan, and I'm writing this to you to let you know that I owe you an apology. I have gotten so excited with the idea of bringing the story of the Universe to you -- to tell you how we got from the birth of the Universe to the present day, to tell you what the world, galaxy, and Universe is like and how it got to be that way -- that I've gotten carried away.
You deserve the story, because it's wonderful and beautiful. You deserve the story, because it's something specialized and complicated, and it's something that I happen to have studied, hard, for the last seven…
jrosenhouse | April 26, 2008A common response to the books by Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris involved castigating them for the shallowness of their understanding of religion. In their incessant focus on fundamentalism and more extreme forms of religious belief, they proved themselves unwilling to consider seriously the nuance and subtlety of mainstream religious thought, it was argued.
P.Z. Myers brilliantly satirized this argument, referring to it as The Courtier's Reply. I was moved to think about it once more in light of this exchange of editorials in the British newspaper The Guardian. Representing sunshine and…
clock | April 26, 2008Early Human Populations Evolved Separately For 100,000 Years:
A team of Genographic researchers and their collaborators have published the most extensive survey to date of African mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Over 600 complete mtDNA genomes from indigenous populations across the continent were analyzed by the scientists, led by Doron Behar, Genographic Associate Researcher, based at Rambam Medical Center, Haifa, and Saharon Rosset of IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, NY and Tel Aviv University. Analyses of the extensive data presented in this study provide surprising insights into the early…
bioephemera | April 25, 2008
Mr. Tompkins Learns the Facts of Life, 1953
Via eliz.avery's flickr stream
Happy DNA Day!
It's been slow here on the blog lately, for a number of reasons - the most salient of which is that I've been on the Hill all week at the Congressional Operations Seminar sponsored by the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown. I highly recommend this course - it was a lot of fun. But unfortunately I didn't have a functional laptop this week, and thus couldn't blog. (At one point, my poor Mac burped up a blue screen of death - I didn't even know such a thing was possible!)
Yesterday, I just missed…
terrasig | April 25, 2008Okay, some people are smoking some bad dope.
Whilst helping the PharmKid get down to the car for school this morning, I came upon PharmGirl, MD, in a rage while sitting in front of her laptop. The object of her vitriol was a 17 April article in BusinessWeek entitled, "Are There Too Many Women Doctors?: As an MD shortage looms, female physicians and their flexible hours are taking some of the blame." The article derives from a point/counterpoint pair of essays in the 5 April issue of BMJ (British Medical Journal) entitled, "Are there too many female medical graduates?" ("Yes" position, "No"…
tfk | April 24, 2008Orac doesn't think Expelled's Nazi claims are a form of Holocaust denial. I disagree.
Orac has some good points, and "denial" may be a strong word. Orac gives the basic criteria of Holocaust denial as rejecting at least one of these statements:
1. The Holocaust was the intentional murder of European Jews by the Nazi government of Germany during World War II as a matter of state policy
2. This mass murder employed gas chambers, among other methods, as a method of killing
3. The death toll of European Jews by the end of World War II was roughly 6 million.
Expelled is either silent on or in…
sb admin | April 23, 2008One of my duties involves teaching nurse practitioner students. Nursing is quite different from medicine, and many of the linguistic markers of nursing differ significantly from medicine. As more physicians' assistants and nurse practitioners enter the primary care world there will be a bit of a culture clash. For instance, my NP students often refer to a physical exam as an "assessment", a misnomer which I do not allow them to use with me. Assessments come after you have spoken to and examined a patient. Another difference is in the common use of "client" in referring to patients. This…
sb admin | April 23, 2008A new study this month in The Lancet examined the health impact of domestic violence (of women by men). This was a very large WHO-funded study looking at multiple physical and mental health problems in abused vs. non-abused women. This is necessarily an observational study, but appears to be well done, and included a large and diverse sample of women.
A few findings are worth a specific mention.
First, intimate partner violence is very common across cultures, with numbers ranging from 15-71% of women who had ever been partnered with a man.
Next, mental health problems, which were self-…
razib | April 23, 2008Is it necessary to assume an apartheid-like social structure in Early Anglo-Saxon England? :
It has recently been argued that there was an apartheid-like social structure operating in Early Anglo-Saxon England. This was proposed in order to explain the relatively high degree of similarity between Germanic-speaking areas of northwest Europe and England. Opinions vary as to whether there was a substantial Germanic invasion or only a relatively small number arrived in Britain during this period. Contrary to the assumption of limited intermarriage made in the apartheid simulation, there is…
gregladen | April 21, 2008
Watching wolves, moose -- and heat -- on Michigan island from PhysOrg.com
(AP) -- Ignoring our observation plane circling above the frozen Lake Superior wilderness, the eight gray wolves seemed as harmless as your beloved pooch cavorting with its pals in the yard. Trotting along Siskiwit Bay, they playfully nipped and pawed each other, pausing occasionally to roll in the snow.
[...]
Humane Society files emergency appeal for sea lions in Ore. from PhysOrg.com
(AP) -- An animal rights group isn't giving up on blocking the government and two states from harming California sea lions that…
gregladen | April 20, 2008Steve Mirsky does a little Darwin Quote Mining reversal exercise in a recent post called "Never You Mine: Ben Stein's Selective Quoting of Darwin:"
One of the many egregious moments in the new Ben Stein anti-evolution film "Expelled" is the truncation of a quote from Charles Darwin so that it makes him appear to give philosophical ammunition to the Nazis. Steve Mirsky reports.
Steve rightly corrects stein, but does not put the quote mining in sufficiently broad context. So I do:
The original text from Darwin that Stein refers to in Expelled! expresses Darwin's ambivalence about the social…
kcontreary | April 19, 2008The occasional 7-dwarf orgy notwithstanding (and you cannot convince me it never happened--I just know there was a night with a full moon and an opportunistic bottle of peach schnapps...), when most Western fairy tales end with "and they all lived happily ever after", they mean a prince and a princess. The ideal of one man and one woman united in marital bliss is so pervasive in the developed world that sometimes it takes an egghead (or a pervert) to question why.
That is exactly what three researchers (so eggheads it is) at Hebrew University have done. In a paper in this month's AER, Eric…
drorzel | April 19, 2008The whole framing/ "screechy monkeys" fracas led to a number of people asking for more frequent postings emphasizing a more moderate view of the great science and religion flamewars. As I said at the time, I'm a little hesitant about this, because there just isn't that much there that crosses the posting threshold for me-- I just don't care enough about most of the incidents that generate noise here to deal with the hassles that come with posting.
In an effort to do a little good by speaking out more, I'll try to compromise by posting occasional collections of science-and-religion related…
jlynch | April 17, 2008Hofstra University solicits submissions for an interdisciplinary conference titled "Darwin’s Reach: A Celebration of Darwin’s Legacy across Academic Disciplines," to be held March 12-14, 2009.
Primatologist Frans de Waal, paleontologist Niles Eldredge, and Judge John Jones (who wrote the Dover decision on teaching evolution) will be among the keynote speakers.
Darwin’s Reach examines the impact of Darwin and Darwinian evolution on science and society in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Robert Darwin and the sesquicentennial of the publication of Darwin’s On the…