Social Sciences
pharyngula | April 17, 2008Yesterday, two great pious leaders of the world met in Washington DC. President Bush has immense temporal power, leading one of the richest countries on the planet with the most potent military force. Pope Benedict is a spiritual leader to a billion people, with immense influence and the responsibility of a long religious legacy. What could they have talked about? Mostly, they seem to have patted each other on the back and congratulated each other on their commitment to superstition.
In remarks greeting the pope at the White House, Bush called the United States "a nation of prayer."
Bush was…
nisbetmc | April 17, 2008On the eve of Expelled premiering in theaters across the country, Pew offers a wide ranging Q&A with Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project. The full interview is more than worth reading, but a particular exchange is revealing.
How can scientists - especially scientists who are religious believers, like yourself - do a better job of reaching out to these people and convincing them that these findings are not a threat to their faith?
That's a very difficult challenge. And I don't think we should underestimate just how threatening it is to someone who has been raised in a…
pharyngula | April 16, 2008Look what they've done: Philadelphia declares a whole Year of Evolution, a celebration starting on 19 April.
The YEAR OF EVOLUTION kicks off for the public on Saturday, April 19, as the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology opens Surviving: The Body of Evidence, a new exhibition which explores the process of evolution and its outcomes. Other public programs so far scheduled at the University of Pennsylvania include lectures by Donald Johanson, Director, Institute for Human Origins (May 2008), Spencer Wells, Project Director of the National Geographic Genographic…
cortex | April 15, 2008Over at Freakonomics, they invited several prominent thinkers to weigh in on a rather lofty question: How much progress have psychology and psychiatry really made?
The answers are mostly interesting, with nearly everyone agreeing that the sciences of the mind and brain have made tremendous progress. That is, of course, the correct answer. When you think that, one hundred years ago, Ramon y Cajal had just published his "speculative cavort" laying out the neuron doctrine, or that we still had no effective treatments for any mental disorders (the frontal lobotomy would become popular a few…
tsmith | April 14, 2008 This is the first of 6 guest posts on infectious causes of chronic disease.
By David Massaquoi
Is this the Beginning of the end of antibiotic resistant problem or just another scientific false hope of eradicating microorganisms that have co-existed with humans for millions of years? In the days before antibiotics, some researchers saw bacteriophages, viruses that can seek out and destroy bacteria, as a promising candidate for fighting infections. Now, as more organisms develop resistance to existing antibiotics, phage research is finding new favor.
(More after the jump...)
At the Society…
laelaps | April 13, 2008It has sometimes been said that the leaders of creationist ministries and advocates of intelligent design are charismatic, charming people who know how to play to the crowd. I don't believe it. Creationists are often just as loud, judgmental, and terse as the stereotype of evolutionary scientists that is so often hauled out to admonish students of nature for not being skilled enough at communicating their ideas effectively. Recently the Calvinist pastor R.C. Sproul interviewed Ben Stein about Expelled, and the result is the antithesis of stimulating discourse;
(Note: The video did not load…
awild | April 13, 2008
The Argentine Ant (Linepithema humile), a small brown ant about 2-3mm long, is one of the world's most damaging insects. This pernicious ant is spreading to warmer regions around the world from its natal habitat along South America's Paraná River. Linepithema humile can drive native arthropods to extinction, instigating changes that ripple through ecosystems. In California, horned lizard populations plummet. In South Africa, plant reproduction is disrupted. Worldwide, the Argentine ant is a persistent house and crop pest. This is not a good ant.
My Ph.D. dissertation, completed a few…
clock | April 12, 2008Being out of the lab, out of science, and out of funding for a while also means that I have not been at a scientific conference for a few years now, not even my favourite meeting of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms. I have missed the last two meetings (and I really miss them - they are a blast!).
But it is funny how, many years later, one still remembers some posters from poster sessions. What makes a poster so memorable?
I guess it has something to do with one's interests - there is just not enough time during a session to check out every single one out of hundreds (or…
revere | April 11, 2008I have professional colleagues who are dedicated birders but it has never interested me, and their interests are mainly independent of their lives as epidemiologists, toxicologists or whatever else they do at work. But the biosphere is truly interconnected in strange ways and sometimes what seems an unrelated realm intrudes itself front and center in a different context. Bird migration is a good example. How is bird flu spread? Is it human enabled movements of infected poultry or the rare bird trade? Or is it the "natural" movements of wild, migratory birds, the natural reservoir for the…
jstemwedel | April 10, 2008I haven't given up yet. You know I'm still looking for more clarity on the basic premises of framing. I tried to work out what does and does not fall within the framing strategy in a flowcharted example and (again) came away with a bunch of unanswered questions.
This round, I'm going to look at an example from the Nisbet and Scheufele article in The Scientist (a link to the PDF given here. I'll confess that I'm still confused, but I think I'm getting closer to identifying precisely what I'm confused about.
Here's what Nisbet and Scheufele say in The Scientist article about communication…
razib | April 10, 2008Ancient DNA: Reconstruction Of The Biological History Of A Human Society:
A research team has reconstructed the history of the evolution of human population and answered questions about history, using DNA extracted from skeleton remains. Knowing the history of past populations and answering unresolved questions about them is highly interesting, more so when the information is obtained from the extraction of genetic material from historical remains. An example is the necropolis at Aldaieta (Araba) where some of these mysteries about these peoples have been answered - thanks to the study of…
sheril | April 9, 2008
Folks up in DC have the chance to catch my colleague Dr. Raphael Sagarin tomorrow at AAAS. He's in town to talk about his new book 'Natural Security: A Darwinian Approach to a Dangerous World':
'From observations of nature and studies in evolutionary biology, Dr. Sagarin has drawn some intriguing conclusions that he suggests may have applications to security in human society. Biological organisms have been developing and adapting novel solutions to myriad threats for their own security for over 3.5 billion years. Across that immense span, literally millions of natural features have…
jstemwedel | April 8, 2008One of the key requirements that researchers conducting studies with human subjects must meet is that they obtain the informed consent of the participating subjects (or of a parent or guardian, if the subject is not able to give informed consent himself or herself). However, there are particular instances where giving the subjects complete information about the study at the outset may change the outcome of the study -- namely, it may make it practically impossible to measure what the research is trying to measure. If these studies are not to be ruled out completely, doing them necessitates…
clock | April 8, 2008A post from December 5, 2007:
Communication
Communication of any kind, including communication of empirical information about the world (which includes scientific information), is constrained by three factors: technology, social factors, and, as a special case of social factors - official conventions. The term "constrained" I used above has two meanings - one negative, one positive. In a negative meaning, a constraint imposes limits and makes certain directions less likely, more difficult or impossible. In its positive meaning, constraint means that some directions are easy and obvious and…
gregladen | April 8, 2008Whence public access policy, and why?
Flashback. The year is some time in the 1980s. The place, southern Indiana. The setting: A meeting of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists.
We are being given a presentation, in the business meeting, by a publisher. The publisher points out that the maintenance of a journal (as we had been doing) is expensive and difficult, and the most efficient way to carry out this onerous task was to have the professional publishers do it. The society was promised that members would have inexpensive subscription rates to the journal, perhaps even free…
hrynyshyn | April 8, 2008Could it be that all this talk about how best to frame argument is pointless? It would if our capacity to change our minds in the face of new information was genetically determined.
If evolutionary psychology doesn't turn your crank, give this post a miss. I'm not convinced myself that there's a lot of merit to this particularly line of inquiry. But just in case...
In a comment posted to one Chris "Intersection" Mooney's recent efforts to explain his support for "framing" science, PZ "Pharygula" Myers gets to the nub of the problem:
Science educators need to get people to accept new ideas,…
cmcclain | April 6, 2008
Several years ago as a young graduate student I was privy to gossip about a supposed site near Puerto Rico where pharmaceutical waste was dumped in the ocean. A senior scientist in my field told me that antibiotics in the waste killed off most of the natural microbes occurring in the water column and on the seafloor. That was all the specifics I received at the time. In the ten years since then I have thought about this off and on, but I was unable to uncover any further information. In January, I was searching for an article on a wholly different topic and finally stumbled across a…
sb admin | April 6, 2008People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is an extremist organization. Some might even call it a cult, and a violent one at that.
Ingrid Newkirk, the president of PETA, is a particularly objectionable fuckwit. Many of my friends are vegetarians for ethical reasons. They object to the treatment of the animals we use for food, and they object to the impact raising food animals has on the environment. It's a personal choice. But they don't think that a chicken is the ethical equivalent of a person. My friends just aren't that stupid.
Ingrid is not one of my friends. In her…
revere | April 6, 2008About a month ago (March 1, 2008) we brought you the story of how a highly reputable and knowledgeable scientist, Dr. Deborah Rice of the Maine Department of Maine Department of Health and Human Services, was bonced off of an EPA scientific advisory committee because the chemical industry trade group, the American Chemistry Council (ACC), objected that she had a bias. How did they know? Dr. Rice, as part of her duties as toxicologist for the State of Maine, testified before its legislature that on the basis of a review of the scientific evidence she believed the deca congener of the…
clock | April 6, 2008All humans, at some point in their lives, go ahead and die. Ages and causes of death vary widely.
Bloggers are humans.
All bloggers, at some point in their lives, go ahead and die. Ages and causes of death vary widely.
But, if you are a journalist with a dry spell in your inspiration, and if you feel threatened by bloggers, and if you already used all the cliches about bloggers being unruly, unwashed, untrustworthy Martians who lie (and point at Powerline, Instapundit or Little Green Footballs as if they were examples of the best of blogging, instead of the cesspools of racist, mysogynist…