Social Sciences
gregladen | February 13, 2008 As Europeans plied the seas in search (and ultimately management) of colonies and conquests, they learned the practical geology they needed to find their way and avoid wrecks. Everyone knows that Charles Darwin's opportunity to spend several years on the Beagle ultimately rested on the British Admiralty's need to improve navigation maps, especially along the South American coasts. The near shore conditions change, some of the existing maps were not adequate, and the size of ships was increasing so once-safe passages no longer necessarily were. The Beagle's Captain Fitzroy had a reputation…
hrynyshyn | February 13, 2008Let's return now to climate change "tipping points," or as a group led by Tim Lenton of the University of East Anglia has renamed them, "tipping elements." They're important because if we can nail these down with a fair degree of confidence, we'll finally have some tangible policy advice to offer the powers that be.
Lenton et al have turned a 2005 meeting on the subject into a paper just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. It's full of predictions about just how far away we might be from triggering dramatic shifts in critical features of the Earth's climate. But…
evolvingthoughts | February 12, 2008
Language Log recently took apart the speech and interview by the Archbishop of Canterbury that the media are, inaccurately, reporting as advocating the introduction of Sharia law into British and by implication other common law jurisdictions. Its conclusion was that Abp Rowan Williams did not advocate Sharia law, but instead suggested that secular law should not have a monopoly on regulating human behavior.
As someone once said, of course they would say that. Williams is a religious leader, and wants to have a role in regulating his adherents' behaviour. Tu quoque, he must accept the same…
bcohen | February 12, 2008As a follow-up to Dave's prior post, I add here reference to a discussion about the same topic in response to an Orion article last Fall. The essay by Janisse Ray, "Altar Call for True Believers: Are we being change, or are we just talking about change?," was followed by over 200 comments. It offers a good canvas of the matter of green academics and the meaning of a greened academia.
She confronts the same moral issue raised in the story Dave cites, along the way posing this scenario:
A global-warming speaker is invited to a village ten miles from Brattleboro to speak. She accepts. There…
gregladen | February 12, 2008A Cafe Scientifique by Yours Truly ....
.... details below the fold.
Cafe Scientifique
Evolution, Cuisine and Romance
Tuesday, February 19, 7 p.m.
Bryant-Lake Bowl, Uptown
$5-$10 (pay what you can)
Were the opposable thumb, an upright stance and a large brain the most important evolutionary events in human history? According to Anthropologist Greg Laden, these and other traits are only the byproducts of the truly important evolutionary transitions for our species: the rise of romance and the evolution of cuisine. Join Laden for a discussion about the co-evolution of diet, sexual strategies…
drorzel | February 10, 2008
Clothes Make Working for the Man Easier
A better take on academic dress.
(tags: academia society)
Gotta do this « Confused at a higher level
I want those flip books...
(tags: physics education academia science)
Deltoid: Bed Nets and artemisinin dramatically decrease malaria
Good news from and for Africa.
(tags: biology drugs society disease)
On being a scientist and a woman : Alice's late-nite pointers to writing conference papers
Good advice from a new blogger
(tags: academia education meetings social-science humanities science)
ESPN - No scholarships, no fanfare, UNC's JV squad…
jlynch | February 10, 2008
As promised, here [pdf, 7.83M] are the slides from today’s Darwin Day talk for the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix. There were somewhere between 80 and 100 people in attendance, and I think it went quite well.
And for any attendees who stop by here [pdf] are the slides from my September talk on Intelligent Design.
pharyngula | February 10, 2008Apparently, Barack Obama did well in the recent primaries, increasing the chances that he'll be the Democratic candidate for president. Right away, we're seeing an old video of an Obama speech (transcript here) being refloated. This is the same speech that prompted me to say I would never vote for Obama. It really is a ghastly exercise in self-delusion and post hoc justification of religious bigotry; I'd say he was pandering to his audience, except that I think he really believes the nonsense he was spouting.
Just reading it again pisses me off, it's so full of stupidity. Look at this:
And…
scientificactivist | February 9, 2008
When I first arrived in Oxford, about two and a half years ago, I found myself face to face with a very vocal and determined animal rights movement. Thriving on misinformation and intimidation--through their visible rallies and underhanded techniques of arson, grave robbing, and constant threats--they had stalled construction on Oxford's new animal research building (a building designed to even further ensure humane conditions for research animals). And, they had effectively silenced the scientific community and the much larger portion of the population that supports animal research.
Then…
stoat | February 9, 2008I'm ploughing my way through the Mad Bish's Speech. As Paul notes, its turgid stuff. At least you have to give him credit for getting religion back in the headlines.
Round about the end of page 2 I read this implies in turn that the Muslim, even in a predominantly Muslim state, has something of a dual identity, as citizen and as believer within the community of the faithful and I find it odd, because you can say exactly the same about a Christian (or Jew or Hindu or...). There is always a conflict between religious and secular law. As far as I know the clearest artciulation of the idea that…
gregladen | February 8, 2008Last night, the Campus Atheists, Skeptics and Humanists club (C.A.S.H.) presented a debate between PZ Myers and Loyal Rue on the question: Can religion and science co-exist? I witnessed this event and would like to tell you what happened.
I want to begin with a message to PZ Myers: Thank you, PZ, for your service! There are a lot of people in the twin cities who could engage in an interesting debate on religion, atheism, evolution, creationism, etc. and do an OK job, but none others have the experience and intellectual preparation (to do an excellent job) and the draw (to guarantee lots…
purepedantry | February 8, 2008People, you suck.
When I was younger (and less of a calloused bastard), I was willing to believe that human beings' pernicious behavior was restricted to particular unsavory individuals or select groups. Likewise, I would write off unscrupulous behavior as isolated incidents in the lives of otherwise good people. In short, I used to believe that bad behavior in people was circumscribed in some way, either in time or into individuals.
The more I experience it, however, the more I believe that bad behavior in humans is so pervasive as to damn our whole species. This is not an anomaly. We…
razib | February 7, 2008Innate social aptitudes of man is a controversial paper. As noted in the biographical introduction to it William D. Hamilton states that his friend Robert Trivers referred to it as the "fascist paper" (see Natural Selection and Social Theory for Trivers' perspective on his relationship with Hamilton). Not because Trivers himself thought it was fascist, rather, that was simply the perception of most who read and criticized the paper. The most vociferous critic was the biological anthropologist Sherwood L. Washburn (see Defenders of the Truth for a detailed exposition of Washburn's many…
gregladen | February 7, 2008I came across this chilling misanthropic missive in support of home schooling.
The greatest pitfalls of public education are the humanistic philosophies taught at the expense of biblical truth, ungodly teachers and classmates seeking to influence our children, and the absence of spiritual or moral considerations within the educational process. However, those problems aren't isolated to the public-school setting (as evidenced by just a few minutes of television-watching).
Within most of our neighborhoods--and even in some Christian schools--there are influences that tear at our desired…
jlynch | February 6, 2008
This coming Sunday I will be giving a public lecture for the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix. All are welcome, whether humanist or not. Details are:
Was There A Darwinian Revolution?
HomeTown Buffet, 1312 N. Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale
February 10th, 2008 9:00 am
[There is breakfast at 9, the talk will begin at 10]
As usual, I will probably post the slides here after the talk.
clock | February 6, 2008Vanessa Woods is a researcher with the Hominoid Psychology Research Group which recently moved to Duke University - just in time for her to be able to attend the Science Blogging Conference two weeks ago. Vanessa is the author of four books (three of those are for kids, the latest one, It's every monkey for themselves just got translated into Hebrew, and is aimed at adult audience). She is a feature writer for the Discovery Channel and she documents her research on her blog Bonobo Handshake (and what it means? Check the blog!)
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my…
drorzel | February 5, 2008
WD5 most likely missed Mars, but we may never know - The Planetary Society Blog | The Planetary Society
The asteroid is now officially lost.
(tags: astronomy planets space science)
Saint Gasoline » Blog Archive » The Allegory of the Trolley Problem Paradox
Or, Why You Shouldn't Major in Philosophy
(tags: comics humanities silly)
My Own Kind of Freedom: A Firefly Novel by Steven Brust -- The Dream Café
Steve Brust's Firefly novel, under a CC license. It's more Firefly than Brust, but still quite good.
(tags: books SF television)
Letters from the Past, A PRL Retrospective
"As part of…
purepedantry | February 1, 2008Complementary and alternative medicine has no business participating in mainstream science or medicine.
As I understand it, there are five core premises on which complementary and alternative medicine is based. I would like to confront each in turn:
1) The evil, old white men who run the medical establishment are united in a vast conspiracy to suppress legitimate treatments. If we had only looked to folk remedies sooner, we would have cured things like cancer and Alzheimer's long ago.
Think about that for a second: do you sincerely believe that everyone -- I mean everyone -- in the…
cmcclain | January 27, 2008George Bush this week declared war on sea mammals, officially adding whales to the dreaded Axis of Evil. The Bush administration stated whales are a threat to the American way of life, democracy, and of course freedom. Joking aside, Bush this week gave the official go ahead for the Navy to conduct sonar training off San Diego this week. The navy admits themselves that whales will be harmed by the exercise. This is occurring despite a recent win in the federal courts by environmental groups to restrict sonar use off the coast under the Coastal Zone Management Act. Bush simply issued an…
oracknows | January 27, 2008This story is a couple of weeks old, but I've only just come across it. It reminds me that there may be some things worse than death, and this is one of them:
To see the face of 32-year-old Huang Chuancai is to witness a rare genetic condition in its most terrible form.
Chinese doctors say Huang, of China's southern Hunan province, suffers from a disease known as neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder of the nervous system that primarily affects the development and growth of neural cell tissues.
For many of its sufferers, the disease means abnormal growth of these tissues and, as a result,…