Social Sciences
pharyngula | December 18, 2007Someday, I'm going to have to get John Wilkins to explain to me why we still have universities with theology departments, and haven't razed them to the ground and sent the few remaining rational people in them off to sociology and anthropology departments where their work might actually have some relevance. It's terribly uncharitable of me, but after reading this interview with John Haught, a Georgetown University theologian, I'm convinced that the discipline is the domain of vapid hacks stuffed full of antiquated delusions. I also feel bad for the guy since he did testify on the side of…
sb admin | December 18, 2007Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivoreâs Dilemma, writes in the latest New York Times Magazine about two stories that âmay point to an imminent breakdown in the way weâre growing food today.â The first is the rise of community-acquired MRSA (thatâs Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a nasty antibiotic-resistant bacteria) and the growing body of evidence linking it to the overuse of antibiotics in industrial pig production. The second is Colony Collapse Disorder, which is wiping out many of the honeybee colonies that farmers rely on for crop pollination.
âWeâre asking a lot of our…
bcohen | December 17, 2007Elizabeth Musselman, an historian of science at Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX, produces a wonderful series of podcasts called The Missing Link. You should all know about it.
(It's Bertrand Russell)
Of The Missing Link, she writes that it is:
A monthly program about science and its delightfully strange history. For people who are scared of science but deeply intrigued by it. For scientists who know there must be a better back story than what's told in the sidebars of their textbooks. And - oh yes - for those three dozen of you out there who, like me, actually make a living as…
laelaps | December 17, 2007
When the topic of persecution of scientists by religious authorities comes up, Galileo is typically mentioned most often, Giordano Bruno every once in a while, and Hypatia of Alexandria not at all. A longer list of figures who entered "warfare... with theology in Christendom" could be conjured up as well, even Linnaeus raising the hackles of the Vatican for grouping Homo sapiens in with primates. A more modern, though no less tragic, story involves the Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the main focus of Amir Aczel's new book The Jesuit and the Skull.
As my wife…
apalazzo | December 17, 2007From Lawrence Krauss, in a discussion with Natalie Jeremijenko that is featured in the latest issue of Seed:
I think that's what makes science special. As a scientist and someone who tries, for better or worse, to extol the virtues of science in a society that doesn't appreciate many of those virtues, I think that ultimately the good stuff wins out even if it takes a while to do it. Because the final arbiter of success isn't people. In science, it's experiments. It's the ability to make it work. If it works, then people buy into it, whether they like it or not. And I really think that's…
hrynyshyn | December 16, 2007The failure of the negotiators at Bali to reach any kind of agreement on a schedule for reducing greenhouse gas emissions has left many observers wondering if maybe it's time to resort to Plan B. Instead of adapting our industrial economy to the physical realities of radiative forcing and positive feedbacks, we should begin the process of adapting ourselves to a much warmer world. And why not? If there's one thing that sets Homo sapiens apart from the rest of the primate gang, it's our ability to adapt. Because planetary ecology isn't that simple, that's why.
Already, the confused logic of…
gregladen | December 14, 2007REPOST from gregladen.com
"Everyone needs to understand the basic facts of evolution as well as the essentials of the scientific method... When people are deprived of a scientific approach to reality as a whole, they are robbed of both a full appreciation of the beauty and richness of the natural world and the means to understand the dynamics of change not only in nature but in human society as well."
-Ardea Skybreak, "The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism"
Ardea Skybreak's new book, "The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism: Knowing what's real and why it matters…
cortex | December 14, 2007There was a very astute comment left in response to my post on evolution and psychopaths:
Normal people (however you define that term) can be desensitized to the suffering of others. Soldiers fighting in a war - those who don't become shellshocked - become insensitive to killing and wounding. Indeed, people with ordinary lives sometimes have to "harden their hearts" just to do their jobs.
I think one of the more uplifting facts of human nature is that it's very hard for us to "harden our hearts". Consider the behavior of soldiers during war. On the battlefield, men are explicitly encouraged…
cortex | December 13, 2007The latest issue of Nature has a thought-provoking article on new research trying to understand the psychopathic brain. On most psychological tests, psychopaths appear perfectly normal. Their working memory isn't impaired, they use language normally, and they don't have reduced attention spans. In fact, several studies have found that psychopaths have slightly above average IQ's.
So what causes the psychopath pathology? The problem seems to reside in the emotional brain: psychopaths have tremendous difficulty sympathizing with the emotions of others. When normal people are shown staged…
katie glasrud | December 10, 2007WARNING. What follows is a a bit of a rant. Worse, it's an undergraduate rant. If awkward phrases, fallacious arguments and poor grammar offends you, I would suggest skipping this post.
It could be that I'm seeing the world through cobalt-colored glasses-- it is winter in MN and very cold and dark-- and it is highly probable that the onslaught of medical school rejection letters biases me, but I think today was the most depressing day of school I've had in recent history.
It started with neurobiology (Ok...this one's a bit of a stretch) when we learned about the development of nervous tissue…
clock | December 10, 2007Generosity May Be Genetically Programmed:
Are those inclined towards generosity genetically programmed to behave that way? A team of researchers, including Dr. Ariel Knafo of the Psychology Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, believes that this could very well be the case.
Like Humans, Monkey See, Monkey Plan, Monkey Do:
How many times a day do you grab objects such as a pencil or a cup? We perform these tasks without thinking, however the motor planning necessary to grasp an object is quite complex. The way human adults grasp objects is typically influenced more by their…
razib | December 10, 2007Update on paper access: You can get it here already.
Note: I'm going to put a link roundup (updated) at this post. End Note
Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution:
Genomic surveys in humans identify a large amount of recent positive selection. Using the 3.9-million HapMap SNP dataset, we found that selection has accelerated greatly during the last 40,000 years. We tested the null hypothesis that the observed age distribution of recent positively selected linkage blocks is consistent with a constant rate of adaptive substitution during human evolution. We show that a constant rate…
sheril | December 10, 2007Science. Such a simple term inextricably involved in every aspect of our being. It's exploring the past while looking toward our future. Science is life.
Step back and consider what we read, watch, hear, and experience in the news and everyday--stem cells, terrorism, immigration, human health, global sustainability, data mining, safety, geoengineering, socioeconomics, and beyond--all goes back to understanding our world: SCIENCE. So I can't fathom why research, innovation, and technology aren't already highest priority on the collective national agenda.
We'll be revealing big news…
evolvingthoughts | December 9, 2007
Just to head off the obvious:
Do people kill because their religion or ideology tells them that nonbelievers are subhuman? Yes. Do people go to war because their religion or ideology tells them it is their patriotic duty? Yes. Do people walk into a church or missionary school and kill people because of their religion or ideology. Almost never. They do it because they are insane.
Believe it or not, the former actions are adaptive: if you follow the conventions you are accepted in your community, which raises your fitness. It's political, not ideological. The latter - the random killing of…
razib | December 9, 2007A few months ago I saw a paper which showed that small average differences across societies on a microeconomc parameter can result in massive variance in macroeconomic trends. Small differences in average trustworthiness or patience across societies (or, more precisely, small differences in the distribution of the psychological trait) can map onto to enormous between society variation in macroeconomic indices which one might adduce derive from the minor individual differences. I was struck by this because it formally and clearly elucidated a major issue I've noted across many domains of the…
evolgen | December 9, 2007The Scientist blog reports that a representative of the National Science Foundation (NSF) was at the annual meeting of the America Society for Cell Biology (ASCB). The NSF representative pointed out a couple of things things:
If your proposal describes research designed to find a cure for some disease, the NSF will not fund it. Well, duh! The NSF is about funding basic research. If you want to cure diseases, go ask the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for money. Research about human diseases and human health are not fundable by the NSF.
If your lab is well funded, don't expect the NSF…
oracknows | December 8, 2007See what happens when I actually manage to keep myself from checking my blog for nearly 24 whole hours?
The trolls take over.
Well, they're not exactly trolls. Trolls often don't believe in what they post; they merely post it to get a reaction, for example, like rabid Hillary Clinton opponents posting on pro-Clinton discussion forums. However, true believers invading the discussions on blogs that oppose their viewpoint can produce much the same result as trolls who troll just for the sake of getting a reaction. Think creationists or fundamentalist Christians posting on Pharyngula or HIV/AIDS…
evolvingthoughts | December 8, 2007
John, hear me.
What? Who said that?
It is I, God.
Oh come on. PZ, is that you? I'm not buying it.
It is I, God. Look, I'll prove it. [Clouds in the sky form the letters "Yep, It's Me" for a minute and then evaporate.]
Ummm, OK, for the sake of argument, let's say it is You, and I'm not hallucinating. What do You want?
I want to tell you how you all must live your lives.
Why? Because You say so? Or because it will benefit us? I mean, you have a track record of delivering arbitrary rules for no apparent benefit to us, and plenty to those who say they represent You. Haven't you…
clock | December 5, 2007Communication
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 thus much more likely for…
j7uy5 | December 5, 2007From an
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in the Washington Post:
Afterward, she stayed strong. She wasn't
going to make the classic victim's mistake of blaming herself for
provoking the attack.
Mo, writing at
href="http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2007/11/mdma_for_ptsd.php">Neurophilosophy,
commented at length upon an article about the use of
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mdma">MDMA (
href="http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/mdma/mdma.shtml" rel="tag">Ecstasy)
in the treatment of
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