Social Sciences
pharyngula | December 4, 2007I wish I could be there this Friday — this sounds like an extremely cool art gallery event, sponsored by the Cephalopod Appreciation Society. See, Seattle gets a whole society, while Morris just gets me, sitting in a corner, pining for molluscs. If you're in Seattle, you should go. Tell 'em I sent you.
Please join the CEPHALOPOD APPRECIATION SOCIETY Friday, DECEMBER 7th at the McLeod Residence for an art opening and squid celebration featuring 20-foot Giant Squids made of fabric by NY artist Cassandra Nguyen.
The general reception is from 6:00 - 9:00 p.m., and from 7:30-8:30 p.m., the…
clock | December 3, 2007In Promiscuous Antelopes, The 'Battle Of The Sexes' Gets Flipped:
In some promiscuous species, sexual conflict runs in reverse, reveals a new study. Among African topi antelopes, females are the ones who aggressively pursue their mates, while males play hard to get.
(which Kate explained a few days ago - is ScienceDaily that slow?)
Dinosaur Mummy Found With Fossilized Skin And Soft Tissues:
The amazing discovery of one of the finest and rarest dinosaur specimens ever unearthed -- a partially intact dino mummy found in the Hell Creek Formation Badlands of North Dakota was made by 16-year-old…
thusspakezuska | December 3, 2007
Ask a Scienceblogger asks: " What's the deal with "virgin birth" (parthenogenesis)?"
Many people, when they hear "virgin birth", think of the Virgin Mary. But all good Catholics know that Mary, Queen of Heaven, is not a true example of parthenogenesis. Really - do you imagine that the Catholic church would let a mere female lay sole claim to giving birth to the God-child? God had to send his "Holy Spirit" down to help Mary along and cuckold poor Joseph. Mary may be the Handmaid of the Lord and the Vessel of Selfless Service but no pope is going to give her sole credit for Jesus.
No,…
oracknows | December 3, 2007I've been spending a bit of time discussing the sad case of Dennis Lindberg, a 14-year-old youth with leukemia who died because of his refusal to accept a blood transfusion when his hematocrit fell to life-threateningly low levels apparently during chemotherapy. My position is that, while competent adults have the right to refuse transfusion for whatever reason they wish, children are not able to understand the implications of their actions and therefore must be protected from such beliefs. I do point out that I understand that the situation may not be as clear-cut in the case of an…
goodmath | December 2, 2007 There's been some talk among the sciencebloggers about the idea of intellectual property, and
href="http://www.scienceblogs.com/clock/">Bora over at "A Blog Around the Clock" asked me to convert
my thoughts into a post. It's a serious topic, which is worth giving some deep consideration, and it's
something that I've given a lot of thought to. Back when I was at IBM, I worked on some projects that were
internal and confidential, and also spent several years working on open-source. I've got two software
patents to my name. I didn't do any of that lightly; I spent a lot of time thinking…
evolvingthoughts | December 1, 2007
[Australian politics: look away]
Oh dear. It took only seven days for the shine to wear off the Labor victory. Julia Gillard has outlined the priorities for education: computers and trades training centres in schools. Yep, that's right, the single most important aspect of education in Australia is trade education and toys.
Never mind that the past 20 years has seen a decline in tertiary education funding by governments of both stripes, so that universities now have to attract overseas students in full fee paying courses to survive. It's all about trades. And toys.
Now I do not think that…
jlynch | December 1, 2007In his discussion of West’s recent talk in Minnesota, PZ notes:
I am extremely impressed with the fact that the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at the University of Minnesota has a historian and philosopher of science on their faculty -- more biology departments ought to make those kinds of strategic alliances to broaden and deepen their discipline.
I wholeheartedly agree. Here at Arizona State, the School of Life Sciences is the home for not only the Center for Biology & Society, but also the History and Philosophy of Science Program. We also have recently started a…
gregladen | November 30, 2007The 1920s. It was a sad, sad time in America. All the biologists got together and, inspired by Darwinian writings, embarked on a campaign to sterilize those they perceived as unfit, the campaign known to us as Eugenics. From Eugenics grew other evils, such as Planned Parenthood, Modern Evolutionary Biology, and The Nazis.
Or so intoned John West of the Creationist Discovery Institute, in a talk ending just moments ago at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities Campus.
The talk itself was rather sad, not just the apocryphal topic. It was executed with a modicum, but only a modicum, of…
gregladen | November 30, 2007In Genesis 4, we see specific reference to herdsmen and farmers as distinct groups, represented by Abel and Cain, respectively. God indicates a preference for the results of herding over planting, and the sibling troubles that ensue result in the world becoming a difficult place to farm, and humans becoming more nomadic, as herders. This is interesting, because it seems like a dramatic shift from reference to irrigation agriculture to herding. Given the usual role of origin stories, we may be seeing a layering of blame in this case. If this is the origin story of cattle keeping nomadic…
pharyngula | November 27, 2007Our Friday plans are getting better and better. Remember, the crappy talk by John West blaming Darwin for Hitler is at 7 on 30 November at the UM campus — come prepared to be critical. The fun part is that we're meeting between 5:30 and 6:45 in the Campus Club, on the fourth floor of the Coffman Union. Then some really good news: Mark Borrello, UM's expert in the history of science, is going to speak briefly after West's drivel. West isn't going to get away with anything, at least on Friday.
Unfortunately, he's also being given an opportunity to lie unchecked to the public on Saturday. The…
omnibrain | November 27, 2007Whenever I meet someone new and I tell them I'm studying psychology I inevitably get asked the ever annoying question "Are you analyzing me right now?" which of course always leads to the same response from me, "I'm as qualified to analyze or give therapy as an engineering student." Which is not at all.
I'm thinking of changing that response to "English majors are more qualified to do that than any psychology student." After all, the humanities and other social sciences seem to be paying much more attention to the classic analysis of old, namely psychoanalysis than any self-respecting…
razib | November 25, 2007Ali Eteraz has an article titled Mistaken identity in The Guardian which is a long rambling reflection on Islamic identity, and specifically his Islamic identity. He is somewhat confused by the conflation of Islam with a quasi-ethnic identity.
There are a few distinct issues here; though in the modern era we deemphasize terms such as "Christendom" or the "Dar-al-Islam," it would be disingenuous to deny that religious affinity is a powerful cross-cultural current. After all, one reason that American evangelicals are focused on the oppression of black Christians in Sudan and Chinese…
cmcclain | November 25, 2007Perhaps as no shock, oceanography is going to need some more money, about $2-3 billion to be exact. A group of international scientist called the Partnership for Observation of the Global Oceans (POGO) says "warming seas, over-fishing and pollution are among profound concerns that must be better measured to help society respond in a well-informed, timely and cost-effective way...A system for ocean observing and forecasting that covers the world's oceans and their major uses can reduce growing risks, protect human interests and monitor the health of our precious oceans." So what would we…
gregladen | November 25, 2007According to a story in the last issue of Psychological Science:
... for most women, high sex drive is associated with increased sexual attraction to both men and women. For men, however, high sex drive is associated with increased sexual attraction to only one sex or the other, depending on the individual's sexual orientation. These results suggest that the correlates of sex drive and the organization of sexual orientation are different for women and men.
[This is a repost from Gregladen.com]
This is one of those studies where a perfectly good (i.e., falsifiable) hypothesis was being tested…
pharyngula | November 23, 2007I mentioned that I should probably attend the odious John West's talk at the U of Minnesota next Friday, and Rick Schauer has stepped up to the plate and provided compelling motivation.
To help make it easier for you to attend West's talk, PZ...I'll sponsor a
Pharyngula Fellowship event at the UM Campus Club.
I'm talking free-beer and munchies to you and any other Pharyngulaites
reading this from 5:30-6:45 at the Club. We then all walk from Coffmann to
Nicholson and confront the poor sap in unison.We'll make more plans as
time passes.
Free beer? I thought this was a myth, a hoary legend…
clock | November 21, 2007It's been a while since I came back from Boston, but the big dinosaur story kept me busy all last week so I never managed to find time and energy to write my own recap of the Harvard Conference.
Anna Kushnir, Corie Lok, Evie Brown, Kaitlin Thaney (Part 2 and Part 3) and
Alex Palazzo have written about it much better than I could recall from my own "hot seat". Elizabeth Cooney of Boston Globe has a write-up as well. Read them all.
So, here is my story, in brief....and pictorial, just like the first part (under the fold).
The Keynote
About an hour or so before the conference, we started…
gregladen | November 20, 2007
This is a photograph of three Great Pyrenees dogs harassing a brown bear in Northern Norway. This photograph was downloaded by me some time ago from a web site that seems to no longer exist. I'd love to know if anyone knows where this web site is now, or
if the documents previously available on it are still available somewhere.
[This is a repost from Gregladen.com]
The story goes like this: Apparently, in this region of northern Norway, brown bears that normally reside in a reserve or park had started to wander into cattle farmland. This would be alarming because a) cattle farmers do…
evolvingthoughts | November 17, 2007
It's not often I get to comment on as-yet-unpublished work, but I have been sent a copy of a forthcoming essay by David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson, two giants of the theoretical evolutionary field, defending and redefining the nature of sociobiology (Wilson and Wilson 2007). As I have recently (i.e., in the last five years) come to be an unflinching sociobiologist, I think it is worthwhile summarising their argument and making some comments. This is the first in a rambling series riffing on that paper.
Introduction
Back in the dark ages, when I was a masters student, Kim Sterelny…
aardvarchaeology | November 15, 2007[More blog entries about skepticism, christianity, religion, atheism, jesus; religion, kristendom, jesus, ateism, skepticism, skepsis.]
Guest blogger Jim Benton, scourge of faiths big and small, pokes a few innovative holes in the logical fabric of Christianity.
Introduction -- Joseph, the 'Five Rocks,' and the Problem of Communication.
This article began as a series of four comments at Debunking Christianity in response to the second of a series of essays by a relatively new member named Joseph. Joseph is an ex-minister and counselor in a conservative Christian denomination who had found his…
denialism | November 13, 2007BarryA drops this idiot bomb on us:
Obviously, by definition, materialists cannot point to a transcendent moral code by which to measure moral progress. Indeed, it is difficult for them to account for moral progress at all because if materialism is correct, the "is" in a society defines the "ought."
Gosh, given that the cdesign proponentsists are all about science they do spend a hell of a lot of time criticizing materialism. Until they get their god-o-meter up and running it seems as though that this is a fundamental conflict between their stated beliefs and practice. But that's nothing…