hrynyshyn | August 2, 2006If you haven't already read Mike Dunford's latest posts (first here, and then here) on the FDA's attempt to restrict emergency contraception to adults only, it's time. Then, just for fun, try to square the government's position on abortion (it's wrong) with its actions (denying girls and young women easy access to a drug that will prevent abortions).
The only explanation that doesn't assume massive hypocrisy and/or a conspiracy to maximize needless pain and suffering, is that the religious right, whose views hold sway in the White House, simply doesn't understand how "Plan B," a.k.a. the…
hrynyshyn | August 1, 2006Well, not clams. And not legs as such. But there's a neat piece out in Nature on the evolutionary leap, so to speak, between fish fins and the limbs of land critters. A team of researchers has "discovered that the median fin of Catsharks, although originating from different embryonic cells, uses the same genes (Hox and Tbx18) during development as limbs and paired fins."
It's not quite that simple, of course. But before we get to the details, allow me to quote from an AP story that appeared within 24 hours of the announcement of the fin-limbs paper. It's about the Creation Museum that's "…
hrynyshyn | July 31, 2006While online polls are generally worthless when it comes to generating representative statistics - see this post and ensuing dicussion (sorry for being cranky, girlscientist) -- they can at time produce quite curious results. This self-described unscientific poll from the Australian science magazine COSMOS really has me wondering about the publication's readership.
"Are humans still subject to natural selection?" asks COSMOS. Fair question. And more than three quarters of the respondents selected one of two quite similar variations on a theme of "yes." But then there were the other responses…
hrynyshyn | July 31, 2006On the one hand, it's kind of sad that early 21st-century society is in need of frequent reminders of just how important reason is. Israelis and Lebanese are slaughtering each other. Iraq is in the midst of what can best be described as a civil war. American politics is dominated by those who believe a flag-burning prohibition is among the most urgent issues facing the country. On the other, it's good to know that some of our media gatekeepers recognize the need for those reminders. Required reading this week for children of the Enlightenment is an essay on the significance of Baruch Spinoza…
hrynyshyn | July 28, 2006A newly unearthed memo from a rural utility in Colorado has shed some light on the thinking behind the coal industry's support for climate change contrarians. You can read the memo, which lays out a strategy for a propaganda campaign against the idea that climate change is something we should be worried about, here, thanks to the wonderful metablog, deSmogBlog.
Seth Borenstein's AP story is a good overview from the popular press, and the RealClimate guys weigh in, too.
I haven't got much to add, except to note that I'm willing to bet there's going to be some mad members of the Intermountain…
hrynyshyn | July 27, 2006It's like every rationalist's worst media nightmare. Pat Robertson interviews Sen. Jim Inhofe on the 700 Club. I know I shouldn't be surprised by what transpired. After all, Inhofe is the guy who keeps calling global warming the greatest hoax of all time. But I have to admit I wasn't prepared for the depths of his mendacity.
Consider this exchange:
ROBERTSON: Tell me, what do the environmentalists believe? Do they worship the God of the Bible or something else?
INHOFE: Well, let's talk about the environmentalists. I call the far-Left environmental extremists the ones like the NRDC (National…
hrynyshyn | July 25, 2006Fill in the blank in this excerpt from a statement by 10 leading climate experts:
These ________ trends are setting us up for rapidly increasing human and economic losses from hurricane disasters, especially in this era of heightened activity. Scores of scientists and engineers had warned of the threat to New Orleans....
The missing word is not "warming" or other comparable references to climate change. The missing word is...
...demographic.
The statement, which is signed by scientists described by the New York Times as being "sharply divided over whether global warming is intensifying…
hrynyshyn | July 24, 2006Time was when I wouldn't have cared much if my alma mater had invited a New Age quack to give a lecture on the university's dime. That was then. This is now. Under the very clever headline of "Pitching Woo-woo," Vancouver's online newspaper, The Tyee tells us that the University of British Columbia last week provided a platform for Rubert Sheldrake, he of the "sense of being stared at" theory of telepathy.
How sad is that?
The thing that really gets my goat is that UBC is trying very hard to be a top-rate research school. Its new tag line is "Canada's Leading Edge." The university has…
hrynyshyn | July 24, 2006I see no reason why frivilous posts should be restricted to Fridays, especially when the item in question is as funny as the original Trek gang performing Monty Python's sendup of "Knights of the Round Table."
hrynyshyn | July 22, 2006From today's New York Times comes a story that should worry everyone:
From 2002 until this year, NASA's mission statement, prominently featured in its budget and planning documents, read: "To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers ... as only NASA can."
In early February, the statement was quietly altered, with the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet" deleted. In this year's budget and planning documents, the agency's mission is "to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific…
hrynyshyn | July 21, 2006This week's Science includes an interesting "forum" on the value of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), that wing of the U.S. National Institutes of Health charged with checking out whether or not herbal remedies and other medical techniques not sanctioned by MDs are worth taking.
The center's been around for about eight years now, and apparently not everyone thinks it's a wise use of $123 million of taxpayers' money every year. My first thought was: isn't it a good idea to apply the scientific method to testing the efficacy of echinacea, St. John's wort…
hrynyshyn | July 20, 2006The fact that yesterday's veto was Bush's first, after more than five years in office, does't interest me all that much. Thomas Jefferson's veto record is a big fat zero and I see nothing wrong with that. What I found bothersome was Bush's justification. He said embryonic stem cell research crosses "a moral boundary." To that I say: which boundary would that be, exactly?
I mean, at which point in the human reproductive cycle does one acquire moral worth? This is the fundamental flaw in the anti-abortion and anti-ESC research argument. Life is a continuum. Even if you believe that life worthy…
hrynyshyn | July 19, 2006You've heard of Jefferson's wall of separation between church and state? How about a wall of separation between church and store? According to the Globe and Mail, there is one now, between a new Wal-Mart outlet and a next-door religious retreat:
After a 10-year battle with its Jesuit neighbours in Guelph, Ont., the giant U.S. retailer has agreed to hide its store so that it won't be seen or heard by people communing with the divine next door.
In an agreement announced yesterday, Wal-Mart will install high berms designed by acoustical engineers and a "living wall" of willows and six-metre-high…
hrynyshyn | July 19, 2006Could it be a coincidence that this column summarizing the political right's infatuation with bad science in England appeared only a couple of days after Chris "Republican War on Science" Mooney arrived in London?
Polly Toynbee of the Guardian writes about the right-wing's shift from climate-change denialism to nuke-power advocacy. She suggests it's all part of a pathetic trend:
The old right has been on an arduous journey, with most finally converted to the truth universally acknowledged, except by flat-earthers: the world is warming at life-on-earth threatening speed. When the climate-…
hrynyshyn | July 19, 2006For anyone needing a good primer on the stem cell situation when it comes to the state of the science, Rick Weiss has a good recap in today's Washington Post.
The core issue:
Religious conservatives, in particular, believe that even human embryos in the earliest stages of life are beings with moral standing.
Proponents of the research, in contrast, allow that human embryos deserve respect but have argued that it is wrong to grant them the same moral standing as a fetus, which has reached a more complex stage of development, or a newborn. In general, proponents have argued for the right to do…
hrynyshyn | July 17, 2006Chris Mooney is sick of the stick. The hockey stick, that is. I don't blame him. How often should we have to revisit the tired argument over whether today's climate is warmer than any time in the last 400 years or 1000? But here we are again, thanks to Joe Barton's House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which commissioned three statisticians with no expertise in climatology to give Mann's graph yet another once-over.
In the absence of anything else of substance to chew on this morning, I bothered to look at what Barton's three wise men came up with. Same old, same old, it would appear. But…
hrynyshyn | July 14, 2006Anyone want to take a run at anticipating the reaction from creationists to the news that "Finches on Galapagos Islands [are] Evolving" (Associated Press, July 14)? I'm thinking they will latch onto the story's first paragraph, which ever so slightly introduces a microscopic degree of uncertainty into the most powerful unifying principle in biology.
I don't fault reporter Randolph E. Schmid or his editors. They're writing for the general public, so it makes sense to lead off a story on evolution thusly:
WASHINGTON -- Finches on the Galapagos Islands that inspired Charles Darwin to develop the…
hrynyshyn | July 13, 2006Is every species of living thing on the planet equally deserving of protection?
I don't think you're going to find too much sympathy for such an extreme position. For one thing, you can't give rights to dinner. I can foresee a time when some of the higher primates, and perhaps some cetaceans, may be afforded some of the respect for life and liberty now enjoyed exclusively by humans, but even that's a ways off.
There is a related issue, however, that is worthy of debate: is every species worthy of preservation? Much more fodder there,
hrynyshyn | July 13, 2006A study just published in the journal Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management concludes that the Prince William Sound ecosystem has fully recovered 17 years after the Exxon Valdez struck a reef and lost 11 million gallons of crude to the Gulf of Alaska. That's not the most interesting part of the study, though.
No, that would be the disclaimer, which I reproduce in full for your convenience:
Disclaimer--The authors wish to acknowledge the financial support provided by ExxonMobil for the time needed to prepare this article; however, the opinions and conclusions expressed herein are…
hrynyshyn | July 12, 2006No sign yet that the science-and-religion debate is heating (or, as the Brits say, hotting) up in the public sphere, but a continuing and expanding dialog on the subject in EOS has been brought to my attention. What started as an appeal to include some philosophy in NASA's mission planning has morphed into an exploration of just how cozy scientists should be with those more concerned with matters more spiritual.
It all began back in early 2005, when Robert Frodeman, a professor of philosophy and religion at the University of North Texas, wrote an essay (PDF) on "Space Policy and Humanities…