razib | July 14, 2008Well, I never thought I'd watch a film with the title, Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy. The "star" of the Sizzle is Randy Oslon, a contributor to Shifting Baselines here at ScienceBlogsTM. In fact, Randy is a major contemporary interpreter of the term shifting baselines. I assume that most readers of ScienceBlogsTM are more familiar with Randy's oeuvre than I am, I haven't watched Flock of Dodos, and in general I tend to not be familiar with mass-market documentary films. I haven't watched either Al Gore or Michael Moore's documentaries, and Expelled was an experiment on my part in…
razib | July 14, 2008A profile of E. O. Wilson in The New York Times, Taking a Cue From Ants on Evolution of Humans:
Dr. Wilson was not picking a fight when he published "Sociobiology" in 1975, a synthesis of ideas about the evolution of social behavior. He asserted that many human behaviors had a genetic basis, an idea then disputed by many social scientists and by Marxists intent on remaking humanity. Dr. Wilson was amazed at what ensued, which he describes as a long campaign of verbal assault and harassment with a distinctly Marxist flavor led by two Harvard colleagues, Richard C. Lewontin and Stephen Jay…
razib | July 11, 2008Dave Appell at Quark Soup has a jeremiad against blogging up. It's fine, but I have to add that I was reading Dave's original blog in early 2002 (the first science blog I ever read), and he would post his frustrations about how crappy it was being a writer and how blogging was unsatisfying. As it happens, it's 2008, and he's come back to blogging, and last I checked he's still a writer. Dave also sent Rod Dreher an angry note for having supported the Iraq War (though Rod now opposes it).
So I'm just sayin', keep the messenger in mind :-)
razib | July 10, 2008I've posted on general scientific literacy broken down by demographic groups in the GSS. I've also pointed to data which suggested that the lower scientific literacy of church goers vis-a-vis non-church goers is an due mostly to the influence of Young Earth Creationism. Finally, I put up a post which suggested that Americans aren't that scientifically inept in the international context. So I thought I would repost the raw responses to various questions. Charts below the fold, but to explain the title, here's the difference between the 18-24 demographic and the over 65 demographic in terms…
razib | July 10, 2008I've already posted on GSS results on science knowledge. But what about the international context? Th working paper Civic Scientific Literacy in Europe and the United States has some interesting data which has international comparisons. Here's an interesting fact regarding "scientific literacy":
This confirmatory factor analysis demonstrates that all 32 of these items reflect a common factor. The uniformly high factor loadings suggest that many of these items are interchangeable and that would be possible to use a subset of these items if one needed a measure of civic scientific literacy…
razib | July 10, 2008This is a follow to the previous post focusing on which demographics know scientific facts. One of the major differences was between those who were very religious and those who were not, with more scientific literacy among the latter. Inductivist looks into the question that many have asked:
...I eliminated the three questions that touched on the question of creation or the age of the earth (i.e., the Big Bang, continental drift, and human evolution) and re-calculated scores with the remaining eight questions. Here are the results:
...
The Protestant mean goes up a few points when...when…
razib | July 9, 2008I don't post much about "politics in the news" because I almost never (OK, never) have anything value-added to say. That being said, I do want add something to the Jesse Jackson comment about wanting to cut off Barack Obama's testicles. Many people are framing this at Jackson's irritation at Obama talking down to black people and putting a specific focus on their social pathologies as opposed to broader societal dynamics. I think it is important to remember that Jesse Jackson isn't an exemplar of bourgeois probity himself (unlike Obama, at least what we know of him). He had an…
razib | July 9, 2008Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
It's been a while since I blogged Stephen Jay Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. I haven't forgotten it, but once I finished the historical preamble, nearly 600 pages, I was in the mood for a breather. My hunch was that despite Gould's emphasis on contingency in his theory in terms of his narrative there would be only a broad contextual relationship between Part I and Part II, the intellectual history of evolution by Stephen Jay Gould, and the scientific theory of evolution by Stephen Jay Gould. I've finished the 8th chapter, which is…
razib | July 9, 2008Most Americans are not aware that Herbert Hoover's Vice President, Charles Curtis, was 3/8 Native American and spent time on the Kaw reservation as a youth. He was also a Kansan. NPR has a piece up which looks back at this historical footnote.
razib | July 8, 2008The always fascinating Inductivist takes a look at science comprehension of Americans via the GSS. Here's his methodology:
In 2006 the General Social Survey asked 437 respondents eleven basic science questions. The first one, for example, was whether the earth's center is hot. I gave each person one point for answering a question correctly, and then summed the scores. My next step was to convert these totals so they resemble IQ scores. I set the white mean at 100, and the standard deviation at 15. Here are some averages:
Since we know the standard deviation I decided that it might be…
razib | July 7, 2008Flyby of Mercury Answers Some Old Questions:
Mercury, the smallest planet, bakes in the heat of the Sun, but it has water in some form. It has volcanoes. It appears to have an active magnetic field generated by a molten iron core. And it has shrunk more than scientists thought.
razib | July 7, 2008Most of you who read this weblog know that one of my primary preoccupations is how to invest my marginal time in terms of reading to optimize whatever it is I want to optimize (i.e., to "know stuff"). Life is short. So I recently began reflecting on the choices I make in terms of reading "classics," and how great thinkers of the past are remembered. Euclid's Elements for example is still relevant today. Arguably the most successful textbook in the history of the world its usage is obviated by the integration of many of its insights into mathematics as a whole. I know many people who go…
razib | July 6, 2008I was looking at poll results for Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO). Internationally the results are all over the place, but within nations the data suggest a pretty strong notional resistance to "playing God," with a rank order of aversion spanning plants (least averse) to humans (most averse). There is some mild positive correlation between education and trust/acceptance of GMOs, and also some between irreligion and attitudes towards cloning and such for animals. The The Pew Initiative On Food And Biotechnology has some good data. For example:
Religious attendance also has a…
razib | July 5, 2008This is a follow up to the post yesterday, Religion is good for your health? Conservative Christianity bad?. I finished reading the paper. It's not a bad one really, but its plausibility will be strongly conditioned by theoretical priors. It is a work in the tradition of Emile Durkheim, and attempts to resurrect a functionalist conception of religious denominations, David Sloan Wilson is smiling somewhere.... The authors posit that the other-worldly orientation of Fundamentalist and Pentecostal denominations results in a host of social dynamics which increase mortality rates. In…
razib | July 4, 2008Prevalence Of Religious Congregations Affects Mortality Rates:
....Blanchard found that people live longer in areas with a large number of Catholic and Mainline Protestant churches. He offers two key reasons for these findings.
"First, these types of churches have what's known as a 'worldly perspective.' Instead of solely focusing on the afterlife, they place a significant emphasis on the current needs of their communities," he said. These religions commonly organize outreach efforts for the needy and homeless, invest in the health infrastructures of their town and participate in other forms…
razib | July 3, 2008They say that to understand the present you need to understand the past. This seems likely to be true, but when it comes to understanding human affairs in their historical and sociological detail I have to admit that I'm skeptical of much genuine positive insight. That being said, I do believe that one can constrain the blind choices and flights of intuition one has through an exploration of the sample space of data which might allow for falsification of a subset of the myriad models. In short, to call bullshit you have to know shit.
A concrete example of this are the events leading up to…
razib | July 3, 2008David continues his series on the thinking of the great evolutionary geneticist Sewall Wright. Today's post, Notes on Sewall Wright: Migration. First, the general:
Continuing my series of notes on Sewall Wright's population genetics, I come to the subject of migration. This is important in understanding the differences between Wright and R. A. Fisher on the role of genetic drift in evolution. Fisher and Wright both agreed that genetic drift would be too weak a process to be of evolutionary significance in large populations (above, say, 10,000 in effective size)...Equally, they agreed that it…
razib | July 3, 2008Jonah pointed me to this artice, The '60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire, which chronicles the shift toward political moderation among the professoriate. That moderation seems to be less about changes in views toward the center of the American political distribution than it is a greater focus on career as opposed to striking a pose as a social revolutionary. As it happens, you can find the working paper which has most of the data which the article is based on, THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL VIEWS OF AMERICAN PROFESSORS. Below the fold I've placed the most interesting graphs, where…
razib | July 2, 2008The Political Mind, Part III (Chapter 2), Chris sayeth:
Anyway, now on to that part I promised you about how real conservatives don't exist, or at least not in great numbers. Towards the end of this chapter, Lakoff gives us the concept of "biconceptualism." This means that some people have both progressive and conservative thoughts -- that is, they dig obedience in some areas of politics, and empathy in others (the two are mutually contradictory, so they certainly can't go together in the same political policy!). Unfortunately for us progressives, most conservatives don't realize they're…
razib | July 2, 2008Nature came out with a piece today, PLoS stays afloat with bulk publishing: Science-publishing firm struggles to make ends meet with open-access model. The title basically says it all. There have already been some negatives responses, see Mike Dunford, Alex Holcombe, Living the Scientific Life, Greg Laden, Jonathan Eisen, Drug Monkey and Frontal Blogotomy. I won't really get into the details here. I think the article makes some good factual points, but they're stitched together in a manner to depict PLoS in a rather unfavorable light. The kicker of course is that Nature has some major…