emjohnson | January 19, 2010This past weekend I was in Durham, North Carolina (my old stomping grounds) attending the annual ScienceOnline Conference that focuses on science communication in the digital age. I am pleased to report that Anton and Bora have built on their previous successes to accomplish something rare for a conference: it was both relevant and refreshingly innovative.
In the next few posts I will highlight some of the workshops I attended and what the important message I got from the panelists involved:
1. From Blog to Book: Using Blogs and Social Networks to Develop Your Professional Writing (…
emjohnson | January 15, 2010Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4
Richard Hofstadter wrote in Social Darwinism in American Thought that this political theory was "one of the leading strains in American conservative thought for more than a generation." In this series I have shown many of the inconsistencies that exist in the literature on social Darwinism and have emphasized the main objections that scholars have raised about the utility of the term.
In Part 1 I presented the standard definition of social Darwinism as defined by Richard Hofstadter and R.J. Halliday. In Part 2 I highlighted the common objection that there…
emjohnson | January 14, 2010Scientific innovation relies on open communication and always has. It has only been through the free exchange of information and ideas that scientific pioneers have expanded the boundaries of knowledge. Through books, pamphlets, letters, journals, and now blogs, scientists communicate their results and imagine new frontiers in the natural world. But even as we reach our highest point of scientific achievement have we failed to learn the lessons that history teaches?
The barriers to science have always come in the form of restricting information. Figures such as Copernicus, Kepler,…
emjohnson | January 12, 2010 The Open Laboratory?! You're kidding? Woo hoo!!!!!!!!My post for Nature Network, Male Chauvinist Chimps or the Meat Market of Public Opinion? has been selected for this year's Open Laboratory as an example of the year's best online science writing. For those who have followed the developments of Ardipithecus ramidus, it will interest you to know that Owen Lovejoy used this study as the basis for his argument that male provisioning was responsible for the origin of bipedalism.
Many thanks to Bora and Scicurious (this year's guest editor) for selecting my piece. They should be…
emjohnson | January 11, 2010Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4
In Quentin Skinner's celebrated history The Foundations of Modern Political Thought he writes that:
If the history of political theory were to be written essentially as a history of ideologies, one outcome might be a clearer understanding of the links between political theory and practice.
In Part II of this series I highlighted how a common objection to the political theory of social Darwinism is that it was a misapplication of Darwin's science to already existing ideas. A second objection is that there is no core theoretical framework that would make the…
emjohnson | January 10, 2010
Image: Atheistcartoons.com
Of course, you can always count on World Nut Daily to explain the illogic of celebrating a victim of capital punishment while supporting its practice:
The reason capital punishment was necessary, God explained, was because human life was so special. There had to be a blood atonement for the death of an innocent man or woman.
There's a much longer and detailed explanation of the absolute requirement for the death penalty in God's economy in Numbers 35. That's where we learn that the land is actually polluted by the unatoned shedding of innocent human blood. There's…
emjohnson | January 9, 2010
In this TED Talk Susan Savage-Rumbaugh discusses bonobos housed in a bispecies environment that have been taught to communicate using pictographs. In the talk she suggests that biology isn't what made humans unique from nonhuman apes, but rather argues that it was cultural developments and social learning. Quite obviously there are some biological differences (around 1% of our genes differ, some of them coding for proteins important for brain formation). However, I challenge you to watch Kanzi build a fire and perform activities that require precise hand-eye coordination (including the…
emjohnson | January 8, 2010Herbert Spencer coined the term "survival of the fittest" in 1852 and suggested that Darwin use it himself after he read On the Origin of Species in 1859. However, Darwin was resistant because he thought it could be misinterpreted. According to historian Thomas Leonard, Spencer then appealed to Alfred Russell Wallace to pressure Darwin to accept the term. Darwin eventually agreed and it appeared in the fifth edition of Origin in 1869.
emjohnson | January 8, 2010Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4
English sociologist Herbert Spencer coined the term "survival of the fittest" in 1852.As I pointed out in Deconstructing Social Darwinism, Part I scholars have begun to seriously challenge the usefulness of the term as a political theory. For example, Gregory Claeys calls the political framework of social Darwinism "a misnomer," Paul Crook states that the ground on which it rests is "decidedly shaky," Robert Bannister calls it a "myth," Donald C. Bellomy refers to it as "heavily polemical, reserved for ideas with which a writer disagreed," Thomas C.…
emjohnson | January 7, 2010Click Here to Vote
Our fellow Scibling Mo at Neurophilosophy has been nominated in the science category for an award as the best producer of short real-time content on Twitter. Check him out at @mocost and make sure to vote for him at the Shorty Awards page. He's currently in ninth place and, with the combined strength of the ScienceBlogs family, we can hopefully push him up to the top slot.
emjohnson | January 6, 2010To everyone on the political right who is now calling for an invasion of Yemen, take a breath. Reflect on the words of one of the few Presidents in history that actually commanded troops in the field before becoming Commander in Chief:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at…
emjohnson | January 5, 2010Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4
Social Darwinism is one of those concepts that everyone knows what it is but few can define. I myself have sometimes reflexively used the concept without fully knowing the history of the term or its use as a political theory. In this series it is my goal to raise some questions about the usefulness of social Darwinism and the way it has been applied. This is a history that is full of contradictions (as history often is) and I encourage people to both challenge and offer suggestions as I develop these ideas.
It is first important to point out that Darwin…
emjohnson | January 5, 2010 Recruitment poster calling for defense of the "Soviet Motherland." Woman holds a document that translates roughly to "military oath."My grandmother sends me a lot of chain e-mails. Many of them are of the right-wing Evangelical Christian variety that have been resent so many times that I have to scroll down several pages just to get through the history of everyone it's been sent to. I've received a video about how Muslims are out-breeding Europeans and how this will be the death of Christianity. Another celebrated the anti-Muslim Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders who claims "there is…
emjohnson | January 4, 2010 Dolphins, such as this individual caught and used by the US Navy, could be granted personhood rights that protect them from such abuse. Image: United Press InternationalIn Douglas Adams' series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy it turned out that dolphins were super intelligent beings from another world who felt protective of the hairless ape creatures that were dithering about feeling self important:
On the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much--the wheel, New York, wars and so on--while…
emjohnson | January 2, 2010Republican Senator John Ensign of Nevada appeared on CNN Dec. 31 and was grilled tenaciously by Rick Sanchez. For those that haven't been following the issue, Senator Ensign started having an affair with the wife of one of his top aides, Douglas Hampton. When they were found out Ensign's family gave Hampton a "gift" of $96,000 and Ensign arranged for lobbying jobs to help Hampton financially. In the process the Senator almost certainly violated the law against former aides working as lobbyists within one year of their government employment.
According to The New York Times:
Senate ethics…
emjohnson | January 1, 2010Goodbye 2009, hello 2010. It was supposed to be the year we made contact. We'll have to make do with a watered down version of healthcare reform instead. At each new year we often seek to look back in reflection and learn a few lessons as we continue our journey. We are also apt to atone. I apologize for the intermittent posting as of late. Work had piled up and it's always difficult to get things done while visiting family. I assure you that we will return to our regularly scheduled program shortly. Writing for me is more of a need than a choice, but without my loyal readers I would…
emjohnson | December 30, 2009
Welcome to the newest installment of the four field anthropology blog carnival Four Stone Hearth. As the carnival enters into a new decade there were many wonderful voices clamoring for attention.
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Cultural
Savage Minds offers a few thoughts on the Na'vi from the James Cameron blockbuster Avatar.
USC Anthropologist Nancy Lutkehaus discusses her impressions after working as an adviser on the set of Avatar.
Sheril at The Intersection reflects on the Science of Avatar Part 1 and Part 2.
Mark at…
emjohnson | December 17, 2009 Wall Street's shadow in New York CityAs the education reformer and philosopher John Dewey once stated, "politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance." Unlike other critics of scientific communication, it is my contention that as long as we only address the shadow we will never create substantive change on such pressing scientific issues as health care and the climate crisis. Today James Hrynyshyn at Island of Doubt has linked to an excellent post highlighting this very concern. The post is from an anonymous employee…