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Most of the ethical questions raised by cloning were already with us.

The Ask a ScienceBlogger question of the week is: On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal. Ten years on, has cloning developed the way you expected it to? On the technical end of things, I suppose I'm a bit surprised at how challenging it has been to clone certain mammals successfully, but getting things to work in the lab is almost always harder than figuring out whether they're possible in theory. I expected, of course, that some would want to try cloning humans and that others would declare that cloning of humans should be completely off limits. But as…

Basketball Players and The Hot Hand

In honor of the start of basketball season, and to commemorate the surprising victory of my Kobe-less Lakers over the Suns, I thought I'd discuss my favorite science paper on basketball. (I did a similar thing to celebrate the beginning of the football season.) The paper is by Amos Tversky (of KahnemanandTversky fame) and Thomas Gilovich. In 1985, Tversky and Gilovich analyzed "the hot hand" among NBA players. As every basketball fan knows, players are streaky: one minute they are in the zone and can't miss a shot, and the next minute every field goal attempt is ricocheting off the rim. But…

Lower Uppers and Status Anxiety

I've always been impressed by America's lack of interest in class issues. Having spent a bit of time in England - a country where class is transposed onto every little social interaction - it was a shock to return to America, a place where disparities in income are both more tangible and more ignored. While there are many reasons for this lack of interest in class issues - Americans have historically been fixated on racial and ethnic divisions, we imagine ourselves as country of "unbridled opportunity", etc. - I wonder if we are reaching a tipping point. For one thing, Americans are clearly…

Everybody Cheats

It was the final exam of my freshman year. I was taking Intro to Psych, and I had just pulled an all-nighter. After a few minutes, I began to notice some odd paper shuffling off to my left. The kid next to me was carelessly using a small cheat sheet, dense with definitions written in 8 point font. I was infuriated. For one thing, the test was curved, so a perfect score hurt everyone. I was also pissed that the cheater would never get caught. We were taking the test in a huge lecture hall, and the grad students monitoring the exam were a distant blur at the front of the class. I briefly…

A quick reply to some of the arguments made recently

I seem to have struck a nerve. I'm getting lots of irate email over this post I made yesterday…not the usual cranky, ungrammatical rants I get from creationists, but literate notes with a hint of desperation. They're still wrong. Everyone is mangling the question. It's not, "What should a scientist think about morals?", or "Should all scientists be atheists?", it's "What should a scientist think about religion?" I'm also not trying to argue that science or atheism is a better way of living your life (not here, at any rate). If a scientist looks at an idea, like religion, how does he evaluate…

Brain Fitness Programs

The Times recently had an article on the booming business of brain fitness: Decaying brains, or the fear thereof, have inspired a mini-industry of brain health products -- not just supplements like coenzyme Q10, ginseng and bacopa, but computer-based fitter-brain products as well. Nintendo's $19.99 Brain Age 2, a popular video game of simple math and memory exercises, is one. Posit Science's $395 computer-based "cognitive behavioral training" exercises are another. MindFit, a $149 software-based program, combines cognitive assessment of more than a dozen different skills with a personalized…

Lava flows: You can't stop them, you can only hope to contain them

Lava flows from Kilauea in Hawai`i move towards a home in Kalapana. Whenever I think about the hazards posed by most lava flows, I tend to think about the opening scene in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Developers are planning to knock our hero Arthur Dent's house down and as a last ditch effort to stop its destruction, Arthur lies down in front of the bulldozer. The demolition supervisor, a certain Mr. Prosser, at one point asks Arthur if he knows how much damage the bulldozer might suffer if he just lets it roll over poor Mr. Dent. Arthur says he doesn't know and Mr. Prosser replies…

Come on and Shook it up, baby, now / Twist and Shout

John Pieret reads Jerry Coyne so you don't have to, and catches Jerry Coyne rewriting history. Pieret notes in particular that Coyne is insisting that "faitheist" was never meant as a pejorative, when it clearly was, and has always and exclusively been used as such. For Coyne to try to rewrite history and claim otherwise is shameful, especially from someone who insists he is the great defender of the principle that "the truth matters." Speaking of which, Pieret closes by noting: "As an aside, Coyne accuses [Center for Inquiry VP John] Shook of 'redefining' "accommodationism." Where, exactly…

The deal on taxes, redux

Steve Benen wraps up the late-breaking reactions to the tax deal, most surprisingly Sen. Mary Landrieu's vigorous opposition: It seemed at least plausible to me that we'd see some Kabuki theater when it came to congressional Democrats' reaction to the tax plan agreement. Perhaps they'd feign outrage, knowing that if Dems publicly expressed strong support, Republicans would automatically balk at the deal. After all, we've seen this before -- if Democrats approve of a proposal, the GOP assumes there's something wrong with it. At this point, however, I think it's fair it's fair to say the Dems'…

Nothing ever changes

Shorter Martin Cothran: How Whiteliberaldemocrats voted on the Civil Rights Act of 1964: Rand Paul can't be a racist for opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in 2010 because there were racist Democrats who opposed it in 1964. Cothran doesn't know why everyone is beating up on Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul for saying he'd vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I mean, sure, the Civil Rights Act does a bunch of stuff that Cothran has no intention of actually discussing, but look how the voting pattern in 1964 doesn't tell a clean story about how one party is a bunch of Freedom…

War is heck

Shorter Bruce Chapman: Have you ever noticed that critics of the "war on science" don't criticize animal rights terrorists? Also, why don't proponents of a "war on poverty" cheer Jack the Ripper's contributions to the effort? For what it's worth, actual Bruce Chapman: Where are the protests against violence-supporting opponents of medical experiments, not to mention those who want to stop irradiation of grain to prevent disease and those who prevent the use of genetically modified crops in such hungry regions as Africa? Well, one can find them this way or this way. Or check the index to…

Circumcision to prevent HIV infection in America

Officials Weigh Circumcision to Fight H.I.V. Risk: Public health officials are considering promoting routine circumcision for all baby boys born in the United States to reduce the spread of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. ... He and other experts acknowledged that although the clinical trials of circumcision in Africa had dramatic results, the effects of circumcision in the United States were likely to be more muted because the disease is less prevalent here, because it spreads through different routes and because the health systems are so disparate as to be incomparable. Clinical trials…

Attitudes about evolution across countries

I have posted Creationism as a function of geography before. John Lynch pointed me to a new poll of Argentina, China, Egypt, Great Britain, India, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Spain and the USA. Though the set of countries is smaller than in some surveys, the number of questions asked were much larger: -Heard of Darwin -Not Heard of Darwin -Know a good/fair amountKnow a little/not much -Know nothing -Agree that scientific evidence for evolution exists -Do not think there is scientific evidence for evolution -Neither agree nor disagree there is scientific evidence for evolution -Think it is…

The biological roots of moral sentiments?

David Brooks has a new column grandly titled The End of Philosophy. Heather Mac Donald at Secular Right chides him for his criticism of the New Atheists, while John Derbyshire offers guarded praise. It seems to me that the jab at the New Atheists was something of a throwaway line and I lean more toward John's position. I give Brooks credit for attempting to inject insights from the new cognitive sciences into contemporary political commentary. Politics is a phenomenon which manifests on a grand scale, but its ultimate roots are at least in part in individual human psychology. The empirical…

MAOA & aggression

Monoamine oxidase A gene (MAOA) predicts behavioral aggression following provocation: Monoamine oxidase A gene (MAOA) has earned the nickname "warrior gene" because it has been linked to aggression in observational and survey-based studies. However, no controlled experimental studies have tested whether the warrior gene actually drives behavioral manifestations of these tendencies. We report an experiment, synthesizing work in psychology and behavioral economics, which demonstrates that aggression occurs with greater intensity and frequency as provocation is experimentally manipulated upwards…

The Nasty Little Truth about Idiots Who Don't Understand Dimensions

I managed to trash yet another laptop - the city commute through the subways seems to be pretty hard on computers! - so while I'm sitting and slowly restoring my backups, I was looking through the folder where I keep links to crankpots that I'd like to mock someday. I noticed one that I found quite a long time ago - and to my surprise, I realized that I never wrote about it! And given that I've been mocking relativity-haters lately, it's particularly appropriate to cover it now. The site is called "The Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics". It takes quite a different approach to…

Some Clarification on Wisconsin's Budget

Over at The Washington Post, Nick Johnson by way of Ezra Klein clarifies Wisconsin's budget crisis (italics mine): - Wisconsin's budget problems are real. The state has a $137 million shortfall in the current fiscal year - after taking into account the need for an additional Medicaid appropriation to get through the end of the year. The state has a $3.6 billion shortfall in the upcoming 2011-13 biennium (the two-year period that starts July 1, 2011). As always, we measure shortfalls as the gap between projected current-law revenues, and the cost of providing a continuing level of services,…

Reading Diary: Atoms & Eden: Conversations on religion and science by Steve Paulson

Warning: I generally don't post about religion/atheism/new atheism or any of those similar topics. I also don't generally post about my own views on such subjects. This post clearly will be breaking those habits. Don't say I didn't warn you. Now on to the review proper... First of all, let's get the elephant in the room out of the way. Yes, I'm an atheist. I don't believe in any god, old- or new-fashioned. I have no spiritual feelings at all really, including any vague "search for a higher meaning or sense of transcendence." I tend to find those sorts of feelings a little odd and…

Stopping chemical catastrophes: Can we do better than calling for stronger storage tanks?

On January 9, 2014 a leak was reported at Freedom Industries’ storage tanks on the banks of the Elk River just upstream of a water treatment plant that services tap water for about 300,000 residents in and around Charleston, West Virginia. The resulting release of at least 10,000 gallons of toxic chemicals used to clean coal contaminated the community’s water supply, making it unfit for use. More than a month later, it remains unclear if this water is truly safe to drink and what the health consequences of exposure to these chemicals may be. But this is far from the only disastrous toxic…

Trying to make the unacceptable acceptable: New books by Dan Fagin and Sarah Vogel illuminate our flawed history of controlling chemical hazards

By Elizabeth Grossman An anecdote related in Dan Fagin’s compelling new book, Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation, that tells the heartbreaking and infuriating history of how chemical industry pollution devastated that New Jersey community, points to one of the biggest flaws in our regulatory system’s approach to protecting people from toxics. In 1986, during a public meeting of the Ocean County Board of Health – Ocean County is home to Toms River, where the Ciba chemical company began manufacturing dye chemicals in the 1950s – an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official…

Phenomenon: It's just magic tricks (and not very good ones)

As promised, I watched Phenomenon, and I've got to say, I'm unimpressed. The premise of the show is there are 10 people with paranormal abilities vying for a 250,000 prize (they could make more if they tried Randi's challenge - I wonder why don't they?). The one that impresses the judges - fraud and huxster Uri Geller, and magician Criss Angel - as well as the studio audience who calls in and votes. Not only are they obviously using simple tricks to pass themselves off as psychics, but they're not even that good at it. Geller, of course, is such a pathetic creep, and acts as if each act is…

HIV/AIDS and viral load

Ah, another day, another paper for the anti-HIV establishment to glom onto and misrepresent. Last week's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association published this paper examining the relationship between HIV load and CD4 T-cell decline: Context Plasma human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) RNA level predicts HIV disease progression, but the extent to which it explains the variability in rate of CD4 cell depletion is poorly characterized. Main Outcome Measures The extent to which presenting plasma HIV RNA level could explain the rate of model-derived yearly CD4 cell loss, as…

More Monads: Stateful Programming

Time for more monads. In this article, I'm going to show you how to implement a very simple state monad - it's a trivial monad which allows you to use a mutable state consisting of a single integer. Then we'll expand it to allow a more interesting notion of state. Let's get the trivial stuff out of the way. To start off, we'll use a simple fixed state type which is just a wrapper for a single integer >data State = State Int deriving (Show) A monad over that would be written: >data SimpleStateMonad a = SSMon (State -> (a,State)) To understand that, just remember that the…

Embryonic similarities in the structure of vertebrate brains

I've been doing it wrong. I was looking over creationist responses to my arguments that Haeckel's embryos are being misused by the ID cretins, and I realized something: they don't give a damn about Haeckel. They don't know a thing about the history of embryology. They are utterly ignorant of modern developmental biology. Let me reduce it down for you, showing you the logic of science and creationism in the order they developed. Here's how the scientific and creationist thought about the embryological evidence evolves: Scientific thinking An observation: vertebrate embryos show striking…

Open Laboratory 2010 - submissions so far

The list is growing fast - check the submissions to date and get inspired to submit something of your own - an essay, a poem, a cartoon or original art. The Submission form is here so you can get started. Under the fold are entries so far, as well as buttons and the bookmarklet. The instructions for submitting are here. ============================ A Blog Around The Clock: What does it mean that a nation is 'Unscientific'? A Blog Around The Clock: My latest scientific paper: Extended Laying Interval of Ultimate Eggs of the Eastern Bluebird A Blog Around The Clock: Evolutionary Medicine: Does…

Gene regulatory networks and conserved noncoding elements

We miss something important when we just look at the genome as a string of nucleotides with scattered bits that will get translated into proteins — we miss the fact that the genome is a dynamically modified and expressed sequence, with patterns of activity in the living cell that are not readily discerned in a simple series of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs. What we can't see very well are gene regulatory networks (GRNs), the interlinked sets of genes that are regulated in a coordinated fashion in cells and tissues. What this means is that if you look within a specific cell type at a specific gene, its…

From President Obama, new support for paid sick and family leave

In the week before his 2015 State of the Union address, President Obama took modest but important steps toward expanding US workers’ access to paid sick and family leave. Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor to President Obama and Chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls, broke the news with a blog post on LinkedIn, where she explained the importance of paid leave: Anyone who has ever faced the challenge of raising or supporting a family, while holding down a job, has faced tough choices along the way, and likely felt stretched between the financial and personal needs of their family.…

Continued Debate on NSA Ruling

There's also lots of interesting debate going on around the legal blogosphere concerning Judge Taylor's recent ruling in the NSA lawsuit. Orin Kerr raises some interesting questions in a post at Volokh. He points out something that concerned me as well when I first read the ruling. I was not expecting a ruling in the case when it was issued, only a ruling on the state secrets privilege, meaning a ruling on whether the case would continue or would be dismissed. Instead, the judge ruled that the state secrets privilege did not apply in this case because no additional discovery was required…

The Tiger Woods Phenomenon

I have to admit to being absolutely fascinated by Tiger Woods. I've followed his career closely, despite doubting him initially. I remember watching the press conference when he announced that he was leaving Stanford and turning pro. I particularly remember watching Phil Knight, CEO of Nike, talk about the $40 million contract they had signed with Woods, and I remember laughing out loud and ridiculing Knight when he said that Tiger Woods would transcend the game of golf the way Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali transcended their sports. No way, I said; not a chance. No matter how good he is,…

Ask Ethan #6: The Center of the Universe

"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair." -C. S. Lewis And yet, when you search for the truth, you often find answers that butt up against your sensibilities, your preconceptions, and even your very notions of common sense. Such is the case in this week's Ask Ethan, where longtime reader and commenter MandoZink asks: I have a question that has perplexed me for most of my life. Recently I sought out and re-read more expert explanations of the…

Messier Monday: A Real-Life Pi-in-the-Sky Cluster, M38

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings." -W. Shakespeare Welcome to just another Messier Monday here on Starts With A Bang! Each Monday, we're taking a detailed look at a different one of the 110 deep-sky objects that compose the Messier Catalogue, each one a different semi-permanent wonder of the night sky for our viewing pleasure here on Earth. Image credit: Alistair Symon, 2005-2009. While we may not think of our galaxy as a hotbed of star formation -- and indeed it isn't compared to many, as it forms less than one Sun-like star per year…

Climate Science As A Second Front for Biology Teachers

The American Biology Teacher has hosted a guest editorial by Glenn Branch and Minda Berbeco of the NCSE. The editorial points out that climate science is under a similar sort of anti-science attack as evolution has been for years, though generally with different (less religious) motivations. Also noted is the problem of fitting climate change into the curriculum, especially in biology classes. Indeed, biology teachers are already having a hard time getting the standard fare on the plate. In recent years, for example, the AP biology curriculum has jettisoned almost everything about plants…

How to do voting

The Days When Democracy In America Was Bogus First, three stories. One comes from other sources, not verified, but everyone at the time (it is said) knew it to be true. Political operatives in the Boston area used to visit the train yards during the days and hours before a local mayoral election. They would round up the numerous "bums and hobos" (now known as homeless people) living in the train yards. Those interested, which appear to have been most, would accept a bit of cash and a broken comb. The cash was their payoff. The comb was broken in such a way that if you set it next to the…

Why fossil fuel corporations killed us

Sometimes, when I look at the things the Republicans and their leader, Donald Trump, are doing, I think of that poignant line in so many actual and fictional moments: "You have killed me." Someone says that because the killing is done, but they are not yet dead. The knife is driven deep, the car is heading for the cliff, the contract killer is closing in. Then the person dies, but not before they get to say, "You killed me." Today, I look at Donald Trump, the Koch Brothers, Rex Tillerson, the petroleum industry, the Heartland institute. They didn't kill me, but they have killed my daughter,…

The Electoral College Map One Week Out: Clinton Victory Likely But Not Assured

A couple of weeks ago, it was impossible to find a pundit or poll maven who saw a Trump victory as a possibility. I made the audacious claim at the time that this was incorrect, and I've been taking heat from it since then. Much of this widespread misunderstanding is ironically caused by the good work of the folks at FiveThirtyEight and their imitators such as the New York Times, who have been publishing probability statements about the outcome. If I know for near certain that Mary is going to beat Joe in an election, then I can say something like this: Probability of winning Mary: 97% Joe…

Constitutional Originalism and Biblical Literalism

James Ryan has a very interesting review of two books that critique originalism as a compelling theory of constitutional interpretation available at SSRN (it will be published in the Stanford Law Review soon). One of the books he reviews, Active Liberty, is written by none other than Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer and it is aimed primarily at Justice Scalia's brand of originalism. Breyer and Scalia have appeared at forums together essentially debating this subject over the last few years, which I would pay good money to see as I think they are the two finest minds on the court. This book…

Cornyn's Remarks on Alito

As I mentioned, I did get to hear a few minutes of Sen. John Cornyn's (R-Texas) opening remarks in this morning's Alito confirmation hearing and got a good chuckle out of it. As is common among partisans of both parties, he portrayed he and his party as motivated solely by a concern for truth and justice while the other party is beholden to "special interest groups" and beset by ulterior motives. It's this kind of pot-and-kettle rhetoric that convinces me that it is folly to take either party seriously. For instance: If qualifications, integrity, fairness, and open-mindedness were all that…

Bush's Imperial Presidency

The Bush administration genuinely appears to think that as long as it claims it needs the authority to do something in order to fight terrorism, there are no limits whatsoever on its power. This has reached the point where even the administration's defenders are having a difficult time finding a rationale for their increasingly imperial behavior. Some of us saw this coming 3 years ago when they began to assert the authority to suspend habeas corpus in specific situations and hold US citizens indefinitely without charging them or giving them an opportunity to challenge their imprisonment, but…

What's So Interesting About Ultracold Matter?

The first of the five categories of active research at DAMOP that I described in yesterday's post is "Ultracold Matter." The starting point for this category of research is laser cooling to get a gas of atoms down to microkelvin temperatures (that is, a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero. Evaporative cooling can then be used to bring the atoms down to nanokelvin temperatures, reaching the regime of "quantum degeneracy." This is, very roughly speaking, the point where the quantum wavelength of the atoms becomes comparable to the spacing between atoms in the gas, at which point the…

Lee Smolin, The Trouble With Physics

Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics is probably the hot physics book of the year. Granted, that's not saying very much, relative to whatever Oprah's reading this week, but it's led to no end of discussion among physics types. And also, frequently, the spectacle of people with Ph.D.'s squabbling like children, so reviewing it is a subject that I approach with some trepidation. I'm coming to this late enough that it's hard to talk about the book without also talking about the various responses to the book. I'll do my best to split that material off into a separate post (if I post it at all),…

Science Blogging: What Is It Good For?

I got some interesting comments on last week's post about the science blogging bubble, and there were two in particular I wanted to highlight. Bee wrote (among other things): But what I think are further obstacle to blogging is the inappropriateness of the medium to science. E.g. blogs put by format an emphasis on novelty, which occasionally disturbs me. There's the option to label posts, but who ever looks at this? I'd vastly prefer to be able if interesting topics stay on top, such that it would be easier to spin longer discussions around a specific topic. Not sure I'm making that very…

The Making Of "Optical Control of Ultracold Collisions"

One of the things I'd like to accomplish with the current series of posts is to give a little insight into what it's like to do science. This should probably seem familiar to those readers who are experimental scientists, but might be new to those who aren't. I think that this is one of the most useful things that science blogs can do-- to help make clear that science is a human activity like anything else, with its ups and downs, good days and bad. To that end, I'm going to follow the detailed technical explanation of each of these papers with a post relating whatever anecdotes I can think…

Faculty Evaluation Is Really Complicated

There's a paper in the Journal of Political Economy that has sparked a bunch of discussion. The article, bearing the snappy title "Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors," looks at the scores of over 10,000 students at the US Air Force Academy over a period of several years, and finds a small negative correlation between the faculty effect on performance in an introductory course and performance in a follow-on course. In other words, as they explain in the Introduction, [O]ur results indicate that professors who excel at promoting…

Marriage: Why and how? And an Update on Jason and Jodi.

In case you didn't know, the marriage proposal launched by Jodi (asking Jason) and largely organized by Stephanie, has resulted in an answer. Congratulation Jodi and Jason! Not long before this internet round robin was launched, Jodi made a limited distribution, organized by Stephanie, of some background on their situation, and a version of this is what you see in the proposal itself. That prompted me to think about marriage related issues a bit, which in turn prompted me to sit down with Jodi and have a private little talk with the girl. Which, of course, I will now share with the entire…

Race, Gender, IQ and Nature

Nature, the publishing group, not the Mother, has taken Darwin's 200th as an opportunity to play the race card (which always sells copy) and went ahead and published two opposing views on this question: "Should scientists study race and IQ? The answers are Yes, argued by Stephen Cici and Wendy Williams of the Dept of Human Development at Cornell, and No, argued by Steven Rose, a neuroscientist at Open University. I would like to weigh in. The real answer, as is so often the case, is "You dumbass, what kind of question is that? Think about it further and rephrase the question!" But I don't…

How to make a vulva

The vulva is one of my favorite organs. Not only is it pretty and fun to manipulate, but how it responds tells us so much about its owner. And it is just amazing how much we're learning about it now. Don't worry about clicking to read more…this article is full of pictures, but it is entirely work safe because it's all about science. It also helps that all I'm going to talk about is worm vulvas. Anybody who has taken a developmental biology class in the last ten years knew exactly what to expect: when a developmental biologist starts getting all enthusiastic about vulvas, you know he's…

Cool scientists

It was 75 degrees yesterday. It got down to 24 today. And pretty much everyone else in the country is under a layer of ice/snow. But Im not gonna write about cold scientists. Im talkin about cool scientists. Chris Mooney, the expert on facades, appearances, and stabbing people in the back with a smile (you see, if youre smiling, its civil! we are all about civility, here!) is worried, for some reason, that scientists arent cool. This is not necessarily scientists fault, per se, as very few professions are actually cool. Being a teacher isnt 'cool'. Being a nurse isnt 'cool'. Working at…

Superheros are Anti-Science

I'm not really a comic-book guy, but I've watched a bunch of comic-book movies recently. Kate was really fired up for the new Captain America movie, so I finally got around to watching the first one as background for that, then when I was sleep-deprived last week I watched the second Thor movie via on-demand cable, then Sunday evening Kate and I went to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier in the theater (her second time watching it-- she's really fired up). Mostly, this has served to confirm that I'm not a comic-book guy. I'm just not invested enough in the idea of a movie about these…

Ghost writers in academia alive and well

I just want to say before I start that I wrote this whole post by myself, and the parts I didn't write are correctly attributed to the proper sources. Jacob Hale Russell, writing in 02138 Magazine (Harvard's alumni magazine), discusses some disturbing trends in academic writing. Specifically, he takes on the modern practice of employing numerous research assistants to essentially ghostwrite works for publication. In 2004, Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree issued a statement apologizing for plagiarism in his book All Deliberate Speed, plagiarism which he didn't know about, and which he…

Male Chauvinist Chimps or the Meat Market of Public Opinion?

Female chimpanzee with her infant requests meat after a successful hunt. Image: David Bygott / Tree of Life Web Project Owen Lovejoy's recent paper about Ardipithecus ramidus and human origins (see my detailed critique here) bases its argument on the male provisioning observed in chimpanzees. However, what went unacknowledged in his theory was the inherent gender bias it represented. A perfect example of this was observed in April with the release of the very study on provisioning behavior that Lovejoy used as the basis for his idea. From the press introductions alone, you would have…