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Coming in from the cold

[Introduction|Part 2|Part 3] The study by McKemy et al is of great significance, as it led to the identification and characterization of the first cold receptor. This study also suggests that TRP channels have a general role in thermosensation, as all the previously identified TRP channels are sensitive to heat. Dhaka et al (2007) show that TRPM8 is required for sensitivity to innocuous cool stimuli and is also involved in sensing noxious cold temperatures. The TRPM8 knockout mice generated in this study have only a partial deficit in sensing noxious cold stimuli, so it is most likely that…

Changing Translation in Mitosis

I've been struggling with eIF4E. You see eIF4E is the major cytosolic cap binding complex. When mRNA is synthesized in the nucleus the cap is loaded with nuclear cap binding complex, CBP80/20. Then (the story goes) the mRNA is exported to the cytoplasm where the ribosome engages the transcript and thus the pioneer round of translation begins. If there are problems such as premature termination codons, the RNA is degraded by nonsense mediated mRNA decay (NMD). If all is well, CBP80/20 is exchanged for eIF4E and now full scale translational synthesis can begin. How does eIF4E promote…

Electoral math.

I've been thinking about the Electoral College, that mechanism by which voters in the U.S. indirectly elect their president. More precisely, I've been wondering whether small modifications in the system might make a significant difference. When the polls close on Tuesday night and the votes are tallied, the next President of the United States will not be chosen on the basis of which candidate received the most votes cast. Rather, each state (and the District of Columbia) will tally its votes, and whoever wins within each state (or the District) gets all of its electoral votes. Except for…

Friday Sprog Blogging: can kids handle science parody?

It willl be no surprise to regular readers on this blog that the Free-Ride offspring like books. At this point, it is even possible that their books outnumber their parents' books, which is almost alarming. (Please send compact shelving and a librarian who can break out some Dewey Decimal on our profusion!) Naturally, this means the sprogs must grapple with the issue of which books are reliable sources of information and with the related issue of which books are appropriate for children. We consider as a test case Animals of the Ocean: In Particular the Giant Squid. The book is hardbound…

The cultivation of girl geeks.

It's been cool to see my ScienceBlogs sisters Sandy, Shelley, and Tara represent in our little nerd-off. I'm inclined to say this offers at least some evidence that women can get as geeky as the geekiest men. Sadly, there seem still to be many people -- including people selling stuff -- who just can't wrap their heads around that idea. The most recent commercial monstrosity demonstrating the belief that females have a fundamentally different relationship to technology than males is the "Digi Makeover", descibed in horrifying detail by Kyso Kiasen at Punkassblog. The short version: it uses…

Was Freud a Prophet?

Mixing Memory posted an interesting reply to my "Gladwell is the New Freud" post. He argued that my "Freud bashing was just wrong": For one, while Jonah attempts to criticize Gladwell for being too Freud-like in his discussion of the "adaptive unconscious" (another term for the "cognitive unconscious"), the very fact that contemporary psychologists have begun to show just how important unconscious processes are is, in a way, a vindication of Freud. As is the fact that we are just now beginning to understsand the interplay of affect, motivation, and cognition -- the very focus of Freudian…

Is being a scientist something you do, or something you are?

Over at Neurotopia, SciCurious has a fabulous post on the question of who is a scientist. Her discussion really teases out a lot of important nuances, and I think her analysis is spot on. I'm going to add my two cents simply to connect Sci's discussion with an issue I've pondered before: the boundaries (or lack thereof) between who we are and what we do. When someone says, "I'm a scientist," at least in common usage, there is some ambiguity about what precisely he or she is asserting: I'm employed as a scientist (or am qualified to be and am seeking such employment). I've studied science.…

Are The Miss USA Contestants more Pro Evolution than the United States Senate?

There's been a fair amount of talk about the Miss USA interview question "should evolution be taught in schools," and a fair amount of attention given to the answers provided by the contestants. For the most part, people have gotten mad at these women because they are both beautiful in a classic patriarchal-normative-way and are handmaidens or hobgoblins or whatever of the sexist system in which we live, and because they are all wrong about evolution and whether or not it should be taught in schools. But, it is not so simple. I've actually seen it written that all but two, or all but one,…

Using Google Calendar from the Linux Command Line

Computer-based calendars are very useful, and the Google Calendar is probably one of the more widely used personal calendars other than scheduling programs such as MS Outlook and Groupwise (both of which are broken). But, webby gooey applications can be rather bothersome because they tend to take up a lot of screen real estate and other resources, and on smaller screens such as a laptop can be rendered virtually useless by all that added functionality built into the web browser itself as well as the calendar page. It is quite possible that on your laptop, your Google Calendar may look…

A genetic cause of rapid degeneration in some Alzheimer's patients

A new study identifies a likely cause of rapid degeneration in some Alzheimer's patients. The results of this study may lead to improved treatment. But first, let's look at the method used in this study, because that may be almost as important as a development. And for this, we will use a sports analogy. Let's say there's an allele (an allele is a variant of a gene) that can boost your ability to play baseball. It really works. It causes an eye-hand coordination thing that improves batting, catching, and also affects your perception of movement in 3D space so you never miscalculate…

Early Exposure To Lead May Be a Factor in Adulthood Criminal Arrest Rates

Lead What causes some individuals to be more violent than others? Obviously, being male is a risk factor for violence and more broadly for criminal behavior. The behavior of one's parents or other adult caretakers, as one is growing up, has been implicated in some studies as well. Poverty is an indirect factor as it can be associated with more direct risk factors. A new study in PLoS looks specifically at one of several possible environmental factors linked to arrest patterns in general and arrest for violent crimes in particular: Exposure to lead. Lead is a toxic metal that…

Darwin and the Voyage: 05 ~ South America on Five Dollars a Day

What do you eat when you are traveling the world in search of truth about the natural world? Most of the time Darwin ate pretty well... While traveling through the interior near Rio, Darwin makes note of some of the agricultural practices of the region. He is visiting farms ... plantations .. carved out of the forest. The chief produce of this part of the country is coffee. Each tree is supposed to yield annually, on an average, two pounds; but some give as much as eight. Mandioca or cassada is likewise cultivated in great quantity. ... that would be Manihot, or cassava, also known as…

Bailey discovers squirrels

It's Saturday and therefore time for some lazy non-science blogging, especially since after I finish this post I'm going to bury myself in grant writing. Multiple grant deadlines are approaching, and, given that most of my grant support expires towards the middle of next year, I have to go full tilt to keep my lab funded and keep my people employed. Such is how it will be throughout most of 2009 until I obtain some more funding. As I mentioned nearly weeks ago, we have a new six month old puppy named Bailey. He's definitely changed our life in a lot of good ways. One thing that I've noticed…

Jeffrey Dahmer: "Darwin made me do it."

I must lead a sheltered life, at least when it comes to the creationism-evolution wars. Sure, I'm more than aware about how much creationists and their more common (these days, at least) bastard offspring "intelligent design" creationists like to cherry pick, twist, and mangle data to make it seem to support their case, or, when all else fails, just lie outright about it. That's no surprise to me. Neither is the mendacious manner in which creationists try to blame Darwin and evolutionary theory for Hitler and the Nazis, as well as the horrors of Stalin and Mao, and just about every other evil…

Hugh Ross's "testable" Scientific Creationism?

A reader sent me some email asking if I knew anything about this book by Hugh Ross, Creation As Science: A Testable Model Approach to End the Creation/Evolution Wars(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). No, I don't. That is a very interesting and ambitious title, though, so I went digging on Ross's website, Reasons to Believe. You'd think that with such a promising statement, and the proposal that they actually have a scientific, testable model for creationism, that their model would be prominently featured somewhere. If you dig deep enough, you will find it, and you will be deeply disappointed. Here's…

Johann Hari on Journalismgate

Johann Hari has written an excellent article in The Nation on the scandalously poor reporting in the main stream media on climate science and scientists: Yet when it comes to coverage of global warming, we are trapped in the logic of a guerrilla insurgency. The climate scientists have to be right 100 percent of the time, or their 0.01 percent error becomes Glaciergate, and they are frauds. By contrast, the deniers only have to be right 0.01 percent of the time for their narrative--See! The global warming story is falling apart!--to be reinforced by the media. It doesn't matter that their…

Et tu, Radagast?

I sort of expected some attacks when I posted yesterday yesterday about how physicians' incomes have been steadily falling. After all, whenever Kevin, M.D. does similar posts, people with--shall we say?--issues regarding physicians often come out in droves to post nasty comments, just as they tend to do whenever he posts about how out of control the malpractice system in this country is. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised when there were so few such comments. But et tu, Radagast? Actually, I never really asked anyone to have a lot of sympathy for us doctors. As I've said many times, I make a…

Check out the new digs--and the new crew

Today is the day. Today is the day that Seed has decided to launch a revamped version of ScienceBlogs, complete with a spiffy new front page. It's long overdue, as the front page as it was had caused a number of frustrations, not the least of which is that bloggers whose posts are not as frequent would see their posts pushed off the front page in a matter of hours. Similarly the lack of any real categorization of the blogs, made it a less than ideal format. It worked OK when there were a few of us. We all knew that it couldn't work when it came time to add a significant number of new bloggers…

Advice From the 15th Century - and the 21st

Ever wonder how the art and science of medicine made it from medieval times to today without self-destructing, à; la alchemy? Meet Leonard of Bertapalia (1380?-1460), a prominent surgeon in Padua and Venice who was not only a dedicated anatomist but a visionary in the surgical arts. He authored one of the first texts on surgery of the brain and was a proponent of meticulous dissection, using every attempt to avoid infection or injury to the patient. Leonard is best known for eight rules he wrote as a guide for the 15th century surgeon. In my opinion they should be memorized by all…

African Diaries: Sketches & Observations, by David G. Derrick, Jr.

Originally posted by Grrlscientist On February 27, 2009, at 12:53 PM I love art, birds and travel, and because Africa has such a huge variety of exotic wildlife that I've only ever seen in zoos and aviaries, it is high on my list of places to visit. Recently, David G. Derrick, Jr., the author of a new book that combines art and African wildlife into an unusual diary format, asked if I would like to read and review his new book, African Diaries: Sketches & Observations (self-published, 2008). This slim paperback is an unusual travel diary because it is comprised of more than 140 of hand-…

Facing the Dread Spring Cleaning

Now that the horrid allergies of spring have passed, I am confronted with the season's other beast: Spring Cleaning. I used to think that was sort of awkward and cliche, perhaps better representing a time long past when housekeeping was designated by misogynistic roles. That, and I was really quite lazy. Then, in the late 1990s, my perspective on cleaning changed, when I took a job with a professional house cleaning service. I quickly learned that cleaning had nothing to do with gender roles (actually, the best cleaner in our company was male, as were some of our most fastidious customers)…

Why this book is so important

In June of 2003, I opened my blog with these words: Megan was born on 17-02-00 weighing slightly more than usual. The first few months of her life were totally normal- we didn't feel concerned about her health or well-being at all. That changed however when she had her DTP jab. I know there's been a lot about the jabs (particularly the combined MMR jab) in the news but we (or rather I, Naomi was a lot more dubious than me but I managed to convince her) decided to go ahead with it and on the night of her first lot of jabs Megan began projectile vomiting and developed a temperature that peaked…

What Is Life? Skip the Definitions, Stick to the Rules

Jessica asked if I think viruses are alive. John has given his opinion. I will waffle, but I hope in an interesting way. The hard thing about answering that question is that we'd have to agree on what it means to be alive. We all have a sense that we know what's alive and what's not, but I think that sense is really just an intuition. We use different circuits in our brains for recognizing biological motion, for example, as opposed to the motion of rocks or cars or other dead things. But the trouble comes when we try to turn that intuition into definition. We can see that things that look…

Lolita's Lepidopterist Lover

Source. "L" and alliterations thereof, turns out to have immense importance in literature and science. Science and art can co-exist. Surprised? Let me explain. The creator of the infamous character "Lolita," Vladimir Nabokov, turns out to have been not only one of the most influential writers of the past century, but to have been an amateur scientist with keen insight into evolution, recently validated by modern DNA technologies. "Lolita" is a novel that has been revered, reviled as pornography, banned and studied by scholars since its publication in 1958. I am in no way qualified to…

The paper they don't want you to read!

The climate change denialists are a bit thin-skinned; they've also been exposed as a bit on the wacko side. The journal Frontiers in Psychology is about to retract a paper that found that denialists tend to have a cluster of weird beliefs (NASA faked the moon landings, the CIA was in charge of the assassination of political figures in the US, etc.) because the denialists screamed very loudly. This outrage first arose in response to a paper, NASA faked the moon landing--Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science (pdf) which analyzed voluntary…

Parental Verbal Abuse and Why I'm Not ROFL

Have you heard about NCBI ROFL? It's a previously-independent blog that has been incorporated into "Discoblog," one of the blogs at Discover Magazine. What they do is find amusing or funny abstracts by searching Pubmed (which is run by the NCBI - National Center for Biomedical Information) and just post the abstracts. No commentary, no interpretation, just the text of the abstract. A lot of times I actually find the abstracts that they choose to post amusing. It is amusing that someone has decided to use superglue to remove objects that are stuck in peoples' ears, or that wooden kitchen…

Ladybrains evolved in the Pleistocene

Dr Gijsbert Stoet thinks we should stop trying to correct gender disparities. Speaking at the British Education Studies Association conference in Glasgow on Friday, he argued: "We need to have a national debate on why we find it so important to have equal numbers. Do we really care that only five per cent of the programmers are women? "Well, actually, I don't care who programmes my computers. A wealthy, democratic society can afford to let people do what they want. "What is better? To have 50 per cent of female engineers who do not really like their work but say, 'Yeah, well, I did it for the…

Phylogeny Friday - 1 December 2006

What if some phylogenies were simply irresolvable? That is, what if, no matter how much data we collected, it would be impossible to reconstruct, with a high level of certainty, an accurate representation of the tree of life? That would suck. A lot. I have mentioned how this can result from long branch attraction or lineage sorting. But are there any taxa where this appears to be a major problem? Antonis Rokas and Sean Carroll have published an essay in PLoS Biology that addresses the issue of bushes (or irresolvable nodes) in the tree of life. They point out four clades in which no single…

Why I won't see "Sicko"

Every day, reading the newspapers or listen to the radio, we are barraged with reminders of how screwed up our society, our country is. We see these things, and have a realization that there is little to no hope that they will change any time soon. I can only take so much despair. I can only take so much reminder of just how screwed up things are. I have stopped listening to the radio on my way driving in to work in the morning, because too often the stories are about places in the world where horrible things are going on. Too often, that place is Baghdad, a place that was screwed up and…

If you are eating or driking something now, don't read this.

I'm serious. You can't see this post until you put down your coffee and make sure your airways are clear. Then you can click on the heading and laugh, and cry, and everything... This is a repost of an item from my old blog. OK, I think this is fake, it can't be real. This was spotted on Pharyngula, and PZ Myers is a smart guy, but maybe this time he was fooled. I'm talking about the "Twin Citeis Creation Science Association 2007 Home School Science Fair" planned for February 17th and 18th. Here is the link if you want to see their site. The following are my favorites form a list of 114…

Social Networking is a wonderful new technology that will unleash human potential

But that isn't always how it goes. On today's radio show, Steve Borsch was talking about the way in which social networking (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is playing out -- as an extension of social interaction more than as a new form of shopping mall or marketing environment -- and an observation I made a couple of weeks ago during the Vikings game congealed like mucus in the back of your throat when you are getting over a cold (See Pandemonium Looms in Minneapolis). So, since I have a blog, I thought I'd hack it up for you. Chris Kluwe is the beloved kicker for the Vikings. I don't really…

A challenge to my readers and fellow science bloggers!

Many months ago, the fossil primate "Ida" was reported to the world with much fanfare, including an entire mass market book and a huge press conference, and everything else one can possibly do to announce a new fossil find. Science bloggers and others got rather upset at the Ida team's over the top fanfare, though few bloggers ever explained why it was a bad thing to make everyone on the planet notice an important new scientific find (and no one made the claim that Ida was not very important). One of the things the Ida team did was to use the term "missing link" in connection with that…

Is Ubuntu running off a cliff?

And, is that necessarily a bad thing? Sometimes I feel like I'm watching Ubuntu running quickly towards a big cliff. Recently, it was hinted/announced that Gnome would be dropped as Ubuntu's default desktop, and x.org dropped as the x server. The mint Distro has forked itself to produce a pure Debian distro, which was what Ubuntu was supposed to be (sort of) when I signed up for it, which I take to be a reaction by the minters of Mint to Ubuntu's increasing non-Debian-ness. At the same time Ubuntu is trying to be all forward moving and stuff, yet it is unable for some reason to provide…

Huxley narrowly escapes The Swine Flu

We brought Huxley in for his first doctor visit yesterday. Everything was fine. But since we were going to a clinic with an urgent care unit, I expected to see a lot of people with the flu in the waiting room. There is always a lot of messing around in the waiting room, with a two stage sign in process, a need to show ID, sign stuff, etc. etc. and then there would be a wait in the waiting room breathing in H1N1 kooties. My plan was to keep Huxley, who was in the nifty car seat-stroller thingie and well bundled against the elements, in the entrance way of the building or even in the…

The Importance of Being Sarah

I really did not think I would live to see the day when a major political party in the U.S. would find it necessary to add a woman to the ticket in order to win the presidency. It's a shame I can't be at all happy about the particular party and woman making history. However, if you will recall, I predicted something like this situation some time ago. I just got the particular woman wrong. As I noted in a comment on that post: ...the majority [of] people will love a non-traditional candidate who is a conservative much sooner than they will love a non-traditional candidate who is a liberal…

Captioned Memo

I was reading the normally sensible Steve Bainbridge when I came across this post that seems to have come from the planet Zebulon in the galaxy Warblogger. Bainbridge offers his interpretation of an intelligence memo in parallel with Kevin Drum's. I was struck by the complete disconnect between Bainbridge's interpretation and the actual words of the memo. I emailed Bainbridge to see if I could get an explanation. With his permission, I post our correspondence: TL: Your interpretation of: "Pull the majority along as far as we can on issues that may lead to…

Battling God

A few months ago, I wrote about my "issues" with the Dawkins/Dennett anti-religion campaign, which concluded: Dawkins and Dennett simply cannot understand the impulse to cling to an antiquated belief system not grounded in fact. (They seem incapable of recognizing that religion, despite its myriad flaws, provides a type of moral succor in times of strife that science can't.) To convince the masses of the errors of their ways, they're using the only weapon at their disposal: logic. The irony, of course, is that faith is not grounded in logic. Reason is toothless in the face of belief. This…

Dear Neurontic

I have some experience with depression, mostly mild although I have had a couple periods that could be described as major depressions. I know that my thoughts are intimately connected to my brain chemistry and that paying attention to how I'm thinking can alter my mood. For example, if I catch myself starting to feel depressed, I can pay attention to the conversations I'm having with myself and interrupt the thoughts that go something like "You worthless, useless, lazy slob". That, along with taking care of chores and projects I've been letting slide, and getting some exercise, usually help.…

Diabetic foot disease: HuffPo hasn't a leg to stand on

As an internist, my specialty is the prevention and treatment of adult diseases.  One of the most common of these diseases is diabetes. There are two main variants of diabetes: Type I (juvenile) and Type II. Type II accounts for about 95% of the 20 million cases of diabetes in the U.S. Diabetes is can be a disabling and deadly disease, but not because of the blood sugar fluctuations per se. High blood sugar damages blood vessels, which in turn damages the organs they supply. We generally divide diabetic complications into two categories: microvascular (small blood vessel), and macrovascular…

Why does plausibility matter? Because bad medicine kills

In the latest conversation about placebos, Steve Silberman got a number of things just right, including these converse statements: Anthracyclines don't require an oncologist with a genial bedside manner to slow the growth of tumors. ...the placebo response has limits. It can ease the discomfort of chemotherapy, but it won't stop the growth of tumors. Placebo, if it exists as a utile clinical entity (and I'm still not convinced) cannot cure cancer---but chemotherapy can, no matter what hand waving and chanting may or may not accompany it. This goes directly to the concept of "plausibility…

Lott on electronic voting

Some weeks ago Lott wrote this article, where he dismissed concerns about fraudulent electronic voting as "conspiracy theories". As far as I can tell Lott has no expert knowledge about computers, and rather than do any research into the electronic voting machines, he has just invented his own version of the way these machines work. For example, he wrote: After the election, most electronic voting machines transfer the election results to a compact disk or some other "read only" format. These CDs are then taken to a central location where they are read into a…

Tim Jahraus needs to be [censored] in the [censored] with a [censored], hard

I know this struggle well. Good teaching involves getting the students actively involved and asking questions and thinking about the material, and it's hard work sometimes to wake them up. For example, my last lecture in our introductory biology course is always about bioethics, where I bring up a lot of controversial topics: eugenics, abortion, animal rights, etc., and rather than just lecturing at them to let them know what the right answers are, I expect them to express their opinions…and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. In two sections this semester with the identical lecture…

This Just In: Scientists Discover True Nature of Feminists!

Jun. 17, 2010 3:34 AM ET SB COMMUNITY DEEMS FEMINISTS IRRELEVANT NOBODY MEAN GIRLS, OMNIPOTENT PRIVILEGED HELLIONS Douchey McDoucherson, ScienceBlogs Writers ANYWHERE (SB) Just days after a remarkable dustup in the science blogosphere, ScienceBlogs community members gathered to render judgment on feminist science bloggers. Noted commenter, blogger, and cress fancier B-DOH! said "PZ and Orac take out the clueless fuckwits of the world with penetrating criticism, incisive wit and clever put downs. Feminists science bloggers, with their aggressive snark, set a tone." Newly disclosed…

Was anyone surprised by this?

Yesterday the Department of Cultural Affairs announced its conclusions in the ongoing academic integrity case involving paleontologist Spencer Lucas. According to the panel, which included two "objective" scientists (both of which have collaborated with Lucas in the past, one of which had issued a letter three days prior to the hearing expressing that he had already deemed Lucas innocent) Lucas is not guilty of claim-jumping research being carried out by Bill Parker and Jeff Martz on ancient archosaurs called aetosaurus (see Darren's original posts for more information on these animals). The…

You Fool! You didn't know this, this, and this...

Ben Stein is out and about flogging his upcoming farce of a documentary, Expelled, and he recently repeatedly shot himself in the foot during a recent appearance on Glenn Beck's self-aggrandizing CNN show. If you can stomach it, here's the video; Hearing what Stein said during this brief interview, he has certainly confirmed what the scientific community has been saying all along, and they have every right to call him a fool. I'm not sure I would call the first slip-up a mistake though, perhaps it's honesty, but it significantly weakens Stein's entire premise. Beck says "Tell me about…

Sport Science, Pulling and Friction

Forgive me for all the posts on ESPN's Sport Science (example: Pulling and Power). I can't help myself. In the short episode recently, Sport Science compared a football player pulling a sled with huge tires on it to a truck pulling stuff. I think their goal was to compare the power per kg from for the player and the truck to show how awesome humans are (and let me just say that humans ARE awesome). The problem was that they really didn't give the truck a fair chance. For the first test, they had Marshawn Lynch pull 585 pounds of stuff. The real question should be: how hard does he have to…

Ben Stein: "I don't think anyone blames George Bush for 9/11"

Via ThinkProgress, which watches CNN so you don't have to, Holocaust-trivializer and Expelled frontman Ben Stein and conservative radio host Larry Elder discuss 9/11: Ben Stein's comments around 1:20 are the least sensible from the entire clip, and that's saying quite a bit. Elder's claim is that George Bush deserves credit for the fact that there were no terrorist attacks on American soil during his presidency, except for 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, which don't count because 9/11 planning began before January 20, 2001 (when Bush took office). So Clinton was responsible, since he failed…

King penguin becomes a knight; his relatives are endangered by global warming

Military penguin becomes a 'Sir': A penguin who was previously made a Colonel-in-Chief of the Norwegian Army has been knighted at Edinburgh Zoo. Penguin Nils Olav has been an honorary member and mascot of the Norwegian King's Guard since 1972. Over the years, he has been promoted through the ranks after being adopted by Royal Guard who visited the zoo. During the ceremony, Nils had a sword dubbed on each side of his head, where his shoulders should be, to confirm his regimental knighthood. The Beeb also reports that "The proud penguin was on his best behaviour throughout most of the ceremony…

Louisiana House approves creationist bill

SB 733, a creationist bill in the Louisiana legislature, was approved on a lopsided vote in the Louisiana House of Representatives today. It now moves back to the Senate, where small differences between this bill and the Senate version must be reconciled before it can go to Governor Jindal. Jindal is a leading contender for John McCain's vice presidential nomination. In response to this and other attacks on the teaching of evolution in Louisiana, the indefatigable Barbara Forrest (author of Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design) and other activists in the Pelican State…

On parables

I'm currently obsessed with my desire to cause various Floridians to be beaten with sacks of California oranges. For a sense of who I'd like to see pulped, check out Carl Hiassen's excellent survey of the situation. In between fancying citrussy punishments for people who needlessly complicate science education, I've become aware that the framing of science is yet again controversial. Mike Dunford responds with a parable: Suppose that you are taking a walk through the hills above a town, and you reach the foot of a dam. There's a crack in the dam, and it's getting wider. You run back down to…