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Who Won The Iowa Caucus 2016? (Final)

UPDATE (Tuesday Morning): In the Democratic Caucus, Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders by an amount so small that the caucus results have to be regarded as tie. Clinton: 49.86% Sanders: 49.57% O'Malley: 0.57% Lesson learned: Those who caucused for O'Malley for ideological reasons, knowing he could not possibly win, account for a larger percentage of the overall caucus than the difference between the top two contenders. If most of those O'Malley voters would have been Sanders voters had O'Malley not been in the race, then they effectively Nadered Sanders. Ted Cruz won the GOP caucus. Cruz:…

Anthropogenic Global Warming Causes Significant Changes in Climate Zones

Human caused climate change is changing the size and location of major climate zones, according to a new study. Climate is complex, and a classic, widely used effort to wrangle that complexity into a sensible form is the Köppen classification system (and variants). We need not speak of the details here, but within this scheme there are five climate groups that include all of the possibilities for the Earth’s land surface. They are: A: Tropical/megathermal climates B: Dry (arid and semiarid) climates C: Temperate/mesothermal climates D: Continental/microthermal climates E: Polar and alpine…

FrankenTrump

The Republican Party and its handlers, including the right wing talk radio jocks such as Rush Limbaugh, and the bought-and-paid-for media such as FOX news, did not create the Tea Party. Michele Bachmann and a few others did that.* But once the Tea Party got going, mainstream conservative Republicans, including and especially leaders in Congress, went right to bed with it. The Tea Party gave Republican strategists an easy way to garner votes and support. This was especially easy to do because America decided to elect an African American president. Make no mistake. The Tea Party is pro-…

The Fun of Going Faster-Than-Light

"There is also an amplitude for light to go faster (or slower) than the conventional speed of light. You found out... that light doesn't go only in straight lines; now, you find out that it doesn't go only at the speed of light! It may surprise you that there is an amplitude for a photon to go at speeds faster or slower than the conventional speed, c." -Richard Feynman You've been around the block a few times, and you know how it goes when you try to go faster and faster. Everything works just like you expect, until you start getting close to the speed of light, c. And then, all sorts of…

Einstein's Last Mystery

"God does not play dice with the Universe." -Einstein "Einstein, don't tell God what to do." -Neils Bohr (disputed, but awesome) Einstein, the brilliant mind behind general relativity and the concept of "spacetime," is making the news again this week. As you all know, gravity isn't some mysterious invisible force traveling across space, it comes about because energy itself -- most commonly in the form of mass -- distorts the very fabric of space. Image credit: GNU user Johnstone and NASA's Galileo spacecraft. Of course, wrapping your head around this can prove quite difficult. Space, as we…

Natural Hazards and Risk Reduction in the Modern World

Great disasters are great stories, great moments in time, great tests of technology, humanity, society, government, and luck. Fifty years ago it was probably true to say that our understanding of great disasters was thin, not well developed because of the relative infrequency of the events, and not very useful, not knowledge that we could use to reduce the risks from such events. This is no longer true. The last several decades has seen climate science add more climatic data because of decades of careful instrumental data collection happening, but also, earlier decades have been added to…

Three Wise Fools

Fresh off his earthshaking debunking of the whole of evolutionary biology with his classic "banana" and "coke can" arguments, Ray Comfort has a compelling new argument against atheism: the electricity argument. It's a little story about "three wise fools" who are exposed to electricity for the first time, and who refuse to believe in this amazing invisible force, and refuse even to test it. Obviously, the "wise fools" are supposed to be modern scientists, and the invisible force they refuse to acknowledge is a god. Comfort tells the tale to make the scientists look like obstinate idiots who…

A New Space Vision: What I think

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth. -John F. Kennedy, 1961 The entire human endeavor of spaceflight is -- without a doubt -- one of the greatest achievements in the history of humanity. Looking up into the heavens certainly provides some spectacular sights and a huge amount of insight into how space, stars, and galaxies work, among a myriad of other things. (And click the image below for an amazing high-resolution version.) But my two biggest complaints about the…

Considering Candidates Post Las Vegas Massacre: Rule Out Tim Walz

A man who was not even known as a gun collector amassed an arsenal that all experts agree included illegal fully automatic weapons. He carried out an act of carnage, alone and using only those weapons, that exceeded in casualty count almost every military battle fought in recent decades by American troops, and that equaled or surpassed all but a very small number of terrorist attacks. He shot five hundred people. He shot these people, killing nearly 60 of them, with guns he was able to get because he lives in America. In America, the Second Amendment has protected gun ownership for so…

Intelligent Design as Roman Mythology

It is appropriate that in the month of January, I have made so many entries about the Intelligent Design movement. January is named for Janus, the Roman god of gates, often depicted as having two faces. The more I study the ID movement, the more convinced I am that Janus is the perfect symbol for it. Indeed, the two-faced nature of the ID movement is, ironically, by design. This was the nature of the strategy that was devised by Phillip Johnson to get ID a seat at the table. One face is presented to scientists and legislators and the other is presented to the churches and to the folks who…

King Leopold’s Soliloquy

I first became aware of, and read, King Leopold's Soliloquy, which is not his soliloquy but a parody of what he might say according to Samuel Clemens, while doing fieldwork in the ex-Belgian Congo. That is where the real story that inspired the essay took place. I lived in an area that at one time had a few a plantations, but the plantations only existed briefly and are now long gone. The "road" through this area was passable only with a very tenacious four wheel drive vehicle (we had a Land Rover) and grew worse every year. But the road at one time was excellent. I knew a guy, an older…

Teaching After The Test: An argument for a national school schedule

First, a word about Nazis and Free Speech, and other matters: Catch up on the latest news about Repression of Nazis, and join the conversation about Free Speech and how sometimes it is better to shut up, over at the X Blog. Today I am preparing a presentation and discussion for a course in AP Biology. Amanda and her colleague have been teaching AP Bio all year, and the test was just given, so there is nothing to live for any more as it were. I asked Amanda yesterday why the students even show up now that the test is over, and she looked at me funny and said "well, they're required to." ...…

Are you a feminist activist? Thank you.

The other day, PZ Myers noted in a Blog post the remembrance of the École Polytechnique massacre in which Marc Lépine hunted down and killed 14 women, injured another 10 women and a handful of men, as his way of striking out against feminism. To be clear, he was hunting down and killing feminists because he felt that feminism had caused his application to the school to be rejected. PZ made the rather bold implication that the MRA’s, anti-feminists and slymepitters of today’s Skeptic and Secular movement were part of the same entity … cultural manifestation, way of thinking, whatever … as…

Sex and Gender in An Odd Primate

The Gender vs. Sex question...referring to the meaning of those two terms in relation to each other...is standard material for discussion in Anthropology and related fields, but is often left unattended to in day to day discourse. Both terms have internal complexity, with Gender meaning something about people’s identity as well as being a linguistic term, different but overlapping, and of course, Sex is a verby noun sometimes. But when we say “Gender vs. Sex” we are clearly talking about biological things such as chromosomes and genitalia, behavioral things such as attraction and orientation…

Vaccination vs. Disease: Which is worse?

It is very reasonable for a parent to worry about vaccines. For one thing, most of them involve sticking the baby or child with a sharp object, thus making the little one cry, and it would be abnormal to not have an automatic reaction to that. For another thing, they are drugs, in a sense. When the little one is ill, and you call in to the health care facility in the hopes that there will be some useful advice, most of the time you hear "No, we no longer recommend giving [fill in the blank with a medicine you thought might work] to children under [one or two months older than your child].…

Killing Street Dogs in Sochi: Why is this a concern now?

It should have been a concern the day after Sochi won its bid for the Winter Olympic Games several years ago. It is reported that authorities or private contractors are taking the street dogs off the streets in Sochi, in preparation for the Olympics, which start tonight. A friend of mine was living in Athens for the weeks before the Summer Olympics there, and she told me that authorities did the same, and that included summary executions, of the dogs, where they were found. This has sparked outrage, of course. I do have to wonder why the decision is made to remove these dogs, and in…

Concussions, Back Problems, and Odd Statistics

Jonah Lehrer has a big article at Grantland on concussions in high school football that paints a fairly bleak picture: The sickness will be rooted in football's tragic flaw, which is that it inflicts concussions on its players with devastating frequency. Although estimates vary, several studies suggest that up to 15 percent of football players suffer a mild traumatic brain injury during the season. (The odds are significantly worse for student athletes -- the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that nearly 2 million brain injuries are suffered by teenage players every year.)…

The Dawkins/Dennett boogeyman

Why would a pro-science op-ed give credence to the words of William Dembski? William Dembski (one of the leading lights of the US intelligent-design lobby) put it like this in an email to Dawkins: "I know that you personally don't believe in God, but I want to thank you for being such a wonderful foil for theism and for intelligent design more generally. In fact, I regularly tell my colleagues that you and your work are one of God's greatest gifts to the intelligent-design movement. So please, keep at it!" You can guess why: to engage in more atheist-bashing. Yes, Dawkins does much to…

Not All Attrition Is Bad

One of the many things I wish I had had time to blog about during the just-completed term was the big New York Times article on attrition in science majors. This generated enough commentary at the time that people are probably sick of it, but I haven't seen anything that exactly matches my take, so I'll belatedly throw this out there. The big point of the article is that lots of students who enter college planning to major in Science, Technology, Engineering or Math (the "STEM" fields, in an awkward but now inescapable acronym) end up graduating with degrees in something else: But, it turns…

Blogging Doesn't Have to Be a Career

Last week, I gave my evangelical talk about science blogging to the Physics department at Wright State, and also a lot of education students who came to the talk (which made a nice change in the sort of questions I got). It's basically this talk that I gave at Cornell a couple of years ago, with a few updates to the slides that don't require a new upload to SlideShare: Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters and How Social Media Can Help from Chad Orzel The pitch that I make, if you don't want to flip through the slides, is that communicating to a…

All the mistakes of the godly are merely metaphor

Imagine you found a population in the US where the majority of the people believed that 2+2=5, and that attempts to correct them with the actual, correct result of adding two numbers were regarded as insults to their revered traditions. I think we'd all agree that they a) they were wrong; b) they were misled, misinformed, and miseducated; c) that they were ignorant of arithmetic; or d) might very well have been maliciously deceived by someone in their midst. Somehow, though, if the ridiculous error involves God, some people take a big step backwards and are appalled that anyone might…

A brilliant Carnival of the Vanities

Carnival of the Vanities (COTV) is one of those cool blog compilation things that circulates among different blogs every week and includes links that other people submit to increase readership. I hosted COTV #87 myself sometime last year when I was a blog toddler of sorts. One of the traditions of the COTV is to try and come up with some unique and charming way of organizing the links, something I failed at miserably when I hosted it. As I wrote then: Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends, we're so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside. I thought about coming up with…

Another Response to Rusty on Biblical Morality

Rusty Lopez has written a more thorough response to my post on morality. I specifically brought up Numbers 31, and Rusty has taken up the cause to defend the biblical passage and the genocidal command allegedly given by God. Here is his defense: There are several avenues of response available to the questions posed by Ed and Dark (very good questions, by the way). For one, I could discuss how the instances of God commanding the Israelites to slaughter their enemies varied in application. In other words, the commands were situation specific and had to do, among other things, with Gods judgment…

Alone in the Multiverse

The LHC is coming, and it's time to place your bets. What do you do? (Fun though it may be, shooting the hostage doesn't really help here.) We're committed Bayesians (for the sake of this post, at least), and we want to assign a probability that the LHC will see supersymmetry. More generally, we have a set of possibilities for our observable physics, and we would like to assign probabilities to each. This is called the problem of finding a measure. Since the theory of eternal inflation with its "bubbling universes" is the context where the multiverse often comes up, this is often referred to…

I get email

I don't just get ranting hate mail. I also get conversion stories and invitations to believe. These are saddest and most pathetic emails of them all—you just want to weep for the credulity of the poor victim. True Good News. God is real. Jesus is Lord. I know God is real because he spoke and acted for my salvation Short Version: God said to me,"Good News", and soon after I recieved a Good News bible. Full experience: I was down Pittsburgh, finishing up a day of work at Cargenie Mellon as I was working as a computer consultant for the Career Center. It was a pretty cool job. I'd write some…

Hugo Reading: Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente

When the Hugo nominees were announced, Catherynne Valente's Palimpsest was the only one of the three Best Novel nominees I hadn't already read that I was pretty sure I would read. I have very little interest in Robert Sawyer's work, and I've read just enough of Paolo Bacigalupi's short fiction to dread the thought of reading something of his at novel length. I may yet read The Wind-Up Girl out of a sense of obligation, because people keep saying it's brilliant, but his previous Hugo-nominated short fiction was so crushingly depressing that I'm not excited by the prospect. I wanted very badly…

The Haeckel-Wells Chronicles

Lately, the Discovery Institute has stuck its neck out in response to the popularity of showings of Randy Olson's movie, Flock of Dodos, which I reviewed a while back. They slapped together some lame critiques packaged on the web as Hoax of Dodos (a clunker of a name; it's especially ironic since the film tries to portray the Institute as good at PR), which mainly seem to be driven by the sloppy delusions of that poor excuse for a developmental biologist, Jonathan Wells. In the past week, I've also put up my responses to the Wells deceptions—as a developmental biologist myself, I get a little…

Religion and Women

A while back P. Z. Myers posted an essay entitled, “You Want Evidence That Religions is Bad for the Species? OPEN YOUR EYES.” Myers was replying to an earlier essay by David Sloan Wilson. Here's an excerpt from Myers: Whenever I hear that tripe about the beneficial effects of religion on human cultural evolution, it’s useful to note that the world’s dominant faiths all hardcode directly into their core beliefs the idea that women are unclean, inferior, weak, and responsible for the failings of mankind…that even their omnipotent, all-loving god regards women as lesser creatures not fit to…

Cordova Steps in it - Again

Ed Brayton, Orac, and the Hoofnagles have already covered this story (click here, here, and here, respectively.) But why should they have all the fun? Over at Uncommon Descent, Salvador Cordova discusses the MacCallum essay, Now, I've seen several of Salvador's public presentations. So I am well aware of his rather imaginative use of quotations. He almost seems to prefer quoting people inaccurately to giving his audience an accurate view of what was said. But this one is low, even for him. MacCallum opens her essay with the following paragraph: It is curious that Charles Darwin,…

Sports and Statistics: Nobody Deals Well With Randomness

One of the chapters of the book-in-progress, as mentioned previously, takes the widespread use of statistics in sports as a starting point, noting that a lot of the techniques stat geeks use in sports are similar to those scientists use to share and evaluate data. The claim is that anyone who can have a halfway sensible argument about the relative merits of on-base-percentage and slugging percentage has the mental tools they need to understand some basic scientific data analysis. I'm generally happy with the argument (if not the text-- it's still an early draft, and first drafts always suck…

Is Science/Religion Incompatibility Just Too Darn Complicated for the Public Square?

I am arriving very late to the party on this one, but I would like to reply to one portion of this post from Jean Kazez. She writes: Likewise, I don't see much point in discussing religion/science incompatibility in the public square. We can all agree on very plain and simple things--if science, then no creation in 6 days. If science, then no dinosaurs living at the same time as humans. Lots of limited incompatibilities like that are indisputable. But the more sweeping assertion that science rules out most of religion is complicated and technical (what is science? what is religion?…

How to Build a Brain

Continuing with the recent book review theme, allow me to say a few words about The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams and God, by David J. Linden. Linden is a professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. If you have been paying attention to the creationists lately, you know they have been playing the brain card something fierce. It is here, they claim, that the bad ol' materialist paradigm has met its waterloo. Surely so magnificent an organ can not be explained by Darwinian evolution? It just has to be the result of intelligent…

A must-see: Key West Botanical Garden

As I mentioned in my intro post to our week in Key West, I was definitely going to make a visit to the Key West Tropical Forest & Botanical Garden. We took the then-PharmToddler there in November 2003 when this gem was just being relaunched after decades of negligence. According to Georgia Tasker at the Miami Herald: It was begun in the Great Depression days of 1934 by the City of Key West, and built by the WPA at the same time as the city's aquarium. At one point, the garden contained an aviary, hand-made rock walls, green houses and 7,000 plants. It opened in 1936 and flourished for…

The Tragedy of the Tao

For a guest post to the meta-blog Daily Canuck, I whipped off a few words on the chasm between what's considered politically feasible when it comes to a national climate change strategy for Canada and what climatology suggests will be necessary. Along the way, I got sidetracked by the bigger question of what to do when the "moderate," "reasonable" or, to use a Taoist phrase, the "middle way" is no longer up to the task of addressing a serious threat. It seems pretty darn obvious that by now, we have allowed ourselves to get in just such a situation. Here's the fundamental problem: 1. Even…

Testing 123

An emailer sends in a link to a comment on The White Coat Underground. It's in the context of naturopathy, the idea that medical problems ought to be treated with natural means. Some of it's a good idea - eating right, exercising, that sort of thing. Those sort of things aren't going to cure much, but they're good things to do. Other aspects of naturopathy pretty much go off the deep end, as ably discussed by any number of medical bloggers on ScienceBlogs and elsewhere. The point argued by this particular commenter went as follows: Speaking of pseudoscience, what do you all think of…

Generic bumps and recycled genetic cascades

How do you make a limb? Vertebrate limbs are classic models in organogenesis, and we know a fair bit about the molecular events involved. Limbs are induced at particular boundaries of axial Hox gene expression, and the first recognizable sign of their formation is the appearance of a thickened epithelial bump, the apical ectodermal ridge (AER). The AER is a signaling center that produces, in particular, a set of growth factors such as Fgf4 and Fgf8 that trigger the growth of the underlying tissue, causing the growing limb to protrude. In addition, there's another signaling center that forms…

You Call That Fair?

Over the past couple weeks an unplanned experiment has taken place that shows what sort of science makes it into the popular consciousness and what doesn't. In the past couple weeks we've had three pieces of research on the same evolutionary puzzle in the same high-profile journal (Nature). One was all over the place--I'll just link the USA Today article as one example. The other two vanished with barely a peep. All three papers tackle the puzzle of kindness. Why do we cooperate when there are powerful evolutionary forces that would seem to work against cooperation? If I waste a lot of my…

Storm Worlds of the Enlightenment: Part 2 with historian Jan Golinski

Part 1 | Part 2 - - - Part 2 with Jan Golinski, author of British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here. WF: This was the most interesting part of the book to me, and I have to risk being too general or generic here, but here it goes: it seems the terms of debate about what caused weather patterns in the 18th century map on closely to what we argue about today. I can go a few ways with this by way of clarification, but let me try this one first: In the Enlightenment, the contrast was between 'weather as…

Friday Rants: Complementary and Alternative Medicine Needs to End

Complementary and alternative medicine has no business participating in mainstream science or medicine. As I understand it, there are five core premises on which complementary and alternative medicine is based. I would like to confront each in turn: 1) The evil, old white men who run the medical establishment are united in a vast conspiracy to suppress legitimate treatments. If we had only looked to folk remedies sooner, we would have cured things like cancer and Alzheimer's long ago. Think about that for a second: do you sincerely believe that everyone -- I mean everyone -- in the…

Obesity linked to brain shrinkage and dementia

THE dangers of obesity are very well known. Being overweight is associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease and stroke, the two leading causes of death in the Western world. Gout is more common in overweight people, with the risk of developing the condition increasing in parallel with body weight. Obese people are twice as likely to develop type 2 diabetes as those who are not overweight, and being overweight is also associated with several types of cancer. The list goes on... Less well known is the effect of obesity on the brain. In the past few years, however, it has…

The Mosquito and the Bottle

Natural selection is not natural perfection. Time and again, biologists have discovered traits that are both beneficial and harmful. Perhaps the most famous example is the devastating disorder known as sickle-cell anemia. To get sickle-cell anemia, you have to inherit two faulty copies of a gene that helps build hemoglobin, the molecule that traps oxygen in red blood cells. In this condition, hemoglobin can't hold its shape if it's not clamped around oxygen. Without it, the defective hemoglobin collapses into needle-shaped clumps, which then turn the cell itself into a sickle shape. The…

(Possibly) Dissociable Prefrontal Effects of Target and Target Class Probability

How do we detect important items in our environment? This crucial capacity has received less attention than one might think, and a number of extremely basic issues remain to be explored. For example, it has long been known that target probability has profound effects on the recruitment of the prefrontal cortex (such that lower-probability targets are associated with greater recruitment of both dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), it has been unclear whether this pattern arises due to the general probability of the class of "targets" or whether it's more stimulus-specific. An…

A Neural FPGA? Dynamic Task-Relevant Code in Prefrontal Cortex

How does the brain exert flexible control over behavior? One idea is that high-level areas of the brain self-organize representations that lead to reward in a certain task, in a sense by "programming" or "executing" a pattern of activity that controls activity in more posterior and domain-specific regions (i.e., sensory or motor cortex). This portrays prefrontal cortex as a kind of field-programmable gate array, which can be dynamically reconfigured on the basis of dopaminergic reward signals, so as to perform different computations at will. Concrete evidence for this view is provided by…

Dopamine for Dummies

Dopamine is probably the most studied neurotransmitter, and yet the neuroscience literature contains a huge variety of perspectives on its functional role. This post summarizes a systems-level perspective on the function of dopamine that has motivated several successful drug studies and informed the construction of artificial neural network models. The details of this perspective are maddeningly complex (at least for me), which is why I thought it would be useful to summarize it here, in the simplest terms possible. There are at least two ways to talk about dopamine release. We can talk…

Dissociable Inhibition Mechanisms In Motor and Oculomotor Tasks

What cognitive processes make up consciousness? One way of answering this question is to identify conscious processes as those involved in controlled but not in automatic behaviors. For example, if you see a bright dot appear in your field of vision, your eyes will automatically orient to that location in space. In contrast, if I have told you to look away from any bright dots that appear in your field of view, you will be able to do this - but only because you possess consciousness in the form of "cognitive control." So, what computations support "cognitive control"? Cognitive control is…

Cephalopods are natural-born editors

Did you know cephalopods may have traded evolution gains for extra smarts? I didn't either. I don't believe it, anyway. The paper is fine, though, it's just the weird spin the media has been putting on it. The actual title of the paper is Trade-off between Transcriptome Plasticity and Genome Evolution in Cephalopods, which is a lot more accurate. The authors discovered that there's a lot of RNA editing going on in coleoids. The process is not a surprise, we've known about RNA editing for a long time, but the extent in squid is unusual. RNA editing is basic college-level stuff, so if your…

Does Taking Birth Control Alter Women's Sexual Choices?

In the classic film Casablanca, the drama hinges on Ilsa's choice between two men: her kind and supportive husband or her rugged and passionate ex-lover. In a moment of abandon, Ilsa returns to her lover's arms only to later change her mind and choose the more stable life she would have with her long-term partner. But what if something as simple as a pill had caused Ilsa to feel differently and make the opposite choice? In a new paper in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution biologists Alexandra Alvergne and Virpi Lummaa at the University of Sheffield in England raise the possibility…

Dumb and dangerous---Kennedy and Kirby's continued clash with reality

The Autism Omnibus Trial is a conundrum for the infectious disease promotion movement. Still, their ability to pick up the goalposts and run is unmatched, and that is just what David Kirby and Robert Kennedy, Jr. have done in today's Huffington Post. To review, the recent Omnibus decision looked at a few test cases for the "vaccine causes autism" hypothesis, and tossed them for being inconsistent with reality. This correlates well with what science has to say about the issue. But of course the overwhelming evidence isn't going to deter these superheroes. They know the answer, and they're…

"Sound Science" and Climate Change

Last month I wrote about how junkscience.com and The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition were fronts set up by tobacco companies to oppose regulatioon of smoking. Chris Mooney published a very interesting article in the Washington Post on the use of the phrase "sound science" by other industry funded groups to oppose government regulation. Iain Murray then attacked Mooney, accusing him of misrepresentation, distortion and double-speak. Mooney has replied here, in my opinion thoroughly destroying Murray's arguments. I've been reluctant to write anything about the climate change debate…

I'm not vulnerable, just especially plastic. Risk genes, environment, and evolution, in the Atlantic

The video interview above, with NIH primatologist Stephen Suomi, is embedded within a feature of mine that that appeared today at The Atlantic website -- and is in the December 2009 issue now shipping -- about a new hypothesis in behavioral genetics. This emerging hypothesis, which draws on substantial data, much of which has gone simply unnoticed or unremarked, I call the "orchid-gene hypothesis," for lack of a better name. Some of the researchers have other offerings. It's been around for several years but is now blooming as evidence accumulates. When I came across it at a conference this…