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Your Friday Dose of Woo: Manifest this, woo-boy!

Woo has patterns. I've learned to see them, and, if you read Your Friday Dose of Woo on a regular basis, perhaps you're starting to see them too. Not that I had originally intended to become so well-versed in woo that I start to notice these things. What really happened is that I just sort of fell into it when one day I happened to come up with the idea for this little Friday feature. Truth be told, it seems to have grown and taken on a life of its own, such that on weeks when I don't do it (like last week), something about the blog just doesn't feel right. On the other hand, it sometimes…

Bad Healthcare Cost Models Produce Silly Results (anyone surprised?)

This morning, my good friend Orac sent me a link to an interesting piece of bad math. Orac is the guy who really motivated me to start blogging; I jokingly call him my blogfather. He's also a really smart guy, not to mention a genuinely nice one (at least for a transparent box of blinking lights). So when he sends me a link that he thinks is up my alley, I take a look at the first opportunity. Today, he sent me a link to a guy who claims to have put together a mathematical model showing that it's impossible to create a national healthcare system without rationing. The argument is a great…

Peptides publishes a clunker

I've got my hands on a strange paper by D Kanduc: "Protein information content resides in rare peptide segments". Here's the abstract. Discovering the informational rule(s) underlying structure-function relationships in the protein language is at the core of biology. Current theories have proven inadequate to explain the origins of biological information such as that found in nucleotide and amino acid sequences; an 'intelligent design' is now a popular way to explain the information produced in biological systems. Here, we demonstrate that the information content of an amino acid motif…

Taking the pill might make your brother hawt?

MHC-correlated odour preferences in humans and the use of oral contraceptives: Previous studies in animals and humans show that genes in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) influence individual odours and that females often prefer odour of MHC-dissimilar males, perhaps to increase offspring heterozygosity or reduce inbreeding. Women using oral hormonal contraceptives have been reported to have the opposite preference, raising the possibility that oral contraceptives alter female preference towards MHC similarity, with possible fertility costs. Here we test directly whether…

Genetic vs. heritable trait

When someone tells you that height is 80% heritable, does that mean: a) 80% of the reason you are the height you are is due to genes b) 80% of the variation within the population on the trait of height is due to variation of the genes The answer is of course b. Unfortunately in the 5 years I've been blogging the conception of heritability has been rather difficult to get across, and I regularly have to browbeat readers who conflate the term with a. That is, they assume that if I say that a trait is mostly heritable I mean that its development is mostly a function of genes. In reality not…

Know your wogs

Update: Ed Brayton has now acknowledged the non-triviality of his original error. Bravo! A gentleman he is. End Update: Today, Ed Brayton has post where he comments on an article about Saudi ties to Sunnis in Iraq, etc. The article itself isn't interesting to me really, but what Ed did say about it caught my attention: That could spark a regional war with the two largest and most powerful Arab nations [Saudi Arabia and Iran], not to mention the world's top 2 oil producers, on opposite sides. There are some factual issues here. 95% of Iranians are not Arabs. The largest number are Persian…

Non-Believers Giving Aid

If you haven't already donated to disaster relief in Haiti, here's your chance: a new umbrella organization to coordinate charitable giving for the godless has been set up. In the first two hours that this was created, over $11,000 has been donated. Get on the bandwagon! Non-Believers Giving Aid: a religion-free way to help disaster victims Washington, DC January 17, 2010 In response to the tragedy in Haiti, several organizations representing 'non-believers' and others have set up a disaster relief fund called 'Non-Believers Giving Aid'. In an appeal for donations, the website of the…

Snarking on Degenerate and Dysfunctional 'Suburban' Culture

And 'suburban' is code. Monday, I responded to a rich twit's complaint about how difficult his life was at $450,000 of annual income (Note: Since then, said twit has removed the post. Fortunately, Brad 'Deling' DeLong is aware of all internet traditions, and has saved the post for posterity). In that post, I wrote: Perhaps Henderson's outburst should be chalked up to the influence of degenerate white culture or our finishing school 'elite' educational system. But I digress. Most readers got the snark, but the first commenter worked himself into high dudgeon over the degenerate white…

Reading Diary: The Machiavellian Librarian: Winning Allies, Combating Budget Cuts, and influencing Stakeholders edited by Melissa K. Aho and Erika Bennet

Melissa K. Aho and Erika Bennet's anthology The Machiavellian Librarian: Winning Allies, Combating Budget Cuts, and influencing Stakeholders is pretty good for what it is, in some ways better than I expected. It's a guide for maneuvering office politics and advancing your agenda, big and small, with the stakeholders and influencers that matters in your environment. Sadly, this book fails for what it isn't: a book that tackles the issues and trends where librarians really need to advance our agendas and make ourselves key "thought leaders" and "influencers." The book is a collection of 25…

Meet the Next 5 of the Kavli Science Video Contest Top 20 Finalists - Now Who will Win the "People's Choice" Vote?

The Kavli Science Video Contest has wrapped up with over 260 entries! Now it's time for the People's Choice Vote, in advance of the awards ceremony on April 29, in Washington, DC, as part of the USA Science & Engineering Festival. People's Choice Voting begins April 2 and closes April 13. Voting is easy, just view the videos on YouTube and click 'like" for your favorites. Click here to view the videos. We will be highlighting the Top 20 Finalists on our blog for the next two weeks. In today's blog get to know the next five of the Top 20 Finalists: SPOTLIGHT ON KAVLI VIDEO CONTEST:…

Protein Synthesis: Transcription and Translation

Here is the third BIO101 lecture (from May 08, 2006). Again, I'd appreciate comments on the correctness as well as suggestions for improvement. -------------------------------------------------- BIO101 - Bora Zivkovic - Lecture 1 - Part 3 The DNA code DNA is a long double-stranded molecule residing inside the nucleus of every cell. It is usually tightly coiled forming chromosomes in which it is protected by proteins. Each of the two strands of the DNA molecule is a chain of smaller molecules. Each link in the chain is composed of one sugar molecule, one phosphate molecule and one…

Modeling sidebar: thinking mathematically

[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.] The Modeling Series (click Math Modeling Series under Categories in the left sidebar) is a moving target for me. Even though the first draft of the post you read each day was written at least three weeks earlier, each has also been freshly worked on as I go back and tinker and adjust and try to…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Let's take a look at recent papers in PLoS ONE and other PLoS journals. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Chemically-Mediated Roostmate Recognition and Roost Selection by Brazilian Free-Tailed Bats (Tadarida brasiliensis): The Brazilian free-tailed bat (Tadarida brasiliensis) is an…

For shame, Forbes magazine

Forbes has published a collection of pseudoscientific nonsense, giving free rein to the hacks and frauds of the Discovery Institute, along with a few other crackpots. There is no hint given that these are marginal characters with no connection to modern science, who are following an ideological agenda with the admitted goal of replacing science and secular government with a Christian "spiritual" rule. There are no rebuttals. I'm sure the DI was thrilled to use Forbes as an arm of their propaganda machine. I can't possibly go through all of it; practically every sentence these guys write is…

Sequestration claims another public health program: The Adult Blood Lead Epidemiology and Surveillance program

When I asked Teresa Schnorr why we should be worried about the loss of a little-known occupational health data gathering program, she quoted a popular saying in the field of surveillance: "What gets counted, gets done." Schnorr, who serves as director of the Division of Surveillance, Hazard Evaluations and Field Studies at CDC's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), was referring to the Adult Blood Lead Epidemiology and Surveillance program (ABLES), a state-based effort that collects and analyzes data on adult lead exposure. For more than two decades, NIOSH has been…

De-Partisaned: What Would You Sacrifice to Save the World?

I gather from the polls that there's a tight race for which of two violent, torturing, mass-murdering or potentially mass-murdering (Romney has had no opportunity to send out automated killer drones over civilian populations yet, but since he has every intention of doing so, the difference really is no difference) war criminals will lead the US.  If the last sentence sounds cynical, well it is and it isn't.  Since every president in my life time (born during the Nixon administration) has been either a mass murderer or a wanna-be mass murderer (don't talk Jimmy Carter to me - there's a reason…

Summer Cooking

Greenpa asked me to talk about how we cook in the summer, and that's a very good subject to talk about - what does a woman who "dances with wood" and cooks on a wood cookstove all winter long do in the summer?  Well, part of the answer is that when we're lazy, we use the electric stove that came with the house. Now from an environmental standpoint, electric stoves are a pretty lousy option.  Using electricity to create heat mostly means burning coal in the US.  Now my family purchases renewable electricity and also my region uses a fair bit of hydro-power, but that's something of a grey area…

PANRC: The Witch of Hebron Part II

Just a reminder to everyone that we'll be starting Kurt Cobb's _Prelude_ on Monday. I have several people who have copies available for circulation, so if you'd like to read along with the group, please drop me an email at jewishfarmer@gmail.com and you'll get a copy in the mail, with only the requirement that you pass it on if more people want it! Kurt is going to be able to participate in our discussion as well! But first, I promised a discussion of sex and gender in The Witch of Hebron. I said I'd write another post about _The Witch of Hebron_, this time explicitly addressing the sex…

Food Preservation 101: Putting Canning In Perspective

I wrote Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Preservation and Storage because when it came time for me to take the next steps in eating locally and homegrown - to holding some of summer's bounty for the long winter, there wasn't any book that really covered what all I needed to know. After writing A Nation of Farmers about the "Why" of growing your own and eating locally, I ran into hundreds of people who had the same problem. They wanted to keep eating the same great food after the CSA boxes stopped coming or the farmer's market closed down, but they didn't know how. One of the…

CHIP provides health insurance to nearly 9 million kids. Its funding expires on Sept. 30.

Earlier this week, members of the Senate Finance Committee announced an agreement to extend funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The announcement had been anxiously awaited by families and advocates across the nation, as the program’s federal funding expires in about two weeks. The agreement is good news, but coverage for CHIP’s 8.9 million children isn’t safe just yet. According to reports, the agreement would extend CHIP’s funding for five years — a win for advocates worried that lawmakers might propose another two-year extension as it did in 2015. The agreement would also…

Scoring Political Points by Misunderstanding Science

Senators John McCain and Tom Coburn have released a report on "100 Stimulus Projects that Give Taxpayers the Blues." Their introduction rails against "torrential, misdirected government spending," and short descriptions of the 100 projects singled out for ridicule are evidently supposed to disgust readers. What disgusted me, though, was an apparent lack of respect for scientific research. Around one-fourth of the 100 projects involved scientific research, and I have to wonder whether their criteria for inclusion was a word that might make a sixth-grader giggle. Monkeys! Ants! Hot flashes!…

DuPont Workers and a Cancer Cluster?

DuPont was busted a couple of years ago by U.S. EPA for failing to report information about adverse health effects associated with exposure to perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA or C8), the chemical used to make Teflon and other non-stick surfaces.  Now it seems that DuPont is dutifully submitting information to EPA's TSCA 8(e) docket and we can thank the Charleston Gazette's Ken Ward for trolling through the docket to find items of public interest.*  Ward recently reported on an analysis conducted by DuPont which identified 19 cases of carcinoid tumors among DuPont employees; 6 of the cases…

The Times doesn't know Bayes

If you've spent any time at all reading science and medicine blogs, you know that many of us are quite critical of the way the traditional media covers science. The economics of the business allows for fewer and fewer dedicated science and medical journalists. In the blogosphere, writers have a certain freedom----the freedom not to be paid, which means that the financial fortunes of our medium (the web) are not directly tied to how many readers I bring in with a headline. But all this is just a lot of words introducing my critique of a recent New York Times article. The article is titled "…

There is no such thing as alternative medicine

What is alternative Medicine, anyway? That's a great question. I know it is, because I asked it. I get this question almost daily. The secret answer is that there is no such thing as alternative medicine. You don't believe me? Why not--I am a doctor. There are several ways to define alternative medicine, and sometimes it is contrasted with "complementary medicine". CM refers to treatments that "complement" traditional medicine, while AM refers to treatments that stand in the stead of mainstream medicine. CAM is a broad category used to refer to both. So what's my problem? How can I say…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Friday - the day to take a look at all seven PLoS journals and make my own personal picks. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Taking the Lag out of Jet Lag through Model-Based Schedule Design: Traveling across several times zones can cause an individual to experience "jet lag," which…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Monday, Monday - let's see what's new. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Real Lives and White Lies in the Funding of Scientific Research: It is a summer day in 2009 in Cambridge, England, and K. (39) looks out of his lab window, wondering why he chose the life of a scientist [1]. Yet…

A Blog Around The Clock: Year In Review

The year in review meme is too random to really capture the highlights of a year on a blog. So, here is a collection of links that I think mark the most important moments of this blog in the last year: January (297 posts) was dominated by the science blogging anthology and the science blogging conference, so it was filled mostly with re-posts of the old stuff, quick links and only a couple of science posts. This was also the time when my name first appeared in the media. This is also the time when I started writing more about Open Science. All of this combined resulted in a large and…

"Life goes on as it did before..."

"...As the country drifts slowly to war" Update: Why do I keep hammering on the "paranoid Iran scenario"? Because I am worried that the decision to "take out" Iran has been made in DC, and that it is now merely a question of when, and with what rationale. There are two considerations: one is next week's midterm election and control of Congress; the other is whether it will be a pre-emptive surprise, with assets moved in place secretly or under cover of exercises and rotations, or, if it will be an "inevitable build up to war" scenario. We'll see the latter coming, the former is interesting…

On the border of change: A portrait of the workers' rights movement in El Paso

by Kim Krisberg In the fall of 2011, a new Texas statute took effect against employers who engage in wage theft, or failing to pay workers as much as they’re owed. The statewide statute put in place real consequences, such as jail time and hefty fines, for employers found guilty of stealing wages from workers. It was a big step forward in a state where wage theft has become as common as cowboy boots and pick-up trucks. In El Paso, which sits on the western-most tip of Texas on the border with Juarez, Mexico, and is among the most populous cities in the nation, wage theft has become so rampant…

MSHA poised to issue investigation report on Upper Big Branch disaster

The US Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) is preparing to issue next week its investigation report on the April 5, 2010 coal mine disaster at the Upper Big Branch mine that killed 29 workers. Ken Ward, Jr. at Coal Tattoo reports that MSHA will hold a media briefing at 3:00 pm (EST) on December 6 at its training academy near Beckley WV. The Charleston (WV) Gazette reporter reminds us that December 6 is an ominous date. It marks the 104th anniversary of the Monongah disaster, the worst mining disaster in U.S. history. MSHA's investigation report will be the…

Male pregnancy?

Yesterday's discussion of future biological advances that will piss off the religious right had me thinking about other innovations that I expect will happen within a few decades that might just cause wingnuts to freak out. First thing to come to mind is that it will be something to do with reproduction, of course, and it will scramble gender roles and expectations…so, how about modifying men to bear children? It sounds feasible to me. Zygotes are aggressive little parasites that will implant just about anywhere in the coelom — it's why ectopic pregnancies are a serious problem — so all we…

Mark Olson on Slavery and the Bible

Mark Olson has written a response - well, kind of - to my post about slavery and the Bible. It's not really a response so much as it is a sneer in my general direction, and a highly inaccurate one at that. He makes no attempt to actually answer my arguments except for a relatively irrelevant one in my first post that was tangential to the real issue. He begins: Now I've written about this before, Mr Brayton does not give the same consideration to theology that he does in the other parts of his life. He is ready and willing to chide a person critical of, say, evolutionary science for not "…

The Deepest View of the Universe. EVER.

"It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure." -Joseph Campbell One of the bravest things that was ever done with the Hubble Space Telescope was to find a patch of sky with absolutely nothing in it -- no bright stars, no nebulae, and no known galaxies -- and observe it. Not just for a few minutes, or an hour, or even for a day. But orbit-after-orbit, for a huge amount of time, staring off into the nothingness of empty space, recording image after image of pure darkness. What would we find, out beyond the limits of what…

Reactions to the Baltimore Riot (2015)

I have a few partly formed, preliminary thoughts about some people's reaction to Baltimore (originally posted on my friend Miles Kurland's page as a comment, then on my facebook page, edited.) What I'm mainly reacting to is the constant drone of people saying that rioting and anti-state violence in Baltimore is fully 100% wrong and will have 0% positive effect. That may or may not be true, but I have the impression that most of these reactions (mainly seen by me on Twitter, which does tend to lack nuance and detail) are of the knee-jerk sort and not well thought out. More importantly,…

Science could have it all wrong. But...

"We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive." -C. S. Lewis Many of you are a little bit skeptical that I talk about things like the History of the Universe, Inflation, Dark Matter and Dark Energy like they are absolute certainties. After all, isn't it true that there are an awful lot of assumptions that we make in order for these things to be true? Image credit: NASA. Absolutely! That's right, I admit it. We make assumptions when we come up…

How to be a good GREAT teacher

"The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires." -William Arthur Ward Every so often, people get up-in-arms about teaching and education in college. New studies come out, new methods are touted and tried, curricula get revised, and pretty much everyone gets criticized. Anyone familiar with the undergraduate experience knows that -- nationwide, at least -- physics departments are often at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to how poorly their students rate them. (There are, of course, some very notable exceptions.)…

Climate Change Not Good For Red Knots

You've heard the phrase, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution," an insightful phrase penned in 1972 by Theodosius Dobzhansky. I would like to add a second part to that phrase, and it goes like this: "... and, nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of co-evolution." This would hardly be an exaggeration, and it can hardly be better exemplified than with examples from migratory birds. Migratory birds have to be adapted to at least three different ecological settings. They breed in one area, migrate (and often spend considerable time) through another…

Reflections on Darwin's Origin of Species

The The Origin Of Species by Charles Darwin was published over 150 years go. At the time, several different alternative theories of the origin and history of life were being discussed in the West. Some of these theories were theological. Theological ideas included a literal translation of the bible, with the flora, the fauna, and humans created in three separate but related creation events on a freshly made earth just a few thousand years ago. Another theological idea had an Abrahamic God's hand involved in the history of life but in ways we were not likely to understand until after death…

Is it appropriate to use the term "Pygmy" when speaking of...Pygmies?

Left: Efe (Pygmy) man. Right: White guy. Some of the people who live in the rain forest of Central Africa are known widely as "Pgymies." That word...Pygmy...is considered problematic for a few different reasons. It refers to a person's physical appearance, because it means "small." The word is sometimes used in biology to refer to the smaller species among a group of closely related species, as in "Pygmy Hippopotamus" or "Pygmy Chimp." In English and probably some other languages, the term is used in a derogatory way to refer to someone who is perceived as not very smart, as in "Pygmy…

The Antiskeptics

Skeptics fight an up hill battle. This battle consists of deploying critical thinking across a range of cultural landscapes, implementing scientific thinking to solve problems, and the thoughtful evaluation of knowledge, while 90 percent of the world is out to stop you, or at least make it hard. Or so it seems. To be honest, I can't back up that 90 percent figure with any hard facts. Sorry. But the Skeptic faces more than just uncritical thinking, incorrect facts, or poor scientific judgment. The Skeptic must also wrestle with ... The Anti Skeptic. Of which there are several kinds.…

Newton and the Counterfeiter

The other side of the coin(age): Newton and the Counterfeiter Did you know that Isaac Newton had two jobs? One, you know about: To figure out all that physics and math stuff so we could live for a while in a Newtonian world (later to be replaced by an Einsteinian world). The other was as the big honcho of the Royal Mint. Where they make the money. In that second job, Newton had several interesting problems to deal with, which were in some ways more complex than how planets keep orbiting around stars and apples keep falling from trees. He needed to secure the coinage of the land against…

Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments (book review)

One of the more popular books I've ever reviewed here, judging by the number of people who read the review, was this one on home chemistry. Now, let's see if we can meet or beat the physical sciences with this new title:Illustrated Guide to Home Biology Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture (DIY Science). Robert Bruce Thompson, author of the chemistry book, has teamed up with Barbara Fritchman Thompson, to produce this new work. The book has a lot of experiments in it, organized in a reasonable way, with complete instructions on everything. I would prefer to see more graphics illustrating the…

Scott Adams is a tosser

Preceded by Boris "the clown" Johnson, SA wins his coveted slightly damp biscuit1 for The Non-Expert Problem and Climate Change Science. TL;DR: it's a pile of dingoes kidneys. But before we get down to the insightful analysis, here's a barely relevant cartoon. Notice the use of the words "weasel" and "expert", and the dig at ethics. Anyway, if you want someone slowly patiently and sorrowfully taking SA's junk to pieces, then you want Victor Venema2. Sou didn't like it either, but deferred the analysis to VV. Via a comment at Sou's I discover that PZ Myers has had some complaints about SA…

ID Isn't Science, But That's the Least Of Its Problems

Speaking of the intellectual collapse of ID, its other major blog, the Discovery Institute's “Evolution News and Views” also seems to have fallen on hard times. How else to explain the presence of this article, by Steve Laufmann? Laufmann addresses the question, “Is Intelligent Design Science?” He divides his answer into five parts. We shall come to them in a moment. Now, as I discuss at some length in Among the Creationists questions about what is, and is not, science generally leave me cold. Lately there's been some hand-wringing among certain physicists about whether string theory and…

Scott Foust: February's Robert O'Brien Trophy Winner

Scott Foust, a german literature student at the University of Cincinatti, is the winner of February's Robert O'Brien Trophy (formerly known as the Idiot of the Month award) for this breathtakingly ignorant article in the newspaper of that university. In it, Foust takes the commonly heard, and utterly false, claim that evolution supports racism and adds to it a whole new set of lies and falsehoods. His particular specialty is the unsupported assertion. Right off the bat, he trots out this one: If evolution is to be believed, black history would include the notion that blacks are still an…

Much Ado About Nothing

I've not commented on the brouhaha that has surrounded Harvard President Lawrence Summers' comment at a conference last week that the relative lack of women in math and science might reflect innate differences rather than the effects of socialization. Let me do so now. Bottom line: *shrug*. I think the whole situation is one giant overreaction based more on kneejerk reactions than on rational thinking. Like it or not, there are some traits that tend to be more common in one gender than the other. Is that true in this particular case? I don't know. I haven't seen the research on it. But I don'…

Classic Edition: Master of None

A discussion in the back-channel forums reminded me about all the many things I've learned how to do badly in the course of my scientific training. My junior high shop teacher probably sprained something laughing the first time he heard that I was doing machine shop work as part of a research project, but it's part of experimental science, so I know a little bit about how to work a milling machine these days. It's a crazy busy week for me, and today will be largely taken up by hosting Jennifer Ouellette, who's visiting campus to tell us about the physics of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So, I've…

We Are Science

If you listen to people talking about (or read people blogging about) new ways of doing things, you'll frequently hear references to Science or Academia as if they were vast but monolithic entities existing in their own right. Statements like "The culture of Science does not reward open access..." or "Modern Academia does not reward high-risk research..." are quite common. They also are often paired with a call for external relief, usually through some government mandate-- "We need funding agencies to make this a condition of grant funding." I always find these statements faintly annoying,…

Darwin Gets his Wellies Wet

I became acquainted with an Englishman who was going to visit his estate ... more than a hundred miles [north] of Cape Frio. As I was quite unused to travelling, I gladly accepted his kind offer of allowing me to accompany him. And so was the case with a number of Darwin's excursions into the bush. ~repost~ Although he organized expeditions to the interior, he also took advantage of individuals or groups traveling one place or another, such as this Englishman, in order to carry out random acts of geologizing and opportunistic biologizing. And thus seven men, including Darwin and his…

Study Suggests Increased Rate of Human Adaptive Evolution

There is a new paper, just coming out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that explores the idea that humans have undergone an increased rate of evolution over the last several tens of thousands of years. By an increased rate of evolution, the authors mean an increased rate of adaptive change in the genome. By recent times, the authors mean various things, depending on which part of the analysis you examine, and depending on what is meant by "increased." ... In other words, the timing of an event that is not really an event (but rather a change in rate of something) is hard…