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Cytogeneticist Dr. Janet Rowley receives AACR Lifetime Achievement Award

The 101st Annual Meeting of my primary professional society, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), convened in Washington, DC, on Saturday and will run through Wednesday, April 21. The theme for this year's meeting is "Conquering Cancer Through Discovery Research," and focuses strongly on the translation of discoveries into cancer treatments. Although the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic dust cloud has delayed many European participants, over 17,000 attendees are expected at the Washington Convention Center where over 6,300 presentations are to be given. AACR was founded in 1907 by 11…

Taking on Big Coal: Hansen's holy war

Coal is turning out to be one of those political litmus-test issues for those worried about climate change. And as usual, the country is polarized. The Iowa Utilities Board is the on the side of angels. Holding the fort with Satan are Arkansas and Indiana, among others. It splits on predictable party lines when it comes to presidential politics, too. But leading the fight against coal isn't a White House hopeful. It's someone who's supposed to stay out of politics. None other than NASA climate guru James Hansen. First, some context. Iowa recently rejected an application to build a coal-fired…

Alarmism? What alarmism?

A friend of mine, who has a pretty well-exercised brain, tried to get under my skin the other day by invoking the specter of climate change "alarmists," suggesting that we've been there before and should reserve a fair bit of skepticism for anyone who says the sky is falling. Which is true, to a point. No one wants to be dismissed as an alarmist. But then he brought up Paul Ehrlich and the famous "population bomb" as a classic example of alarmism that amounted to nothing. I fear my friend has bought into one of those fables that continues to dog the environmental movement. This post is an…

Voting for science; science for voting

Anyone who's spent even a modest amount of time and effort investigating the battle over the teaching of intelligent design creationism in the country's classrooms will recognize the argument that an understanding of evolution is essential to a decent science education, let alone a degree in biology. And so it is. But many of the same proponents of banishing creationist clap-trap from public schools, myself included, often extend that argument beyond science into the wider cultural and economic spheres. And there things get a little muddy. A proper understanding of evolution is the…

My Vote

I follow cheerfully; and, did I not, Wicked and wretched, I must follow still Whoever yields properly to Fate, is deemed Wise among men, and knows the laws of heaven. - Euripides Wise advice as quoted in the Enchiridion of Epictetus. With that in mind, let those of us to the right of center contemplate the coming abyss with calm composure. Some things are in our control and others not, Epictetus tells us. This election is in the latter category. In the absence of a truly shocking and unexpected surprise, senator Obama is the next president of the United States. We would like to have…

Renovating a runt - the extreme evolution of the Y chromosome

Men who think that size really matters should probably not think too hard about the Y chromosome. This bundle of genes is the ultimate determinant of manliness, and it happens to be a degenerate runt.  Over a few hundred million years, it has shrunk considerably, jettisoning around 97% of its original genes. Where it was once a large library of genes, now it's more a struggling independent bookstore. This loss of information defined the youth of the Y chromosome but nowadays, things are different. Renovation is the order of the day. Jennifer Hughes from MIT revealed the recent history of…

Tiny fungi replay the fall of the giant beasts

Around 15,000 years ago, North American was home to a wide menagerie of giant mammals - mammoths and mastodons, giant ground sloths, camels, short-faced bears, American lions, dire wolves, and more. But by 10,000 years ago, these "megafauna" had been wiped out. Thirty-four entire genera went extinct, including every species that weighed over a tonne, leaving the bison as the continent's largest animal. In trying to explain these extinctions, the scientific prosecution has examined suspects including early human hunters, climate change and even a meteor strike. But cracking the case has…

A physicist agrees with me!

So I guess they can't be all bad. Yesterday, I chastised Michio Kaku severely for stepping out of his expertise as a physicist to say something stupid about biology. James Kakalios agreed with me, and sent along a little essay about the subject that also makes the point that expertise is important. In Defense of Elites James Kakalios Following the recent mid-term elections, the consensus of many pundits is that this past November the American public sent a strong message of "anti-elitism." The good news is that nothing could be further from the truth. Americans are certainly not anti-…

Do lost people really go round in circles?

In 2007, Jan Souman dropped three volunteers into the Sahara desert and watched as they walked for several miles, in an attempt to walk in a straight line. Souman was interested in the widespread belief that lost travelers end up walking in circles, a belief that has never been properly tested but has nonetheless become firmly entrenched in the popular consciousness. Just think about Frodo and Sam's hike through Mordor or the three hapless teens in the Blair Witch Project. To see how non-fictional humans would fare, Souman tracked a group of volunteers using GPS as they walked through a…

Electrical stimulation produces feelings of free will

When it comes to the human brain, even the simplest of acts can be counter-intuitive and deceptively complicated. For example, try stretching your arm. Nerves in the limb send messages back to your brain, but the subjective experience you have of stretching isn't due to these signals. The feeling that you willed your arm into motion, and the realisation that you moved it at all, are both the result of an area at the back of your brain called the posterior parietal cortex. This region helped to produce the intention to move, and predicted what the movement would feel like, all before you…

Low-calorie diets improve memory in old age

People diet for many reasons - to fit into clothes, to look more attractive, or for the sake of their health. But to improve their memory? It's an interesting idea, and one that's been given fresh support by Veronica Witte and colleagues from the University of Munster in Germany. Witte found that elderly people who slash the calories in their diet by 30% were better able to remember lists of words than people who stuck to their normal routine. It's the first experiment to show that cutting calories can improve human memory at an age when declining memory is par for the course. The benefits…

[Book] Davenport’s Dream

It is always cute when the anti-evolutionists (in all their guises) try to do history; witness here, for example. Veteran observers are not surprised to find them trying to warp history (see here, here, here & here for that). Nowhere is this warping more evident than in how DI-hacks such as John West & Richard Weikart have promulgated a meme linking Darwin to Haeckel to Nazism. This has been clearly dealt with by a number of historians (see references herein and read Robert Richards’ latest book on Haeckel). Equally as resilient is the idea (also held by West & Weikart) that…

Epistasis and pathways in fly eye pigmentation

I was going to talk about a cool recent paper that described the evolution of novelties by way of modifying modular gene networks, but I started scribbling it up and realized that I was constantly backtracking to explain some fundamental concepts, so I stopped. I was concerned because one of the most common sources of confusion I've found in my students in the past was difficulty in distinguishing phenotypes from the complexities of the underlying genotype, and I have to be slow and thorough in setting up those differences early on until it sinks in, a habit I'm continuing here. It's so easy…

Undercurrent?

Is there some kind of especially violent undercurrent right now, in the right-wing river of hate? Ed Brayton just href="http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/11/missouri_republicans_call_for.php">posted about a billboard put up by the GOP, specifically the href="http://lafayettecountyrepublicans.blogspot.com/2009/11/new-i-70-billboard-replaces-famed.html">Lafayette County (Missouri) Republicans: style="display: inline;"> src="http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/I-70%20Billboard%2011_19_09.jpg" class="mt-image-none" style="" height="300" width="400"> The sign href="http://…

Machiavellian Monkeys

Our brains are huge, particularly if you take into consideration the relative size of our bodies. Generally, the proportion of brain to body is pretty tight among mammals. But the human brain is seven times bigger than what you'd predict from the size of our body. Six million years ago, hominid brains were about a third the size they are today, comparable to a chimp's. So what accounts for the big boom? It would be flattering ourselves to say that the cause was something we are proud of--our ability to talk, or our gifts with tools. Certainly, our brains show signs of being adapted for these…

Divine Worms

As someone who writes a lot about evolutionary biology, I've often had people say to me, "I just can't believe that evolved." Originally, that referred to the lovely side of nature--the beauty of flowers, for example, or the grace of birds in flight. The implication was that these things were so beautiful and intricate that they had to be created for a purpose--a beautiful purpose, obviously. But after I started writing about parasites, that underwent a fascinating change. Parasites may be deadly and gross, but they also have some mind-boggling adaptations. Most mind-boggling of all is the…

Science, Sneezing, and Environmental Justice: Part 3 with Author Gregg Mitman

Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 - - - Part 3 with Gregg Mitman, discussing his book Breathing Space, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here. WF: Following that--or perhaps too similarly--I see that the book has been reviewed widely, suggesting a diverse range of readers. But who did you want to write it for? GM: The book is meant to be a crossover book. By that, I mean it was written to appeal to scholars and students in environmental history, medical history, history of science, and historical and cultural geography, and also to a more general readership…

Leaving creationism

We occasionally get threads full of deconversion stories here: atheists arrive at their conclusions by some very different paths, where sometimes it was an easy and natural transition, and sometimes it was painful, agonizing, and there are still deep wounds left from parting the ways with religion. Today, though, I'd like to ask a narrower question: How did you come to accept evolution? Some of you will find the problem odd, because you've never believed in anything else. I know when I was growing up, despite going to Sunday School and all that nonsense, my church never mentioned the subject…

Mobius syndrome is nothing to smile about

Science has an article this week (sadly behind a subscription wall) about a rare disease called Mobius syndrome. Mobius syndrome is a developmental disorder of facial muscle innervation with a variety of presentations; however, the presentation often includes facial paralysis and difficulty in smiling: The syndrome is named for Paul Julius Mobius, a German neurologist who published an early description of it in 1888. (He was also the grandson of August Ferdinand Mobius, the mathematician of Mobius strip fame.) According to a statement developed at the conference, the syndrome's defining…

Lower back pain often does not require imaging

Here is a lesson in why defensive medicine should be avoided: it costs a lot, it doesn't help patients, and it has the potential to hurt them. Chou et al. published a study in the Lancet showing that in patients presenting with lower back pain without serious clinical symptoms (more on this in a second) imaging does not improve outcomes. Lower back pain is a common presentation in clinic. It is pretty prevalent with about 15 percent of Americans reporting having had it. However, in most cases it isn't anything to be alarmed about. In the majority of cases, it goes away pretty quickly…

Did Ancient Aliens visit the earth and guide human evolution?

No. One other event I participated in was a "debate" with an ancient alien theorist. It was very peculiar, as you might guess. The way this came about was that Scotty Roberts, the alien astronaut fan, proposed a session on his wacky speculations, and the conference organizers didn't want such lunacy to sail through without a word, so they asked some of the people on the science & skepticism track to engage. Greg Laden and I agreed to sit on a panel with him and another person, with Desiree Schell to moderate. And then I just kind of ignored the prospect until the day of. Greg Laden met in…

Tactile-emotion synaesthesia

Synaesthesia is a neurological condition in which stimuli of one sensory modality evoke experiences in another modality. This is thought to occur as a result of  insufficient "pruning" during development, so that most of the pathways connecting parts of the brain mediating the different senses remain in place instead of being eliminated. Consequently, there is too much cross-talk between sensory systems, such that activation of one sensory pathway leads simultaneously to activity in another. Once believed to be extremely rare, synaesthesia is now thought to be relatively common. The cross-…

You cannot be serious! Perceptual errors by professional tennis referees

The Men's Final of the 1981 Wimbledon Tennis Championships is one of the most memorable events in sporting history. John McEnroe, who was playing against Bjorn Borg, famously challenged one of the referee's calls by throwing a tantrum, during which he shouted the immortal line "You cannot be serious!" McEnroe's outburst was controversial, and he was almost eliminated from the championship because of it. But he may have been right to challenge the referee after all: according to a new study published in Current Biology, in such close calls, professional tennis referees consistently misjudge…

A Complicated Death

Last year was the hottest on record, or the second hottest, depending on the records climatologists look at. The planet has warmed .8 degrees C over the past 150 years, and scientists are generally agreed that greenhouse gases have played a major part in that warming. They also agree that the warming will continue in the decades to come. Many experts are concerned that warming may make two unpleasant things more common: extinctions and diseases. In tomorrow's issue of Nature (link to come here), a team of scientists report on a case that ties these two dangers together: frogs have become…

Everybody Post About Mirror Neurons!!!

Mixing Memory brings up some excellent points regarding mirror neurons in primates, and Frontal Cortex follows up with his thoughts. To both of them I say "bravo, but your skepticism probably doesn't go far enough". We give Rizzolatti et al too much credit with their conclusions. After all, they've only demonstrated the existence of mirror neurons in monkeys. Due to the obvious inherent difficulties associated with recording from human neurons in vivo, no one has yet (to my knowledge) published anything that demonstrates the existence of mirror neurons in people. Instead, we stick…

Imaginative, Yet Literal? Fewer False Memories Among Children Than Adults

Children are often thought to be imaginative and fanciful, not only in their perception of the world but also in the veridicality of their memories. It may therefore be surprising that a robust method for eliciting false memories in adults is actually ineffective in children. In fact, children even tend to show better performance than adults in terms of false recall in the DRM paradigm, a task in which a list of words must be remembered where every word in each list is strongly associated with a word that is not presented in each list. Adults tend to show a robust tendency to incorrectly…

Platform-Independent Intelligence: Octopus Consciousness

"To understand ourselves, we must embrace the alien." - PZ Meyers One difficulty in understanding consciousness is the fact that we know of only one species that certainly possesses it: humans. A new article by Jennifer Mather suggests that octopi may also possess consciousness, despite the vastly different architecture of their brain. If two very different neural architectures can both support forms of advanced cognition, then the similarities between them may help clarify the computational requirements for intelligent behavior. Octopus brains are striking different from those in primates…

King of the Cortex: Anterior PFC

As enigmatic as prefrontal function seems to be, the anterior portions of prefrontal cortex (aPFC) are even more mysterious. This results partly from the fact that aPFC is particularly difficult to access and study electrophysiologically in nonhuman primates, as Ramnani and Owen note in their 2004 Nature Reviews Neuroscience article, and so detailed neuroanatomical investigations of aPFC have been conducted only recently. The authors report how this work has led to a breakthrough in the understanding of aPFC's computations. Ramnani and Owen review Brodmann's early analysis of aPFC, also…

Ethical implications of death by prayer

Nearly a year ago, a young girl was killed by her parents. She was dying of diabetic ketoacidosis, and her parents provided only prayer. They weren't living on some compound under the thrall of some cult leader. They weren't living in a third-world country far from modern medical care. They were living in the middle of Wisconsin, and had access to any care they might need, but while their child suffered, the parents did the equivalent of nothing. This type of situation has been done to death, but since the parents are about to go on trial, let's review the responsibilities of the state…

More Hawkish Folly, or How to Pave the Road to Hell

Capt. Andy MacLean, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, after his unit's first night of serious combat in the Iraq War, Apr 1-2, 2003. Image by David Leeson/Dallas Morning News/CORBIS SYGMA ___________________________________________________________________________________ The floor of the National Museum of Iraq after it sacking during the second week of April, 2003. ___________________________________________________________________________________ Among the responses to my previous post, "Why we're suckers for war talk", was a comment accusing me of "the error of…

Enjoying Florida

Yeah, I know I'm lucky. While most of my readers are struggling to shovel the snow out of their driveways, I'm enjoying yet another weekend of 80 degree heat and lovely sun. So it only seems right to take advantage of the good weather and hit the outdoors. So, on Saturday, Barry and I visited Historic Spanish Point. It's a local historical/archaeological site in Sarasota, FL. The site covers prehistoric human activity all the way to colonial gardening - and it is beautiful. There are a variety of flowers and other plants all around you. My personal favorite area was the butterfly garden,…

Framing Lieberman

Matt "Framing Science" Nisbit has a post up that asks a somewhat very loaded question: "Did the Far Left Blogs Turn Lieberman Into a Republican?" In fact, now that I look more closely at the question, I'm starting to notice that the question isn't just loaded; it's loaded on multiple levels. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Matt is a communications guy, and he knows what to do to shape a message (even if he doesn't always manage to do it successfully). Matt seems to see part of his mission in life as a voice in the wilderness, pointing out all the ways we communicate wrong, and all the…

PC vs Mac: Race and Gender in Advertising

There was something that always bothered me about the Mac commercials purporting to show me how hip Mac computers are. It's that I never really felt included in the world of those ads. Mac computers are personified by a uber-cool geek-chic attractive young white man. PCs, of course take on the flesh of a somewhat portly, a bit older, less attractive white man whose geek is unredeemed by any hint of cool. Did I mention they are both white men? In ad after ad after ad, we see these two white men portray personal computers to the viewing audience. You can watch the collection of ads from…

NAS Deigns to Admit 9 Women This Year

The Chronicle of Higher Education daily update reports on this year's inductees to the National Academy of Sciences. A total of 72 members and 18 foreign associates elected this year - and guess what, they managed to find 9 worthy women. Yes, NINE. Is that not amazing? But fear not, friends. We are told: The number of women inducted is nearly half the record 19 elected in 2005 (The Chronicle, May 4, 2005). Nevertheless, the percentage of all members who are women has steadily grown to reach about 10 percent this year, an all-time high. The proportion should continue to grow as more…

When Does the Gunman's Race Matter?

The Chronicle Review this week is essentially devoted to analysis of and commentary on the Virginia Tech massacre. The Chronicle asked a number of individuals what they would say if they were asked to speak to the Virginia Tech graduating class at commencement this year. Edward J. W. Park's contribution deserves special attention from everyone, I think. (no subscription needed) Park's message to the graduating seniors - and to all of is - is about how racial and ethnic labels function in our society and in particular in the case of shooting incidents. It is about his hope that education…

Not Even On the Radar Screen

Ask a Science Blogger asks: UPDATE: THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE THE OCT. 27TH ASK A SCIENCE BLOGGER ANSWER What's the most underfunded scientific field that shouldn't be underfunded?... I can't presume to know the definitive answer. But I can give you one answer: a field that's not even on the radar screen for nearly everyone. We all know women routinely go to see their gynecologist, and women's reproductive health is an important issue. What's the equivalent for men? Do you hear of men routinely going to see their andrologist? The closest thing they have is a urologist, and that's just not…

Religion and Freedom. Or: Why Freedom Requires Secularism.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated eleven years, four months, and one day before I was born, but I miss him. There are issues today where his voice is needed even more than it was needed in 1960. But Kennedy is dead and buried, but the issues of religion he had to confront are not. And his voice needs to be heard, because Kennedy was firm in his stand, he was eloquent in the way he expressed it, and he was right. Yesterday, Mitt Romney gave a speech on religion that many have compared to Kennedy's. And it's not an entirely unreasonable comparison. Like Kennedy, Romney gave his…

Biologically realistic politics continued

Before we continue, let's get a few definitional matters out of the way. First, there is the "state of nature" issue. A longstanding tradition in political philosophy is that humans existed at some stage in a state of nature, that is to say, a condition of living without the constraints of historical society. Hobbes thought it was a bellum omnia contra omnes - a war of all against all. Locke, on the other hand, thought that it was a state of free association of contractually independent agents capable of making a social contract. Both positions are just biologically unrealistic. Humans, if…

Emotional words distract, but only when you're searching for meaning

I attended an unusual middle school. It was designed on an "open concept," with the idea that there should be no walls between classrooms. Social pressure would keep the noise levels down, because if kids got too loud, then their peers in other classes would encourage them to hush up. This actually worked most of the time, but one day one of the English teacher's classes was getting out of hand, and after trying several ways to get their attention, she resorted to something a big more dramatic. In a very loud voice, she simply said SEX! Her class, and several classes nearby, instantly stared…

Product placements in movies: When they work, and when they don't

Product placements in movies and TV shows are becoming so commonplace that my kids now cynically take note of them whenever they appear. It wasn't always that way. In 1982 when I first saw E.T. I had no idea that Elliott's use of Reeses' Pieces to lure E.T. into his home was part of a clever marketing ploy that had been pre-arranged with the multinational conglomerate selling the candy. Now that nearly every household has a DVR allowing viewers to fast-forward through commercials, advertisers are relying more and more heavily on product placement to show off their wares. But how effective are…

How do we find those lost keys? The color of the environment doesn't seem to matter

The other day, our car wouldn't start and Jim had to ask a neighbor over to help him jump-start it. There was much rushing in and out of the house looking for flashlights and other tools to help get the job done. After the neighbor left, Jim wanted to drive somewhere and couldn't find the keys. Clearly he had just had them because he was working on the car. Where could they be? We searched up and down throughout the house, but we couldn't find them and eventually had to use a spare set. The next morning as I was getting ready to leave for our school carpool in our other car, I found them…

Barcoding redux

So, here I am in Phoenix airport, waiting to go back home, and I read T Ryan Gregory's snark about me and barcoding. Apparently I am to learn only from his blog posts and not from (perish the thought) critics. One should never attend to critics. My crime was, of course, to say that I thought Brent Mishler of UC Berkeley and others (including mein host in Phoenix, Quentin Wheeler, and Kip Will) were correct in their concerns that barcoding was being touted as a replacement for proper taxonomy and that it will draw resources from it. What are the issues? There are three, as I see it. One…

Query and First Edit for Grimace Speaks to a Geneticist

(This is an old slide I used for one of my genetics classes - the general idea about what Grimace is exactly was pilfered from a graphic design school advertisement I saw where several presumably student's works were showcased. if you happen to know who the student was that originally designed it, let me know, because a few of my graduate students are interested in finding out). I can't remember exactly how I found out about McSweeney's, but I do know that upon reading Wendy Molyneux's "How To Tell People That You Are A Billionaire Without Sounding Obnoxious", I was pretty much hooked. Also…

Ruminations from Douglas Adams

Quotes of the Day from Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams: "I know that astrology isn't a science,' said Gail. "Of course it isn't. It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or, what's that strange thing you British play?' "Er, cricket? Self-loathing?" "Parliamentary democracy. The rules just kind of got there. They don't make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but…

What is a species?

If somebody asked me to write a short essay giving an overview of my favourite topic, the nature of species, I doubt that I could. I can write a long essay on it (in fact, several) but it would be excruciatingly hard to write a short one. For that, we need a real writer. Carl Zimmer is the guy. He has an essay on species in the current edition of Scientific American. And despite quoting some obscure Australian philosopher, it is a good summary of the issues. How he manages to get up on a topic like that amazes me. It took me a good five years. There's a connection with this blog. A while…

Casual Fridays: Which PowerPoint tips really work?

There's been an abundance of PowerPoint advice in the science blogosphere lately. Based on my personal experience, I'd say Chad and Amy give some good advice -- and it's advice that probably serves them well in their own presentations. But I was curious about something different. There are plenty of places where you can find tips about PowerPoint. The bigger question is, do these tips actually help poor speakers improve their presentations? In other words, can offering basic presentation advice without actually showing someone how to be a more engaging speaker help them give better…

Defending Evolution as a Matter of Political Strategy

PZ disagrees with my suggestions about strategies for defending evolution. More specifically, he disagrees that we should be using, as messengers, scientists who reconcile faith and evolution (aka Ken Miller) to reach the broader American public. As PZ puts it: Why, sure. And the ideal messenger to reach the public on Democratic ideals is a moderate Republican. The way to win friends and persuade people is to dilute your message so much that you sound just like them. Baa-aaa-aa-a. Ah, but are we diluting our message here? I don't think that we are. The goal, for me, is to "defend the teaching…

Debating Ron Bailey and Wesley Smith, Part II

Yesterday, extending a public debate that I participated in earlier in the week, I criticized some arguments by Reason's Ron Bailey and started to criticize some writings by the Discovery Institute's Wesley Smith. I'm pretty much done with Bailey (see our exchange here), with whom I really don't disagree all that much. But I have more to say about Smith's arguments on the stem cell issue. In my previous post, I left off by objecting to Smith's attempt to create what I view as a false opposition between adult and embryonic stem cell research. There's much more to say here. In particular, I'd…

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Goat

William Buckland, from Reminiscences of Oxford. In the year 1166 a woman quietly passed away in a cave on Mount Pelligrino, Sicily. It was the end she chose for herself. At the age of twelve she had left home to become a hermit and devote her life to worshiping God, and her remains were left to rot in the isolated cave that was her home. Her name was Rosalia. Then, in 1624, a deadly epidemic spread through Palermo. It was at this time that a sick woman claimed to have seen a vision of Rosalia, and for the plague to be ended, the apparition instructed, Rosalia's bones would have to be…

Darwin and the Bishop's Wife

The skeleton of an orangutan and a human compared. From Richard Owen's The Principal Forms of the Skeleton and of the Teeth. I have developed something of a bad habit. Whenever I am reading a book, paper, or article and I spot a bit of unattributed "received wisdom" I immediately get the urge to track down the reference to see if the author is in error. The task might consume only a few minutes or it may take many hours, but I cannot help my compulsion. An op-ed by Karl Giberson and Darrel Falk, co-creators of the Biologos website, set me to work this afternoon. The pair wrote; But the…