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What average genetic variation can tell us (or not)

To the left I've juxtaposed the images of the four Bushmen males whose genomes were analyzed in the recent Nature paper and compared to Desmond Tutu. I've added to the montage a photo of a Swedish and Chinese man. The Nature paper looked at the HapMap data sets which had within them whites from Utah, northwest Europeans, and Chinese from Beijing, and compared these populations to the Bushmen and Desmond Tutu. One important point that this paper emphasized was that the rule-of-thumb that African populations have the most extant genetic diversity of all human groups, and that the Bushmen have…

Let my people (let themselves) go.

Blogging has been light because grading has been heavy. But Chad has a post that started me to thinking. (Danger! Danger!) And, since he has stated his desire to avoid a flamewar at this time, it seems only fair that I do that thinking over here so his space can be unscorched. The question at hand, initially posed by Scott Aaronson, is whether there might be a shortage of women in science because women are more prone to be "repelled by nerd culture" than men. What do we mean by "nerd culture" here? This is Scott's characterization of it (along with his preferred strategy of making the…

Marriage, children, and tradition

ThinkProgress reports on an interview with Jennifer Roback Morse of the National Organization for Marriage [sic].  The explain: Jennifer Roback Morse of the National Organization for Marriage’s Ruth Institute has been particularly vocal over the past few months, promoting ex-gay therapy and suggesting that young people not have gay friends. In an interview published in Salvo Magazine in September, she was quite candid about the archaic stereotypes about same-sex couples that inform her anti-gay positions: Morse tells Salvo: MORSE: If you look at same-sex couples, both at what they say and…

Personhood

Michael Egnor is trying to pick a fight over abortion with P.Z. Myers. Egnor is building a bog-standard argument that every human zygote has an inherent right to life, therefore abortion is immoral (the unargued assumption being that a woman's right to life doesn't really matter). It's a reminder why the Discovery Institute, whose website Egnor clutters up with his occasional screeds, has been overtaken in media attention by old-school young earth creationism: Disco. and ID creationism are static, while young earth creationism always finds new ways to surprise you. Anyway, in reiterating…

Sam Harris v. Sean Carroll

The discussion is interesting. Sam Harris recently and infamously proposed that, contra Hume, you can derive an 'ought' from an 'is', and that science can therefore provide reasonable guidance towards a moral life. Sean Carroll disagrees at length. I'm afraid that so far I'm in the Carroll camp. I think Harris is following a provocative and potentially useful track, but I'm not convinced. I think he's right in some of the examples he gives: science can trivially tell you that psychopaths and violent criminals and the pathologies produced by failed states in political and economic collapse are…

Iran

I haven't blogged about Iran at all, and I don't really feel bad about it. Obviously, it's the big news story, but I don't know what will happen, and the people I'm reading don't seem to have a clear idea either. I'm optimistic that honest election results will be posted, and that the genuine winner of their election will be seated. But those are not the issues at play. The protests are being treated as a borderline revolution, with Mousavi as a potential George Washington. I'm less sure of that. Mousavi was a major backer of the Islamic Revolution, favors an Iranian nuclear weapons…

Dead pirates, the media, and accountability

Lindsay Beyerstein rightly thinks there's "Enough dead teen pirate porn already." While we're all glad that Captain Phillips was safely recovered, Lindsay raises some important questions: Two days after the rescue, the banner headline on the front page of the Washington Post should not read "3 Rounds, 3 Dead Bodies." And if that's the front page headline, surely they don't need a second story about pirate-shooting in the same edition. The American public is relishing the deaths of the pirates to a degree that's downright unseemly. This is true. While the technical skill of the SEAL snipers…

Introducing Cryptanalysis

To understand why serious encryption algorithms are so complex, and why it's so important to be careful with the critical secrets that make an encryption system work, it's useful to understand something about how people break encryption systems. The study of this is called cryptanalysis, and it's an amazingly fascinating field of applied mathematics. I'm going to be interspersing information about cryptanalysis with my cryptography posts. One thing to remember here is that we'll be talking about it mainly in the context of how you can break an encryption system - but cryptanalysis is also…

Creationism Is Just One Symptom Of Conservative Pathology

This is one a couple of posts about Creationism, written originally on May 1st, 2005. Creationism Is Just One Symptom Of Conservative Pathology I am not an "evolutionist". I am not a "Darwinist". I am a biologist. Thus, by definition, I am an evolutionary biologist. Although my research is in physiology and behavior, I would never be able to make any sense of my data (or even know what questions to ask in the first place) without evolutionary thinking. As I am also interested in history and philosophy of biology, I consider myself a Darwinian. But not a "Darwinist" or "evolutionist" - those…

Tom Bethell on AIDS--the breakdown

Chris has been excoriating Tom Bethell (author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science") over on The Intersection and elsewhere (see, for example, here, here, and several posts here). However, since he's not yet done a takedown on Bethell's chaper on AIDS (titled "African AIDS: a Political Epidemic"), he suggested I have a go at it. Man, I knew the book would be bad, but it reaches a whole new level of terrible. Bethell's central thesis will be familiar to anyone who's read the anti-HIV arguments by Peter Duesberg and others. As the chapter title suggests, Bethell claims that…

Creationism Is Just One Symptom Of Conservative Pathology

This is one a couple of posts about Creationism, written originally on May 1st, 2005. Creationism Is Just One Symptom Of Conservative Pathology I am not an "evolutionist". I am not a "Darwinist". I am a biologist. Thus, by definition, I am an evolutionary biologist. Although my research is in physiology and behavior, I would never be able to make any sense of my data (or even know what questions to ask in the first place) without evolutionary thinking. As I am also interested in history and philosophy of biology, I consider myself a Darwinian. But not a "Darwinist" or "evolutionist" - those…

Waving Good Bye To The Stadium Wave Model: About that global warming hiatus

It is said that global warming has taken a break over the last decade or so. This is not true. Surface temperatures (air, sea surface, and ice) have increased over this period of time, though less so than previous years. Also, there are various indicators that the coming year or so may be extra warm, depending on what happens in the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps more importantly, deep sea temperatures seem to have gone up, and since most of the effects of anthropogenic global warming are seen in the ocean (over 90% of the extra heat goes there), changes in the rate of global warming at the surface…

Palaeowomaen: Barbara Isaac, Women in The Field, and The Throwing Hypothesis

The following post has been slightly revised in response to commentary below and elsewhere. I thank all those who commented for the helpful critique. The question of diversity in science, and more specifically, success for women, is often discussed in relation to bench or lab oriented fields. If you read the blogs that cover this sort of topic, they are very often written by bench scientists, for bench scientists, and about bench scientists. Which makes sense because most scientists probably are bench scientists. But a lot of scientists are fieldworkers, and the problems, challenges and…

Orr on Dawkins

Evolutionary biologist H. Allen Orr has this lengthy essay in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. Officially it's a review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Joan Roughgarden's Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist, and Lewis Wolpert's Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origin of Belief. Actually, though, Orr says almost nothing about those latter two books. Orr begins by describing his admiration for much of Dawkins' previous work. (He describes The Selfish Gene as the best work of popular science ever written).…

Unscientific America: Give the people what they want, or what they need?

In the post where I reviewed it, I promised I'd have more to say about Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. As it turns out, I have a lot more to say -- so much that I'm breaking it up into three posts so I can keep my trains of thought from colliding. I'm going to start here with a post about the public's end of the scientist-public communication project. Next, I'll respond to some of the claims the book seems to be making about the new media landscape (including the blogosphere). Finally, I'll take up the much discussed issue of the book's treatment of…

Better late than never: The Dunning-Kruger effect meets an incompetent anti-vaccine "analysis"

It never ceases to amaze me just how ignorant of very basic principles of science anti-vaccine activists often are. I mean, seriously. Every time they try to post something, whether they know it or not, they end up making themselves look so very, very stupid--or at least ignorant. The Dunning-Kruger effect takes over, and people who may actually be very successful--intelligent, even--in other fields of knowledge make newbie mistakes and draw egregiously misinterpreted conclusions from existing data. Worse, they have no clue that they don't know what they're doing. In the arrogance of…

What a lot of it boils down to when it comes to antiscience

After a long run of arguing against global warming and indoor smoking bans, it appears that our favorite Libertarian comic with a penchant for bad arguments and ad hominem attacks on scientists has temporarily left the field of blog combat in a huff of "giving up" that reminds me of a certain Black Knight telling a certain King that he's not beaten and that it's "just a flesh wound." I'm not worried; I'm sure he'll be back whenever he returns from his vacation to speak for himself. In the meantime, while the blog silence is golden, I'd like to step back a minute. I don't want to rehash old…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Holy Koranic Dr. Emoto, Batman!

Last night, seeking to expand the name of Orac rather than his waistline, I did a skeptical meetup with a local skeptics' group to discuss the topic of quackademic medicine. A fine time was had by all (at least as far as I can tell). What that means, unfortunately, is that I got back too late last night to have time to prepare a helping of new insolence that you all crave. (And you know you do crave it so.) Fortunately, the archives are here and chock full of excellent woo to republish from time to time, perfect for this situation, and I'm taking advantage of them now. The installation from…

Mark Hyman: Mangling cancer research and systems biology in the service of woo

It occurs to me that I ought to thank Mark Hyman, "pioneer of functional medicine," and creator of "Ultrawellness," particularly since he started blogging for that wretched hive of scum and quackery (WHSQ), The Huffington Post. He may not post all that often, but when he does I can be assured that the woo will be flowing in torrents from HuffPo to my computer screen, thus providing me with yet another dose of blogging material. Not surprisingly, given Hyman's history, his latest bit on HuffPo is no different. Entitled Cancer Research: New Science on How to Prevent and Treat Cancer From TEDMED…

J.B. Handley: Attacking the AAP over vaccines...again

I may have taken a break yesterday, but that doesn't mean I've abandoned my mission to make this Vaccine Awareness Week (or, more properly, the Anti-vaccine Movement Awareness Week, dedicated to countering the lies of the anti-vaccine movement). Even though it was good to take a day off, the anti-vaccine movement rarely takes a day off, and yesterday was no exception. Indeed, one of the most belligerent anti-vaccinationists of all, the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest anti-vaccine bull of all, decided to show up for the first time in a long time yesterday on his organization's…

The Vitamin C Empire Strikes Back

Well that didn't take long, did it? Three days ago, I described a study that I had noticed in the October 1 issue of Cancer Research that described an animal study that strongly suggested that vitamin C administered at sufficiently high doses may interfere with the action of multiple chemotherapeutic agents. You can read the link for full details of the study as discussed by yours truly. In fact, although I only blog sporadically about the exaggerated claims of advocates of vitamin C as a cancer cure, but when I do I like to think I hit the mark, starting two and a half years ago when I wrote…

The Story of Schrodinger's Apple

Sometimes, inspiration and insight can come from the strangest places. This post, gathered from a series on my old site, describes my experiences with the classic symbol for morality: The apple (as in, the fruit of knowledge of good and evil.) It started with a dream that some would consider blasphemous, a journey into the world of myth and metaphor, and ended up with some of the ideas I wrote about last week. I've condensed it all into one post, so you'll have to forgive me if it is a bit more tangential than usual-or if I'm relaxing in a hot spring somewhere, rather than editing it. The…

A homeopath unplugged from reality

Yesterday's post made me sad. It always makes me sad to contemplate a 14 year old boy facing the loss of his father to an aggressive form of leukemia, as Danny Hauser is. The kid just can't catch a break. First he himself develops Hodgkin's lymphoma. Because he happens to live in a family that has taken up a faux "Native American" religion that claims its "natural healing" is better than chemotherapy, he resists undergoing treatment, and his family supports him. After a judge orders him to undergo chemotherapy, Danny and his mom then take off on the lam from the law, heading for Mexico and…

"Green Our Vaccines": Celebrity antivaccinationist ignoramuses on parade. Or: I didn't know that Dumb & Dumber was a documentary

(Note: In the photo above, the guy in the sunglasses behind Jim Carrey is our old friend Dr. Jay Gordon, Santa Monica antivaccinationist-sympathetic pediatrician to the beautiful people. He's the one with his tongue sticking out.) It's worse than I thought. In seeing the first bits of video last night from the "Green Our Vaccines" rally led by celebrity useful idiots Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey. I had been thinking of trying to be "nicer" to them, given that their fans who have shown up here seem to think I have been very, very mean to her and that I lack compassion. I also realize…

"Why aren't there more clinical trials studying the effect of CAM on cancer?" cries the CAM advocate

I've lamented time and time again just how much money the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) wastes on basic research and clinical trials of modalities that are, from a scientific viewpoint, so highly implausible that the chances of finding a clinically useful or relevant--or even a consistent statistically significant--effect (for example, homeopathy or reiki) or on therapies for which there is already abundant negative evidence (chelation therapy, for example) are vanishingly small. In this fifth year of a flat or declining NIH budget and of scientists facing…

Science leads you to killing people? Not that nonsense again!

That's the message that Ben Stein has been pushing lately, namely not just the hated "Darwinism" but science itself inevitably leads to political philosophies such as Nazi-ism and Stalinism (but especially Nazi-ism, given its emphasis on racial hygiene and eugenics), including the mass murder that resulted from them. As a result, Stein has been correctly and deservedly excoriated not just by science bloggers, but even by fellow conservatives such as Instapundit, who characterized Stein as "totally having lost it," and John Derbyshire, who correctly characterized Stein's lies as a blood libel…

Does combatting quackery and pseudoscience through rational argument and ridicule work?

As hard as it is to believe, I've been at this blogging thing for 12 years now. In fact, it's been so long that this year I didn't even remember to mention it when it happened nearly two weeks ago. Over that time period, I've dealt with a large number of conspiracy theories. Indeed, skeptics can't help but avoid it. After all, conspiracy theories are at the heart of a lot of pseudoscience, quackery, and crankery. For instance, the very first bit of pseudohistory that served as my "gateway drug" into skepticism, Holocaust denial, is based upon a massive conspiracy theory that the Jews made up…

Physics of Linerider IV: Friction?

Friction in Line Rider Is there friction in Line Rider? Does it function as physics would expect? To test this, I set up a simple track:  Basically, a slope with a flat part to start with and to end with. Let me show you something simple before further analysis:  This is the x-position vs. time for the line rider on the first horizontal portion of the track (before he or she goes down the incline). This shows the rider…

"Pithecophobes of the World, Unite!" (Full version)

Nearly ten years ago I started a book on Creationist misuse of intellectual history. I never finished it, which is probably for the best. The file is unfortunately MIA and all I have remaining was a section that I turned into a talk that I gave at ASU in 1999. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting the text of that talk. Enjoy and feel free to comment. "Pithecophobes of the World, Unite!"Revisionist ’History’ and Creationist Rhetoric. "This monkey mythology of Darwin is the cause of permissiveness, promiscuity, pills, prophylactics, perversions, pregnancies, abortions, pornography,…

Ropes: Twining Together Strings for Editors

It's been a while since I've written about any data structures. But it just so happens that I'm actually really working on implementing a really interesting and broadly useful data structure now, called a Rope. A bit of background, to lead in. I've got this love-hate relationship with some of the development tools that Rob Pike has built. (Rob is one of the Unix guys from Bell labs, and was one of the principal people involved in both the Plan9 and Inferno operating systems.) Rob has implemented some amazing development tools. The two that fascinate me were called Sam and Acme. The best and…

The Basic Balanced Search Tree: Red-Black trees.

During my Haskell tutorial, I used balanced binary search trees as an example. I've had people write to me asking me to write about that in a non-functional programming post, because the Haskell one got too tied up in how to do things without assignments, and with tail recursion. Binary search trees (BST) are another one of the really fundamental simple data structures. They're conceptually similar to heaps - they're also a kind of size-ordered binary tree with O(lg n) performance - but they've got a different set of basic invariants to represent the different performance goals. The goal…

Innate social aptitudes of man

Innate social aptitudes of man is a controversial paper. As noted in the biographical introduction to it William D. Hamilton states that his friend Robert Trivers referred to it as the "fascist paper" (see Natural Selection and Social Theory for Trivers' perspective on his relationship with Hamilton). Not because Trivers himself thought it was fascist, rather, that was simply the perception of most who read and criticized the paper. The most vociferous critic was the biological anthropologist Sherwood L. Washburn (see Defenders of the Truth for a detailed exposition of Washburn's many…

Must H5N1 moderate its virulence as it evolves?

[Warning: this post is fairly long and has a reasonable geek factor. It explores the question whether the virulence of H5N1 "must" moderate as the virus evolves.] The high case fatality ratio of H5N1 (currently around 60%) is a reflection of how virulent this virus appears to be at the moment. Virulence is the ability to cause severe disease. The common cold virus and H5N1 both cause disease (both "pathogenic") but H5N1 is highly virulent, the common cold virus is not. The only thing a virus does is make copies of itself. It doesn't grow, it doesn't eat, it doesn't eliminate waste or move. It…

Clock Tutorial #9: Circadian Organization In Japanese Quail

Going into more and more detail, here is a February 11, 2005 post about the current knowledge about the circadian organization in my favourite animal - the Japanese quail. Japanese quail (Coturnix coturnix japonica), also known as the Asian Migratory Quail, are gallinaceous birds from the family Phasianidae, until 1960s thought to be a subspecies of European migratory quail (Coturnix coturnix coturnix), but now considered to be a separate species, designated as Coturnix japonica. The breeding range of the wild population encompasses Siberia, Mongolia, northeastern China and Japan, while the…

I don't read descriptions of Harvard Square under various weather conditions, or, review of "Intuition" by Allegra Goodman

Looking at my two yesterday's posts, one on science fiction and the other on LabLit, together with Archy's excellent post on history of SF, something, like a hunch or an idea, started to develop at the back of my mind (continued under the fold). If you look at the way scientists are portrayed in older SF and in recent LabLit, there is a distinct difference. There is not much old LabLit, and new SF does not have many scientists in it (what with the whole flood of cyberpunk and fantasy), so I'll ignore those for now. In old SF, a scientist is likely to be portrayed as a loner, a refugee from…

How Much Work Is Small-Scale Farming?

Meg emails to ask me "How much work is small-scale farming, anyway?" I want to farm and I'm planning on trying it out over the summer as an intern, but what I'm worried about is not being able to keep up with everyone else. I'm healthy and reasonably energetic, but everyone makes it sound so hard! Should I even try?" Well first of all, I think Meg is doing exactly the right thing in trying it out. The best way to understand whether you are suited to small-scale agriculture is to get some experience, idealy on several different small farms that do the kinds of things you want to do.…

Mike Adams branches out into TB denial?

In a scathing attack on what he calls "gunpoint medicine", Mike Adams attacks the medical establishment for their supposed ability to imprison patients, force treatments on people against their will and generally be very very evil. Health officials in Lawrenceville, Georgia have arrested and jailed Francisco Santos, a teenager who tried to walk out of a hospital and go home after being diagnosed with TB (tuberculosis). Instead of allowing him to leave the hospital, health authorities arrested and jailed the teen, throwing him in into a 15 x 20 foot isolation chamber and not allowing him to…

Clock Tutorial #9: Circadian Organization In Japanese Quail

Going into more and more detail, here is a February 11, 2005 post about the current knowledge about the circadian organization in my favourite animal - the Japanese quail. Japanese quail (Coturnix coturnix japonica), also known as the Asian Migratory Quail, are gallinaceous birds from the family Phasianidae, until 1960s thought to be a subspecies of European migratory quail (Coturnix coturnix coturnix), but now considered to be a separate species, designated as Coturnix japonica. The breeding range of the wild population encompasses Siberia, Mongolia, northeastern China and Japan, while the…

Clock Tutorial #9: Circadian Organization In Japanese Quail

Going into more and more detail, here is a February 11, 2005 post about the current knowledge about the circadian organization in my favourite animal - the Japanese quail. Japanese quail (Coturnix coturnix japonica), also known as the Asian Migratory Quail, are gallinaceous birds from the family Phasianidae, until 1960s thought to be a subspecies of European migratory quail (Coturnix coturnix coturnix), but now considered to be a separate species, designated as Coturnix japonica. The breeding range of the wild population encompasses Siberia, Mongolia, northeastern China and Japan, while the…

Clock Tutorial #9: Circadian Organization In Japanese Quail

Going into more and more detail, here is a February 11, 2005 post about the current knowledge about the circadian organization in my favourite animal - the Japanese quail. Japanese quail (Coturnix coturnix japonica), also known as the Asian Migratory Quail, are gallinaceous birds from the family Phasianidae, until 1960s thought to be a subspecies of European migratory quail (Coturnix coturnix coturnix), but now considered to be a separate species, designated as Coturnix japonica. The breeding range of the wild population encompasses Siberia, Mongolia, northeastern China and Japan, while the…

Birds in the News 53 (v2n4)

Canada Goose, Branta canadensis, with reflection. Click image for larger view in another window. Photo: TFlockhart. Avian Mysteries Hundreds of the seabirds known as rhinoceros auklets, Cerorhinca monocerata (pictured, left), have died and are washing up on the southern Oregon coast, but scientists haven't settled on an explanation for their deaths. Beach observers say that hundreds of carcasses -- as many as 20 to 30 per mile -- were reported last week. Explanations include a storm that killed lots of birds as they were gathering for breeding season and warming ocean waters that are…

Are Pigs Really Like People?

We hear this all the time. Pig physiology is like people physiology. Pigs and humans have the same immune system, same digestive system, get the same diseases. Pigs are smart like people are smart. Pigs are smarter than dogs. And so on. Ask a faunal expert in archaeology or a human paleoanatomist: Pig teeth are notoriously like human teeth, when fragmented. Chances are most of these alleged similarities are overstated, or are simply because we are all mammals. Some are because we happen to have similar diets (see below). None of these similarities occur because of a shared common…

Is Donald Trump A Russian Asset? (Updated after news conference)

It has been suggested that President Elect Trump has been compromised by Vladimir Putin and/or the Russian Intelligence agency. This allegation suggests that Putin and/or the FSB have information, including video of unsavory sexual activities of some sort (loosely defined) and documentation of inappropriate business activities, that could be used to blackmail the future United States President. Since this is something I have been saying for weeks that we would eventually learn, I'm compelled to make a few comments. What did we sort of know and when did we sort of know it? In the weeks…

An octet of vignettes

Dang. Tagged. Can't you people leave me alone? All right, here are the rules. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog I suppose I could list what I had for dinner over the last 8 days, you guys don't know that, but then I'd have to…

How Does This Affect the Jews?

UPDATE: October 12, 5:00 pm. It has been pointed out to me that my statement that support for Israel has been a constant of post WWII American foreign policy is not correct. President Truman recognized Israel upon its formation, but relations between Israel and the US were distinctly chilly through most of the fifties and early sixties. This only changed in the late sixties, as a response to the warm relations between Syria, Egypt and the Soviet Union. The strong support of the US for Israel has far more to do with American interests in the region than it does with the influence of the…

The Making of "Squeezed States in a Bose-Einstein Condensate"

Yesterday's write-up of my Science paper ended with a vague promise to deal some inside information about the experiment. So, here are some anecdotes that you would need to have been at Yale in 1999-2000 to pick up. We'll stick with the Q&A format for this, because why not? Why don't we start with some background? How did you get involved in this project, anyway? I finished my Ph.D. work at NIST in early 1999, graduating at the end of May. I needed something to do after that, so I started looking for a post-doc by the don't-try-this-at-home method of emailing a half-dozen people I knew…

Interpretations of Probability

Here's Timothy Gowers, a Fields Medalist, from his book Mathematics: A Very Short Intorduction: However, there certainly are philosophers who take seriously the question of whether numbers exist, and this distinguishes them from mathematicians, who either find it obvious that numbers exist or do not understand what is being asked. Everyone knows there is friction between scientists and philosophers of science. Richard Feynman spoke for many scientists when he quipped that, “Philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” From the other side, it is not…

Only 109 Reasons?

It's election time here in the US and we need a new Congress -- here's why: 1. Congress set a record for the fewest number of days worked -- 218 between the House and Senate combined. [Link] 2. The Senate voted down a measure that urged the administration to start a phased redeployment of U.S. forces out of Iraq by the end of 2006. [Link] 3. Congress failed to raise the minimum wage, leaving it at its lowest inflation-adjusted level since 1955. [Link] 4. Congress gave itself a two percent pay raise. [Link] 5. There were 15,832 earmarks totaling $71 billion in 2006. (In 1994, there were 4,…

Building Gab: Part One

Earlier this month I wrote two posts about the evolution of the eye, a classic example of complexity in nature. (Parts one and two.) I'd like to write now about another case study in complexity that has fascinated me for some time now, and one that has sparked a fascinating debate that has been playing out for over fifteen years. The subject is language, and how it evolved. In 1990, Steven Pinker (now at Harvard) and Paul Bloom (now at Yale) published a paper called "Natural Selection and Natural Language." They laid out a powerful argument for language as being an adaptation produced by…

Universe Q&A: Frank White

A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece here on Universe exploring the ideas of the futurist Gerard K. O'Neill, who designed far-out but ultimately quite pragmatic environments for human habitation in space in the mid-1970s. In that article, I touched briefly on the notion of the "Overview Effect," a phrase coined by the writer Frank White to describe the profound insight -- characterized by a sudden awareness of life's interconnectedness and the frailty of our planet -- experienced by astronauts gazing down at the Earth from space. Frank White is the author of The Overview Effect: Space…