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House Approves Mandatory Public Access to NIH Research Results

In my post earlier today, I stressed the need for the NIH to mandate open access to research publications supported by its funding: As the largest supporter of biomedical research in the US, the NIH has a special obligation to make sure that its (taxpayer funded!) research is published in the public domain. Since May 2005, the NIH has had an optional open access program that revolves around PubMed Central. Specifically, the NIH "requests and strongly encourages all investigators to make their NIH-funded peer-reviewed, author's final manuscript available to other researchers and the public…

How the Internet may save science coverage in news media

The March 2008 issue of Nature has a great editorial piece on the current (and future) state of science in news media. The article draws heavily on new information released by The Pew Research Center in a report called The State of the News Media 2008. It discusses the glaringly evident problem of waning science coverage in news media. Here are the main points: 1.Apparently, science coverage has never been very high in news media. It hovered around 4-6% (of total news coverage) from the mid-1970s until 2001 and is currently down to about 2%. 2.The problem doesn't appear to be just with…

Physicists, brace yourselves for a revolution! Faster than light travel discovered!

Those slippery rascals at Answers in Genesis have been doing research, they say, and Jason Lisle claims to have discovered something radical. I have been working for some time on solving the "distant starlight problem." This is the issue of how starlight from the most distant galaxies is able to reach earth within the biblical timescale. Although light is incredibly fast, the most distant galaxies are incredibly far away. So, under normal circumstances we would be inclined to think that it should take billions of years for their starlight to reach us. Yet, the Bible teaches that the universe…

The Neuroscience of Insight

I've got an article in the latest New Yorker (not online) on the neuroscience of insight. I begin the article with the harrowing story of Wag Dodge and the Mann Gulch fire, before describing the research of Mark Jung Beeman, John Kounios and Earl Miller: There is something inherently mysterious about moments of insight. Wag Dodge, for instance, could never explain where his idea for the escape fire came from. ("It just seemed the logical thing to do" was all he could muster.) His improbable survival has become one of those legendary stories of insight, like Archimedes shouting "Eureka!" when…

Airlines lobby to reopen European airspace closed by Eyjafjallajökull

Some very quick notes on Eyjafjallajökull: Eyjafjallajökull erupting at night on April 17/18, 2010, with impressive incandescent explosions. European airlines are taking "test flights" to see the effect of the ash on their aircraft in hopes to convince EU officials to reopen airspace. Now, officials from KLM say that everything went fine in their test flight, but I haven't seen any details about flightplans, altitude and all the sorts of info you'd want to see if you want to believe these test flights are representative. However, the president of KLM does have a bit of a point in saying…

Population structure & Singapore

Singapore is a racially diverse society, so there's a natural pool of diversity from which one can draw for study of human variation. The Han majority of Singapore derive predominantly from Fujian in southeast China. The Indians are mostly from the southern regions dominated by Tamils or Telugus, but there are large minorities from all over the subcontinent. Finally, the Malay category is really an amalgam of peoples of Southeast Asian Muslim origin, from native Singaporean Malays, to Malaysian Malays, to immigrants from Indonesia. Singapore Genome Variation Project: A haplotype map of three…

ScienceOnline2010 - Program highlights 4

Continuing with the introductions to the sessions on the Program, here is what will happen on Saturday, January 16th at 2 - 3:05pm: A. Citizen Science and Students - Sandra Porter, Tara Richerson (science_goddess), and Antony Williams Description: Students are a great resource for projects that require large numbers of volunteers. We will discuss examples of projects that combine student learning with authentic research and the power of blogs to connect students with projects. Discuss here. B. Medicine 2.0 and Science 2.0--where do they intersect? - Walter Jessen Description: Medicine 2.0…

Public Intellectuals R Us - Discuss....

Daniel Drezner: Public Intellectual 2.0: ".....The pessimism about public intellectuals is reflected in attitudes about how the rise of the Internet in general, and blogs in particular, affects intellectual output. Alan Wolfe claims that "the way we argue now has been shaped by cable news and Weblogs; it's all 'gotcha' commentary and attributions of bad faith. No emotion can be too angry and no exaggeration too incredible." David Frum complains that "the blogosphere takes on the scale and reality of an alternative world whose controversies and feuds are ... absorbing." David Brooks laments, "…

Geologists get to suffer with the idiots, too

My most memorable encounter with the anti-animal research cadres was several years ago, when I was a graduate student, and the Animal Liberation Front snuck into our building one night and vandalized one of my colleague's labs; they destroyed data, stole some irreplaceable mutant lines, and walked away with most of the research animals, things like white mice and quail and other small furry lab-bred animals. In their noble humanitarianism, they later released them all just off of I-5, where all the baffled, frightened little beasties made the local red-tailed hawks very, very happy. It's the…

Blogging Is Not Mandatory

I mentioned on Twitter that I was thinking of proposing a Science Online program item about the professionalization of blogging, throwing in a link to post from a couple months ago. That included a link to this SlideShare: Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters and How Social Media Can Help from Chad Orzel And that was re-tweeted by Chris Chabris, kicking off a gigantic conversation about the whole idea of scientists communicating directly with the public (most of which took place after I went to bed last night, so I only saw it in my Twitter…

Mill on Kinds and Types

A while back I excerpted some Whewell on classification by types. Here is John Stuart Mill disagreeing with him, and, I think, starting off the modern literature on natural kinds. Kinds are Classes between which there is an impassable barrier; and what we have to seek is, marks whereby we may determine on which side of the barrier an object takes its place. The characters which will best do this should be chosen: if they are also important in themselves, so much the better. When we have selected the characters, we parcel out the objects according to those characters, and not, I conceive,…

Funny Looking Rock found on Mars!

When last we heard from Rhawn Joseph, he was playing with photoshop and trying to sell off his online journal, the Journal of Cosmology. The Journal of Cosmology has been plugging away, claiming to have found bacteria in meteorites and then diatoms in meteorites — give them a blurry, vague photo of some shapeless blob, and they'll claim it looks just like something biological on Earth. Either that, or they'll photoshop my head on to it. Rhawn Joseph's latest struggle: he's suing NASA for suppressing evidence of life on Mars. His evidence is this pair of photos taken by the Mars Opportunity…

Help jailed AIDS researchers in Iran.

You know what makes an already scary world a lot scarier? When a government decides it's a crime for disease researchers to do their job. From Declan Butler: Iran has summarily tried two of the nation's HIV researchers with communicating with an "enemy government," in a half-day trial that started and ended on 31 December in Tehran's Revolutionary Court. There will be no further court hearings, and a verdict is expected within days. The brothers, Arash and Kamiar Alaei, who have achieved international acclaim for their progressive HIV-prevention programme, have been held in Tehran's…

Birds in the News 107

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Swainson's Hawk, Buteo swainsoni, in flight. Image: Justawriter [wallpaper size]. People Hurting Birds An extremely rare lesser spotted eagle, shot earlier this year by dumbass human hunters on the island of Malta, has been saved from death but may never be able to return to the wild. The bird, nicknamed Sigmar after Germany's environmental minister, underwent three operations to repair damage it suffered after being shot, but it may not be enough for the bird to live in the wild again. The bird can feed itself and…

The Blues in Russian

The story of research on linguistic relativity can be summarized thusly: early cognitive scientists, inspired by the work of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, were all-too eager to find that thought is influenced, if not determined, by language (either by its grammatical categories, ala Whorf, or by the words we use). Their enthusiasm caused them to get greedy, and instead of starting simple, they went straight to perceptual properties that are sorted out very early in visual perception. If the perception of such properties could be shown to have top-down influences (like linguistic influences…

ScienceOnline'09 - introducing the participants 3

Let's highlight some more of the participants of this year's ScienceOnline09 conference: Kevin Emamy is coming to do a demo of his CiteULike reference management platform. Kay Endriss teaches statistics in Career Center High School in Winston-Salem (see the Wikipedia page). Martin Fenner is the Clinical Fellow in Oncology at Hannover Medical School in Germany. He blogs on Gobbledygook and will lead a session on Providing public health and medical information to all. Matt Ford is a writer for Nobel Intent and will co-moderate a session Science blogging without the blog? Suzanne Franks is my…

ScienceOnline2010 update

Just a few updates on the progress in the organization of ScienceOnline2010 to those of you who do not follow me (or scio10) on Twitter. The main event - the actual sessions of the conference - will be held, like last two years, in the beuatiful building of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society (and publisher of American Scientist). The main conference program will occur on Saturday, January 16th and half of Sunday, January 17th, 2010. Breakfast, lunch, tea and coffee will be catered there on both days. As we did every year, we will have an Early Bird Dinner on Thursday night. This is…

Birds of a Feather? The Problem with Niche Search Engines

This week's On the Media spotlights Rushmore Drive, the new search engine marketed to African Americans (audio above). As the program describes, the search engine uses a unique algorithm to find those sites that are most heavily trafficked by blacks and to return them at the top of the search results. From host Bob Garfield's interview with CEO Johnny Taylor: JOHNNY TAYLOR: The algorithm, it's one of the few places where the black community becomes the majority for purposes of producing results. In all of the mainstream search engines, the majority's behavior is what detects how the results…

Colonialism Meets International Athletics

This post isn't about science, but it is about something close to my heart. For a long time, I've been outraged over the eternally-unresolved status of U.S. territorial possessions like Puerto Rico and Guam, and over the disenfranchisement of Americans right here in Washington, D.C., who aren't allowed to have voting representation in Congress. Now, a cool website is using the Olympics to publicize D.C.'s status plight. The argument is that if DC isn't granted statehood, then like the other U.S. territories (read "colonies"), it ought to be allowed to have its own Olympic team. In essence,…

Do musical tastes help you get to know someone?

If my twentieth high school reunion last year was any indication, we seem to hang on to the music we listened to as adolescents longer than any other time period. Everyone was dancing to "Purple Rain" and "Rock Lobster" like the music written in 1984 was the best ever written. A 1996 study confirmed this notion, finding that young adults express stronger preference ratings for music than older adults. Take a look at a random sampling of accounts on MySpace, and you'll see that nearly every member has a song associated with his or her account. It's as if music somehow forms part of a person's…

Teaching evaluations

Yesterday in class my students filled out one of those stereo-typical bubble sheet evaluations that supposed to tell me (and the administration) something meaningful about my teaching abilities. I won't see those results until after grades are turned in, but that's OK with me because I didn't find the questions asked on the standard form particularly useful. Plus, I gave my own evaluation a few weeks ago and those results are already in. So how's my teaching going? 31% of students said that my general performance was excellent, 47% of students said it was good, 19% said it was acceptable,…

One More Thing Harvard Postdocs Can't Have

OK I live 30min away from the Longwood Medical Center by foot. Most days I walk to and from work but on rainy/blizzard days I take the M2 Shuttle, a free service provided by Harvard to ship people between the Medical Campus here at Longwood and the Main Campus in Cambridge. It's dependable and well used. Now to save a couple of bucks, they're going to charge postdocs 2$ a ride. That's more than the cost of a T fare (T=subway in Boston)! Why? Doesn't Harvard want to help us get to work and be efficient? No way. After all, it's OK to crap on postdocs. And to make matters worse it's not all…

Best Science Books 2011: Booklist Online

Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: Booklist Online Biography, Environment, Business. Galileo by John Heilbron American Eden: From Monticello to Central Park; What Our Gardens Tell Us about Who We Are by Wade Graham Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig,…

Strawberry Genes and Budding Math Geniuses

This week, two press releases from the Institute: The first was on the sequencing of the woodland strawberry genome (unfortunately, in the same week the cacao genome was sequenced). The Institute scientists who participated in the project contributed in the computational analysis of genes encoding flavor- and aroma-related proteins. This wild cousin of the cultivated strawberry is a member of the rose family, along with fruit trees including apples, peaches, cherries and almonds. In other words, this small annual plant is sure to become a useful experimental model for plant and agricultural…

Dixonian future animals of Brussels

I've just spent a few days at the Institut royal des Sciences naturelles de Belgique in Brussels, for theropod-related reasons. A great museum, with tons of excellent material on display. I just want to briefly report one interesting discovery here: I was surprised and delighted to find that the recently opened Gallery of Evolution includes a small selection of hypothetical future animals, apparently the inhabitants of the Dixonian epoch. Here's my favourite beast... It's the giant penguin Neopygoscelis dentatus, though I didn't know this when I was looking at it: I wondered whether it might…

Medieval Zombies: the Grateful Dead

Reading Anund & Qviberg's new guide book on Medieval Uppland, I came across a great religious legend: "The Grateful Dead". (The band got its name from a dictionary entry on this family of stories.) The earliest version of the legend is found in the German Cistercian prior Caesarius of Heisterbach's 13th century book of miracle stories, the Dialogus miraculorum. This book was hugely popular for centuries, and though Caesarius is largely forgotten today, we do remember his chilling line about how to tell a Cathar from a Catholic, attributed by Caesarius to one of the Albigensian Crusade's…

SchadenFriday: James Dobson

Maybe we should call this one SchadenThankFuckingChrist. It appears that Dobson's influence has been steadily falling off. The ministry apparently has been "flat" for some time. For example, in 1994 Dobson's monthly newsletter had a circulation of 2.4 million copies. Today, that circulation is about 1.1 million. Also, in the 1990s, Dobson was drawing audiences of 15,000 or more to his speeches; but in the lead-up to the 2006 mid-term election, only about 1,000 people heard his anti-abortion speech at the 2,500-seat Mt. Rushmore National Monument amphitheatre. Daly explains that the event was…

Lott calls me "extremely dishonest"

In an email to a poster at The High Road forum Lott writes "The actual data has been available on one of my websites at www.johnlott.org since February 2003. The Appendix of my book, The Bias Against Guns, goes through and discusses the data in depth. I talk about how the survey was done, the questions used in the survey, who did the survey, how it was weighted, etc. there. The www.johnlott.org website also has some downloads discussing the survey debate in general. On this last point, Lambert has been extremely dishonest. For example, he has a long list of surveys but he lists the date…

On the Checking of Boxes

One of the many ancillary tasks associated with my job that I wish I was better at is the advising of students. More specifically, the advising of students who aren't like I was at that age. What I mean by that is that when I was a student, I didn't need to be convinced of the utility of liberal arts education. I had specifically chosen to go to williams in part because of the small size (having grown up in a small town, I found it more congenial), but also because I was never only interested in science. I always enjoyed reading books and discussing history and politics, so I didn't need a…

The Basics of Starting Seeds

In keeping with the reminder I got that I should back up a little bit, and present my ideas more coherently for those who haven't encountered them before, I thought I would add a post about why someone might want to start seeds, and how to do it, to supplement the posts on winter sowing and the sowing of perennials from seeds. New gardeners generally start out by buying their seedling, and depending on where you are getting them, this can be a problem. The destructive wave of Late Blight that hit the tomato crop across the eastern half of the US was derived from seedlings purchased at big-…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with John Timmer

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked John Timmer from Ars Technica to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? Geographically, I…

Open Access Rants: Hanging together on the goddam wagon

Twitter is a great place to rant and rave sometimes. You can feel free to let loose and say what you're thinking without necessarily feeling that you need to have completely well-formed ideas. The enforced brevity can sometimes also be a plus, as it forces you to distill what you want to say to the bare minimum. It it possible to string together longer thoughts across multiple tweets but it becomes a bit awkward to read. I let loose a couple of Open Access related rants over the last few days and I thought I'd share them here, slightly cleaned up to make them more readable. Both are fairly…

ConvergeSouth 2006

Yesterday, I spent a wonderful day in Greensboro, most of it on the NC A&T campus attending ConvergeSouth. I am still trying to recover from the event, so this post is just a big Hello to everyone I met there and another post about buidling online communities inspired by the meeting will follow soon. First, a big Thank You to the organizers of the event, Sue Polinsky, Ed Cone, Ben Hwang and JW. Great to see you all again! Great job! Last year, I came in knowing only a few people. Two days later, I knew many more. This year, it was only one day long so it was hard to catch up with…

AIDS doctors held on secret charges in Iran: a call to help

Many of you were readers here when science bloggers and scienceblogs in particular played a pivotal role in the case of the Tripoli 6, medics under sentence of death in Libya over trumped up charges of infecting children with HIV. Another urgent matter now confronts the worldwide scientific community involving two Iranian doctors. Declan Butler, Nature senior correspondent, has described the situation in a post at one of the Nature blogs: Iran puts leading HIV scientists on trial Posted on behalf of Declan Butler Iran has summarily tried two of the nation's HIV researchers with communicating…

AIDS doctors held on secret charges in Iran: a call to help

by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure Many of you were readers here when science bloggers and scienceblogs in particular played a pivotal role in the case of the Tripoli 6, medics under sentence of death in Libya over trumped up charges of infecting children with HIV. Another urgent matter now confronts the worldwide scientific community involving two Iranian doctors. Declan Butler, Nature senior correspondent, has described the situation in a post at one of the Nature blogs: Iran puts leading HIV scientists on trial Posted on behalf of Declan Butler Iran has summarily tried two of the…

Social Media Are Social

I didn't see this before yesterday's post about Twitter, but over at SciLogs, Kirk Englehardt gets evangelical, offering a very chipper list of "Ten Reasons for Academic Researchers to Use Social Media." I'll just put the item headers here, though each of these has a more complete description, with links to lots of other stuff: 10. You’re in the Driver’s Seat 9. It’s About the Network 8. It’s Newsy and Trendy 7. Promotion (may) = Citations and Downloads 6. Spreading Your Love of Science 5. Setting the Record Straight 4. Sharing Interesting Things 3. Enhancing Your Research 2. It’s Easy 1. It…

From London to NY to Copenhagen: Optimism about Science Journalism

Over at the Columbia Journalism Review, Cristine Russell is back from the World Federation of Science Journalists conference and reports on a panel of leading editors who are generally optimistic about the future of science coverage at their respective news organizations. Editors at the Times of London and the BBC reported that their organizations were actually expanding their science beat. On the US front, the NY Times' science editor Laura Chang recognized the need to diversify their readership by "going broad," thinking specifically about what topics and dimensions of science are relevant…

Learning From Mistakes: An Important Revision to Conflict Monitoring Models of Anterior Cingulate

People are remarkably bad at switching tasks - and research focusing on this fact has isolated a network of brain regions that are involved in task-switching (I'll call it the "frontal task network" for short). One of the stranger findings to emerge from this literature is the fact that we're actually worse at switching to a more natural or well-practiced task after having performed a less natural one. One potential explanation for this "switch cost asymmetry" is that the task network may recognize the potential for errors when performing the unnatural task, and therefore "help it along"…

Proven: Michael Behe is a Moron

Michael Behe made a guest appearance in Beaver County the other day to engage in a debate on intelligent Design vs. Real Science. He got interviewed by a local reporter, who posed questions to both Behe and his antagonist. Here I provide a few excerpts for your amusement. First, you may be wondering where Beaver County is. The Beaver County Times Online, like most local newspaper, does not mention where it is. Do you know how much time we bloggers have to spend figuring out where these dumbass local stories come from? You have to use odd clues and make guesses. For instance, the…

The future of participant-driven genomic research

Over at the 23andMe blog The Spittoon, company co-founder Linda Avey expands on her vision for a novel model of genomic research, in which personal genomics customers contribute their genetic and health data to fuel research into the inherited and environmental triggers for disease. This is a model that 23andMe has been building towards for a long time. In May last year the company launched 23andWe, a cutely-named effort to obtain detailed health and trait data from their existing customers through online surveys which could then be combined with genetic data to find novel gene-trait…

In(s) and Out(s) of Academia

Bjoern Brembs is on a roll! Check all of these out: Incentivizing open scientific discussion: Apart from the question of whether the perfect scientist is the one who only spends his time writing papers and doing experiments, what incentives can one think of to provide for blogging, commenting, sharing? I think because all of science relies on creativity, information and debate, the overall value of blogging, commenting and sharing can hardly be overestimated, so what incentives can there be for the individual scientist? Journals - the dinosaurs of scientific communication: Today's system of…

The WHO vaccine plan: while you're up get me a Grant

The wound opened by Indonesia's balk on supplying H5N1 viral isolates to WHO for vaccine surveillance (see here and here) has now been fixed -- with a band-aid: Indonesia and other five countries are being awarded grants by the World Health Organization to establish in-country manufacturing capacity for influenza vaccine, according to Indonesian branch of WHO. As part of a concerted effort to ensure more equitable access to a potential pandemic influenza vaccine, up to 2.5 million U.S. dollars sponsored by the governments of Japan and the United States will go towards Brazil, India, Mexico,…

Annals of peanut butter: from Texas to Colorado

The plant in Blakely, Georgia that was the apparent source of the salmonella peanut butter outbreak didn't make peanut butter for retail consumption. It made bulk peanut butter and peanut butter paste which became an ingredient in many other products. The number of products is now around 2000, the largest product recall in US history. So if you bought peanut butter retail you're safe, right? Not so fast. The Peanut Corporation of America (RIP; filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy Friday) owned another plant in the Texas panhandle. Maybe you didn't know that. Neither did the Texas authorities,…

The Essence of Kleptocracy

At my advanced and cynical age, I have concluded some level of corruption in the political process is necessary. And I say that despite the very nice "thank you" note that Mr and Mrs Obama sent my wife last month for the challenge donation. They must have had to write a lot of thank you notes. Anyway, when I was young and idealistic I was outraged, outraged I tell you, at the corruption I was dimly aware of in the political process. Particularly within Iceland, where everyone really did know everyone else, and the corruption was particularly local and petty. But, while it was infuriating and…

Cato on Bush's Unconstitutional Tendencies

While we're on the subject of the Cato Institute, it's worth checking out their new report, written by Gene Healy and Tim Lynch, about Bush's abysmal track record on constitutional matters. It's funny, just a few months ago I had a hardcore liberal accuse me of being a "primitive reactionary" for defending the Cato Institute against his charge that the think tank was in the pocket of corporate paymasters. I pointed out that less than 10% of Cato's funding comes from corporate sources, but what good are facts against someone with an ideological axe to grind? Liberals generally like to think…

A response to a response to a proportionate response

In A proportionate response to Trump’s climate plans?" I reported RT's opinion that WTO rules only permit border taxes if there is an equivalent domestic tax. VV, no great fan of Tol, replied William, a scientific article published this May came by on Twitter. It states: "The implementation of such measures is likely to be technically possible under WTO rules (Veel, 2009 Veel, P.-E. (2009). Carbon tariffs and the WTO: An evaluation of feasible policies. Journal of International Economic Law, 12(3), 749–800. doi: 10.1093/jiel/jgp031; Zhang, 2009 Zhang, Z. (2009). Multilateral trade measures…

Is Linux Getting the Shaft?

As I recently reported, there is an order of magnitude difference between the market share of Linux "out there" in the world, and the market share of LInux on Scienceblogs.com and on this very blog. Subsequently, I was trolled by my very own brother "... so, when is Luniux going to reach 1% market share?...." and this item has come out on ZDNet (which we all know is essentially funded by Microsoft, right?): Linux - Still chasing that elusive 1% market share. Suddenly, it dawned on me that something is wrong with this picture. Maybe. Is it necessary to assume that the readers of Sb are…

Another New Term, Another Set of Teaching Experiments

Classes for the Winter term start today, and I'm totally prepared for this. Yep. Uh-huh. Losing a bunch of prep time to snow and ice last week hasn't thrown anything into disarray. Anyway, for a variety of reasons, I've ended up departing from my plan to not do any new preps while I'm stuck being Chair, and I'll be teaching intro E&M this term. This isn't a completely new class, but the last time I taught it I was very much in traditional lecture mode, and this will be my first pass using more of an active learning approach. Which will mean a lot of time re-working slides and that sort of…

The first annual StoryCorps National Day of Listening

The recent passing of Studs Terkel and my conversations with African American colleagues after the Obama victory has given me pause to think about our life stories, especially the life stories of our elders. For example, I lost all of my grandparents before I could get their life stories on videotape, digital recorder, or writing - I also said I was going to do it during some visit home. My grandparents had some incredible stories about The Great Depression, the World Wars, even the history of my hometown that was farmland in the middle of factories only a dozen miles from one of the…

Overlooked in the evolution war

Everyone's had a good time taking shots at Ann Coulter's inability to think straight. Some valiant types, like PZ Myers, have even sacrified several hours of their lives to reading and picking apart her pathetic prose. Everything she says is wrong, particularly her efforts to explain why evolution is a myth. All well and good. This kind of response is necessary. So are international efforts like that of the recent declaration by "67 national academies of science under the united banner of the Interacademy Panel on International Issues [who] blasted the scriptural teaching of biology as a…