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Can we at least demand “Secular Communion”?

Here's another provocative article from the New Humanist titled "Holy Communion", a critique of two of the "New Atheists". It has an incredibly offensive illustration to go with it, but the article isn't quite that bad. It's not that good, either. First, I have to confess: I'm not a humanist. I'm just not that keen on defining myself by my species, and I'm not going to join a group that willfully excludes squid. Still, I sympathize with the aims of secular humanism and I'm willing to work alongside them, just as I'm willing to work with reasonable Christians and Muslims — I'm just not ever…

Why do muscles hurt after exercise?

As long as I'm stranded in a snowstorm (thankfully fading right now) and unable to teach my human physiology class this morning, I thought I'd at least put a small part of the story I was going to tell on the web. We're currently talking about muscle physiology, and I've already gone over the sliding filament theory of muscle contraction…oh, you know that one, right? Muscles contract using interlaced filaments of myosin (in red, above) and actin (blue), and myosin acts as a kind of motor gear, burning ATP to ratchet the actin filaments along their length, shortening the muscle. The ratchet…

The memory molecules - interview with Todd Sacktor (and a feature in Eureka)

The latest issue of Eureka, the Times's monthly science supplement, is out today. I've been incredibly supportive of the venture and it's great to see that a major national newspaper is increasing its science coverage, rather than cutting back on it. For this issue (the fourth, I think), I've written a piece on fear and memory, including a lot of research that I've previously covered in this blog. While writing the piece, I interviewed a scientist called Todd Sacktor who's doing some fascinating work in this field. Sacktor discovered that a protein called PKMzeta is vital for storing memory…

Horse Race Coverage & the Political Spectacle

At Time magazine, a focus on who will break out of the pack?! As the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary approaches, it's all horse race all the time in the news media with an almost exclusive focus on "insider" coverage of campaign strategy and a fascination with who's ahead and who's behind in the polls. Lost in the media spectacle is any careful coverage of issues and policy proposals, or serious discussion of candidate background. In fact, it seems there's never been a time in 2007 where issues have taken primacy over the sports game of political coverage. Consider that an analysis by…

Where do numbers come from?

When I was addressing this lunacy about how God exists because minds and mathematics are supernatural, I was also thinking about a related set of questions: biologically, how are numbers represented in the brain? How did this ability evolve? I knew there was some interesting work by Ramachandran on the representation of digits and numerical processing, coupled to his work on synesthesia (which is also about how we map abstract ideas on a biological substrate), but I was wondering how I can have a concept of something as abstract as a number -- as I sit in my office, I can count the vertical…

Book Review: Owen's Ape & Darwin's Bulldog

In 1857 Richard Owen proposed that our species, Homo sapiens, belonged to a distinct subclass separate from all other primates. He called this new group the Archencephala and based it as much upon human powers of reason as minute neuroanatomical differences between apes and humans. What's more, our "extraordinarily developed brain[s]" not only placed us above all other creatures but gave us new moral responsibilities, and in closing Owen stated; Thus [Man] fulfils his destiny as the master of this earth, and of the lower Creation. Such are the dominating powers with which we, and we alone,…

Nabokov was right - so was Stephen Jay Gould wrong?

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss, poems that take a thousand years to die but ape the immortality of this red label on a little butterfly. - excerpt from Vladimir Nabokov's "On Discovering a Butterfly" It's not very well known that novelist Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, was also a lepidopterist; for six years, he was a Research Fellow at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology (now part of the HMNH). Carl Zimmer recounts in the NYT how Harvard professor Naomi Pierce recently set out to test Nabokov's hypotheses about blue butterfly speciation, and discovered…

Basic concepts: scientific anti-norms (part 2).

Coming on the heels of my basic concepts post about the norms of science identified by sociologist Robert K. Merton [1], and a follow-up post on values from the larger society that compete with these norms, this post will examine norms that run counter to the ones Merton identified that seem to arise from within the scientific community. Specifically, I will discuss the findings of Melissa S. Anderson [2] from her research examining how committed university faculty and Ph.D. students are to Merton's norms and to the anti-norms -- and how this commitment compares to reported behavior. You'll…

Alternative medicine as religion

Over the years, I've often likened non-science-based medical belief systems to religion. It's not a hard argument to make. Religion involves believing in things that can't be proven scientifically; indeed, religion makes a virtue out of ignoring the evidence and accepting various beliefs on faith alone. Similarly, alternative medicine frequently tells you that you have to believe in the therapy, dedicate yourself completely to it, in order for it to work. Of course, as I've also mentioned before, it is that insistence on belief and total commitment shared by religion and alternative medicine…

Simplistic criticisms of cancer therapy by Dr. Margaret Cuomo

I wondered how long it would take for someone critical of current cancer care to capitalize on the recently reported health misfortune of a celebrity. The answer, unfortunately, is "not long at all." I will admit, however, that the source of that use and abuse of the misfortune of a celebrity was not the usual suspect; i.e., Mike Adams, whom I've taken to task on many occasions for gloating over celebrity deaths and illnesses, such as those of Tony Snow, Patrick Swayze, and Elizabeth Edwards, as "evidence" that conventional medicine either doesn't work or kills. The celebrity to whom I am…

I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy

I've pointed out before that pover the last couple of years I've become a bit of a fan of old time radio, having discovered Radio Classics on Sirius XM Radio. I don’t remember how I discovered it, but I rapidly became hooked on shows like Suspense, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, The Whistler, Gunsmoke, Dragnet, The Six Shooter, and The Adventures of Sam Spade (the Howard Duff episodes, of course). Then, of course, there's The Story of Dr. Kildare. This particular radio show stared Lew Ayres as Dr. Kildare and Lionel Barrymore as the irascible Dr. Leonard Gillespie (the latter of whom was…

Vaccines and autism: Same as it ever was

If there's one thing I've learned during the last seven years about the antivaccine crowd invested in the idea that vaccines cause autism, it's that it reacts with extreme hostility to any sort of studies that cast doubt upon their pet idea that vaccines cause autism. That's somewhat understandable, given how much of their identity so many members of the antivaccine movement have invested in their idea, but not all studies that fail to support the central dogma of the antivaccine movement (i.e., that vaccines cause autism and are in general evil) are created equal, at least not with respect…

The AMA acts to try to rein in doctors spreading misinformation

Even if you're a relative newbie to this blog, you probably wouldn't be particularly surprised to learn that I don't much like Dr. Mehmet Oz, a.k.a. "America's Doctor." Of course, I refer to him as something slightly different, namely "America's Quack," for a whole host of reasons, including his featuring psychic mediums like John Edward and Theresa Caputo, faith healers, Ayurveda, homeopaths, dubious dietary supplements, and even antivaccine loons like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Indeed, when about a year ago Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) hauled him in front of her Senate committee over his…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Feedback loops, reproductive cells, cancer, and design

It is with some trepidation that I approach the latest target of Your Friday Dose of Woo. No, it's not because the woo is so potent that it has actually struck the fear of You-Know-Who in me (I leave it up to readers to determine whether I was referring to God or Valdemort), although it is indeed potent woo. Nor is it that the woo is boring woo (there's a reason why "power of prayer" kind of woo usually doesn't make it into YFDoW unless there's a really entertaining angle to be targeted). No, it's because this particular woo seems to combine genetics with systems biology (I kid you not),…

False Pearls before Real Swine

"In today's lecture, I will be casting false pearls before real swine" ... I won't tell you who said that, but when he did say it, he was in front of a classroom of several hundred Harvard freshmen, and he was referring to the idea of telling little white lies to the unwashed masses in order to achieve the dissemination of greater truth. No one in the room but the wizened teaching assistants, clustered off to the side furtively consuming their lunch in the "no food allowed" lecture hall, got the Biblical reference. There were spit takes. But the problem with false pearls is that they don't…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic (Beam) Blues Again Mama!

Although there's been plenty of woo this week (Harriet Denz-Penhey, anyone?), it hasn't been the truly entertaining woo that I so love, you know, the kind of woo of Your Friday Dose of Woo, my long-standing (albeit now intermittent) excursion into the depths of alt-med silliness so over-the-top that it requires--nay, demands!--some serious not-so-Respectful Insolence, but in a more light-hearted way. After all, it's Friday, and what better way to get ready for the weekend than with a little visit to Dr. Orac's Emporium of Quackery and Pseudoscience known as Your Friday Dose of Woo, as long…

The ghoul returns again to feast on the flesh of celebrities

I waited. I knew it was coming. It had to. History was on my side. My quarry was nutty, but in a way exceedingly predictable. it wasn't so much that I knew exactly what he would do. He wasn't predictable in that way. It was that I knew he would do something crazy. Actually, on second thought, I did know what he was going to do. I had only to consider how ghoulishly he treated Tony Snow and Bernie Mac, and Tim Russert and how he leapt at the opportunity to abuse Christina Applegate. To him, when a dying celebrity like Patrick Swayze rejected quackery, it was more than he could stand. Whenever…

Deepak Chopra misunderstands skepticism

Things are crazy now for me, both at home and at work. I mean really, really crazy. So crazy that even I, one of the most verbose bloggers out there, am forced to take two or three days off from my little addiction--I mean habit. Consequently, having foreseen that this time would come around these dates, I, Orac, your benevolent (and, above all verbose) blogger have thought of you, my readers. I realize the cries and lamentations that the lack of fresh material inevitably causes. That, I cannot completely obviate. However, I can ease the pain somewhat, and I can do this by continuing my…

"Academic freedom" for pseudoscience?

Readers may have noticed (or maybe they haven't) that I haven't commented at all on the Guillermo Gonzalez case. As you may recall, Gonzalez is an astronomer at Iowa State University, as well as advocate of "intelligent design" creationism. In May 2007, ISU denied tenure to Gonzalez. Not surprisingly, the ID movement in general and its propagnda arm (Discovery Institute) in particular have done their best to try to portray Gonzalez as a martyr who was "persecuted" for his beliefs and denied his "academic freedom." Despite the attempts of the DI to milk it for all its PR value, as usual, the…

The depths of antivaccination lunacy

I've posted many times about the pseudoscience of the mercury militia, that group of parents, bolstered by those Don Quixotes tilting at the mercury windmills in the cause of extracting more money from the government to compensate "vaccine-injured" children with autism, Mark and David Geier. These and other luminaries of the mecury militia blame vaccines for lots of bad things, be it autism, immune problems, "autistic enterocolitis," and generalized "mercury toxicity," all the while asserting piously (and, most amazingly of all, with a straight face) that, oh no, they aren't in any way "…

Anti-mercury warriors descending further into the depths

Damn you, Kathleen. Every time I think that I can give the whole mercury/autism thing a rest for a while and move on to less infuriating pastures, you keep finding things that keep dragging me back to the pit of pseudoscience inhabited by Dr. Mark Geier and his son David. The first time around, Kathleen found the Geiers misrepresenting David Geier's credentials on published journal articles to make it appear that David Geier had done the work reported in the articles at George Washington University when in fact he had not. I found David Geier's appropriation of the name of George Washington…

Owen's Ape & Darwin's Bulldog, by Christopher Cosans

Originally posted by Brian Switek On March 10, 2009, at 11:14 AM In 1857 Richard Owen proposed that our species, Homo sapiens, belonged to a distinct subclass separate from all other primates. He called this new group the Archencephala and based it as much upon human powers of reason as minute neuroanatomical differences between apes and humans. What's more, our "extraordinarily developed brain[s]" not only placed us above all other creatures but gave us new moral responsibilities, and in closing Owen stated; Thus [Man] fulfils his destiny as the master of this earth, and of the lower…

The gene for Jamaican sprinting success? No, not really.

Anyone who has walked past a TV set over the last few days will have seen footage of the remarkable Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, who comfortably cruised to victory (and a world record) in the Olympic 100 metre sprint, and as I write this has just done precisely the same thing in the 200 metre sprint. The interest in Bolt stems not from the fact that he wins his races, but rather from the contemptuous ease with which he does so. And Bolt is not the only Jamaican to impress in short distance events in Beijing: the country's women's sprint team took all three medals in their 100 metre dash.…

What Are The Origins of (Large) Number Representation?

This post considering the evolutionary origins of numerical cognition, specifically in terms of the approximation of large numbers, is meant as a companion to this week's series on the developmental origins of numerical cognition and developmental dyscalculia, at Child's Play. What are the origins of number representation in the mind? Are there any innate building blocks that contribute to our understanding of mathematics and number, or must everything be learned? Number is an important domain of human knowledge. Many decisions in life are based on quantitative evidence, sometimes with life…

Vaccine exemptions in California threaten herd immunity

I don't know if it's confirmation bias, faulty memory, or if my individual impression is correct, but it seems to me that over the years I've been blogging that stories like this one seem to be becoming depressingly more common: Getting inoculated for diseases such as whooping cough and measles used to be a childhood rite of passage that few questioned. Now with shifting parental attitudes about vaccine safety, a growing number of California children are entering kindergarten without shots. The trend worries public health officials because of the link between immunization rates and infectious…

The Wellness Warrior, Jess Ainscough, has passed away

Two months ago, I took note of a somewhat cryptic blog post by a young woman named Jess Ainscough. In Australia and much of the world, Ainscough was known as the Wellness Warrior. She was a young woman who developed an epithelioid sarcoma in 2008 and ended up choosing "natural healing" to treat her cancer. Among the "natural healing" modalities touted by the Wellness Warrior included that quackery of quackeries, the Gerson protocol, complete with coffee enemas and everything. She even did videos explaining how to administer coffee enemas and posted them on YouTube, although that video is now…

As states try to crack down on non-medical exemptions to school vaccine mandates, antivaccinationists lose it (yellow Star of David edition)

With the Disneyland measles outbreak still going strong and striking far more unvaccinated than vaccinated, it's not surprising that a discussion has begun in some states about lax policies that permit religious and/or philosophical exemptions. In Oregon, for example, the legislature is considering SB442, a bill apparently originally intended to provide a technical fix to the process for obtaining philosophical exemptions to vaccine mandates by giving parents deadlines to submit the required documentation for non-medical exemptions, but the antivaccine troops became totally riled up when the…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: A Biblical cure for autism?

I like my Folder of Woo. Besides providing me endless fodder for this little weekly feature, my Folder of Woo also provides me nearly endless amusement. Sometimes, I'll just peruse it, looking at woo old and new, woo that's been featured in this little weekly exercise in diving into the belly of the beast, woo that has yet to be featured, and woo that will probably never be featured. Unless people suddenly discovery rationality and science, my Folder of Woo is likely to continue to exist. I suppose that could happen, but it's pretty unlikely, which means my Folder of Woo is likely to continue…

The "I told you so" fantasy, or: The fallacy of future vindication

Last week, I noted a particularly loathsome trend (even for antivaccinationists) to invoke Holocaust analogies for what they view as the "vaccine-induced autism epidemic holocaust." Now, loathsome analogies are not uncommon among antivaccinationists, who routinely refer to their children as "damaged" or "toxic" and view them as somehow not their "real" children, but this time around, former reporter turned hack editor for the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism fantasized about dragging his former colleagues through the "evidence" for a vaccine Holocaust the same way that Allied troops…

Fundraising for antivaccine research

If there's one thing that antivaccine cranks tell us that has a grain of truth in it, it's to be wary of pharmaceutical companies and their influence. Their mission is, of course, to make profits, and sometimes the search for profits can lead them to do things that are less than savory. Of course, antivaccine cranks take reasonable skepticism and wariness of pharmaceutical company influence and amp it up to ridiculous heights, in much the same way that they take concerns about potential side effects of vaccines and amp them up to even more ridiculous heights. It's what they do. In any case, I…

Quoth an antivaxer: DNA vaccines are contaminating our DNA in the name of transhumanism!

I've been at this blogging thing for well over 12 years now. I know, I know. Sometimes it amazes even me that I been doing this so long. I also know that I've been mentioning just how long I've been blogging more frequently. Sometimes I worry that the blog will turn into nothing more than posts counting down the days since I started this whole crazy thing. Of course, the main reason I mention this is not so much out of a desire for repetition but as a way of expressing amazement when I find something new and/for bizarre that I don't recall having heard before. So it was when I came across an…

The RAND Corporation: Supporting the "integration" of quackery with real medicine since 2008

As regular readers of this blog and related blogs know, over the last two or three decades there has been a successful effort to legitimize quackery in the form of what is now called “integrative medicine.” Three decades ago, modalities like homeopathy, acupuncture, much of traditional Chinese medicine, reflexology, chiropractic, and many other modalities based on vitalism, prescientific mysticism, and pseudoscience were rightly referred to as quackery. Then in the 1990s came “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), a term that sought to sand the rough edges of quackery off of the,…

Once again, acupuncture doesn't work for menopausal hot flashes

Of all the forms of quackery that have been “integrated” into medicine of late, arguably one of the most popular is acupuncture. It’s offered in fertility clinics. It’s offered in hospitals and medical clinics all over the place. The vast majority of academic medical centers that have embraced quackademic medicine offer acupuncture. (Quackademic medicine, for those not familiar with the term we reserve for the study of alternative medicine in academic medical centers that really should recognize it as quackery.) Hell, quite a few that haven’t embraced quackademic medicine offer acupuncture.…

How I Spent My Memorial Day Weekend

Because sometimes I need to take a breather, here's this post about fun stuff. (with apologies to Carl Sandburg...) Delfest jams on little mud feet. It dances looking over mountain and meadow on singing multitudes and then moves on. I can't believe I have to wait a whole nother year for Delfest 2011. What is Delfest, you ask? The third annual eponymous bluegrass festival founded by bluegrass legend Del McCoury was held this year, as in the previous two years, at the Allegany County Fairgrounds in Cumberland, MD. But it's more than "just" bluegrass, and more than just a music festival…

On the need for grownups [Updated]

Attention conservation notice: This post should have been broken into about three parts, but it's written now and I don't care. Read it at your risk. Consists of points I've made before to little avail, thinly veiled disdain for people I respect, and cartoons. As I've said before, reading anti-accommodationists is bad for the health and bad for the brain. It was a habit I kicked, and getting back to it, even slightly, has not been a cheering experience. It reminds me of the reason I don't write about Israel/Palestine. One side commits some atrocity, and this leads the other side to commit…

Todd Wood talks (some) sense

Todd Wood is a creationist. He is a professor at Bryan College, named for William Jennings Bryan, who prosecuted John Scopes in 1925. He is, in particular, a professor of baraminology, the creationist notion that his particular Christian God created the "kinds" in the first week, and that by careful measurement, he can identify those "kinds." He thinks the earth is less than 10,000 years old. He thinks evolution is wrong, but he also freely acknowledges that it is the very best scientific knowledge available, and has been on a minor crusade to move other creationists away from the…

Yet Another Idiotic "Proof of God"

A bunch of readers, and one commenter in another thread, have all hit me with a pathetic monstrosity of a purported proof of God. Several have even been misled by the URL where the dreadful thing is posted, thinking that ScienceBlogs have picked up a creationist. Rest assured, this bozo and his blog have nothing to do with our beloved ScienceBlogs (note the "S"); it's just some jerk who wants to try to capitalize on our reputation. If you want to find the original page, you can go to "scienceblog.com" yourself and find it. I'm not going to link to this slime - his blog name is an attempt to…

Hatred Can't Be Contained

In one of the more controversial posts I've written (or at least one that got me a lot of hate email), I described how "hatred is the Republican base": The Washington Post recently reported about the failure of the anti-segregation amendment to pass in Alabama (it was essentially 50-50). According to the CNN exit poll, 73% of Alabama voters were white. Assuming that the vote to keep the segregationist amendment was negligible among non-whites, this means that 68.5% of whites voted against the anti-segregationist amendment (or for segregation). One of the lame excuses given was that some…

Self-Projection and Foreign Policy "Scholars"

Glenn Greenwald had a great post Wednesday about establishment foreign policy scholars, and how they delimit the 'acceptable' foreign policy debate: The Foreign Policy Community is more secretive than the Fight Club. They believe that all foreign policy should be formulated only by our secret "scholar"-geniuses in the think tanks and institutes comprising the Foreign Policy Community and that the American people should not and need not know anything about any of it short of the most meaningless platitudes. They are the Guardians of Seriousness. "Serious" really means the extent to which one…

I Told You This Would Happen: Part Deux

I hate being right, but I knew the Mighty Conservative Wurlitzer was going to slime Amanda and Shakes. Before I get to a detailed discussion of the NY Times article about the whole blogger kerfuffle, I have a very simple question. What if Amanda and Shakes, rather than being campaign bloggers, had taken important administrative, behind-the-scenes jobs with the Edwards campaign? Seriously, both parties have had all sorts of people as campaign workers. So why are bloggers a big deal? If they were doing a bad job, then they should be fired because of their shoddy work. But many campaign…

“Religion is…a lot like a girl”

Sometimes, reading the shrill words of theists trying to interpret atheists is a real trip to Bizarro World. What you see, generally, is freakishly far off the mark and often more a case of projection than understanding. It would be hard to get more overt than this: someone named Kathryn Lofton has written an essay titled "So you want to be a new atheist", which, presumably, is about describing some common set of properties, a dogma and doctrine, that anyone can follow to be one of the New Atheists. Unfortunately, she falls off the rails from the very beginning, since we're all a diverse…

About Beneficial Mutations

From the archives comes this bit about the ludicrous (and willful) misunderstanding that creationists have regarding 'beneficial' mutations: Whether they are young earthers or intelligent design advocates, one tactic creationists use is to claim evolutionary biologists-always described as "evolutionists"-think something which we do not. Over at Thoughts from Kansas, Josh had a very nice post describing the mechanisms by which mutations happen (among other things). Without fail, in charged a creationist: The evolutionists make the claim that there are enough mutations that turn out to be…

The Structure of Evolutionary Theory blogging, chapter 5

Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. And now there have been 5. Through 5 chapters of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Stupidly I only realized that Stephen Jay Gould wrote two books which he had insisted be bound together. The table of contents which I was familiar with turned out to be the "Expanded Contents." The Contents proper give a better lay of the land: Chapter 1:       Defining and Revising the Structure of Evolutionary Theory 1 Part I, Chapters 2-7       The history of Darwinian Logic and Debate 91 Segue to Part II 585 Part II, Chapters 8-12       Towards a Revised and…

Devil Take the Hindmost As Public Policy: What Deficit Reduction Really Looks Like

File this under 'heartless in the heartland.' One of the things that is so awful about the current deficit reduction fetish (well, other than at submaximal employment, increasing deficits are not a problem, so we're keeping millions of people needlessly unemployed) is that budget cuts always fall on the most vulnerable, such as people with cerebral palsy who need a great deal of help to retain some level of dignity. The unlovely ones who make us feel uncomfortable lack champions, and suffer for it. Which brings me to this horrific story, by way of Susie Madrak, from Pennsylvania: A month…

Why Tenured Professors Should Never Be Allowed to Opine About Free Trade or Free Markets

I've long held that tenured professors who espouse 'free trade' or 'free markets' should have their tenure revoked--let's see how their tune changes (and I do include Krugman in this*). Ditto pundits with cushy sinecures. Let's put them in a world where they could show up at 9am and be told to pack their things and leave the building by 11am and see whether they extol its virtues (FREEDOM!!!)**. Anyway, by way of Digby, we stumble across this brilliant essay about Robert Nozick, the Harvard philosopher who made libertarianism respectable. While the whole thing is worth a read, this section…

"Will You Stop Using 454?" Um, I Already Kinda Did

A couple of weeks ago, I came across this discussion thread "Will you stop using 454?" It's a pretty good thread--not much to disagree with there, although, from my perspective, it missed a key point (I'll get to that). But my answer is simple: I already have. My work focuses primarily on microbial genomics--that is, whole bacterial genomes. And 454 just isn't getting it done. Before I get to that, let's review very briefly how we assemble a genome (I'm simplifying greatly and leaving out a whole bunch of molecular biology and chemistry here--this is for the uninitiated). We don't…

William D. Hamilton: the nutty professor

I would like to give a heads up that the last volume of W.D. Hamilton's papers are out, Narrow Roads of Gene Land, The Collected Papers of W. D. Hamilton Volume 3: Last Words. Of course, you should check our volume 1, on social theory, and volume 2, the evolution of sex. If you don't know who Hamilton is, you should. Matt Ridley and Richard Dawkins as we know them are in large part due to Hamilton's body of work, from his gene-centered social models to exploration of the "Red Queen" theory of the origins of sex. Hamilton's hero early in life was the great evolutionary biologist R.A.…

Lives not worth living?

Via William Saletan, Prenatal Test Puts Down Syndrome in Hard Focus. Being an numbers man, I found this interesting: Until this year, only pregnant women 35 and older were routinely tested to see if their fetuses had the extra chromosome that causes Down syndrome. As a result many couples were given the diagnosis only at birth. But under a new recommendation from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, doctors have begun to offer a new, safer screening procedure to all pregnant women, regardless of age. About 90 percent of pregnant women who are given a Down syndrome…

The evolving male

Simpler mode of inheritance of transcriptional variation in male Drosophila melanogaster: Sexual selection drives faster evolution in males. The X chromosome is potentially an important target for sexual selection, because hemizygosity in males permits accumulation of alleles, causing tradeoffs in fitness between sexes. Hemizygosity of the X could cause fundamentally different modes of inheritance between the sexes, with more additive variation in males and more nonadditive variation in females. Indeed, we find that genetic variation for the transcriptome is primarily additive in males but…

Group selection is fascist and progressive

So, check out this retarded post at the Huntington Post, Goodbye Selfish-Gene: A New Upheaval in the Science of Human Behavior: Plain talk: The Darwinian prop of the lone cowboy rugged conservative bundle of selfish genes has now been pulled out from under the cowboy and the lone cowboy has suddenly collapsed into a mumbling baffled cartoon. Humans are pack animals. We live and die in herds. The group provides the individual with the means of physical and psychological survival. We need the group as much as the group needs us. It's a fair trade that's been evolving for millions of years. The…