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What to do with Bible thumping students (a repost)

.... Have you ever had this happen: You are minding your own business, teaching your life science course, it's early in the term. A student, on the way out after class (never at the beginning of class, rarely during class) mentions something about "carbon dating." This usually happens around the time of year you are doing an overview of the main points of the course, but before you've gotten to the "evolution module"... Jeanne d'Arc was a very influential 10th grader. I understand she gave her Life Science teachers a very hard time. This is the only contemporary depiction of Joan of…

James Watson: Please bend over while I kick your freakin ass

Just for fun. A repost of something that floated to the top several months ago. October 17th 2007 to be exact. There is a reason I'm reposting this. For now, I'll let you guess. It is now time to kick James Watson's ass. The man is a terrible embarrassment to us all. ("Us" being scientists and rational types.) It is said by the press that Watson "makes his colleagues cringe when he goes off script" or "is known for making controversial remarks" and so on. Fine. But these are not apt descriptors for James Watson's most recent remarks or, for that matter, many of his earlier remarks…

"Doctors" of Naturopathy in Minnesota? Or: Barbarians at the gate

I know I'm a bit late to this game, but those of you who read ERV, Denialism Blog, and Pharyngula didn't think that their prior mention of this story about how the State of Minnesota is going to allow naturopaths to claim the title of "doctor" would stop me from jumping right in even if I am a day late (which in the blogosphere might as well be a year), did you? If you did, you don't know me very well, even after three years of blogging. This sort of thing is the raison d'être of this blog, and just because blogging about an antivaccine rally last week and about Abraham Cherrix yesterday…

Economics and voter irrationality: my review of The Myth of the Rational Voter

I recently reviewed Bryan Caplan's book, The Myth of the Rational Voter, for the journal Political Psychology. I wish I thought this book was all wrong, because then I could've titled my review, "The Myth of the Myth of the Rational Voter." But, no, I saw a lot of truth in Caplan's arguments. Here's what i wrote: Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter was originally titled "The logic of collective belief: the political economy of voter irrationality," and its basic argument goes as follows: (1) It is rational for people to vote and to make their preferences based on their views of…

The Canadian Breast Screening Study attacked: Why do doctors have such a hard time with the concept of overdiagnosis?

The last couple of weeks, I've made allusions to the "Bat Signal" (or, as I called it, the "Cancer Signal," although that's a horrible name and I need to think of a better one). Basically, when Bat Cancer Signal goes up (hey, I like that one better, but do bats get cancer?), it means that a study or story has hit the press that demands my attention. It happened again just last week, when stories started hitting the press hot and heavy about a new study of mammography, stories with titles like Vast Study Casts Doubts on Value of Mammograms and Do Mammograms Save Lives? ‘Hardly,’ a New Study…

Choosing Wisely about homeopathy, supplements, and "detoxification" quackery

One of the major differences between science-based medicine (SBM) and alternative medicine—or, as they call it these days, "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine"—is that SBM is always questioning itself, always reevaluating its practices. Related to this difference is that SBM does change its practice, discarding treatments that don't work and incorporating those that do work (or at least work better than older practices). As I've said many times before, the process by which this happens is messy and slower than we might like, and that provides ammunition to…

Andrew Wakefield wants a "live public televised debate." Oh, goody.

I want to thank Dan Olmsted, the editor of Age of Autism. I think. Why do I say this? After all, Olmsted is the managing editor of perhaps the most wretched hive of antivaccine scum and quackery that I am aware of. However, he's actually done me a favor. You see, the other day, the instigator of the U.K. anti-MMR wing of the antivaccine movement, Andrew Wakefield, posted a video to YouTube because he's really feeling some serious butthurt right now: Basically, it's Andrew Wakefield complaining about being blamed for an ongoing measles outbreak in South Wales. Of course, given that, if there…

The "no debate" debate

I like the word "manufactroversy." It's a lovely made up word that combines the two words "manufactured controversy" and is, to boil it down, defined as the art of creating a controversy where none really exists. In the case of science, it's the concerted effort to make it seem as though there is a legitimate scientific controversy when in reality there is not. Indeed, one might say that the very purpose (or at least the main purpose) of this blog is to discuss manufactroversies. These include issues such as quackery, where promoters of pseudoscientific, unscientific, and prescientific…

Old wine poured into a newer skin: The Society for Integrative Oncology updates its clinical guidelines for breast cancer

"Integrative medicine" is a term for a form of medicine in which pseudoscience and quackery are "integrated" with real medicine. Unfortunately, as Mark Crislip puts it, when you mix cow pie with apple pie, it doesn't make the cow pie better; it makes the apple pie worse. Unfortunately these days, there's a lot of cow pie being mixed with apple pie. Worse, it's gotten to the point where integrative medicine is subspecializing. For instance, there is now a specialty known as "integrative oncology," which particularly burns me. Indeed, supportive care oncology has been very susceptible to the…

An as yet unidentified "holistic" practitioner negligently kills a young woman with IV turmeric (yes, intravenous)

It was only just yesterday that I recounted the story of a naturopathic quack in Bowling Green, KY who told a cancer patient that "chemo is for losers," promising her that he eliminate her tumor within three months. She listened to him, and as a result she died, as she and her husband were suing the quack. Not long after, her distraught widower walked into the quack's office on a Friday evening earlier this month and, if the police charges are accurate, shot him dead. Basically, because this quack convinced the woman to forego chemotherapy, whatever chance of survival she had was eliminated.…

Quackademic medicine at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

The Society for Integrative Oncology (SIO) doesn’t like me much. I understand. I haven’t exactly been supportive of the group’s mission or activities. So it wasn’t surprising that SIO wrote letters trying to rebut a Perspectives article on “integrative oncology” that I published in Nature Reviews Cancer two years ago. What depressed me about that encounter was that one of the complaints the SIO had about my article was that it spent too much verbiage discussing homeopathy as one pseudoscientific treatment that “integrative” oncology “integrates” with science-based medicine and no one uses…

The quackery that is "naturopathic oncology"

With a bill to license naturopaths (HB 4531) wending its way through the Michigan legislature supported by supplement manufacturers, its current status being in consideration by the full House of Representatives, periodically I feel the need to provide ammunition to the bill’s opponents, because we need to protect the patients in the state of Michigan from the naturopathic quackery that would be unleashed if this bill were to be passed into law. If there is one area that naturopaths have been invading with a vengeance and even gaining enough seeming legitimacy to propose what they risibly…

The conspiracy circle is complete: Brian Hooker claims "The Man" has gotten to the "CDC whistleblower"

There is a disturbance in the antivaccine Force. I can sense it. Actually, it doesn’t take any special talent to detect this. You don't have to be some sort of pro-science Jedi. The evidence is everywhere. The most prominent examples of posts in the antivaccine crankosphere that tipped me off are on—of course!—the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism, which references another blog’s post with blaring capitalized headlines, BREAKING: CDC WHISTLEBLOWER "DR. THOMPSON HAS BEEN HANDLED" SAYS DR. HOOKER AT MANHATTAN VAXXED Q&A. Elsewhere, He Who Shall Not Be Named (and to whom I shall no…

Finding the "Meaning of Fossils"

Standing in front of a small tank of mudskippers in the special "Water" exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, I heard a gentleman next to me comment to his friend "You know, if evolution is true, it's really amazing how many different kinds of animal there are." I have to admit that the first thought to pop into my mind was "If?" but after my twinge of arrogance passed I had to agree; it really is fantastic that evolution has produced such diverse forms of life. Present diversity is only half of the evolutionary equation, though. Without an understanding of common descent we…

It's more than genes, it's networks and systems

Most of you don't understand evolution. I mean this in the most charitable way; there's a common conceptual model of how evolution occurs that I find everywhere, and that I particularly find common among bright young students who are just getting enthusiastic about biology. Let me give you the Standard Story, the one that I get all the time from supporters of biology. Evolution proceeds by mutation and selection. A novel mutation occurs in a gene that gives the individual inheriting it an advantage, and that person passes it on to their children who also gets the advantage and do better than…

My talk at AAAS

It was a tremendous honor to be the first speaker at a session on evolution education last February. The session included such luminaries as Ken Miller, Olivia Judson, Neil Shubin, and David Deamer, who each presented a marvelous overview of how evolution illuminates our understanding of biology, from the origins of life to the behavior of beetles, from the workings of the cell to peculiarities of the human body. While I could not hope to speak with authority matching those great scientists on those particular fields, my opening talk set the stage by showing that, 150 years after the Origin…

Tau Mutation in Context

I got several e-mails yesterday about a new study about the molecular mechanism underlying circadian rhythms in mammals ("You gotta blog about this!"), so, thanks to Abel, I got the paper (PDF), printed it out, and, after coming back from the pool, sat down on the porch to read it. After reading the press releases, I was in a mind-frame of a movie reviewer, looking for holes and weaknesses so I could pounce on it and write a highly critical post, but, even after a whole hour of careful reading of seven pages, I did not find anything deeply disturbing about the paper. Actually, more I read…

Tau Mutation in Context

I got several e-mails yesterday about a new study about the molecular mechanism underlying circadian rhythms in mammals ("You gotta blog about this!"), so, thanks to Abel, I got the paper (PDF), printed it out, and, after coming back from the pool, sat down on the porch to read it. After reading the press releases, I was in a mind-frame of a movie reviewer, looking for holes and weaknesses so I could pounce on it and write a highly critical post, but, even after a whole hour of careful reading of seven pages, I did not find anything deeply disturbing about the paper. Actually, more I read…

Robert Meyer Strikes Again

Some of you may remember Robert Meyer, a former Robert O'Brien Trophy winner we had some fun with a few months ago (see also here and here). He wrote an abysmal article packed full of blatant falsehoods about Stephen Jay Gould. He repeated a number of hoary old creationist chestnuts. For instance, he claimed that Gould and Eldredge developed Punctuated Equilibrium (PE) because of the absence of transitional forms in the fossil record (completely false, and debunked by Gould himself numerous times), and that PE was just like Goldschmidt's Hopeful Monster notion (also false, also debunked by…

Drug safety versus a "Constitutional right" to access to experimental drugs, part 2

[Note: Part I is here.] I tell ya, I stay up all night putting the finishing touches on a grant, and what happens? Mark Hoofnagle over at Denialism.com finds a real hum-dinger of stupidity published in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately (or fortunately, given the rampant stupidity that appears to be going on in this article), I do not have a subscription to the WSJ; however, a little Googling found the whole text here. I've written about this conflict before, and it's a recurring theme in the multiple posts that I've done regarding dichloroacetate (DCA), the small…

Three swings, three misses

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that it's been quite a while since I've featured the antics of a certain character who's become a bit of the bête noire of my fellow surgeons. I'm referring, of course, to Dr. Michael Egnor, a renowned neurosurgeon from SUNY Stony Brook who's made 2007 a very embarrassing year indeed for surgeons like me who accept evolution as a valid scientific theory, as, in fact, the entire underpinning of modern biological and medical sciences. Starting back in March, having whetted his appetite for looking foolish by jumping into the comments of a posts in…

Bernadine Healy: Flirting with the anti-vaccine movement

There's an old saying, so old that it's devolved into cliché: Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it. I'm sure the vast majority of my readers, if not every last one of them, have heard this saying before. Certainly, it has a lot of truth to it. Sometimes it even applies to blogging. The most recent example that comes to mind occurred yesterday, when a commenter named David M. taunted me (or so he thought): I know you all like to pick on actresses, college students and parents with sick kids, but how about taking a look at the column by Dr. Bernadine Healy on U.S. News. She used…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Acid, base, or woo?

It's about time it was Friday. No, it's not because it will mean any less work for me; in fact, this weekend will probably mean more, as I have to go to a workshop that's more like boot camp. It's more because the subject matter of this blog had become such a major bummer, with the fifth anniversary of September 11, followed by a rumination about aging, followed by two posts about the dismal funding situation at the NIH. The only thing breaking up the gloom was getting a chance to point out a lovely deconstruction of an HIV "skeptics'" misguided attempt at claiming the mantle of skepticism,…

There's no such thing as viruses?

I was in a bit of a crappy mood last night. There were a number of reasons for this, including frustration at work trying to put together two grants, trying to revise a manuscript to resubmit it, dealing with collaborators and various other headaches. Indeed I had a splitting headache by the end of the day when I finally hit the road for the commute home. Things were so bad that I seriously considered actually going to bed and not bothering at all with the blog. I know, I know, such a thing has seldom happened in the nearly four years I've been doing this blog. It must be my obsessive…

Science and the AAAS (not to mention the WHO) sell their souls to promote pseudoscience in medicine, part 2

The holidays must truly be over. I say this because, starting around Sunday, the drumbeat of blogging topics that I haven't covered but that apparently you, my readers, want me to cover has accelerated. However, before I can move on to what might or might not be greener blogging pastures, material-wise, I feel obligated to finish what I started yesterday, namely the deconstruction of an advertising supplement promoting the "integration" of "traditional medicine" (in particular, traditional Chinese medicine, a.k.a. TCM) for which Science and the American Association for the Advancement of…

Does genistein interfere with breast cancer therapy?

More than two-thirds of breast cancers make the estrogen receptor. What that means is that these tumors have the protein receptor that binds estrogen, which then activates the receptor and causes all the genes that are turned on or off by estrogen to be turned on and off. That's how estrogen acts on normal breast epithelial cells and on breast cancer cells. The significance of this observation is that estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancers respond to estrogen. Indeed, estrogen contributes to their growth, and blocking estrogen is an effective treatment against them. Indeed, that most…

Chris Wark spins the story of the Amish girl with cancer whose family refuses her chemotherapy

Here we go again. Over the last month or so, I've been intermittently writing about a very sad case, a case that reminds me of too many cases that have come before, such as Abraham Cherrix, Kate Wernecke, Daniel Hauser, and Jacob Stieler. All of these are stories of children who were diagnosed with highly curable cancers who refused chemotherapy and were supported in that decision by their parents. Generally pediatric cancers have an 80-90% five year survival, and recurrences after five years are rare; given that children can be expected to live many decades, the consequences of refusing life…

Hillary Clinton is "medically unfit to serve" as President and Donald Trump has narcissistic personality disorder: Stop this uninformed medical speculation about the candidates!

I’ve been debating whether to write about this for a while now, given that the first article that I noticed about it was first published a week and a half ago. Part of the reason for my reluctance is that it would be too easy for politics to be dragged into this more than I generally like. Of course, I don’t make a secret of my political leanings, but I usually don’t go out of my way to be an explicitly political blogger. I do, however, frequently write about areas where science and medicine intersect, and when I do I always come down on the side of science and rationality. This brings us to…

"What Doctors Don't Tell You" about homeopathy?

We in the US certainly have our share of pure quackery; there’s no denying it. After all, we have to take “credit” for inflicting the likes of Joe Mercola, the ever-libeling conspiracy crank and hilariously off=base scientist wannabe Mike Adams, Gary Null, Robert O. Young, and many others on the world. Unfortunately, we sometimes export our quacks elsewhere. Such was the case with expat Lynn McTaggart, who with her husband Bryan Hubbard moved to London to inflict their woo on our friends the Brits. I first heard of her when I encountered her mystical magical belief that our thoughts can heal…

Kevin in China, part 5 - His Legend Preceeds Him!

The fifth installment just came in - read under the fold. (Oh, and BTW, I was wrong - the installments ARE in the correct chronological order) Muyu, extended stay, report (Mu - you, as in newt) I never thought it would come to this, having to give a report on my finds and experiences in the town, but fortunately there has been enough of a mix of activity to keep me interested. My town experience started when we left Dongxi on the 14th of June and headed back to Muyu. From the 14th until the 23rd I stayed in Muyu (that's 10 days!!) and on occasion went to some places nearby. 15 - 16 June…

More than just Resistance to Science

In the May 18th issue of Science there is a revew paper by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg. An expanded version of it also appeared recently in Edge and many science bloggers are discussing it these days. Enrique has the best one-sentence summary of the article: The main source of resistance to scientific ideas concerns what children know prior to their exposure to science. The article divides that "what children know prior to their exposure to science" into two categories: the intuitive grasp of the world (i.e., conclusions they come up with on their own) and the learned…

In which pro-vaccine advocates are inappropriately portrayed as frenzied, self-righteous "zealots"

One of the odd things about having been a blogger as long as I have been is that, occasionally, posts that I wrote years ago rise up to bite me long after I've forgotten that I even wrote them. Actually, that's usually not the right way to put it. Blogging is a very short term activity in that most posts are very ephemeral. They're usually (but not always) about something immediate, of the moment. Don't get me wrong. There are quite a few posts that I've written that aren't so ephemeral and could be read now without reference to the events or news that inspired them and be just as good now as…

A fallacy-laden attack on science-based medicine, revisited

On Monday I took a blogger by the name of Dr. Marya Zilberberg to task for firing a series of profoundly anti-scientific broadsides against science-based medicine (SBM). Although I did not attack Dr. Zilberberg personally, I was quite harsh in my characterization of her attacks, because, well, they were quite bad, full of straw men, special pleading, and the claim that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, all topped off with a particularly egregious mischaracterization of what SBM is. Steve Novella also piled on, which was appropriate because Dr. Zilberberg's attacks were mainly…

Oprah and Jenny McCarthy: A woo too far

Last week I wrote a bit about what I've been tempted to call Oprah's War on Science but settled for the title of a documentary called The Oprah Effect. The reason, as I have mentioned before, is that arguably there is no single person who does more to promote pseudoscientific and dubious health practices than does Oprah Winfrey. I was happy to learn that more people are questioning Oprah's promotion of outright quackery than I recall ever having seen before. It wasn't always so. Oprah Winfrey is an extremely powerful media figure, having been the host of the highest rated syndicated talk show…

Senator Tom Harkin's and Representative Darrell Issa's war on medical science

In discussions of that bastion of what Harriet Hall (a.k.a. The SkepDoc) likes to call "tooth fairy science," where sometimes rigorous science, sometimes not, is applied to the study of hypotheses that are utterly implausible and incredible from a basic science standpoint (such as homeopathy or reiki), the National Center of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), I've often taken Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) to task. That's because Senator Harkin is undeniably the father of that misbegotten beast that has sucked down over $2.5 billion of taxpayer money with nothing to show for it. It's…

By Seed prodded, or there's less to these studies than meets the eye

OK, I've been prodded enough! Yes, I've been aware of the study purporting to present good anecdotal case reports showing that there might be something to the hypothesis that megadoses of vitamin C can cure cancer where other therapies fail. I've also been aware of an in vitro study that suggested selective toxicity of vitamin C to tumor cells compared to normal cells. I've even been meaning to write about since I first saw it a couple of weeks ago, but the AACR intervened, as did a number of other topics, and, like so many other topics that I want to write about but somehow never find the…

The testimonial of Hollie Quinn: The Huffington Post promotes breast cancer quackery right before Breast Cancer Awareness Month

I hate The Huffington Post. I really do. Why, you ask, do I hate HuffPo so? I hate HuffPo so because of its history from the very beginning of its existence of promoting the vilest forms of anti-vaccine quackery and pseudoscience. It's because, over the last couple of years, not content with being the one-stop-shop for all things antivax on the Internet, right up there with Whale.to, Mercola.com, and NaturalNews.com, HuffPo branched out very early into quantum quackery, courtesy of Deepak Chopra. Just search for "Huffington Post" and "Deepak Chopra" on this blog and you'll discover how many…

Simmer on low heat, stir occasionally

That's my recipe for dealing with crackpots; feel free to use it, it's easy. You all may remember Vincent Fleury, the French fellow who ascribes developmental processes to swirls of cellular movement in development, who wrote a peculiar paper in a European journal of applied physics (which I mocked mercilessly), and who then went crying to fringe journalist Suzan Mazur, and then demanded withdrawal of my review and an apology. He's done it again. I just received a copy of a letter from France, which was also sent to the vice chancellor of academic affairs of my university, demanding that I…

Giuliani Is Creepy

In a NY Times article about Bernard Kerik, I came across this passage (italics mine): Mr. Giuliani said he planned to appoint Mr. Kerik as first deputy correction commissioner. Mr. Kerik, who wrote of this in his autobiography, "The Lost Son," was taken aback; he was a year removed from being a police detective. "Mayor, I appreciate your confidence in me, I really do," he said. "But I ran a jail. One jail. Rikers is like 10 jails." Just do it, the mayor replied. Mr. Kerik followed Mr. Giuliani downstairs to a dimly lighted room. There waited Mr. Giuliani's boyhood chum Peter J. Powers, who…

Seed Magazine Covers Acinetobacter

Update: I was in error (long day at work). The article was published in Wired magazine Seed Magazine, the meatworld Overlords of ScienceBlogs, has an article about Acinetobacter baumannii, a bacterium which can be resistant to virtually every antibiotic used to treat it--and in some cases, all antibiotics. It's pretty good, although I think A. baumanii is less of a problem than MRSA, for example. It's also never been clear to me why the strains that circulate in hospitals are resistant to fewer drugs than those recovered from environmental trauma wounds (e.g., wounded soldiers). Anyway, I…

Illegal Immigration: It's the Wages, Stupid

Some brilliant Republican solons from the great state of Missouri have released an official state report that argues that abortion has led to illegal immigration. The 'argument?' Abortion has eliminated U.S. workers, leading to a need for illegal immigrants. Clearly, these brilliant minds have never heard of the meat-packing industry. The meat-packing industry used to be unionized, and, consequently, virtually all of its workers were either legal residents or citizens. Then the unions were busted, resulting in crappy pay and dangerous conditions, and many people--rightfully so--did not…

Really? This guy is conscious?

You may have heard the recent news about a Belgian man who was diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state after an accident, but who now has been miraculously discovered to have actually been conscious for the last 23 years, trapped in a partially paralyzed body. How horrific, and how frightening that the doctors could have made such a ghastly error. Until you watch this video. How did they figure out that the poor man was actually alert and mentally competent beneath his deeply damaged exterior? They're using facilitated communication: somebody holds his hand and moves it around to…

I See Stupid People: The Commander Codpiece Edition

Granted, going after Little Lord Pontchartrain for being an idiot is like picking on the slow kid, but the 'leader' of the U.S. just burbled this (by way of The Liberal Avenger): George W. Bush, responding to Katie Couric's question on what the United States has learned from interrogating high-value terrorism suspects: "Well, for example -- there's a -- we -- we uncovered a -- a potential anthrax attack on the United States. Or the fact that -- Khalid Sheik Mohammed had got somebody to -- to line up people to fly airlines, to -- to crash airlines on, I think, the West Coast or somewhere in…

The top ten list that covers all the important stuff

It's coming up on the end of another year, so of course we need top ten lists. I'm impressed with the ambition of The Onion, which reports on the Top 10 Stories of the Last 4.5 Billion Years. My favorites are Woman Domesticated, Evolution Going Great, Reports Trilobite, Fire, Setting Everything in Sight on Fire Discovered, Rat-Shit-Covered Physicians Baffled By Spread Of Black Plague, and Dinosaurs Sadly Extinct Before Invention Of Bazooka, but really, the top prize has to go to Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates World. According to the cuneiform tablets, Sumerians found God's…

If We're Going to Send the National Guard to Iraq...

...we might want to issue them rifles. From the NY Times: "We're behind the power curve, and we can't piddle around," Maj. Gen. Harry M. Wyatt III, commander of the Oklahoma National Guard, said in an interview. He added that one-third of his soldiers lacked the M-4 rifles preferred by active-duty soldiers and that there were also shortfalls in night vision goggles and other equipment. If his unit is going to be sent to Iraq next year, he said, "We expect the Army to resource the Guard at the same level as active-duty units." ...Capt. Christopher Heathscott, a spokesman for the Arkansas…

Don't delay, donate!

We have received most excellent news from Seed: notice that challenge bar to the left, where I (and many other science bloggers) are asking you to donate to public education? We're doing great—my challenge has gathered over a thousand dollars so far, all to help out teachers and schoolkids—but now Seed has announced that they will match the total donations, up to $10,000. Double your money! I've set a goal of raising $2000 for teachers, but I've got a dozen projects listed, and they're going to need more than that if all are to be fully funded. If I hit the goal, don't stop—you can keep…

Atheism and sex and gender

I'm sad now. Jen has a video of Greta Christina talking about atheism and sexuality, and for several days I've been trying to get it to work…and no matter what I do, it won't play. Greta is great, though, so it's almost certainly an excellent talk…maybe it will work for you. Greta Christina on Atheism & Sexuality from Jennifer McCreight on Vimeo. Jen also has the results (and more) of a survey of her readers, with the somewhat sorta kinda surprising result that even as a young feminist atheist writer, 75% of her audience are male. We need to encourage more women to participate and lead…

Links 5/12/11

Links fahr ya. Science: On the "Hot Hand" in Basketball "There's no crying in baseball" . . . the status quo of Ph.D. programs? Farm antibiotics: "Pig staph" in a daycare worker GOP Assault on Truth: Why Do Conservatives Pretend They Know More About Science Than Scientists? Other: But For One Misplaced Decade What Alan Simpson doesn't know about life expectancy and Social Security In Washington, You Don't Need To Know Anything About Policy To Be a Senator Or Chair Important Commissions Circumcision ban a step closer to the ballot (the comments are priceless) With 56% of American Internet…

The G matrix, pleiotropy and quantitative traits

My previous post, Weird lands of the tails, had some concepts implicit which I didn't elucidate in detail. For example, I assumed that the speed is a quantitative trait, and the many genes which control its variation have pleiotropic effects. That is, gene 1 has effect on phenotypes 1 through n. Gene 2 has effect on phenotype 1 through n. Speed may be just one of those phenotypes. More formally what I'm thinking about is a genetic variance-covariance matrix, or G matrix. If you keep the G matrix in mind I think it's kind of ludicrous to expect that speed was actually what was being selected…

Sunday Sacrilege: Bonus Edition!

I just had to add this one. In Meghalaya, India, students taking instruction in cursive writing found an interesting illustration in their textbooks. Christians in the area (this is a region of India with a Christian majority) are very upset and have banned the books and are considering legal action. The Archbishop of Shillong has protested. We are deeply hurt by the insensitivity of the publisher. How can one show such total disrespect for a religion? Wait a minute…the Archbishop of Shillong? I'm not going to take this seriously until Cardinal Wangadoodle and the Reverend Mother Punitang…