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The Importance of Smell

From Rachel Herz's quite interesting The Scent of Desire: In one study that contrasted the trauma of being blinded or becoming anosmic [losing you sense of smell] after an accident, it was found that those who were blinded initially felt much more traumatized by their loss than those who had lost their sense of smell. But follow-up analyses on the emotional health of these patients one year later showed that the anosmics were faring much more poorly than the blind. The emotional health of anosmic patients typically continues to deteriorate with passing time, in some cases requiring…

Holy crap, we were all played!

There once was a gigantic blow-up of accusations that fed into Chris Mooney's self-righteous crusade against atheists as harming the cause of science education. Remember "Tom Johnson", the mysterious scientist who told stories of outrageous bias against Christians in academia, driven by people like me and Richard Dawkins? Mooney was very grateful for his brave willingness to speak up. Well, the fallout from the collapse of the 'You're Not Helping' blog continues. "Tom Johnson" was the same sockpuppeteering undergraduate, "William". The entire episode was a contrivance built up into a mountain…

Men, Women and Empathy

Interesting stuff: The research team led by Tania Singer, at UCL, asked volunteers to play a game with employees of the lab, secretly instructing the employees to play either fairly or unfairly. Afterward, the scientists measured brain activity in the same volunteers under quite different circumstances: looking on as their former game opponents were subjected to various degrees of pain. In both male and female volunteers, the brain areas that signal pain became active, giving neural evidence of their empathy with the others' pain. Strikingly, however, that empathy did not appear to extend to…

Oliver Sacks and Lullabies

For a wonderful example of Oliver Sacks' "romantic scientific method" at work - a method he borrowed, at least in part, from the great Russian neurologist A.R. Luria - listen to this NPR piece, by Robert Krulwich. It's a beautiful story about the power of stories to help us make sense of our ourselves. Here's how I summarized this romantic method in my recent profile of Sacks: In his writings, he [Sacks] uses music as a metaphor for his unusual approach to medicine. He cites a Novalis aphorism--"Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution"--in several books, usually…

Are Men Happier than Women?

From David Leonhardt: There appears to be a growing happiness gap between men and women. Two new research papers, using very different methods, have both come to this conclusion. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists at the University of Pennsylvania (and a couple), have looked at the traditional happiness data, in which people are simply asked how satisfied they are with their overall lives. In the early 1970s, women reported being slightly happier than men. Today, the two have switched places. Mr. Krueger, analyzing time-use studies over the last four decades, has found an even…

Colored people are Republican, whites are Democrats?

This is the last Jay Nordlinger post. I suspect what's going on here is a chasm between different Ways of Knowing, but this anecdote that he passes on is just bizarre: So, my husband is black, I am biracial (white/Korean). Here is my three (homeschooled) children's experience of life: All their black and Korean relatives are voting for McCain (security, taxes, marriage, and abortion). All their white relatives are voting Obama (well-meaning, misguided liberals). At least half the Republican families they know are black homeschoolers. What exactly does this mean? The myth that the proportion…

Genetic engineering in the service of social engineering?

FuturePundit comments on the recent story about the shift away from the "Mediterranean diet" in the Mediterranean, specifically Greece. This is naturally leading to greater obesity. FuturePundit states: Fresh produce and olive oil can't compete with hamburgers and fries. We need to either genetically engineer ourselves to dislike junk food or we need to genetically engineer our metabolisms to handle junk food without harmful effects. I've been trying to avoid fried foods myself; but one thing that I have been noting is that when I walk by a restaurant where there's a lot of frying going on I…

Friday Flotsam: Galeras settles, Krakatau anniversary, what is under Yellowstone and more.

Sorry about the lack of posts - I've been not only frantically prepping for class and my Eyja talk, but also I'm somewhat under the weather with an ill-timed sickness, so even though there is stuff to talk about, I haven't really had time/wherewithal to deal with it. However, expect big things from Eruptions next week! Drawing of a ship washed inland by the tsunami generated by the August 27, 1883 eruption of Krakatau. I'll throw a few quick links: The alert status at Galeras has been dropped back down to "orange" after the non-explosive eruption earlier this week. However, INGEOMINAS warns…

I'm a stay-at-home kind of guy

People are still asking me to come speak at various places, and I'm just going to have to put my foot down. Here's my calendar for the next few months: Oslo on 16 June Copenhagen on 18-20 June Lindau on 26 June-1 July Minneapolis and Convergence/Skepchick Con 1-3 July Vancouver, BC on 30 July Fargo, ND atheist convention on 17-20 September Cheribourg, Quebec for RiboClub on 20-22 September Montreal, AAI convention on 1-3 October LA, Secular humanism conference on 7-10 October (I'll be on a panel with Chris Mooney, discussing accommodation vs. confrontation. Uh-oh.) Mexico…

Friday Flotsam: Australian volcano watch continued, the impact of the Siberian Traps and the threat from Hualalai

News to finish up your week: Summit area of Hualalai in Hawai'i Another day, another "threat" of volcanic eruption in Australia. I'm impressed with the abject fear Aussies seem to have for this perceived increased threat of an eruption - or at least what the press wants you to believe. This time, watch out near Bundaberg, Townsville and Cooktown in southeast Queensland! In more press-related exaggeration, the Siberian Traps - a flood basalt eruption from, well, thousands of rift/vents in Siberia - is boiled down to being one Siberian volcano by the Telegraph. Dr. Mark Sephton of the…

Monday Musings

First day of class! As you might imagine, I'm a little scattered (well, with classes and the fact that we bought a house over the weekend. You know, just that). The Tavurvur Crater at Rabaul erupting in 1994. News! The Examiner.com (SF) has a slideshow and brief article on the current excavations of ruins buried by the Santorini/Minoan eruption that occurred ~3950 years ago. The eruption wiped out much of the island of Crete in the Aegean Sea, but whether there was anyone actually still living on the island when it happened is still a mystery. It seems that most of the Minoans left the…

Redoubt Update for 5/26/2009

Lenticular clouds forming over Redoubt on May 25, 2009. Image courtesy of AVO/USGS and sent to me by Eruptions reader Todd Russell. We haven't talked much about Redoubt lately, so I thought I'd add a brief update. First off, the Alert Level at the volcano still sits at Orange/Watch status, meaning that although the volcano is not erupting, it could at almost any time. Most of the threat of eruption stems from the ever-growing lava dome on the volcano. AVO noted today that the "Hut webcam views today show evidence of recent rockfall activity, including a fresh ash deposit to the east (left)…

Alert level raised at Anak Krakatau

Anak Krakatau in Indonesia. Eruptive activity is definitely on the uptick at Anak Krakatau. The Jakarta Globe is reporting that the volcano is "spewing molten lava 1000 meters in the air". I'm not entirely sure if that is accurate or that the volcano is throwing volcanic bombs or tephra that high. The head of the Volcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation Center in Indonesia, merely referred to as Surono in the article (are we playing Brazilian soccer?), says that the volcano is "a high threat because the eruptions have started spreading." Again, I'm not too sure what that means, whether…

Repairing after eruption: the Waimangu Valley and Mt. Tarawera

One of the more impressive areas I visited while in New Zealand was the Waimangu Valley near Mt. Tarawera (above). The valley itself was created by blast explosions (phreatic explosions) during the 1886 eruption of Mt. Tarawera. These eruptions cut right down the axis of the rhyolite domes (most of which erupted ~1305 A.D.) and extended off the volcanic edifice to form the valley to the west of the volcano. In the valley, no juvenile lava was erupted, instead explosions carved out large pits that formed the Waimangu Valley and today the valley is filled with lakes and thermal features (below…

The last moments of Pompeii

Sometimes I wonder if we know more about the fates of people who died in a volcanic eruption over 1800 years ago than we do about most people who died in any given eruption this year. Not that there is anything particularly wrong with that - we're fascinated by both volcanoes and Roman antiquity - but the level of detail done for the victims of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. is stunning. Considering that this blog got started (to an extent) thanks to our cultural obsession with Pompeii, I thought it fitting to post a bit about a recent report on the last moments of a family in Pompeii. Nothing really…

Llaima (Chile) erupts (Updated)

Update 7/2/08: Sounds like the lava flows from Llaima are increasing ... or that there are more of them. The lava flows, as mentioned below, pose a threat to melt the ice on the volcano and produce lahars, or at least flooding. Lots of news this morning about a new eruption at Llaima in Chile. The composite volcano is in south central Chile (the lakes region) about 430 miles south of Santiago. This is at least the third time this year that Llaima has erupted, and this time a lava flow is heading down the volcano towards the Rio Calbuco as far as 800 m downslope. The fear is the lava flow…

HIV/AIDS denial is inherently discrediting

Slacktivist observes that Bryan Fischer is an AIDS denier: Tweet from Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association: “New pill stops HIV virus. But won’t stop AIDS since caused by extensive inhalant drug use, not HIV.” So there it is. Bryan Fischer is an AIDS denier. The chief spokesman of the American Family Association is an AIDS denier. Do you need to know anything, anything at all, else about Bryan Fischer? No. Is there anything, anything at all, else that you could possibly learn about Bryan Fischer that would balance this out and make him a credible and/or decent human being? No. So…

More Israel

Right-wing Israeli activists threaten to protest Rahm Emanuelâs sonâs bar mitzvah in Jerusalem: Last year, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel announced at the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America in Washington that he was planning to take his son Zach to Israel for his bar mitzvah. âThis memorial break, I am taking my son, my nephew Noah with Ari my brother, so they can have their bar mitzvah in Israel,â said Emanuel. Now, right-wing Israeli activists, who consider Emanuel a âtraitorâ to Israel because of the Obama administrationâs stance against new settlement…

Mohammed is defiled…but it's a very old story

All the kerfuffle about people drawing Mohammed in recent years has been seriously misplaced: there is a very entertaining archive of Mohammed images, everything from serious medieval renditions to obscene contemporary scrawls. Cat's out of the bag, Muslims—pictures of Mohammed are everywhere, and they've been around for centuries. In related news, the UW Madison Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics did their own consciousness raising excercise, chalking stick figure Mohammed's all over campus. Some of the reactions were amusing: I think it's clever that some of the opposition came along with…

Inexplicable

Dear internets, Why does anyone read Megan McArdle? The debunking of her silliness is clogging my RSS reader, and I'd like you all to just stop reading her already. I tuned her out way back when she went by the name "Jane Galt." I consider it entirely fair to treat Ayn Rand fandom as an automatic disqualifier from rational discourse, and McArdle's use of a Randian pseudonym told me all I needed to know about what I'd get by reading her. So whenever someone links to her, I ignore it. If everyone else did the same thing, my blog-reading would be much nicer. And honestly, what would you be…

Birds of a feather flocking together

It's been a few weeks, but I thought I would point you to an interesting post on OkCupid's blog about race and dating. They report an interesting trend of preference for white men among all groups of females, as well as lots of other interesting nuggets. Of course, as many have noted the core demographic of OkCupid is a bit different than the general population, and might be especially so when it comes to racial minorities. I did think though that the stated racial preferences of the sample are interesting in light of other data which suggest women are more racialist than men. In all classes…

Andrew Gelman makes political punditry boring

Stories and Stats: The truth about Obama's victory wasn't in the papers: Our story of the 2008 campaign confirms some parts of the journalistic narrative and refutes others. Yes, the economy was important; yes, young voters swung to Obama and the Congressional Democrats; yes, Obama did particularly well among minorities (Latinos and Asians as well as African Americans), even beyond the Democrats' usual strength among these groups; yes, the Democrats made new inroads among the most affluent voters. But no, working-class whites did not run away from Obama; and no, Obama did not redraw the…

How tall will Megan McArdle & Peter Suderman's theoretical offspring be?

Peter Suderman & Megan McArdle are getting married. One of my thoughts was, "How tall will their offspring be?" (assuming they are intent on producing any) I couldn't tell Peter Suderman's height from photographs with certainty, but he has confirmed they are the same height, 6 feet 2 inches. What sort of heights would we expect for the McSuderkinder?* Assuming 80% heritability for height, 3 inches as the standard deviation for both sexes, 5'10 and 5'4 as mean heights (male & female), and plugging into the calculator: The highest probability of height for any male offspring: 6 feet 3…

Optimism across the world

People By Nature Are Universally Optimistic, Study Shows: Data from the Gallup World Poll drove the findings, with adults in more than 140 countries providing a representative sample of 95 percent of the world's population. The sample included more than 150,000 adults. Eighty-nine percent of individuals worldwide expect the next five years to be as good or better than their current life, and 95 percent of individuals expected their life in five years to be as good or better than their life was five years ago. ... At the country level, optimism is highest in Ireland, Brazil, Denmark, and New…

More genetic structure of human populations

Genome-wide Insights into the Patterns and Determinants of Fine-Scale Population Structure in Humans: Studying genomic patterns of human population structure provides important insights into human evolutionary history and the relationship among populations, and it has significant practical implications for disease-gene mapping. Here we describe a principal component (PC)-based approach to studying intracontinental population structure in humans, identify the underlying markers mediating the observed patterns of fine-scale population structure, and infer the predominating evolutionary forces…

African genetic structure

I've been fine tuning Ubuntu all day with goodies and getting drivers to work right, so I missed this paper on African genetics: Africa is the source of all modern humans, but characterization of genetic variation and of relationships among populations across the continent has been enigmatic. We studied 121 African populations, 4 African American populations, and 60 non-African populations for patterns of variation at 1327 nuclear microsatellite and insertion/deletion markers. We identified 14 ancestral population clusters in Africa that correlate with self-described ethnicity and shared…

To Richard Dawkins: Fear of Death is Adaptive

Richard Dawkins: 'There is something illogical about the fear of death': The comfort of a dying soldier, the succour for a grieving mother or belief in the after-life of a widower - is it still possible to see the utility of certain psychological aspects in some religious beliefs or customs? [Interviewer - R] I do see a psychological value, if it does have a real value. I would not wish to be the person who destroys that person's psychological succour. I would not compromise with my public speaking out in the public forum and writing. But if I was visiting someone who was recently bereaved, I…

Alien genetic architecture

p-ter has a post up which he illustrates with a photograph of a rather ghoulish prosimian. I've read that some of the Victorians found chimpanzees & gorillas almost obscene because of their simultaneous resemblance to humanity and manifest inhumanity. I somewhat feel the same about prosimians, especially tarsiers. No doubt this is due to my relative familiarity with immature chimpanzees on television shows. In any case, there is a new paper out which demonstrates that the genetic architecture of blue eyes in two species of lemurs is not similar to that in humans. Contrast this to…

Blacks & McCain Belters come together under god

A commenter below wondered how much of Southern American religiosity is just a function of black religiosity, seeing as how blacks make up a larger portion of the American South's population. A fair amount. That being said, I decided to look at two GSS variables, GOD & BIBLE, and break them down by region & race. The regions are from the Census, and I dropped all the regions where the N's for blacks were less than 100. Obviously there aren't that many blacks in the Mountain region, so comparing that region's blacks & whites is going to be difficult with a GSS size sample. In any…

Diamonds, the Younger Dryas & extinctions

Nanodiamonds in the Younger Dryas Boundary Sediment Layer: We report abundant nanodiamonds in sediments dating to 12.9 ± 0.1 thousand calendar years before the present at multiple locations across North America. Selected area electron diffraction patterns reveal two diamond allotropes in this boundary layer but not above or below that interval. Cubic diamonds form under high temperature-pressure regimes, and n-diamonds also require extraordinary conditions, well outside the range of Earth's typical surficial processes but common to cosmic impacts. N-diamond concentrations range from 10 to…

Mr. Spock is Not Logical (book draft excerpt)

As I mentioned, I'll be posting drafts of various sections of my book here on the blog. This is a rough draft of the introduction to a chapter on logic. I would be extremely greatful for comments, critiques, and corrections. I'm a big science fiction fan. In fact, my whole family is pretty much a gaggle of sci-fi geeks. When I was growing up, every Saturday at 6pm was Star Trek time, when a local channel show re-runs of the original series. When Saturday came around, we always made sure we were home by 6, and we'd all gather in front of the TV to watch Trek. But there's one one thing about…

More Old Friends: The Bible Code Guys

Time for our second visit with old friends. This time, we're going to check up on "The Lords Witnesses", the bible code geniuses who made somewhere around a dozen attempts at using their code to nail down a date at which the UN building in NYC would be blown up. These nutters are a spinoff of the Jehovah's witnesses. They believe that there is a secret code embedded in the bible. They agree that all of the other people who claim to have found secret codes in the bible are all just a bunch of crackpots - but they have the truth. Their code is a classic example of a human-created pattern. It…

Relativistic Crap from an IDist.

In one of Jeff Shallit's recent posts on the Panda's Thumb, he mentioned that Tom Bethel, aside from being a creationist, was also a relativity denier. In general, relativity denial is a veritable mine of bad math. So I went looking - and found Bethel's anti-relativity site. As I expected, we've got extremely silly bad math. In fact, it's the worst kind of bad math - it's a lack of math masquerading as being math. It's also, sadly, full of pathetic errors. For instance, there's this: The argument that gravity must travel faster than light goes like this. If its speed limit is that of light…

Public Key Cryptography using RSA

Technorati Tags: cryptography, public-key, encryption, RSA, asymmetric encryption The most successful public key cryptosystem in use today is RSA - named for its inventors Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman. I first learned about RSA in grad school from one of my professors, Errol Lloyd, who was one of Ron Rivest's students. Errol is without a doubt the best teacher I've ever had (and also a thoroughly nice guy). If you want to go to grad school to study algorithms, you frankly couldn't do better than heading to Delaware to work with Errol. I have very fond memories of Errol's class where we talked…

Unity in diversity, last response to John Wilkins

John put up his last thoughts on race, and Evolgen chimed in with his ruminations. First, nice exchange. Quick points.... 1) I'm not hung up on a word. If you want to agree on another word that captures what I'm trying to say, I'm willing to go along with it. 2) One key point I want to make is that we should be cautious about relying on Lewontin's 85% intragroup vs. 15% intergroup data. Evolution and genetics are sciences of some subtly, and one can not draw a straight line between statistical data and pithy verbal conclusions. Context and framing matters a lot. What exactly does "…

Race

John Wilkins has a post on race where he expresses skepticism about its biological reality. He comment was in response to a post on my other blog (by another individual), but I'll stand by it. I've talked abut race in the past, and I'm not into the topic at this point since it is going over old ground, but a few quick responses.... Re: Lewontin's point about 85% within group vs. 15% between group variance, that is true, at one locus, but it ignores the correlation structure across loci. This is elucidated by mathematical geneticist Anthony Edwards in his paper from a few years back (PDF…

Nature Blogging 101 Session: Attendee Responses

tags: annual science communication conference, ScienceOnline'09, SciO09, Sigma Xi, Research Triangle Park, science blogging conference, nature blog writing If you've been following this blog for very long, you will recall that a colleague (and former SciBling), Kevin Zelnio, and I co-hosted a session at the recent ScienceOnline '09 conference in North Carolina about Nature Blogging. I published a list of questions on my blog that were projected live onto a screen during our presentation (along with reader comments), to serve as a focal point to guide our discussion. I also asked the attendees…

Why you CAN have your $1000 genome - so long as you learn what to do with it [Genetic Future]

As part of his Gene Week celebration over at Forbes, Matthew Herper has a provocative post titled "Why you can't have your $1000 genome". In this post I'll explain why, while Herper's pessimism is absolutely justified for genomes produced in a medical setting, I'm confident that I'll be obtaining my own near-$1000 genome in the not-too-distant future. Matt's underlying argument is that while sequencing costs will continue to drop, obtaining a complete genome sequence that is sufficiently accurate for medical interpretation will require additional expenses (increased sequence coverage to…

Climate Change and the Integrity of Science redux

Nearly two years ago, Science magazine published the following Lead Letter, signed by 255 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences addressing attacks on the integrity of climate science. The science has continued to strengthen, the evidence in real world observations has become even stronger and more obvious. In response, in the past few months, there has been a last-gasp effort (see, for example,  here and here) on the part of the ever-shrinking group of hard-core climate deniers to confuse the public and especially our elected officials. Given this continuing profusion of false and…

(Mis)Understanding Sea-Level Rise (SLR) and Climate Impacts

One of the most important and threatening risks of climate change is sea-level rise (SLR). The mechanisms are well understood, and the direction of changes in sea-level is highly certain – it is rising and the rate of rise will accelerate. There remain plenty of uncertainties (i.e., a range of possible outcomes) about the timing and rate of rise that have to do with how fast we continue to put greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the responses of (especially) ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, and the sensitivity of the climate. Even little changes can have big consequences. As we saw…

The Public Park Parable of Political Psychology

Another one on psychology of political ideology (form April 08, 2005): ------------------------------------------ Ezra Klein, Majikthise and Revere of Effect Measure are having another round of discussion of the Lakoff's scheme. One of the problems in this discussion, I think, is the confusion between Conservatism Vs. Liberalism as Systems of Government on one hand, and Conservatism vs. Liberalism as Personality Traits on the other. Going back in history and arguing for or against the two archetypes by invoking Nixon, Reagan, McCarthy, Stalin, Hitler, Clinton, Carter, whoever...misses the…

Basic Terms and Concepts in Math and Science

I don't know how many of you check out the constantly growing list of links to posts that cover Basic Terms And Concepts in Science, but you should. Our Seed Overlords are cooperating and will soon set up a place where all those posts will be re-posted, commented upon, edited, etc. - a one-stop shopping for all basic stuff useful, for instance, in teaching at all levels from Kindergarden to Postdoc! Until then, here is my unofficial list - not the one compiled by Wilkins - that also includes some of my own posts, as well as some of the other people's posts that I found useful in teaching…

Searching for safer chemicals – but safer for whom? New EPA flame retardants report highlights the dilemma

When a widely used chemical is identified as an environmental health hazard and targeted for phase-out and elimination, among the most challenging questions for those involved with using and making such a chemical are: What to use instead? and Will the replacement be safe? The US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) report identifying alternatives to the flame retardant hexabromocyclododecane (HBCD) illustrates how difficult those questions can be to answer. It also highlights how important it is to consider the entire life-cycle of finished products when looking for hazardous chemical…

Sex Education, Family Farm Style

Simon came in the door calling "Moooooooomm....Moooooommmm!!" It didn't sound like the "someone is bleeding to death" call or the "Isaiah said my hat looked funny and I beaned him one with a rock and he had the temerity to hit me back and it hurt..." cry, each which has a certain urgency too it. Nor was it even the much more relaxed "by the way, I haven't seen my littlest brother for a long time, like since before lunch, and you told me not to let him fall in the creek, but I really wasn't paying attention" one. No this was a "Mom, I've got something cool to tell you" call. What, I…

3rd Circuit judges laud workers' right-to-know

In late November, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit heard oral arguments on the two petitions for review of OSHA's health standard on hexavalent chromium (CrVI).   The transcript of the proceeding (52-page PDF) reveal that these judges did their homework.  They knew the history and content of the final rule.  I was heartened to read one judge interrupt the Labor Department attorney with: "Well, one thing that concerns me [about this final rule] is the requirement for notifying employees at the action level of the risk.  And I'm not certain why…

What a conspiracy theorist president means Part 2 - Amanda Marcotte interviews me for Salon

Amanda Marcotte, who I've enjoyed reading since her days at Pandagon, was curious about what having a CT president might mean. For some crazy reason, she thought she should ask me about it. Briefly, I tried to summarize the patterns of thought conspiracy theorists engage in, their willingness to accept any belief if confirmatory of their guiding ideology, and their tendency to project their own darkest behaviors onto others. Overall, I thought she provided a great summary of the problem. My only critique would be it's not all doom and gloom. One thing we talked about that didn't make it…

Bill Maher, the moronic Food Babe, and the NYT discusses what to call climate change denialists

Bill Maher did it again last night, doubling down on his anti-vax nonsense claiming the real problem is we haven't done a controlled population-based trial on vaccination vs non-vaccination. Sadly, I don't have a clip, but I have to say this time at least I was gratified that his panel wasn't composed of complete morons and they actually challenged him on some of his nonsense. This is actually a classic impossible expectations denialist argument, he essentially proposes an experiment that would be wildly expensive, impossible to perform, and highly unethical. Worse, it still is internally…

Are Liberals really more likely to accept science than conservatives Part II?

About a month ago I asked if denialism is truly more frequent on the right or is it that the issues of the day are ones that are more likely to be targets of right wing denialism? After all, one can think of slightly more left wing sources of denialism like GMO paranoia, 9/11 conspiracies, altie-meds, and toxin fear-mongering. The mental heuristics that cause people to believe, and then entrench themselves, in nonsense seem generalizable to humanity rather than just those attracted to conservative politics. Why should those who identify as liberal be any different? Wouldn't they just…

Student guest post: Are parasites causing a rise in the global HIV epidemic?

Student guest post by Carrie Ellsworth During the summer of 2010 I spent two months in Ghana studying a parasite called schistosomiasis. We worked in a small town called Adasawase to determine prevalence and treat the schoolchildren who were infected. We were told that schistosomiasis was not a major health concern for the people in the town because they were often faced with other diseases that had more immediate and severe health consequences than a parasitic infection. It became apparent that if we wanted the people of this small town to take this health threat seriously, we needed to…

Egnor just doesn't know when to quit

I don't know if you've seen any of the posts here at Scienceblogs or Panda's Thumb about the Discovery Institute's newest protégé, Dr. Michael Egnor. A professor of neurosurgery at SUNY-Stony Brook, Dr. Egnor has been pontificating on how "Darwinism" has nothing to offer to medicine; and indeed, that evolutionary biology has "hijacked" other fields of study. Mike has already aptly pointed out many of Egnor's strawmen and intellectual dishonesties, so I won't review them all. I've stayed out of the fray until now because I've had limited time and others have been handling it quite ably,…