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How to respond in the classroom to questions about religion

... In public schools. According to one Federal Judge in the US, not much. A Mission Viejo high school history teacher violated the First Amendment by disparaging Christians during a classroom lecture, a federal judge ruled. a repost James Corbett, a 20-year teacher at Capistrano Valley High School, referred to Creationism as "religious, superstitious nonsense" during a 2007 classroom lecture, denigrating his former Advanced Placement European history student, Chad Farnan. The decision is the culmination of a 16-month legal battle between Corbett and Farnan - a conflict the judge said…

How Labs Have Changed My Life...

...and made me a better person. Well, sort of. I started writing this after learning that several of my SciBlings (Janet, Chad, RPM, Razib, Mike) were countering Steve G's argument that science labs, as an addition to "theory" or "lecture" courses are more or less a waste of time and money. I'm a biology student, and know little of the financial aspects of labs, but I do consider myself an expert on having labs; I've had to take little else in the past few years. My argument is almost identical to the others regarding the necessity and integrity of labs, but I will point out one thing: Gimbel…

Extra, Extra

Here's your weekly round-up of fun and fascinating: To start with, I did a 6-part series on numerical cognition and the development of math skills, here and at Child's Play: 1. The Developmental Origins of Numerical Cognition 2. What is Dyscalculia? How Does It Develop? 3. Developmental Dyscalculia Explained: Strategy, Memory, Attention 4. Numbers on the Brain: Neurobiology of Mathematics For an evolutionary perspective, there were the two companion pieces this week here: 5. What Are The Origins of Large Number Representation? 6. The Origins of Small Number Representation Science From Lucas…

Mount Biodome Part Deux

So we're fusing two crappy mid-90s movies here -- Bio-Dome and Hot Shots! Part Deux -- but bear with me, this has nothing to do with the cinema. Inspired by Chad's attempt to come up with a Mount Rushmore for all of science, I decided to narrow the scope and create a Mount Biodome (limited to the life sciences). My three suggestions for sure locks were Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel and Thomas Hunt Morgan. Darwin and Mendel will make everyone's list, but my nomination of Morgan did not go over so well (as I suspected). Some more nominations can be found below the fold... If we ignore…

Will the hominin from Kenya please stand up?

The origin of bipedalism, one of the classic traits popularly cited to separate humans from other primates, has long been a controversial area of research. A number of hypotheses have been floated over the years, but now that more fossil material from the time around the chimpanzee/human split has been uncovered researchers have been able to get a better idea of just how old bipedalism is. In a new paper published in Science, Brian Richmond and William Jungers suggest that the remains of the 6 million year old Orrorin tugenensis provide the earliest known postcranial evidence of hominin…

Tenure-track faculty and departmental decision making.

Chad got to this first (cursed time zones), but I want to say a bit about the Inside Higher Ed article on the tumult in the Philosophy Department at the College of William & Mary that concerns, at least in part, how involved junior faculty should be in major departmental decisions: Should tenure-track faculty members who are not yet tenured vote on new hires? Paul S. Davies, one of the professors who pressed to exclude the junior professors from voting, stressed that such a shift in the rules would protect them. "If you have junior people voting, they have tenure in the back of their…

Science Blogging - what it can be

From quite early on in my blogging endeavor, I was interested in exploring science blogging, what it is, what it can do, and what it can become. So, check out some of my earliest thoughts on this here and here. Then, over about a month (from April 17, 2006 to May 17, 2006) I wrote a gazillion posts on this topic, and many science bloggers chimed in in the comments or on their own blogs. The repost of all of them together is under the fold. Check the originals (and comments) here: April 17, 2006: Publishing hypotheses and data on a blog - is it going to happen on science blogs? April 20,…

Life Science, Physical Science and Environment Weekly Channel Highlights

In this post: the large versions of the Life Science, Physical Science and Environment channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week. Physical Science. Thunderstorm over Toronto, Ontario. From Flickr, by krunkwerke Life Science. From Flickr, by Noël Zia Lee Environment. From Flickr, by lexdenn Reader comments of the week: In Animal Rights Extremists kill at least a dozen mink, The Evil Monkey of Neurotopia v. 2.0 laments the ignorance of a group of animal rights activists who released 6,000 mink from a fur farm; farm-raised animals, he stresses, are…

HIV's Kitzmiller v. Dover?

It's been awhile since I've written about HIV/AIDS denial on here. To be honest, the whole area has just burned me out a bit; it gets tiresome to even discuss issues with people who so fundamentally deny the basic tenets of microbiology and infectious disease epidemiology. But in my absence, there's been quite a bit going on, much of it collected here at the AIDStruth website. However, I have to draw your attention to a notable story today. The first is like something out of "Law and Order." An HIV-positive man is appealing his conviction in Australia of endangering the lives of three…

Watson to Africa: You're All Dumb

Spitting on Rosalind Franklin's grave is apparently not satisfying enough for Jim Watson. When you are a largemouth ass, you have to do much, much more. So now he's maligned all of Africa and everyone of African descent. Here's a quote: he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really". Also, His views are also reflected in a book published next week, in which he writes: "There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities…

Suppression and Enhancement of Collisions in Optical Lattices

I announced my intention to do some research blogging a little while ago, and managed one pair of posts before the arrival of SteelyKid kind of distracted me. I'm still planning to complete the Metastable Xenon Project blog, though (despite the utter lack of response to the first two), and the second real paper I was an author on is "Suppression and Enhancement of Collisions in Optical Lattices," a PRL from 1998, with a preprint version available here. So, this is another paper about collisions, obviously, but what's an optical lattice? An optical lattice is an arrangement of laser beams--…

RP 12: Some things about science

I have been meaning to write about this for quite some time. Really, I wanted to reply to Chad's article on science at Uncertain Principles, but you know how things go. So, here are my key and interesting points about science in random order. Science is all about models (not ball bearings) Science is about making models. What is a model? A model can be lots of things. It can be a mathematical relationship, a conceptual model, or even a physical model. One model I like to use is static friction. For many cases, the frictional force can be modeled as: This model says the frictional…

Some things about science

I have been meaning to write about this for quite some time. Really, I wanted to reply to Chad's article on science at Uncertain Principles, but you know how things go. So, here are my key and interesting points about science in random order. Science is all about models (not ball bearings) Science is about making models. What is a model? A model can be lots of things. It can be a mathematical relationship, a conceptual model, or even a physical model. One model I like to use is static friction. For many cases, the frictional force can be modeled as: This model says the frictional…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The shifting sands of anti-entropic woo

Everybody (well, mostly everybody) learns in science and physics class the Three Laws of Thermodynamics: Energy cannot be created or destroyed, meaning that the increase in the internal energy of a thermodynamic system is equal to the amount of heat energy added to the system minus the work done by the system on the surroundings. The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium. As temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant. These three laws pretty much describe the…

Finishing up Homeopathy Awareness Week: It's not just homeopathy, it's quantum homeopathy!

Homeopathy Awareness Week is almost over, alas. I hope I've done a good job at making my readers even more "aware" of just how silly the principles of homeopathy are. To finish up, I thought I'd repost a bit of "classic insolence" from three years ago, because it's dedicated to one of the most amazing homeopathic woo-meisters I've ever seen: Lionel Milgrom. It was also the very first post I ever did for Your Friday Dose of Woo. Enjoy! While thinking about ways to make the blog better, I wondered if I should emulate some of my colleagues, many of whom have regular features every week, often on…

The Huffington Post delves deeper into the woo

Since its very inception, the Huffington Post has been a hotbed of antivaccine lunacy. Shortly after that, antivaccine woo-meisters like David Kirby, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Kimg Stagliano, and, apparently, one of the editors (Special Projects Editor Rachel Sklar) were joined by all-purpose woo-meisters like Deepak Chopra. True, for a brief period of time there appeared to be an occasional voice for vaccines on HuffPo, but they never lasted. After all, RFK, Jr.'s been there nearly four years now and David Kirby almost as long, while pro-vaccine commentary pops up briefly, gets shouted down by…

It's not just homeopathy. It's quantum homeopathy!

Unfortunately, as we have been dreading for the last four months or so since her relapse was diagnosed, my mother-in-law passed away from breast cancer in hospice. She died peacefully, with my wife and the rest of her family at her side. As you might expect, I do not much feel like blogging, and even if I did my wife needs me more. Because I foresaw this coming, however, I do have a series of "Best of" reposts lined up. If you've been reading less than a year or two, they're new to you. If not, I hope you enjoy them again. I don't know when I'll be back, other than maybe a brief update or two…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Oxygenate your silver! (Or is it "silverate" your water?)

It may be Thanksgiving weekend here in the States, and fellow ScienceBloggers PZ and Ed may be getting sniping at each other over Larry Moran's rather intemperate comments. (Can't we all just get along, guys, at least for the holidays anyway?). Worse, this kerfluffle is threatening to suck in other fellow ScienceBloggers Mike Dunford, John Wilkins, John Lynch, and Chad Orzel, as well. You know, this whole thing reminds me a lot of political and religious arguments that used to break out among my family sometimes during holiday gatherings. Let's hope the results of this one, like the results…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: It's not just homeopathy, it's quantum homeopathy!

While thinking about ways to make the blog better, I wondered if I should emulate some of my colleagues, many of whom have regular features every week, often on Friday. And, since I usually get a little less serious on Fridays anyway (and, because traffic seems to fall off 50% or more anyway regardless of what I post, on the weekends, too), it seemed like a good idea. But I couldn't think of something that ties together the common themes of this blog, yet maintains a suitably Friday-blogging light-hearted feel to it. And then I came across this article: L. R. Milgrom (2006). Towards a New…

It's not just homeopathy, it's quantum homeopathy, which is so much better

Note: Orac is away somewhere warm recharging his Tarial cells for further science and skepticism. In the meantime, he is rerunning some of his favorite posts. Because it's vacation, he thought he'd rerun a fun post. He needs it; vacation is almost over, and it's back to work on Monday. So, here's one from 2007. I believe I reran it once a few years ago, but it's been at least three years, which means that if you haven't been reading at least that long it's new to you. Besides, it's the post that introduced me to the woo-tastic wonder that it Lionel Milgrom. While thinking about ways to make…

Rabies, Annual Influenza, and Low Hanging Fruit

Olivia Judson describes what it would take to prevent almost all rabies deaths from Africa (rabies currently kills around 55,000 people annually): To eliminate the disease from humans, therefore, it needs to be eliminated from dogs. And the way to do that is through dog vaccination. (At first, it may seem perverse to vaccinate dogs rather than humans, given that it's humans we want to protect. But because rabies is spread by dogs, not people, we can't break the chain of transmission unless we vaccinate the animals that spread it.) The crucial factor in predicting the spread of an infectious…

The Cranky Book Meme

Chad, over at [Uncertain Principles](http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2006/10/cranky_book_meme_voted_off_t…) found an interesting meme, which I thought would be fun to take a stab at: >What authors have you given up on for good? And why? Darn good question, that is. I'm often fascinated by comparing an authors earliest stories/books to their later ones, to see how they changed. And there are definitely a few authors who's work I really enjoyed at one time, but who have deteriorated to the point where I'll never read them again. I'll tell you about three of mine - feel free to add your…

I get email

One of the mysteries of my email is that there are noticeable waves of like content that come through. Right now I'm getting a lot of hate mail that rants and raves about how clever I must think I am … which is definitely not a theme that I've been pushing, so all I can assume is that somewhere out there is a website or email chain that is talking about my horrible egotism. Either that, or they're all just suddenly feeling very inadequate and are lashing out. Here's one that not only accuses me of parading my mighty brains about, but of also pretending to be "'cool' and 'hip'" — but anyone…

Planet in the Zone (Breaks Embargo)

The Swiss-French planet hunter team have a new interesting discovery. A low mass "super Earth" in a potential habitable zone. Nature news story UPDATE: Details are up on the Extrasolar Planet Encyclopedia and Udry's web page and here is the actual preprint (PDF) Hm, interesting, the full solution gives a finite eccentricity to the middle planet, which is interesting, but it could still be very small. Dynamically, looking at formation it makes a big difference if the middle planet has e << 0.1 or e ~ 0.1-0.2 Interestingly the numbers in the submitted paper are slightly different from…

How to Teach Physics Real Good

There has been a lot of effort to try to figure out how to teach physics better, at the university level, in the US. Of course, we know perfectly well how to do that. To teach physics well, you provide an intensive, mathematically rigorous in-sequence series of classes. You need at least two different parallel classes per term, each class a prerequisite for the succeeding class and coordinated syllabii for parallel and successive classes, providing an initial short review of the previous material. You also need a parallel sequence of coordinated mathematics classes, such that the…

Donors, Disasters, and Disease

When severe flooding in Pakistan left millions of people without food, shelter, and water, I wrote a post wondering why that disaster was getting less attention than Haiti's earthquake. I suspected the gradual nature of the disaster was part of the problem, and commenters had additional suggestions, ranging from Haiti's closeness to the US to the US public's overall view of Pakistan as a nation. Last week, The New York Times' Lydia Polgreen put some numbers on the Haitian earthquake vs. Pakistani floods comparison and delved into reasons for the disparity: In all, $3.4 billion has been…

Sing, Sing a Song

Over at his AOL gig, John Scalzi points to a list purporting to be the Top Ten All Time Pop Singalong Songs. Here's the list: 1) Baha Men - Who Let the Dogs Out 2) Beatles - Hey Jude 3) Bee Gees - Stayin' Alive 4) Whitney Houston - I Will Always Love You 5) Tommy James and the Shondells - Mony Mony 6) Joan Jett and the Blackhearts - I Love Rock and Roll 7) Don McLean - American Pie 8) Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody 9) Santana Featuring Rob Thomas - Smooth 10) Village People - YMCA Words fail me. Almost. Words like "madness" and "sadly deluded" and "totally on crack, maybe cut with something…

Light, up to 11

Whew! Back from a very successful wedding and honeymoon, moving into a new apartment, writing thank-you notes, and all the fun jazz that comes with being newly married. But hey, we've got to get this blog cranking again at some point, and now's as good a time as any. We'll kick things back off with a letter from a reader, Scott writes in with a question: If you have a cubic meter of nothing but highly condensed photons, what would the upper limit on its energy density be? (If there is even a limit.) Classically there's no theoretical limit on the field strength, though radiation pressure…

Another book list

There's another one of those book lists circulating - a list of 100 works of which it is claimed that the average American has read only six. Whether that is true or not (and Chad doesn't believe it), the list contains the usual mixed bag of works. Below the fold is the list; bolded works were read and finished (31), italicized were either not finished or are compilations (8). 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6 The Bible…

The Fit-Fat Fight Reignites

The fit-fat fight -- whether someone can be obese but still healthy -- has reignited (if it ever really stopped) with an article in the Archives of Internal Medicine that was reported in the NYTimes. Wildman et al. used data from the NHANES study and looked at the relationship between Body Mass Index (BMI) and whether the individuals had a variety of other indicators of cardiovascular risk -- mostly blood tests that indicate poor cardiometabolic physiology like high cholesterol or high blood pressure. What they found was that large numbers of obese individuals (BMI > 30) had few…

Some quick thoughts on undergraduate research.

Jake, Chad, and Rob have posted about a newly published study about the benefits of research experiences for undergraduates. The quick version is that involvement in research (at least in science/technology/engineering/mathematics disciplines) seems to boost the student's enthusiasm for the subject and confidence, not to mention nearly doubling the chances that the student will pursue a Ph.D. I'm going to chime in with some observations of my own: 1. Making knowledge is different from learning knowledge. One of the important things undergraduate research can do is give a student insight to…

Avatar as a racist trope

HP asked me to look at a couple of posts discussing Avatar. I did. SEK at Lawyers, Guns and Money writes of Avitar: ...the film is racist. Its fundamental narrative logic is racist: it transposes the cultural politics of Westerns (in which the Native Americans are animists who belong to a more primitive race) onto an interplanetary conflict and then assuages the white guilt that accompanies acts of racial and cultural genocide by having a white man save the noble savages (who are also racists) This is true but there are redeeming qualities worth noting. For example, in the end .... the…

Snobs

I didn't quite know what to expect when I entered the theater to see The Dark Knight last evening, I just knew it was going to be good.* I was absolutely blown away. This isn't the sort of film where you walk out saying "It was good for a comic book movie." It is a great movie, period, something that changes what a comic-based mythology can be with careful planning (even if the Joker's love of chaos seeps into the mix). Unlike so many other films there's not the sense of obligation to hardcore comic book fans that results in endless streams of in-jokes, cameos, and crossovers; much like it…

Emailing your professor: some suggestions

Chad says all the online academics are obligated to respond, somehow, to this New York Times piece on emails from students to professors. So, I shall. But, rather than digging into the details of the article itself, or worrying about the sample size upon which it is based, or the assertions by at least one of the professors interviewed that she was misrepresented, I'll just share some advice. This is based entirely on my email likes and dislikes, so take it with a grain of sodium chloride. Before emailing an urgent question to your professor, spend a moment or two making sure you are not…

Thursday Throwdown: More volcano news than I can list here

I'm still playing catch-up after my week in the desert, so I've seen a lot of articles I've wanted to mention ... but a certain other volcano has taken up a lot of my time. However, I will attempt to make amends for that now. By the way, would you believe Ubehebe Crater was closed? How do they close a volcano, anyway? However, I did get a great snap of a welded tuff on the road outside of Shoshone, CA. A strongly welded tuff near Shoshone, CA. The dark interior is remelted volcanic ash/tephra surrounded by less welded pink tuff with abundant pumice clasts. Denison student David Sisak is on…

Why we lecture

Last year, Brad deLong did a most excellent dissection of the lecture, how it came to be, and why universities need to rethink the whole approach to learning concept before they get eaten by technology development providing even cheaper content delivery. I've been meaning to editorialize on this for a while, and then Chad planning for start of classes prodded me into action, doubly so when Chad posted a link to jolly nice resource for active learning in physics at Learnification Now, others have provided expositions on how to teach wellgreat... So I guess it is up to me to risk the wrath of…

Considering the science world's 'massive communication problem'.

In the aftermath of a pretty enthusiastic pile-on to a claim that Expelled! had a successful first week of release, Chris Mooney calls for "serious introspection about the massive communication crisis we're facing in the science world". You know I'm always up for introspection. Indeed, regular readers have been very patient with my labored attempts to get clear on the whole "framing" thing. While I'm not prepared to advertise myself as any kind of expert on framing, I finally think I know what questions I'd like to ask of the people with framing expertise to try to sort out the ongoing slug-…

Framing Science - the Dialogue of the Deaf

My SciBlings Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet just published an article in 'Science' (which, considering its topic is, ironically, behind the subscription wall, but you can check the short press release) about "Framing Science" Carl Zimmer, PZ Myers, Mike Dunford (also check the comments here), John Fleck, Larry Moran, Dietram Scheufele, Kristina Chew, Randy Olson, James Hrynyshyn, Paul Sunstone and Alan Boyle have, so far, responded and their responses (and the comment threads) are worth your time to read. Chris and Matt respond to some of them. Matt has more in-depth explanations here, here and…

What happened to bird flu? (partial answer, here)

If you were wondering what happened to bird flu, you can ask the people in Vietnam, South Korea and Nigeria. The virus doesn't care if you know where it is or not. It just keeps going about its business, making copies of itself, using whatever hosts are around whose genetic and protein copy machines it can hijack for its own use. With all the talk about "where's bird flu?" it is useful to remind ourselves it's still around. And flu season is just starting: Nigeria: Bird flu reached every region of Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, after government inspectors found infections in three…

In Praise of Ken Ward's Worker Safety Reporting

The Charleston Gazette's Ken Ward amazes me with his tenacious attention to worker safety, his watchdog instincts, and his exceptional commitment to follow-up.   One of Ward's practices that I especially appreciate is his detailed reporting of worker fatalities in West Virginia.  Take for example, the death in March 2008 of Ricky Collins Sr., 44, a truck driver for a subsidiary of Massey Energy.   Ward reported initially on Mr. Collins' death explaining: "...he was killed Thursday [March 27] when he tried to help free a trailer that was stuck on a steep...or 'humpbacked,' railroad…

Tenure and War

The debate over the tenure process that Rob kicked up at Galactic Interactions continues with Chad worrying about senior academic complacence and the Incoherent Ponderer pondering some more the latter makes a good point - the big hurdle is moving from postdoc to tenure track, that is anecdotally where most of the involuntary attrition takes place (a lot of people who stop after PhD seem to do it by choice, they've had a taste and decided to do something else, thank you). Once on the tenure track, the odds are better; the real issue seems to be the process, not the outcome. It is a brutal…

The Purpose of Academia

Chad has an interesting riff on tenure and academia and the "business model" for universities. He touches some buttons. Several things came together today for me, one was a website that required me to pick an occupation that "best fit" what I did. I reluctantly selected teacher, because I am not an administrator, certainly not an engineer and nothing else was even close. But I am not a teacher, although I do "teach" classes. Nor am I that abomination of a neologism, the "educator". I do interact with students, I present material in a structured manner (I like to think). I guide students in…

The Most Difficult Course... For A Teacher

"It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge." -Albert Einstein Last month, an interesting conversation happened on the topic of the most difficult course that a student takes in their studies. Image credit: Steve Perrin / University of Michigan MSIS. The question, of course, was asking about most difficult in terms of the course content that the student must learn. In any field, there are plenty of options to choose from, and while an individual student's mileage may vary, teachers and professors tend to learn very quickly just which courses (and…

How many countries have ever had a woman leader?

First, a little Benazir Bhutto story, since we are on the subject of women leaders. A friend of mine was to be on the podium of Harvard's graduation the year Benazir Bhutto was to give the keynote, and heard this conversation. John Galbraith, the economists who was also a professor at Harvard, Bhutto's former undergraduate advisor, and her friend, was also to be on the stage, and all the famous people who were to be on that stage were to walk out in procession. The Secret Service, who were protecting Bhutto who at the time was Head of State, arranged the people so that two or three guys,…

Teh AMO hottness

I should probably sneak in a few posts before Chad gets back. It's been a hectic week, as the time came for my current experiment (as it does for all experiments) where one stops futzing around trying to make things better, and takes the actual data, with an eye to moving on. This means that you want good, clean runs with lots of attention to detail (as opposed to the semi-qualitative exploration of parameter space, when you're first seeing an effect), and the first thing life-wise that suffers during this phase is blogging. But the second-worst blog post in the world is the why haven'…

The Philosophy of Science of Lord of the Rings

Phil at Bad Astronomy opined (and it is a common opinion) that the supernatural is incoherent: If you posit some thing that has no perceivable or measurable effect, then it may as well not exist. And as soon as you claim it does have an effect -- it can be seen, heard, recorded, felt -- then it must be in some way testable, and therefore subject to science. Joshua was not so sure about this. The supernatural could, perhaps, interact observably with the universe at some times but not at others. Under normal circumstances the normal laws apply, under others, supernatural stuff happens. Chad…

Drunkard's Tennis and the Advice of Winners

Writing grants and teaching, not to mention trying to get some actual research done, has taken up a considerable amount of my time this quarter. I mean, sheesh, I've barely had any time to read! This has, of course, made me grumpy. So when the publisher of The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow offered me a review copy of the book, I was very happy. I mean, I love probability and I love, um, well....you know :) First of all, let me say that Mlodinow's book is preaching to the converted! A large portion of his book is devoted to showing how randomness…

Liveblogging the 2009 State of Innovation Summit

I'm here in DC at the Newseum for the State of Innovation Summit, a collaboration between SEED and the Council on Competitiveness. The crowd is pretty awesome - right now Adam Bly, SEED's CEO, is sitting a few rows from me with E.O. Wilson. Earlier, Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, talked about a conversation he'd had recently with Steven Chu about using the Smithsonian's resources to enhance public understanding of climate change. As he spoke, the intense sunshine of a summer day in DC played across the Smithsonian castle turrets directly behind him (the seventh floor…

Early, somewhat controversial hominid walked like an Australopith

The ape human split is a bit of a moving target. In the 1970s and early 1980s, there were geneticists who placed it at very recent (close to 4 million years ago) and palaeoanthropologists, using fossils, who placed it at much earlier. During the 1980s, the ape-human split moved back in time because of the importance of sivapithecus, then later in time when Sivapithecus slipped and fell out of the hominid/hominin (human ancestor) family tree. Meanwhile the geneticists were moving towards a more and more recent split. At one point not too long ago, all the evidence converged with the split…

Stressing the Fiction in Science Fiction

Science fiction has been the "buzz" in the past few days, starting with PZ's post on how biology gets snubbed by SF authors and followed by thoughts from Chad, Razib, Rob and Janet. The consensus? Science in general gets snubbed by most SF authors. Why? As many of the commenters correctly point out, SF is still fiction and fiction has its own rules that are usually more important than the science. Bending the laws of physics (arguably the most abused section of science in SF) is not just a playful extrapolation of existing knowledge, it is a tool for the author to further the story. Without…