jlynch | May 18, 2009
(I was originally going to hold off posting this until May 31st, but there seems little point)
I've been blogging here at Scienceblogs since January 2006, nearly three and a half years. During that time I have made many good friends - both fellow bloggers and readers - and have enjoyed the support of Seed Media Group. The time has, however, come for me to move on. The reasons are numerous but are also not really worth recounting here.
I do intend to continue blogging and will be found at http://jmlynch.wordpress.com at least for the short term. Hopefully some of you will follow me there.…
jlynch | May 18, 2009From a report released by BIO: The Biotechnology Industry Organization:
On average, only 28% of the high school students taking the ACT , which is a national standardized test for college admission , reached a score indicating college readiness for biology and no state reached even 50%.
Only 52% of 12th graders are at or above a basic level of achievement in the sciences, and for 8th graders only 57% are at a basic level of achievement.
Average scores for 12th graders in the sciences have actually declined from 1996 to 2005 and shown no improvement for 8th graders both on overall and the…
jlynch | May 15, 2009NCSE has announced that two remaining anti-evolution bills have died in committee: Alabama & Missouri.
To recap the year:
Mississippi - dead in committee
Oklahoma - dead in committee
Iowa - dead in committee
New Mexico - dead in committee
Florida - dead in committee
Alabama - dead in committee
Missouri - dead in committee
Texas - in committee
The boys over at the Discovery Institute must be a little down this evening. With a record like that, they are the Detroit Lions of anti-evolutionism.
jlynch | May 15, 2009
Finished grading today, so the Spring semester is finally over. I'm out of here for a few weeks. See you sometime in June.
jlynch | May 11, 2009So I'm trying to simplify things in real life as I think I am suffering from information overload (among other things).
First task was to clean up my Facebook friends. From here on, it's family, colleagues and (usually graduate) students. Folks I know only in virtual space are likely to have gotten bumped. Sorry if you were one of those - truly, no offense was intended. I'm willing to follow folks on Twitter though, so feel free to join that way. Just follow me and I'll reciprocate. There's also Friendfeed.
Second task will be to prioritize regarding blogging. That will involve some thinking…
jlynch | May 10, 2009Turns out that yesterday I posted my 2000th post here at Scienceblogs without even noticing it. Heh!
jlynch | May 10, 2009Back in December 2006 I referred to Francis Beckwith as an ID supporter. This resulted in he informing me that he "has never been much of fan [of] design arguments, ever [and that his] interest in the debate focuses on the jurisprudential questions involving the First Amendment and what could be permissibly taught in public schools under that amendment." At that time I retracted and removed any reference to Beckwith as a supporter. More recently, Beckwith has objected to others referring to him as a creationist and an ID supporter. Tim Sandefur has replied, and now Barbara Forrest has offered…
jlynch | May 9, 2009I spent this morning at a workshop for K-12 biology teachers. The workshop was organized by the School of Life Sciences here at ASU and gave some 20 students to interact with faculty regarding teaching evolution. My presentation was titled "Teaching Evolution One Icon At A Time" and aimed to educate the teachers regarding the Discovery Institute's "teach the strengths and weaknesses of evolution" approach post-Kitzmiller. Slides are below:
jlynch | May 7, 2009Mark Chu-Carroll has done it so that you don't have to ... read the Dembski & Marks paper that I mentioned a few days back. Shorter MC-C: "Same old rubbish." Read his full verdict here.
Update (5/11): Dembski "responds" (and apparently cannot bring himself to actually name who makes the criticism) and Mark sets him straight.
jlynch | May 4, 2009"Biological imperatives trump laws."
Quick ... who said that? Evil Darwinist? Nazi eugenicist? Liberal professor? Nope to all three.
Answer is Orson Scott Card - sci-fi hack, proponent of guiltless genocide, and anti-Darwinist - in a screed against gay marriage. One is left wondering whether rape is OK to Card - after all, spreading your seed is one of those "biological imperatives".
Longer Card:
How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy…
jlynch | May 3, 2009In early 2009, a bunch of folks at UCSB took over the Torpig botnet for ten days. In that time, they observed more that 180,000 infections and recorded over 70G of data that the botnet captured. During that time, over 8,000 accounts at financial institutions were "acquired".
The report is available online [pdf]
jlynch | May 2, 2009The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine is a sham concocted by Merck and Elsevier. See here and here. I'm sure there are some sort of ethical issues here.
Update (5/3): Janet and Isis have more on this. Janet notes:
Myself, I'm not really moved by the claim that publishing standards were so different 6 years ago that Elsevier has clean hands here. It's pretty obvious from this response that Elsevier was happy to take money from Merck to make something journal-like, trading on Elsevier's reputation as a publisher of proper journals. And the "no plans to look further into the matter…
jlynch | May 1, 2009
My postdoc was spent looking at hybridization between humpback (Gila cypha, above) and roundtail (G. robusta) chub in the Colorado river system (see here for a publication that stemmed from that - perhaps sometime I'll post on that work). My fieldwork was at the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers where we'd capture, measure, tag & photo the fish. Thus, I'm happy to report the following:
The humpback chub, a closely watched indicator of the Grand Canyon's ecological health, has grown steadily in number since 2001 as changing conditions on the Colorado River have…
jlynch | May 1, 2009In 2000, Baylor's Michael Polanyi Center (Dembski's pet project) hosted a conference title "The Nature of Nature: An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Role of Naturalism in Science". It now looks like the proceedings of the conference are finally appearing:
Bruce L. Gordon and William A. Dembski, eds., The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2009).
You've got to hand it to those ID boyos, they believe in loooooooong editing phases on their projects. This could explain why we're waiting on so much that has been promised.
The volume…
jlynch | May 1, 2009Yet another defeat for the anti-evolutionists. NCSE is reporting that Florida's Senate Bill 2396 has died in committee. To recap:
Mississippi - dead in committee
Oklahoma - dead in committee
Iowa - dead in committee
New Mexico - dead in committee
Florida - dead in committee
Alabama - in committee
Missouri - in committee
Texas - in committee
I can't imagine the Discovery Institute is too happy. It has failed miserably in developing "a new science for a new century" and, having given science up, has failed at legislative action. Time for Plan 9, I think.
jlynch | April 29, 2009Earlier this month we celebrated Paul Nelson Day. Today is yet another ID-related (and as it happens, also Paul Nelson related) anniversary. Four years ago, I posted a piece (reprinted a year and a half later here) on Nelson's forthcoming monograph on common descent. By now, it has been "forthcoming" for eleven years. At the time of my original post, Nelson claimed that he was "carefully doing a good job with a rich and difficult topic" but also noted that he and Dembski "have been working on a shorter article, with some of the monograph's main points, which we plan to submit to the best peer…
jlynch | April 29, 2009Mark posted this on Facebook, but is is so wonderful I need to pass it along: