jlynch | July 31, 2007Sahotra Sarkar (Philosophy of Biology, University of Texas) has revived his blog in response to the creationist takeover of the Texas Board of Education.
Sarkar is the author of Doubting Darwin? Creationist Designs on Evolution and thus will no doubt have good things to say about the situation in Texas.
jlynch | July 30, 2007Events
1964 - Ranger program: Ranger 7 sends back the first close-up photographs of the moon, with images 1,000 times clearer than anything ever seen from earth-bound telescopes.
1999 - Discovery Program: Lunar Prospector - NASA intentionally crashes the spacecraft into the Moon, thus ending its mission to detect frozen water on the moon’s surface.
Births
1718 - John Canton, English physicist
1858 - Richard Dixon Oldham, British geologist
1860 - Mary Vaux Walcott, American artist and naturalist
1918 - Paul D. Boyer, American chemist, Nobel Prize Laureate
Deaths
1980 - Pascual Jordan, German…
jlynch | July 29, 2007Births
1641 - Regnier de Graaf, Dutch physician and anatomist
1889 - Vladimir Zworykin, Russian physicist
jlynch | July 28, 2007I get back from Exeter later on today, but as it turns out will be departing up north for a short break from the heat of Phoenix. Blogging will recommence later this week.
Below is your Today in Science.
Events
2005 -Astronomers announce their discovery of Eris, a possible tenth planet.
Births
1898 - Isidor Isaac Rabi, American physicist, Nobel Prize Laureate
Deaths
1781 - Johann Kies, German astronomer and mathematician
1994 - Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, British chemist, Nobel Prize Laureate
jlynch | July 27, 2007Births
1867 - Charles Dillon Perrine, American-born astronomer
1902 - Karl Popper, Austrian-born philosopher
1904 - Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov, Russian physicist, Nobel laureate
1915 - Charles Townes, American physicist, Nobel laureate
1925 - Baruch S. Blumberg, American scientist, Nobel laureate
Deaths
1869 - Jan Evangelista PurkynÄ, Czech anatomist
1930 - Allvar Gullstrand, Swedish ophthalmologist, Nobel laureate
1968 - Otto Hahn, German chemist, Nobel laureate
2000 - Abraham Pais, Dutch-born American physicist, science historian, and biographer of Albert Einstein.
2002 - Archer John…
jlynch | July 27, 2007Gert Kortoff has written a review of Behe's Edge of Evolution. He points out:
Readers interested in "Intelligent Design Theory" will be disappointed. The reader won't find an exposition of the Intelligent Design Theory. Nine out of ten chapters are about the limitations of neo-Darwinian evolution and the last chapter is about fine-tuning. There is no chapter devoted to design theory. Not even one paragraph describing what design theory actually is. ... Behe has the complete freedom to write about design theory, but no coherent treatment of the theory can be found. Professor Jerry Coyne stated…
jlynch | July 27, 2007It's just after noon here in Exeter and I'm getting ready to head off to lunch. Yesterday's session on multi-level selection was very interesting with Rick Michod (U of Arizona) giving a particularly though provoking paper on the transition to multicellularity. Today's sessions are relatively outside my interests, but I expect to catch an afternoon session on paleobiology before the General Business meeting (that most beloved of society events). Hopefully the rain will stay away!
jlynch | July 26, 2007Events
1921 - Researchers at the University of Toronto led by biochemist Frederick Banting announce the discovery of the hormone insulin.
Births
1733 - Jeremiah Dixon, English surveyor and astronomer
1833 - Thomas George Bonney, English geologist
1848 - Loránd Eötvös, Hungarian physicist
1881 - Hans Fischer, German chemist, Nobel laureate
Deaths
1844 - John Dalton, English physicist and chemist
1917 - Emil Theodor Kocher, Swiss surgeon, Nobel laureate
1931 - Auguste-Henri Forel, Swiss entomologist
jlynch | July 25, 2007Well I made it safely to England and the ISHPSSB meeting. Yesterday evening was spent in the pleasant company of Precious Little Snowflake and others. Good fun and good beer was had by all. Today the conference proper starts and I'll be in two sessions on Evolutionary Developmental biology ("evodevo") and perhaps one on either iconoclastic biologists or multilevel selection. Tomorrow looks good with sessions on selection and homology. My own session (on teaching methods) isn't until Saturday afternoon, so I have plenty of wind-up time.
More anon ... if the damp and greyness doesn't depress…
jlynch | July 25, 2007Events
1963 - Syncom 2, the world’s first geosynchronous satellite, is launched from Cape Canaveral on a Delta B booster.
Deaths
1960 - Maud Menten, Canadian biochemist and co-discoverer of the Michaelis-Menten equations
jlynch | July 24, 2007Events
1978 - Birth of Louise Brown, the first "test tube baby".
1984 - Salyut 7 Cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya becomes the second woman in space and the first to perform a space walk.
Births
1799 - David Douglas, Scottish botanist
1920 - Rosalind Franklin, English crystallographer whose work formed the basis for Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double helical structure of DNA.
Deaths
1616 - Andreas Libavius, German physician and chemist
1842 - Dominique Jean Larrey, French surgeon
1843 - Charles Macintosh, Scottish chemist and inventor
1963 - Ugo Cerletti, Italian neurologist
jlynch | July 23, 2007Births
1794 - Johan Georg Forchhammer, Danish geologist
Deaths
1974 - James Chadwick, English physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1986 - Fritz Albert Lipmann, American biochemist, Nobel Prize laureate
2005 - Richard Doll, English epidemiologist
jlynch | July 22, 2007Events
1962 - Telstar relays the first live trans-Atlantic television signal.
1972 - The United States launches Landsat 1, first Earth-resources satellite.
Births
1775 - Etienne-Louis Malus, French physicist and mathematician
1886 - Walter H. Schottky, German physicist
1906 - Vladimir Prelog, Croatian chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1773 - George Edwards, English naturalist
1878 - Carl Freiherr von Rokitansky, Bohemian physician
1916 - Sir William Ramsay, Scottish chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
1968 - Henry Hallett Dale, English scientist, Nobel Prize laureate
jlynch | July 22, 2007
Above is a picture of a lightning strike east of Camelback Mountain last night. The monsoon season has officially started here in Phoenix, so we’re looking at a few weeks of increased humidity and thunderstorm activity. A good enough reason to skip out of town. Tuesday sees me head off to England for the ISHPSSB bi-annual conference - the premier meeting of historians, philosophers and social scientists interested in biology. Four days of talks and socializing with people such as John Wilkins. Good fun, though I hear there is flooding in the SouthWest of England that might disrupt travel…
jlynch | July 22, 2007So Orac is worth $3590 and Janet tunes in at $4875
Me? I’m
worth $4050.00. Dead though.
$4050.00The Cadaver Calculator - Find out how much your body is worth. From Mingle2 - Free Online Dating
Mingle2 - Free Online Dating
jlynch | July 22, 2007Over at Obsidian Wings, Hilzoy has a thoughtful post on the lessons we should learn from the Iraq debacle, including #4:
When the rest of the world thinks you’re crazy, it’s worth entertaining the possibility that they might be right. We should not defer to their judgment mindlessly, but we should have what Jefferson called "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind."
Well worth checking out.
jlynch | July 21, 2007
Births
1711 - Georg Wilhelm Richmann, Russian physicist
1784 - Friedrich Bessel, German mathematician and astronomer
1887 - Gustav Ludwig Hertz, German physicist, Nobel laureate
1888 - Kirk Bryan, American geologist
1888 - Selman Waksman, Ukrainian-born biochemist, Nobel laureate
Deaths
1802 - Marie François Xavier Bichat, French anatomist
1826 - Giuseppe Piazzi, Italian astronomer
1922 - Jokichi Takamine, Japanese chemist
jlynch | July 21, 2007Dembski pimps an interview with his new bestest buddy, the electrical and computer engineer, Robert Marks "director of the Baylor Evolutionary Informatics Lab" (which is comprised of Dembski, Marks and two students). The Isaac Newton of Information Theory says:
I hope you catch from the interview the ambitiousness of the lab and how it promises to put people like Christoph Adami and Rob Pennock out of business (compare www.evolutionaryinformatics.org with devolab.cse.msu.edu).
Let’s do that shall we? Let’s compare the two labs. Number of journal papers by the Baylor Evolutionary Informatics…
jlynch | July 21, 2007Which LOLcat are you? I are serious cat (37% affectionate, 33% excitable, 51% hungry). Who haz my sandwich?
Hungry for knowledge in any internet forum, you demand decorum. Any off-topic remarks, absurd statements, or tomfoolery on the interweb is deeply frowned upon by you. Truth has no room for drollery.
jlynch | July 20, 2007Events
1925 - Scopes Trial: In Dayton, Tennessee, high school biology teacher John T. Scopes is found guilty of teaching evolution in class and fined $100.
1969 - Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin become the first men to walk on the Moon, during the Apollo 11 mission.
1983 - The world’s lowest temperature is recorded at Vostok Station, Antarctica at â89.2°C (â129°F).
Births
1620 - Jean Picard, French astronomer
1710 - Paul Möhring, German physician
1810 - Henri Victor Regnault, French chemist
1923 - Rudolph A. Marcus, Canadian chemist, Nobel laureate
Deaths
2004 - Edward B.…