Basic Concepts
evolvingthoughts | July 26, 2008
In the process of maintaining the Basic Concepts in Science list I often have to make a judgement call about whether or not something is a basic enough post. For example I have a slew of rather good but to my mind very technical posts by Carl Brannen at Mass which are labelled "Elementary Science" that I cannot understand. I have a PhD in philosophy of science, so I figure if I can't understand them fully, they are pretty much not at the basic level. But then again, they are basic in that science.
So this raises (not begs!) the question of what is a basic concept...
... and this has no…
sciencewoman | June 13, 2008
Noted the other day when Minnow was puzzling. It's a good thing she can't read yet.
skookumchick | June 11, 2008Okay, I've been having some interesting conversations on and offline about what boils down to engineering epistemology and identity. Of course, that's my research area, so I dig it. And I want to start having a bigger conversation about if there's anything particularly indelible or inherent about "engineers" or "engineering." But first I want to throw open the comment doors, and see what your thoughts or beliefs are about engineers' place in the world - how they construct themselves, how they reproduce or resist disciplinary narratives about engineering, why they may be more prone to…
jstemwedel | February 25, 2008Coming on the heels of my basic concepts post about the norms of science identified by sociologist Robert K. Merton [1], and a follow-up post on values from the larger society that compete with these norms, this post will examine norms that run counter to the ones Merton identified that seem to arise from within the scientific community. Specifically, I will discuss the findings of Melissa S. Anderson [2] from her research examining how committed university faculty and Ph.D. students are to Merton's norms and to the anti-norms -- and how this commitment compares to reported behavior.
You'll…
jstemwedel | February 23, 2008A while back, I offered a basic concepts post that discussed the four norms identified by sociologist Robert K. Merton [1] as the central values defining the tribe of science. You may recall from that earlier post that the Mertonian norms of science are:
Universalism
"Communism"
Disinterestedness
Organized Skepticism
It will come as no surprise, though, that what people -- even scientists -- actually do often falls short of what we agree we ought to do. Merton himself noted such instances, and saw the criticisms scientists made of their peers who didn't live up to the norms as good…
skookumchick | February 16, 2008Some of the comments to this post brought up the topic of implicit gender bias, and I thought the time might be ripe for a couple of pointers on the subject. Although I'm changing the context a little (from ethics training to search committees), the comments on reducing bias remain the same.
The first is that, in general, but with considerable caveats,* BOTH women and men are biased against women's applications, papers and such. The issue of gender bias is NOT just a problem of men being biased against women.
In fact, let's be clear - in all of these stories about gender, there are some…
jstemwedel | January 29, 2008Since much of what I write about the responsible conduct of research takes them for granted, it's time that I wrote a basic concepts post explaining the norms of science famously described by sociologist Robert K. Merton in 1942. [1] Before diving in, here's Merton's description:
The ethos of science is that affectively toned complex of values and norms which is held to be binding on the man of science. The norms are expressed in the form of prescriptions, proscriptions, preferences, and permissions. They are legitimatized in terms of institutional values. These imperatives, transmitted…
evolvingthoughts | January 24, 2008
We got delicioused, for the Basic Concepts Post, and wow, scores of links and (I hope) new readers. Some of the referrals [UPDATED]:
Del.icio.us
Geek Dad at Wired
Unbridled learning
Andy's classes
Farm School
A Small Speck
A Garden of Varied Delights
the Daily Irrelevant
Clipmarks
ABQNews
Frédéric Boulanger's Journal
A Lone Tree Green Meadow
Thinking as a Hobby
Masson's Blog
Rational Homeschooling
You Are Wrong
Trash Bin
Jon Lowder (with the best Latin tag: Stultus est sicut stultus facit, quoting the famous Roman philosopher, Forrestus Gumpius, a Stoic, I believe)
Reportr.net
Welcome to…
sciencewoman | January 22, 2008It's mid-January and you are probably contemplating whether we'll get another snow day this week. Or maybe you are thinking about your upcoming ski trip? Or how you'll pay your heating bills? any case, winter is probably on your mind.
Ah winter, that time of year when the Earth is farthest from the Sun. Right?
Wrong. The Earth is actually closest to the Sun in early January. It's called the perihelion and this year it occurred on January 3rd.
My readers in the Southern Hemisphere are probably feeling pretty smug right now. After all, it's pretty obvious that they are in the heat of summer…
voltagegate | October 12, 2007Over the past few billion years, life has persisted through countless geologic, atmospheric and extraterrestrial disturbances through its ability to change with the environment. Ecosystems exist in their present state because they have evolved to be as such. It took trillions of events - biotic and abiotic - for these complex systems to weave their thick web of dependence.
One way for ecologists to define and correlate these varied environments is by categorizing these areas by the types of plants that inhabit them. These categories are called biomes. Categorizing each biome by plant life is…
voltagegate | October 10, 2007Ecology is a study of interactions or relationships between organisms and the environment; the connectedness between living systems and non-living systems on the Earth. Ecology is, in a sense, a historical field, founded upon the Earth's far reaching and ever evolving natural history.
The term ecology comes from the Greek root words oikos logos, literally "the study of household," first combined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866. Haeckel was referring to the interactions within the house of nature, and we have used the word ecology (translated from the German Oekologie or Ãkologie) to describe complex…
voltagegate | September 24, 2007
A stand of Dahurian Larch beginning to change color in Northeast Siberia.
Between 50 and 65 degrees N latitude lies a globe encircling band of forest dominated by conifers and chilly winds called the boreal forest (boreal is from the Greek word for north) or the taiga (Russian for "marshy pine forest"). From Iceland's wiry birch forests to the larch covered northern areas of Siberia, the boreal forest grows in a climate where extremes are commonplace, and where much of the wilderness remains preserved.
The boreal forest is generally a cold place; it is winter in these areas for over half the…
voltagegate | September 15, 2007Another kind comment from a student reader on one of the older biomes posts:
Thanks for posting this! It really helped me get some info for MY "Tropical Dry Forest Biome" project for biology class. I couldn't find any info at the library or on any other sites! So I thank goodness this was here....
You're welcome Haley! Keep up the blogging (and the blogging).
So why haven't I written any basics posts in a while? Well, to be honest, much of my time and energy in the past few months has been focused on getting a job in my field. I've recently had to pick up a few shifts doing catering locally…
evolvingthoughts | September 12, 2007
Recently, that is since 1975 or so, the view has arisen that a living thing is something that satisfies several conditions.
In 1966 George C. Williams introduced the notion of an "evolutionary gene" in his Adaptation and Natural Selection, which was, he said, a "cybernetic abstraction". This idea was taken up by Richard Dawkins in his The Selfish Gene.
Dawkins posited that evolution had some necessary and sufficient criteria:
There had to be replicators with the following properties:
Longevity (over evolutionary time)
Fecundity (more made than can survive)
Fidelity (nearly perfect…
evolvingthoughts | September 7, 2007
Now we turn to the modern accounts of life.
In 1828, Friedrich Wöhler produced uric acid without using “kidney of man or dog”. Prior to that time, there was considered to be something different between organic chemistry and inorganic chemistry. Living things had some “vital fluid” that other things lacked. Most often this was expressed in Aristotelian terms even if, like Buffon, they were very anti-Aristotelian. But still life was not fully explicable in chemical terms.
Vitalism, as this idea was termed, did not die with Wöhler, though. In fact, we can find instances of it until the…
evolvingthoughts | September 5, 2007
Carl Zimmer has one of his usually clear and precise articles on recent work on the nature of life, focussing on the work of Carol Cleland, who is at the National Astrobiology Institute, despite reduced funding for actual science by the present administration. I met Carol last year when we both spoke at the Egenis conference on the philosophy of microbiology.
Carol argues that we do not have a theory of what life is. She may be right. One of her arguments is that if there were multiple "origins of life" events that used different chemistry, we may not even be able to "see" the others…
jstemwedel | August 22, 2007A regular reader of the blog emailed me the following:
Have you ever considered setting up a section for laymen in your blog where posts related to the philosophy of science, how research is conducted, how scientists think etc. are archived? An example of what I think might be a good article to include would be your post on Marcus Ross.
Part of why I like reading your blog is because you analyze these fundamental issues in science, and I believe that this will help any laymen who stumble upon your blog for the first time quite a bit. It certainly helped me! I had to trawl through tons of…
evolvingthoughts | August 10, 2007
Rob Wilson has a new entry up at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entitled "The Biological notion of an individual". It discusses an interesting problem, one that goes back to discussions by Julian Huxley in 1911. What is an individual in biology?
The term "individual" means, etymologically, that which is not divisible. Of course we can divide up organisms, but if we do this physically, they immediately thereafter cease to be the organism. Except... there are colonial organisms that can be so divided - sponges, hydras, slime molds, and so on. To make matters worse (much worse, as…
jstemwedel | July 23, 2007
The average American's lack of scientific literacy has become a common complaint, not only among scientists but also among those who see our economic prospects as a nation linked to our level of scientific know-how. Yet somehow, science has become an area of learning where it's socially acceptable to plead ignorance. Adults leave the house without even a cocktail-party grasp of the basics they presumably learned in middle school and high school science classes, and the prospects of herding them back into a science classroom to give it another go seem pretty remote.
Natalie Angier's new…
jstemwedel | July 23, 2007My last post for the basic concepts series involved phases of matter and transformations from one phase to another. This post will look at how a phase change can be put to practical use in a common household appliance -- the freezer. My aim here is to give you a good thermodynamic feel for how a freezer works. As a bonus, I'll explain why leaving the freezer door open is a futile strategy for cooling down a hot kitchen.
If you're constructing a freezer (or a refrigerator -- the same basic set up, but with a different temperature range), the goal is to keep the temperature in your cold…