communicating science
pharyngula | February 16, 2009The Minneapolis Café Scientifique is taking place tomorrow evening: and it's all about spiders in love. I want to go, but I'm still digging out from under my accumulated work.
I will be at the Café next week, here in Morris — I'm giving half of it, and Lynn Fellman will be giving the other half. We'll be talking about genetics and genealogy, and reconstructing deep ancestry from your genes. Should be fun! Come to one or the other!
laelaps | February 11, 2009There has been an awful lot of hand-wringing going on over Charles Darwin lately. Some have picked up a long-running meme and proclaim "One hundred fifty years without Darwin is too long!" while others declare that we should kill every Darwin we meet. Just as every American president must "Get right with Lincoln" every biologist must "Get right with Darwin" in one way or another. (Thus far, I think Ed is the only one who has really got it right.)
What I find particularly amusing, however, is that those who assert that we must sweep Darwin under the rug to save biology do little to produce the…
laelaps | February 3, 2009From his instance that human evolution has halted to his rather crummy review of Stephen Jay Gould: Reflections on His View of Life (see my thoughts on the book here), Steve Jones has been raising the hackles of his colleagues more than usual lately. Given that I am not a scientist I cannot count myself among his frustrated peers, but I was aggravated by Jones' latest op-ed "Can we please forget about Charles Darwin?"
Jones is worried that this year's celebration of Darwin's work will overshadow modern evolutionary science. Jones writes;
I hope that, by its end, its subject's beard, his…
pharyngula | January 22, 2009Or, as we used to call 'em when I was a young'un, a comic book. Check it out — it'll be an illustrated Darwin biography for all the people who don't want to wade through the magnificent, but long, two volume Janet Browne bio.
I know I'll be buying a copy. There are other evolution books in graphic novel form, and Scott Hatfield has a summary.
laelaps | January 19, 2009
This blog has been a little quiet over the last few days, but I was simply having too much fun at the Science Online '09 conference to find the time to sit down and blog. I got to meet some of my favorite bloggers, too many to mention them all here (I would undoubtedly forget some if I tried to make a list), but I was certainly glad to catch up with old friends and make some new ones.
I didn't go just to hang out with other science writers, though. The primary reason I was at the conference was to co-moderate two sessions. The first, on using the web to teach college science with Andrea…
laelaps | December 22, 2008more animals
It doesn't quite beat creationism as the most tiresome topic on science blogs, but the regular argument over whether mainstream science journalism or science blogging has more of "teh awesum" comes pretty close. We science bloggers try to focus on how we're making a difference in science communication, while every now and then another MSM article or editorial comes out assuring us we're just taking part in a passing fad.
In a show of snarkiness that had me going "Not this again...", science journalist George Johnson recently went on a rant about my Sb colleagues Ed Yong and…
laelaps | December 21, 2008
If you have never heard of sexual selection, if "evo-devo" sounds like the name of an 80's new wave band, if you believe in evolution but don't understand it, Jerry Coyne's forthcoming book Why Evolution is True isn't a bad place to kick off your intellectual journey. There is no one book that can encompass everything that is important to understand about evolution, but Why Evolution is True makes an admirable attempt at surveying the intertwining lines of evidence scientists follow to determine how life came to be as it is. Indeed, Coyne's book follows in the long tradition of popular books…
pharyngula | December 19, 2008Help the National Academies out:
What topics in science, engineering, and medicine matter most to you? The National Academies are interested in developing useful and engaging print and web-based educational materials on the topics that you'd like to learn more about. They invite you to participate in a brief survey. You can find that survey here.
In the 2-minute survey you'll be presented with a list of topics and asked to select the five that matter most to you. At the end, you can see how your answers compare with the results so far. And you can enter a drawing to receive a National…
laelaps | December 5, 2008In conversations about the sad state of science literacy in America, Sputnik usually comes up. (It's not at Godwin's Law status yet, but it's close.) The argument is that we either are in a "Sputnik moment" that researchers can use to make the case for greater investment in science, or that we need such an event to reinforce the importance of science in this country.
The problem is, as David Goldston pointed out in this week's issue of Nature, that the story isn't so simple. America was not a scientific backwater at the time of the launch of Sputnik, and (as is often the case with events said…
laelaps | November 17, 2008
"The Young Monkey," from Funny People, or the True Origin of Species
When I refer to a book with the phrase Origin of Species in the title, it is generally understood that I am talking about the volume by Charles Darwin, published in 1859, that was so important that we are still avidly discussing it almost 150 years after it was published. Like any popular hit, however, there were other tomes that tried to capitalize on the fame of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.
Earlier this year I mentioned one such title; a print version of some of T.H. Huxley's popular lectures…
laelaps | November 10, 2008
The skulls of Homo sapiens and a Neanderthal compared, from Arthur Keith's Antiquity of Man.
Our species is nothing if not vain. The natural world is saturated with wonders, yet the phenomena of most concern are those directly relating to us. Even in the long public argument over evolution, where the ancestry of whales and birds is often quarreled over, our own ancestry is the real reason for the contention. What makes evolution so threatening to some is that it applies to every organism and does not allow us to draw a line in the sand between us and the rest of life on this planet. We are…
pharyngula | November 7, 2008It's cute: this exercise in molecular visualization has been all dolled up with anthropomorphized atoms to sneak it into kids' attention spans.
I can't be entirely dismissive, though. There's some cool stuff lurking in the backgrounds of these scenes, it's just unfortunate that the goofy cartoon stuff is always being placed front and center.
I am kind of hoping that the creationists, with all their talk of cars and buses and traffic lights in the cell, steal this video. I can almost imagine Michael Behe exclaiming that the sophisticated facial expressions of atoms are evidence of intent and…
pharyngula | November 6, 2008It isn't at all unusual for the authors of scientific papers to leave a comment at a blog discussing their work — it's happened here quite a few times, and it's a good thing. It's a plus when they confirm what you've said or add more information to the discussion, and it's also wonderful when they correct you on errors. I think most scientists are getting the idea that blogs are tools to help disseminate scientific ideas to a wider audience than the science journals can. They certainly don't replace the journals, but add a way to inject the results into the public sphere, where they can be…
laelaps | November 2, 2008I was recently asked a few questions about ScienceOnline '09 by Stephen, one of Miss Baker's biology class students. You can check out my responses here.
[Thanks to Bora for the link, too.]
laelaps | October 20, 2008Some days I just want to scream. For years I believed what the textbooks and teachers told me about the history of science, taking in their arguments from authority, but when I started to look into the same events myself I found they were much more complex than I had previously known. I cherish the new knowledge I have gained, but it comes with a price. When someone spews out a bit of textbook cardboard, I cringe as if fingernails were being drawn across a chalkboard.
Today's tidbit was that Charles Darwin could never account for apparently maladaptive characteristics displayed by animals, i.…
laelaps | October 14, 2008I'm tired of being prevented from reading academic papers because of subscription walls. Both as a student and someone who loves to dig into the history of science, I often cast a wide net when I'm searching for information on a topic I want to know more about. At this very moment, for instance, I'm taking a break from writing a chapter of my book about birds and dinosaurs. In doing research for the chapter, I have come across a number of references that have been hard to come by, one of which is Alick Walker's 1972 Nature paper "New light on the Origin of Birds and Crocodiles."
Rutgers,…
laelaps | October 13, 2008This coming January I will have the pleasure of speaking at two discussion at Science Online '09; one on the history of science, and the other about using the web to teach science in college. You can have a look at the wiki pages for both talks here (history) and here (college science), but they will certainly change during the coming days and weeks.
I want to make sure the things that I will be talking about with my esteemed colleagues will be interesting and relevant, so if you have any ideas about what you would like to be discussed during these sessions, please chime in via the comments.…
laelaps | October 13, 2008As we approach the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, I can't help but notice the shoddy treatment natural selection receives in many of the college courses I have attended. Everyone is in agreement that understanding natural selection is important, so much so that it often gets its own lecture, but apparently it is not important enough to have professors memorize relevant examples of it.
I have seen it happen over and over again. The major points of evolution by natural selection are outlined (usually between 4 and 8 concepts, with…
pharyngula | October 5, 2008I saw their line of educational toys at AAI — if you've got young kids, grandkids, nieces or nephews, check out the growing line of evolution games and toys at Charlie's Playhouse.
pharyngula | September 30, 2008Tuesdays are not relaxing days for me; this is the day of the week when I sink into long class sessions for hours at a time. Somehow, I also decided that the last Tuesday of every month was also going to be the day for Cafe Scientifique, which I host here in town, and which I'm also giving today.
So come on out to the Common Cup Coffeehouse on Atlantic Avenue in Morris tonight, at 6:30pm, and watch a tired PZ give a talk. Don't worry, though — I'm going to present a little travelogue on my cruise to the Galápagos Islands, with a little science sneakily snuck in here and there, which is going…