communicating science
pharyngula | August 5, 2008Who has heard of Jim Ottaviani? He's a guy with an excellent line of science-related comics — I have "Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards", but there are quite a few others I have to buy now — and now Scott Hatfield interviews Ottaviani at the San Diego ComicCon. Remember, we need multiple approaches to get science across to people, and comics/graphic novels have wide appeal!
pharyngula | July 29, 2008I'd like to thank Megan for mentioning Colin Purrington's excellent essay on what you can do to improve the presentation of evolution in museums. It's positive, it's simple, it's stuff you can do on your very next museum visit.
pharyngula | July 29, 2008I approve of this article criticizing the dumbing down of science in museums. I think a lot of science museums need a good sharp kick in the pants, because they are going too far down the road of pandering to mass media sensations — our local museum is running a big show on the science of Star Wars, and that article is complaining about the exhibits at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia about "Real Pirates" and "Chronicles of Narnia". These are real concerns, and there has been a steady drift away from challenging attendees with interesting ideas towards merely entertaining them.
On the…
laelaps | July 24, 2008
An ebony langur (Trachypithecus auratus), photographed July 23th, 2008 at the Bronx zoo. Of all the animals at the zoo people stop to watch primates more than nearly any other group of animals. The monkeys & apes watch the primates on the other side of the barrier, too.
"What's that animal?"
"It's like a zebra mixed with a horse!"
"I don't like it."
And with that mother and teenage daughter walked off to inspect the red river hogs and gorillas of the Bronx zoo's Congo exhibit, ignoring the plastic slab explaining that the okapi in front of them is related to giraffes. I've seen the…
laelaps | July 17, 2008Ok, maybe the name isn't as catchy as Jurassic Fight Club but that's what it's all about; ancient critters ripping the guts out of other ancient critters and how we know they did it. I'll have a review of the first episode, featuring Majungasaurus, up next week, but in the meantime the History Channel has released a slew of videos and other materials to look over prior to the premiere (including a game that I'm sure will remind a few of you of Primal Rage).
The show itself features a number of experts but the main host is "Dinosaur George" Blasing, and while I'm not on board with all of his…
laelaps | July 16, 2008[Note: Apparently Emma Marris didn't like Sizzle either, and you can read her review in Nature. I'm definitely interested in seeing more reviews of the film from various sources as we get closer to the release date.]
After reading Chris Mooney's hyperbolic review of Sizzle this morning I have to admit I was a little pissed off. While I panned the film Chris went head-over-heels for it; it seems that we saw two different films. Maybe we did. Although the topic of science communication is an undercurrent through the film (breaking to the surface in a few places) I did not think that framing was…
laelaps | July 16, 2008I've never liked the term "Darwinism." To me it has always been more of a watchword that might indicate that I was talking to a creationist, a term I generally do not encounter unless I'm reading or hearing an argument against a straw-man version of evolution. (I'm not a big fan of "evolutionist," either.) It may have been useful in the past, when evolution by natural selection (as popularized by Darwin) was competing with other systems like Neo-Lamarckism and orthogenesis, but today it doesn't have any relevance. (It should also be noted that A.R. Wallace wrote a book on natural selection…
laelaps | July 14, 2008
Sizzle, the new documentary by Flock of Dodos creator Randy Olson, describes itself as "a movie you'll feel passionate about (even if you don't know why)." This description is particularly apt, although perhaps not in the way that the team behind the film expected.
Randy Olson is concerned. An Inconvenient Truth was a great film but there are still hordes of people who deny human activities are changing the world's climate and reputable climate scientists seem nowhere to be found. He decides to set off on an admirable quest to find the top climatologists and find out what they have to say…
laelaps | July 14, 2008John Wilkins recently announced that he has an article about science blogging in press over at Trends in Ecology & Evolution, and many congratulations to him. The piece is definitely worth a look, appraising science blogs in terms of how they impact science communication and may benefit historians, but there was one aspect of the paper that bothered me. While many science bloggers are graduate students and researchers (as mentioned in the paper) there are many, like myself, who do not have such ties to academic institutions. Indeed, there are many bloggers who can write eloquently and…
pharyngula | July 12, 2008
This should enliven your morning: Abigail Smith and I did a Bloggingheads diavlog the other day, and now you can watch us chatter away. I know you've all been wondering what Abbie looks like in person. (One odd thing about recording these, though: we are conversing over the phone, but we don't actually see each other while we're recording — it's a bit of a surprise to see how it turns out.)
I should have combed my hair before I went on, I realize, and maybe I shouldn't have been sipping at that glass containing the blood of innocents throughout.
laelaps | July 6, 2008
A clip from Young Frankenstein.
Scientists suffer from an image problem. If you were to ask a child to draw a picture of a scientist, for instance, you'd probably receive a depiction of an old, crazy-haired white male holding a bubbling test tube, the image drawing heavily from Dr. Frankenstein and Albert Einstein. This image seems to be especially difficult to dig out, and at times even the people who want to bridge the gap between scientists and the public resort to childish name-calling, portraying researchers as freaks and geeks (i.e. "... feel free to imagine startled and upset sheep…
pharyngula | July 6, 2008Larry Moran has been highlighting the work of some great science writers — you really should start off your day with selections from two of my favorites, Richard Lewontin and Niles Eldredge. It's almost as good as coffee for perking up your brain.
laelaps | June 30, 2008A few months ago I was enjoying a pleasant evening with a few friends when the topic of evolution came up, more specifically the work of Stephen Jay Gould. One of the people in the room asked "Who's he?" and before I could respond someone else did, commenting "Well, he showed that Darwin was wrong." I can't lie, I'm surprised I didn't exclaim "WHAT?!" (although I did think as much). I quickly jumped in and explained how this was not so, explaining in words what Gould illustrated with a coral branch in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. While Gould is famous for his arguments with "ultra-…
pharyngula | June 29, 2008Blake Stacey, who is a good guy to have by your side in a firefight, has a wonderfully complicated post on this thing called science blogging. He's mostly stating the obvious: it's anarchic, it's very hard to pull out, say, introductory material on a specific topic in science, there are problems of accountability, we don't produce anything as coherently useful as a basic textbook, etc. Well, yeah. This is a general problem with solutions that bubble up from the ground rather than being defined from above — they do something very, very well, but it usually isn't the something that a planner…
laelaps | June 29, 2008Over at the Other 95% Kevin Z picks up where I left off on high school science education, publishing science books, and the barriers that he and I both face in our quest to become science writers (among other things). Most interesting, though, is his response to a somewhat off-the-cuff remark I made about making cheaper (if not free) science books available to the public. As someone who is working on a book and would like to write plenty more, there has to be a way for science writers to make a living. (If I could I would drop whatever else I was doing at the moment and focus on writing, but…
laelaps | June 26, 2008Through the magic of the intertubes, Blake has a dump-truck full of reflection on the current state of science blogging and what science blogs can't do. The question at the center of the post is "Can someone get a fair science education from reading science blogs?" and Blake says no, citing the general lack of interest in laying out the basic concepts of science. Unless you're personally motivated to contribute there isn't much incentive to write such introductory material; many of us write because we enjoy it and there just isn't an incentive to try and come up with a textbook chapter.…
laelaps | June 23, 2008On April 19th Philadelphia marked the beginning of it's "Year of Evolution," a year-long celebration of the science that, to paraphrase Dobzhansky, makes sense of biology. Jon Hurdle has an article about the festivities in today's New York Times, but right out of the gate what could have been a good article is marred by putting everything in the context of the evolution v. creationism culture wars. Rather than praising Philadelphia for supporting good, established science the year-long series of events is tacitly cast as a reaction to creationism;
In the long-running culture war between…
laelaps | June 22, 2008Reflecting upon my high school science education, there isn't very much I can remember. Physics and chemistry are largely a blur (vague recollections of Avogadro's number and the time when my experiment exploded are all that remain) and the hours I spent in biology were largely a waste. For all the pressure put on us students to excel, taking the college-level AP classes early, I graduated high school with a passion for science but almost no real knowledge of it. I was not served well by the textbook procedures and had I not already resolved to be a scientist I probably would not have…
laelaps | June 18, 2008There is no student of nature in all of history who is as well-documented as Charles Darwin. While the paper trail that chronicles the private thoughts of important researchers like Georges Cuvier and Richard Owen is often frustratingly thin, reading the entirety of Darwin's books, papers, and correspondence could easily become a full-time job. Beyond the importance of his ideas we celebrate Darwin because his life is open for us to examine, the story of how a young believer in Creation set sail for a journey around the world that would ultimately spark a scientific revolution. There is…
laelaps | June 18, 2008
I haven't read Ken Miller's new book, Only a Theory, as yet, but the magic of the intertubes has allowed me to see his recent appearance on "The Colbert Report." Like PZ already noted I think Miller steamrolled over Colbert to make sure he got his talking points across (which is practically a necessity if you feel you need to get all your statements in before the 6 minutes is up) but what I found most interesting was Colbert's last question about what we would do if creationists co-opted the language of evolution. Although the question was posed as a hypothetical it is something that is…