communicating science
pharyngula | June 17, 2008Somebody has floated the idea of building an Evolution Museum in the same neighborhood as Ken Ham's Creation "Museum". Superficially, it's a fine idea, but no, I can't support it, for a number of reasons.
Every natural history museum is an evolution museum.
There is already a natural history museum in Cincinnati—The Cincinnati Museum Center.
The web page for this proposed museum is thin and unprofessional. It looks like someone had the bright idea to build a competing museum, and his first and only strategy was to scribble up some html, in the hopes that millions will come pouring in…
laelaps | June 16, 2008With all that's been going on lately I completely forgot that Ken Miller's new book Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul (not to be confused with Richard Dawkins' upcoming book, Only a Theory?) came out last week. I probably won't get to it for a long time (I'm still engrossed in Endless Forms Most Beautiful and have to finish In the Shadow of Man), but I am curious if anyone has picked it up yet.
Although I am not disinterested in the new book the is present a glut of books about evolution & creationism has somewhat dampened my enthusiasm for such titles, a…
laelaps | June 16, 2008During a promotional interview for the creationist propaganda piece Expelled, Ben Stein asserted that "science leads to killing people." In the new film The Happening, by contrast, toxins released by plants cause people to off themselves in any number of stomach-turning ways, but the M. Night Shyamalan film might have more in common with Expelled than can be surmised from the previews.
There's a bit of discussion about some statements that actor Mark Wahlberg makes at the beginning of the film (Marky Mark plays a science teacher) having to do with evolution. The case the some anti-evolution…
laelaps | June 14, 2008
Although I have no interest whatsoever in seeing The Happening and I'm not particularly enthused about the new Incredible Hulk, I couldn't help but observe this years' (so-far mediocre) crop of summer movies features a few scientists as heroes. First there was archaeologist Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and yesterday audiences could see Edward Norton take up the role of fictional scientist Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk ("Doc Bruce Banner, Pelted by gamma rays, Turned into the Hulk. Ain't he unglamorous!"). While not featuring a heroic scientist…
laelaps | June 13, 2008As I once commented to Jennifer Ouellette, we science bloggers can be a funny bunch. We whine and complain about the way science is misrepresented in mass media, but many of us want to produce popular science pieces ourselves. Is is because we think that we can do better? (I know that's part of my own motivation, at least.) More specifically, I wonder how many of us have published/are working on books of our own? I've been tracking the progress on my own project, but plenty of other science bloggers are either working on their own books, have already published books, or both. Carl, Jennifer,…
pharyngula | June 8, 2008It's nice to know that at least one person liked my talks in Seattle — and I know at least one didn't, the creationist who made the tired accusation that I was a "fundamentalist" in the Q&A — but you can make up your own mind, since a podcast of the NWSA talk is available.
Now, though, I just want to go home and take a nap for a while.
laelaps | June 2, 2008Of all the concepts of nature I have so far encountered in my research on the history of evolution as an idea, few (if any) are as virulent as the Great Chain of Being. Although Stephen Jay Gould claimed that White's 1799 book An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables represents the last gasp of the Great Chain of Being the idea was not simply discarded or forgotten. While the concept ultimately failed to make sense in terms of the ordering of nature it found a refuge in evolutionary theory, particularly in considerations of how humans are related to…
pharyngula | May 23, 2008Randy Olson doesn't like you. He says some very harsh things about the science blogs readership on the Skepticality podcast — you guys are all just so darn mean to him. This is all very unfortunate, because he does have some good things to say, but he's also taking disagreement very personally, and is seeing things only through the lens of the filmmaker,which is skewing his perspective away from some significant points, at the same time that it's giving him some useful and interesting views.
For instance, he criticizes my response to the event in which I got kicked out of a movie theater —…
pharyngula | May 16, 2008You people all need to get on over to Sciencewomen — she's been blogging the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. This is the stuff of the next generation of scientists!
pharyngula | May 12, 2008I got a letter from the producers of this new evolution series to be shown on 17 June on The History Channel. It allays many of the concerns we had from the original press release.
I want to thank you for your post "The History Channel might do something right" (May 6) about the channel's upcoming series on evolution. Unfortunately the synopsis that was posted was actually a draft of an intended press release (written by a PR copywriter as one of your readers correctly suggested) which was sent out in error before it had been vetted for accuracy.
As one of the producers working on evolve, I…
pharyngula | May 8, 2008After all, the big squid are washing up on Puget Sound beaches, so I, too, feel the call. I'm going to have to make the journey.
It also helps that the Northwest Science Writers Association has invited me to come out and give a talk. I'll be speaking on 2 June at the Pacific Science Center on communicating science, somehow. I think I'll also be spending several days visiting family and friends…and maybe some of those poor lovely tentacled denizens of the Sound who find themselves stranded on the shore.
pharyngula | May 6, 2008I just got this announcement for a new series to appear on the History Channel in June. This has the potential to be really good — at least it sounds like the focus is on the biology — and we'll have to tune in.
SERIES PREMIERE!EVOLVE:
EYES
Eyes are one of evolution's most useful and prevalent inventions, equipping approximately 95 percent of living species. They exist in many different forms across nature, having evolved convergently across different species. Learn how the ancestors of jellyfish may have been the first to evolve light-sensitive cells. In the pre-Cambrian era, insects, in…
pharyngula | May 4, 2008And he is dismayed at the absence of science. Charles Darwin's blog reviews a week's worth of programming, and finds a near total lack of any kind of science. The one exception, sort of, are the police procedurals.
Not a single factual science programme on any of the channels available to everyone who has a television. However in the dramatic presentations it is clear what science is for: it is to help the police elucidate which American has killed which other American. It is also clear who becomes a scientist: people of eccentric appearance and manner with peculiarly arranged hair. They…
laelaps | April 30, 2008This coming Friday will mark the beginning of the summer 2008 movie season, the first big-budget film to make an appearance being Iron Man. What does that mean for the unfunny and atrocious propaganda piece Expelled? If the theaters near me are any indication, it means that Stein's film flunked at the box office and is being expelled to make room for summer blockbusters. Of the three theaters that carried the film in my area, all of them are going to drop it this coming Friday, although I'm sure Expelled will soon re-appear on DVD.
The fact that Expelled is getting dropped from theaters doesn…
laelaps | April 29, 2008[Note: Just to put this post in context, today I was feeling extremely frustrated with the seemingly blind acceptance creationism receives because it makes some people feel comfortable. This is surely not my best work, and if anything it represents me trying to sort out the reasons why I keep coming back to the debate even though it can be aggravating at times.]
On a cold Sunday afternoon last February, I sat down to share a few slices of pizza with the man who had invited me to come speak about evolution to the Congregation for Humanistic Judaism of Morris County, along with my wife and his…
pharyngula | April 28, 2008My fellow academics, have you ever noticed that when our science students have problems with writing, we send them off to get tutorials from the people who know better, over in the English department? Our campus has a writing room where students can get advice from experts before they hand in their work to the science nerds. Unfortunately, there is no reciprocal arrangement: when English majors write about science, almost any claptrap can pass muster, we science nerds don't provide remedial science education, and they don't send their students to us to get their assertions vetted. This leads…
laelaps | April 24, 2008During the past week many bloggers on ScienceBlogs and elsewhere have been talking about Expelled and whether (based upon the opening weekend reaction) it seems like it's going to be a success or a failure. I'm not going to rehash what I've already said on that subject, but the discussion has once again erupted into a mini-battle over framing. Perhaps "discussion" is too kind a term for what's going on at this point; feud would probably be more apt.
For those who aren't regular readers, I've had a difficult time getting my head around what framing is, how it is distinct from what good…
laelaps | April 21, 2008It's Monday morning, three days after the opening of the creationist propaganda piece Expelled, and everyone seems to be talking about whether the film can be considered to be a success or not. Wing Nut Daily says that it was a resounding success (despite coming in at #8), while many of my fellow science bloggers don't see it that way at all. I guess it all depends on what your definition of "success" is.
The numbers that have come in so far indicate that Expelled took in about 1.2 million dollars on Friday, which quickly dipped to $990,000 on Saturday on $958,000 on Sunday, making the total…
pharyngula | April 20, 2008John Horgan actually defended Ben Stein on Bloggingheads. Now I can understand being a little contrarian, but that's going too far.
More importantly, I've been asked to do another bloggingheads session — it could be with John Horgan, and an opportunity to chastise him for that (as well as talk about something more substantive) or it could be with someone else — so I thought I'd throw it out here. Who do you think would be a good person for me to team up with for a diavlog? Maybe there's someone out there who hasn't been on bloggingheads you'd like to see.
pharyngula | April 16, 2008Look what they've done: Philadelphia declares a whole Year of Evolution, a celebration starting on 19 April.
The YEAR OF EVOLUTION kicks off for the public on Saturday, April 19, as the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology opens Surviving: The Body of Evidence, a new exhibition which explores the process of evolution and its outcomes. Other public programs so far scheduled at the University of Pennsylvania include lectures by Donald Johanson, Director, Institute for Human Origins (May 2008), Spencer Wells, Project Director of the National Geographic Genographic…