General Science
evolvingthoughts | March 10, 2007
Migrations has this wonderful image of the structure of a yeast cell done by EMBL through electron tomography. You can even see the cytoskeleton.
Below the fold:
sb admin | March 8, 2007This is my meager contribution to the "Basic Concepts" series that is going on around here. (I hope to do more later, but for right now I want to start with this one.) I've written about this before at my blog's old location, but I'm writing this now without looking back at that; we can compare later to see how consistent I am.
I also expect other scientists to have a slightly different take on this.
In three words, my view is that the scientific method is nothing more than Applied Common Sense. Now, "Common Sense" has at least three meanings. The first meaning is "the title of a tract…
evolvingthoughts | March 2, 2007
Way back in 1843, John Stuart Mill wrote this:
When the laws of the original agent cease entirely, and a phenomenon makes its appearance, which, with reference to those laws, is quite heterogeneous; when, for example, two gaseous substances, hydrogen and oxygen, on being brought together, throw off their peculiar properties, and produce the substance called water---in such cases the new fact may be subjected to experimental inquiry, like any other phenomenon; and the elements which are said to compose it may be considered as the mere agents of its production; the conditions on which it…
evolvingthoughts | February 28, 2007
Ignore the incredibly lame credits song. This is a cool video, filmed in Panama by actual ecology students, foot fungus and all...
Click To Play
Biodiversity is all around us! In this video we introduce you to the concept of biodiversity. It is more than just the total number of species, however. It describes diversity at all levels from genetic diversity to ecosystem diversity. Yet we are losing biodiversity. We pose the question, "What can each of us do to help save what is left?"
evolvingthoughts | February 25, 2007
The Australian is Rupert Murdoch's treasure. He began it to show that the established state-based papers weren't doing trheir job properly, and it took over 15 years to become profitable. So one might think that its editorials are somewhat representative of Rupert's own views.
Ian Musgrave has a couple of articles that show fairly conclusively both that the paper is becoming firmly anti-science (as all good conservatives must be these days, it seems), especially with respect to climate change. His first post discusses the ways the distinction between facts and belief are smeared by…
evolvingthoughts | February 25, 2007If you saw this:
what would you think it meant? I think it means exhaust fans are pleasant to pirates and not to everybody else, who run to find aircon. NASA Watch thinks it means "that big ceiling fans can send flaming arrows down to kill pirates and people crossing the street". It might even mean that if you see a pirate on a windy day, you should run for your life.
The UN, though, thinks it means "the potential dangers of being close to a large source of ionizing radiation".
Which goes to show that successful symbols are never designed by committees that are not experts in symbol design.
evolvingthoughts | February 20, 2007
Psychologist Daniel Gilbert on the unwritten vow taken by psychologists. From p3 of Stumbling on Happiness (ISBN 9780007183135).
Few people realise that psychologists also take a vow, promising that at some point in their professional lives they will publish a book, a chapter or at least an article that contains the sentence: 'The human being is the only animal that...' We are allowed to finish the sentence any way we like, but it has to start with those eight words.
Most of us wait to relatively late in our careers to fulfil this solemn obligation because we know that successive…
evolvingthoughts | February 18, 2007
I get notifications of the incredibly bigoted and stupid comments at Town Hall.Com via Google. I usually ignore them - that's PZ's domain. But this has to be commented on.
Some idiotic ignoramus named Mary Grabar attacks Sam Harris, who most likely knows three orders of magnitude more than she about the history of both science and religion, thus, in a column nicely titled "Letter to a Stupid Atheist":
You have a degree in philosophy, I see, but were you aware that science as a mode of thought came about through monotheism? You see, the idea of a single creator made it possible for human…
evolvingthoughts | February 18, 2007
This announcement of an essay competition at Inter-Research, a German-located research group, may be of interest to students:
Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics
Ethics of Climate Change
CALL FOR ESSAYS
Major consequences of climate change are now predictable to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty. Many of these consequences will be experienced within the next 100 years - on time scales relevant to emergency preparedness, medical responses, infrastructure alteration, financial investments, treaty negotiations, etc. These changes will impact the globe, geographically,…
evolvingthoughts | February 16, 2007
As everyone is tired now of hearing, Intelligent Design booster Michael Behe has argued there is an "irreducible complexity" in some biological processes that means they cannot have evolved. The basic logic is pretty simple - if a system needs all its parts, then the lack of any part means it would be nonfunctional. This means, he says, that for it to have evolved, those other parts would be twiddling their thumbs evolutionarily, until all the parts are in place.
The incredibly smart, handsome and active Ian Musgrave has a piece on Panda's Thumb on Behe's key example, the clotting cascade…
evolvingthoughts | February 10, 2007
Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Science and Ethics has asked scientists what they (as opposed to philosophers) mean by "theory". I intend to write how philosophers have use the term sometime soon, when this grant application is done and a paper revised, but if you are a scientist, go visit her and comment.
evolvingthoughts | February 7, 2007
Sahotra Sarkar has published a book on Intelligent Design, that is rather different from other offerings. Sarkar uses the topic as a way to riff off matters of epistemology, the sociology of science and the use of science in society. I haven't seen the published version, but I read an earlier ms copy and on that basis I can recommend it as a more technical and philosophical approach to the topic.
evolvingthoughts | February 7, 2007
Leiter reports that ISU is downsizing, for no apparent reason, its philosophy and physics departments. This is not unique to ISU. I have seen it occur in a couple of Australian universities too. The odd thing is that this is not because student enrolments are low; teaching loads are large in some cases. It appears to be due to individual objections by powers-that-be to philosophy for various reasons. One such reason here is that humanities students attract a lot less funding per head than science students, leading to unreasonable teaching loads to break even. This reduces the research…
evolvingthoughts | February 6, 2007
It pays to remember that people go up in those contraptions all made by the lowest bidder. Here's a statement from Lisa Nowack's family:
"We are naturally saddened and extremely concerned about the serious allegations being made against Lisa. We love her very much, and right now, our primary focus is on her health and well-being.
Lisa is a very intelligent, accomplished individual. As a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, and in her professional career in the Navy and NASA's Space Shuttle program, she has served over 20 years with an unblemished record. Lisa attained the rank of Captain,…
evolvingthoughts | February 5, 2007
I just can't escape that damned Demarcation Principle...
A fellow emailed me the other day, asking what I thought about String Theory. Was it science? He was trying to argue with Intelligent Design folk, and they brought String Theory up as a case of science that doesn't have any testable evidence yet. He responded "science is what scientists do", and ask my opinion about that claim...
I responded thus [names removed to protect the innocent]
[Name], you are stepping in deep, very cold, and very dank waters.
In public, when trying to deal with soundbite science, it is worthwhile saying…
evolvingthoughts | February 4, 2007
The Biohumanities Project of Paul Griffiths, of which I am a minor part, has a page up of talks and discussions at conferences and workshops, recorded for podcasting. We have just revamped and shifted our podcast page to here. If you want to stay abreast of these, subscribe to our RSS feed.
Some of the crispy goodness: A conference on mechanism and reduction, a conference on the philosophy of ecology, and a conference on evidence based medicine, plus talks on emotion, essentialism and biological hierarchies.
evolvingthoughts | February 3, 2007
Here's a tastefully done blog on sex and physics: The Physics of Sex: Where Science and Intimacy Collide. They discuss what beds are best, how lubricants work, optimal strategies for mating based on network theory, and so on. It's a lot of fun. Even safe for work.
evolvingthoughts | January 28, 2007
As a chronic insomniac (and consequently incoherent raver - the mutterings at the end of the Beatle's "I'm so tired" represent my daily conversation), I am very interested to read of a possible drug that targets a hormone family called "orexins", low levels of which are found in narcoleptics. Apparently the drug has few if any known side effects.
Some of you neurologically and pharmacologically educated bloggers: read and expound on this please! I'm so tired...
evolvingthoughts | January 24, 2007
Tetrapod Zoology, which has been one of my favourite blogs for some time now, has finally moved into Da House! It will get fine tuned, as things go on, I'm sure, but the look and feel are secondary to the wonderful content. Go find out about blood-eating birds.
evolvingthoughts | January 23, 2007
Species: A term which everybody thinks they understand, but which nobody agrees upon, to denote the "basic units" of groups of biological organisms.
It is sometimes said, or has been said to me, that one ought not know too much about a topic if you are to define it clearly. This is because the expert knows all the many nuances that apply in different conditions, and writes not to the beginner but to the other experts. So I must note here that my thesis and continuing work is on species concepts, and things may get a bit rocky. You've been warned.
First of all I'd like to disagree with…