General Science
evolvingthoughts | August 4, 2008
I get a lot of Google alerts about various things, including species concepts, obviously. I have noticed a pattern: media from the so-called "developed" or "first world" almost never put much in the way of actual facts or knowledge in their reports, concerned, I guess, that it will scare the consumers away. But the developing nations, in this case Bangladesh, will do so. They seem to value knowledge and science. Wonder why?
Here's a piece "The Importance of biodiversity", from The New Nation, a Bangladeshi independent newspaper:
Wetland ecosystems (swamps, marshes, etc.) absorb and…
evolvingthoughts | August 4, 2008
My Sciblings Bora, John, Brian and Benjamin have asked what the value of the history of science is to scientists. Below the fold is my apologia for writing a stonking great history of a scientific concept (species, in case the sidebar wasn't enough hint), in which I defend the worth of intellectual history to historians. Maybe it will add something to this debate. It is from the preface to my book. I hope the history of science is worthwhile, but it is interesting that the people who most wanted my book to be published are scientists working in the field on which I am writing, so I think it…
evolvingthoughts | August 4, 2008
Phil, of Bad Astronomy fame, has been offered and accepted the chairmanship of James Randi's Educational Foundation. I think that's a great choice by Randi and a great honour for Phil. Couldn't happen to a better guy.
evolvingthoughts | August 3, 2008
A blog post by the incredibly multilingual John Wilkins (who knew he spoke French, Portuguese and Spanish? OK, it's by proxy, but it's nearly as good as actually speaking it) is now available in Spanish. Gee but he looks like he knows whereof he speaks... Thanks to Eduardo Zugasti for the choice and translation.
Second, and more important, is a paper in Nature by Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse. Entitled "Life, Logic and Information" it is yet another claim that information technology is the best way to conceptualise biology, in particular biological systems. I am fully in agreement with…
evolvingthoughts | July 27, 2008
Lately there has been a rediscovery on the blogia of C. P. Snow's Two Cultures - which initially was the divide between those who understood the Second Law of Thermodynamics and those who don't, but is now, it appears, between those who know math and those who don't, and the respective attitudes. In Chad's initial post, the discussion turned to the Sokal hoax and what it is supposed to prove. So what I want to do here is a little "compare and contrast" between what is usually thought to be the main themes of postmodern philosophy (not being an expert, I may be... no I certainly am…
evolvingthoughts | July 26, 2008
A new genus name for water mites, from a recent paper in Zootaxa:
Vagabundia comes from the Spanish word ‘vagabundo’ that means ‘wanderer’. It is a feminine substantive; sci refers to Science Citation Index. We pointed out some time ago (Valdecasas et al. 2000) that the popularity of the Science Citation Index (SCI) as a measure of ‘good’ science has been damaging to basic taxonomic work. Despite statements to the contrary that SCI is not adequate to evaluate taxonomic production (Krell 2000), it is used routinely to evaluate taxonomists and prioritize research grant proposals. As with…
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…
evolvingthoughts | July 21, 2008
I was breathless, sitting in the loungeroom of my religious studies teacher in Year 7. Unlike nearly everyone else in my year, I was a space nerd. I kept card files of each astronaut and cosmonaut. I knew how many thousands of pounds each F1 engine on the Saturn V used per minute. I was waiting...
And this ghostly and ethereal image showed a man who stood on the landing pad of the LEM on another world, and... well just watch it for yourself and know this was one of the greatest moments of my life, a year after one of the worst (the death of my dad):
sa smith | July 12, 2008PZ and I are on Blogging Heads TV today!
w00t!
Clip below the fold (epigenetics!), full video at BloggingHeads!
evolvingthoughts | July 1, 2008
Readers may be somewhat surprised that Evolving Thoughts hasn't made much of the Darwin bicentennial and the Origin sesquicentennial so far. Well, I haven't needed to, given the number of other folk making hay from this. In particular I recommend Carl Zimmer's piece, over at his new digs with Discover magazine. Carl points out John van Whye's paper that showed that Darwin didn't "sit on the theory for 20 years" but rather followed a preplanned sequence for backing up his ideas. However, when Charles planned this research, he greatly underestimated the time it would take him (the Cirripedia…
evolvingthoughts | June 26, 2008
Barbara Forrest has an excellent analysis and background story on the introduction of the creationist bill in Louisiana, and the organisations supporting it, here at Talk2Reason.
There's a new phylogeny of birds out. See GrrllScientist's post, and a full size tree here. Late edit See Bird Evolution - Problems with Science for more.
Jesse Prinz has an essay on atheism and morality, which I think jumps the shark at the end (how can there be atheist charities? Atheism is the lack of some belief, so any charity that doesn't make theism part of its core mission already is atheist), here at…
sa smith | June 26, 2008Per Ahlberg and his crew just found another fossil along the fish-->tetrapod line! WHOO!!!
Ventastega curonica and the origin of tetrapod morphology
All the major news sources have picked up on this story already, with all the crappy journalism we have come to expect from most contemporary 'science' writers... ugh...
So why dont you all just head over to TalkRational and ask Per himself about his research ;)
Side note to Per--
Dear Prof. Ahlberg,
This is my second request for your data underlying your recent paper, "Ventastega curonica and the origin of tetrapod morphology," published…
evolvingthoughts | June 25, 2008
The French have always had an affinity for developmental models of historical processes. Comte famously argued that societies had four stages to go through. Lamarck held that species were like individual organisms that had a youth, maturity and senescence. And more recently Teilhard held that evolution was heading towards a single goal. It's the philosophy of the Great Chain made temporal...
But maybe there are more general properties of historical processes that might be empirically determined to be either evolutionary (contingent) or developmental (systematically predictable)? After all…
evolvingthoughts | June 22, 2008Willard Van Ormond Quine was, I believe, one of the best of the 20th century philosophers, and is someone who has greatly influenced me. Here is a TV interview by Brian Magee, from the 1970s, if I am right. They discuss the nature of philosophy. This year marks the centenary of Quine's birth.
"The Ideas of Quine" on Youtube:Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5
Hat tip to Calculemus. The heading is a bad pun on one of Quine's most famous essays: "On What There Is".
evolvingthoughts | June 21, 2008
Philosopher David Albert and physicist Sean Carroll* will be doing a Bloggingheads.tv spot like the one Paul Myeahs and I did recently. I'll add the direct URL when it comes online.
Update: The spot is here. In particular note the segment on how Albert got suckered by the What the Bleep Do We Know? filmmakers (shades of Expelled. Is this s trend in science denial documentary making in the US?).
* Not the biology Sean Carroll, the physicist Sean Carroll.
sa smith | June 12, 2008What do I wanna do?
Um, be a PI. Get to play in a lab forever. Contribute to my field. Be respected. Be loved by my students. hehehe My dream is to do research until I die, thus to have the opportunity to totally traumatize my grad students by letting them discover my cold, dead body slumped over the tissue culture hood one morning (ah, if I could only be there to laugh at them!!!)
But do I plan on being a PI? Do I hang my hopes and dreams on it? Will I be crushed if I cant be a PI?
Nope!
I mean, I think Im smart enough. I think Im creative enough. I think Im a pretty hard worker.…
evolvingthoughts | June 11, 2008
I can't say much about this without reading the paper in the company of Somebody Who Knows About Chemistry, but Jack Szostak's team at the Harvard Medical School has done some interesting looking work on the self assembly of lipids into miscelles that could contain DNA reactions. What is new to me is the claim that lipids might have been formed in hydrothermal vents rather than as by-products of the original chemical cycle. But it doesn't explain how the transition from "found" lipid monomers to "made" monomers arose. Anyway, check it out.
evolvingthoughts | June 4, 2008
This is a kind of scattered post on a few things that have caught my eye, while I am avoiding boring work.
Paeloblog reports that a paper in Nature has done a phylogeny on continuous rather than discrete characters, using morphometric criteria to do a hominin phylogeny. This is not the first such attempt to use continuous characters in cladistics, and I would be interested if those who understand this topic comment on this attempt. It seems to me that the main difference between discrete and continuous data would be that the continua are an ordered set of otherwise discrete data points, so…
sa smith | June 2, 2008Guess you all have heard by now Yoko lost (EMIs suit is still pending). Ah well, Yoko is appealing, this will go on forever, but this case reminded me of another part of Yellow 'Inner Life' that I wanted to blog about.
See, what I found odd about EXPELLEDs use of 'Imagine' is that it is completely gratuitous. Its like going on a rant about the lyrics to an Amy Grant song in the middle of a documentary about schizophrenia. I mean, you could draw a tenuous line through an Amy Grant lyric and Christianity and how they deal with mental illness, but really? Kind of an odd tangent.
Thus I was…
evolvingthoughts | June 1, 2008
John Pieret's blog Thoughts in a Haystack has an essay on this that is well worth reading, although I'd rather be called an elite snob than an elite bastard because all Australians are bastards. It's part of the Carnival of the Elite Bastards #1 at En Tequila es Verdad.