General Science

MOUSEBENDER: Good Morning.WENSLEYDALE: Good morning, sir. Welcome to the National Cheese Emporium.MOUSEBENDER: Ah, thank you my good man.WENSLEYDALE: What can I do for you, sir?MOUSEBENDER: Well, I was, uh, sitting in the public library on Thurmond Street just now, skimming through History of the Inductive Sciences by William Whewell, and I suddenly came over all peckish.WENSLEYDALE: Peckish, sir?MOUSEBENDER: Esurient.WENSLEYDALE: Eh?MOUSEBENDER: (In a broad Yorkshire accent) Eee I were all hungry, like.WENSLEYDALE: Ah, hungry.MOUSEBENDER: In a nutshell. And I thought to myself, 'a little…

This is a repost from the old ERV. A retrotransposed ERV :P I dont trust them staying up at Blogger, and the SEED overlords are letting me have 4 reposts a week, so Im gonna take advantage of that! I am going to try to add more comments to these posts for the old readers-- Think of these as 'directors cut' posts ;) I was going to drop this. I was going to drop this, because I thought Premise had dropped it. But they finally served papers to XVIVO (I probably wouldnt have done that if Yoko/EMI were suing me, but Im not drunk on Jesus Juice, so there you go), so I am going to rip Premise a…

Nothing is more excruciating to me than to see myself and hear myself. It's even worse when I'm up against someone who presents so much better than I do. So watch Paul Myers (I think that's how they spell his name) and me talk about Stuff at Bloggingheads.TV. The video is terrible (that's my fault; we should have recorded our own video and sent it to the editors, instead we recorded each other by way of an Australia-USA link that was routed, I fear, via Mongolia and Finland, using packets carried by mules). I'm out of sync. But it doesn't matter - it's voice with some moving pictures, that's…

One of my two favourite ethicists has just got tenure. Now she can say what she really thinks. [I don't know who started the canard that ethicists are unethical. The two I know are very ethical indeed. Probably a decision theorist.] Language Log gives voice to the oft-repeated but (so far as I can tell, rarely supported) claim that humans are somehow smarter than other animals when children because they can hold a conversation. Still, they are right to be critical of journalistic tropes. I nearly forgot to link to Kate Devitt's latest blog entry on memory. Here she discusses how…

Page 3.14 has a poll up now on the UK refusing to ban everyones favorite science experiments, MANIMALS! What 3.14 doesnt mention is that Parliament (is that what they call it?) debated another topic today I find equally creepy: Saviour Babies. Even with todays genetic counseling and genetic testing, sometimes shit just happens, and kids are born with shitty, shitty terminal or life threatening diseases. But on the plus side, with todays genetic counseling and genetic testing and in vitro fertilization, parents can choose an embryo that is a perfect HLA match for their sick child, have…

If scientists working in biology or a related field like psychology want to get attention, they will say something like this: Darwin was wrong, or made a mistake, or is insufficient to explain X, where X is whatever they are researching. It makes them seem to be proposing something important, because everybody agrees Darwin proposed something that changed our way of looking at life and ourselves. If we are saying he was wrong, a "paradigm shift" cannot be far behind... So a paper entitled "Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds" is a surefire…

Comparative limb growth of a bat (top) and a mouse, in utero development. From the paper below. One of my favourite statistics is this: one in every four mammal species you meet is a rat or rodent, and one in every five is a bat. That's right, nine in every 20 mammal species is covered by one of these taxa: we may as well treat rodents and bats as the standard mammalian species type. So a paper that combines them has to be good. Quintessence of Dust (what a title!) gives an excellent summary and discussion of a paper that tested evolutionary hypotheses of the evolution of bat wings by…

So much has been happening in the world while I was giving a talk on the adaptiveness of religion in Sydney. The Platypus thing was one item I'd have blogged on if the rest of the blogosphere hadn't beaten me to it. All I can say is that no matter how many bloggers write on the mosaic nature of the platypus genome, at least I got to hold one. And I would never have used the meaningless term "reptile". And although I have only been to NYC twice, I can say I have a favourite store there, and I saw it on CSI: NY recently (although they obviously tidied up the counter for the shoot). And…

... is a blogger on the paranormal and skeptical stuff. She has some nice posts on Women and superstition (parts one and two) and Skeptical Books for Children (parts one, two, three and four). Go check them and her out.

On a newsgroup that shall remain Nameless, one of the regulars, Bill Reich, just heard on the History Channel: Smilodon is the ancestor of all the modern big cats. Oy! So this thread is for egregiously* wrong statements made on erstwhile factual television shows. Please state where you heard it, and if possible the show name and episode. * Egregiously. Look it up. A cool and useful word.

John Hawks has a very nice post for people with basic math, explaining why a recent press release announced that 70,000 years ago the human species encountered a population bottleneck of 2000 individuals, and why it's most likely wrong. In the process he explains effective population size. It's a tad too complex even for an Intermediate Concepts post, but still worth the effort. Larry Moran at his blog has opened a comments thread, as the Hawks blog is comment free (I am unsure if I should be censorial or jealous), and John promises to come back and answer them.

... Wilkins turns green with envy. There's a special sort of immortality for those who work in paleontology which clearly outweighs the total lack of jobs and remuneration: having a species named after you. My friend and accredited geologist and paleontologist has now had a trilobite named after him. Ladies and gentlemen, below the fold, Chris Nedin's tribble, Megapharanaspis nedini! Pretty little thing, isn't it? Of course, nobody would ever name a fossil after a philosopher, would they? You need to find something with no definite shape, for a start. [Hint!]

In the thread on the recent debate between Winston and Dennett, I said that I thought the greatest threat to scientific progress and rationality was antimodernism, which was not always religious. Here, I'm going to elaborate on that cryptic comment. First of all, some of my commenters think that this doesn't rule out religion being the threat. It may still be the major source of illiberalism, and I cannot deny that, but I think the problem lies not in the instantiation of the antimodernism, but in the psychology that underlies it. For religious ideas would have no issue if they did not…

The Nays won, narrowly, and the debate, between Daniel Dennett and Lord Robert Winston, will be available as a podcast here. A summary is here. One thing that I find interesting in these debates, which let's face it are more important for allowing people to vent than actually proving anything, is that those opposed to religion tend to think, as the Guardian commentator does, that anyone who has what I would think is a rational approach to belief, is a kind of "God-Lite", "an unthreatening and more-or-less rational - and private - approach. It's hard to object to that: practised in this way…

I have an uncanny ability to offend those who I shouldn't be offending, with bad jokes. In a recent post I put in a Tom Lehrer video where he mocks sociology. Having had philosophy mocked by my friends and contacts over the years (you study what? Your navel?), I guess I am a bit inured to such things. But I forgot that in this case there is a double whammy: philosophers have spent a lot of time mocking sociology, especially in the context of science. So below the fold, I put a comment made by respected sociologist of science, Eli Gerson, which he put in the comments of that post, and which…

I am not being discipline-centric, no, not at all. This one's for Eli Gerson...

Imagine a scientific theory that very few people know or understand. Let's call it "valency theory". Now suppose someone objects to valency theory because it undercuts their view of a particular religious doctrine, such as transubstantiation. So they gather money from rich members of their faith community and start a public relations and political campaign to have the form-substance dichotomy (hylomorphism) taught as chemical science. What would be the outcome? Well, for most people they would remain as uneducated on the topic as before. They may know, vaguely, there is a dispute of some…

Biologist and philosopher Sahotra Sarkar is combative, to say the least. When he says what he means, it can hurt physically if you are the target. I almost feel sympathy for Ben Stein... And knowing one of the principals in this comment, I had to laugh. When Kimbo says he thinks you are full of shit, he uses those words. I once had him say to me during a Q&A after I gave a talk, "'Fuck you,' he explained." To be fair, I had just told him I thought he was wrong. So anyone who thinks Intelligent Design has been expelled and they are victims, or that bloggers should be treated with…

Or so you might think NASA is saying, after a 13 year old kid showed they'd miscalculated the odds of an asteroid hitting earth by a factor of 3.

In an amazing display of misjudgment, Paul Newall of the (otherwise) excellent site The Galilean Library has interviewed me about my views on the philosophy of biology. There are some serious folk interviewed there, so of course I feel like a fraud, but hey, you all know I love the "sound" of my own voice. There's also a lot of interesting material there for those who want to know more about the history and philosophy of science, and history and philosophy in general. Go visit it even if you don't want to hear more of your favorite silverback.