General Science
evolvingthoughts | April 13, 2008
Daniel Holz at Cosmic Variance has a beautifully written obit for John Wheeler. We are grateful for the time the great thinkers spend on us students.
Wired has an article on the updating of the classic experiments by Benjamin Libet on the fact that conscious choices occur after the brain has already begun a task.
evolvingthoughts | April 2, 2008
Idiots and the ignorant should not speak on matters they do not understand. As I am both, I want to make some vague and ultimately useless comments about Framing, yet again. This has been motivated by Chris Mooney's admirable attempts to get to the heart of the matter: here, here and here.
In a book that I really liked– The Science of Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen refer to teaching as "lying to children". The reason is that teachers can only teach what children are ready to receive. So they get cartoon versions of science and other topics, which are then refined…
evolvingthoughts | March 31, 2008
While we're on the topic of animals that act like humans, consider this very sad, very famous case: Nim Chimpsky. Raised to be a human boy, when the funds ran out and Nim got to the age equivalent of a five year old boy, he was sent off to live with other chimps. Imagine that you are a five year old boy and get put into a cage with chimps...
And despite Nim's handlers' published opinion, it seems he did use ASL for communication, as have other chimps more humanely looked after.
evolvingthoughts | March 31, 2008
So we're all such cosmopolitan nerds, blogging away... here's a guy (a friend of mine, actually) who has been doing a regular web column on Southern Hemisphere Astronomy for ten years. Give it up please for the well-bearded over-educated and definitely an over-achiever: Ian Musgrave. Go visit his blog and congratulate him.
evolvingthoughts | March 30, 2008
Watch the video under the fold, from Chang Mai in Thailand. There's a moment where you realise what the elephant is representing, and a shock that comes when you see that it is representing something. I don't know if it's been trained to do this but it looks real to me.
evolvingthoughts | March 28, 2008
Ernst Rutherford, the "father" of nuclear physics, once airily declared "In science there is only physics. All the rest is stamp collecting". By this he meant that the theory of physics is the only significant thing in science. Such mundane activities as taxonomy in biology were just sampling contingent examples of physics.
So it is with some amusement that I note that in order to make sense of string theory, a group of physicists have been trying to do taxonomy over string theories. Why this is more than a "gotcha!" is that since the late nineteenth century, philosophers of science have…
evolvingthoughts | March 25, 2008
Okay, so it's the Wilkins Ice Shelf, but it's even more important than news about me. The 6000 square mile (15,540 km2) ice shelf named for Sir Hubert Wilkins, the famous Australian Antarctic explorer (and very possibly some kind of relation), is breaking off due to global warming. This is the single largest such break up observed so far.
evolvingthoughts | March 21, 2008
On the one hand you have Jake Young discussing the role of expertise in public debates, concluding that maybe experts shouldn't expect that information from knowledgeable folk will automatically influence the uneducated. On the other hand, this...
evolvingthoughts | March 18, 2008
When I was about 8, I read in a newspaper that one of my favourite short stories, "The Sentinel", by Arthur C. Clarke, was to be made into a movie by some film maker I never heard of. I had to wait 5 years to see 2001, A Space Odyssey. The last of the golden age science fiction writers, who thought that anything was possible, has died.
evolvingthoughts | March 17, 2008
The ever-interesting blog of Moselio Schachter, Small Things Considered has another post of thought-provoking microbes: hyperthermophiles. These wee beasties live at 90°;C in anoxic conditions. I particularly liked the passing comment:
Growth and division of these organisms was observed at 90°;C under anoxic conditions using a dark-field light microscope (which takes quite a set-up).
Um yes. I'm betting that was a Herculean effort! In particular this is interesting because there is a bias in identifying microbes that do not culture in ordinary lab conditions. These researchers are to be…
evolvingthoughts | March 17, 2008
The European Space Agency is doing lots of interesting work for biology, in particular ecology. This map allows you to zoom into any place on the planet to see the land cover. [From Eureka Science News]
evolvingthoughts | February 18, 2008
As I prepare my lectures for this semester (Australian universities start the academic year in late February, early March, apart from those poor sods who have summer semesters) I am moved by Moselio Schaechter's little essay In Defense of the Lecture to ponder what propaedeutic use lectures are. Or, in other words, do they help or hinder learning?
Years back, I had a friend who ran the Science and Humanities School at a small regional campus of Monash University who often said to me, with his psychology hat on, that lectures are the worst way to teach. I never found them all that helpful,…
evolvingthoughts | February 18, 2008
Back when Darwin was a student at Cambridge, he read, and almost memorised the Rev William Paley's Natural Theology, and thereafter remained impressed by the obvious adaptiveness of the parts of organisms and their interrelations. As is well known, he gave an explanation differently to Paley's external intelligence that designs all these facets of life - instead he claimed that natural selection, a process like Adam Smith's "hidden hand" explanation for the functioning of economies, was enough to explain adaptation.
I have long thought that Darwin was too much in thrall to the traditions…
evolvingthoughts | February 16, 2008
A real journalist reviews a media conference held for the new pro-ID film Expelled:
Freedom of expression is unseemly at an Expelled press conference. There was no give-and-take, no open marketplace of ideas, in fact, scarcely any questions at all. Ruloff and Stein batted one softball after another out of the park from those posed by Paul Lauer, a representative of the film's public relations firm. Questions from non-employees had to be submitted by email. Lauer (or somebody at his firm) screened them.
I'm not sure whether Thomas Aquinas handled media inquiries this way. I'll have my…
evolvingthoughts | February 13, 2008
Biology does normativity all the time. There are things that are the "normal" type of state of a species, an organism, an ecosystem, and so on, and things that are abnormal. But the puzzling thing is that all philosophers know, since David Hume, that normativity doesn't develop out of facts. So no amount of factual statements about species, organisms and ecosystems will give a definition of what is normal.
A suitably abstract introduction to the Seed Masters' Imperative: "Tell us what a disease is", right? Hey, I'm a philosopher. What did you expect?
One of the normative words of…
evolvingthoughts | February 9, 2008
Some of you may recall I was immensely impressed by Laurie Pycroft, a 16 year old who started Pro-Test, which defended the use of animal models against the vicious and largely unthinking nastiness of animal "rights" protesters. Now Nick Anthis, at The Scientific Activist, is reporting that they seem to have achieved many of their aims in defending science from the ignorant. However, I think they will always have to be active - this stupidity has been around for over a century in Britain and elsewhere, and won't go away any time soon.
evolvingthoughts | February 2, 2008
As well as the Basic Concepts list, I occasionally get sent some links that are in my mind too advanced to be basics, but too good not to mention. So I will do with them what I have done with the Basics. Send me some links...
Recent additions
Coturnix's Biological Clock tutorials, 1-16, and a short history, from A blog around the clock
Update to links
Basics of radiometric dating
Mathematics
Fourier transforms for the practical person by parseval at A Candle in the Dark
FT of some common functions by parseval at A Candle in the Dark
Ain’t so convoluted by parseval at A Candle in…
evolvingthoughts | January 22, 2008
You'll recall that we had a new logo and link for Blogging Peer Reviewed Research. This is now rebadged and has become Research Blogging. It will aggregate and feed the posts on peer reviewed research.
evolvingthoughts | January 21, 2008
So, I just found out that I'm teaching this semester, which is a comfort (money will come in, and we can eat) and a pain (I am going to Arizona in March, so we will have to sort out some guest lectures or something). The subject is philosophy of the life sciences, but the blurb covers topics I wouldn't have put up myself:
This course looks at some of the philosophical issues arising out of the study of the life sciences-primarily biology & ecology. These issues include problems associated with the theory of evolution such as: (i) recent philosophical debate on the unit of selection; (…
evolvingthoughts | January 17, 2008
OK, so by now a number of you are either quite puzzled or are up in arms about this notion of mine that genes aren't information. First I'll recap and then make some general philosophical and historical points.
I argue that something can only be said to be information bearing if it is isomorphic to one formalisation of what counts as an Information Processing System (IPS). Anything that doesn't have the requisite mapping between these formal descriptions and physical systems doesn't count. I further argue that genes do not show the right properties of these formal systems, and hence should…