History and Philosophy (often of Science)
jlynch | December 7, 2007John Stockwell (among others) has suggested that there needs to be a baseline with which to compare Behe’s productivity as a scientist. Stockwell suggested Sean B. Carroll and, as always, I’m happy to oblige. (FYI, I’ve omitted Carroll’s review articles.)
Couple of things are of note here. Firstly, and most obviously, Carroll’s publication record makes (Full professor) Behe look like a piker, especially when you consider that Carroll’s papers appear in journals such as Nature, Science, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Secondly, we see the predicted shift from first-author…
jlynch | December 6, 2007
Events
1900 - Max Planck discovers the law of black body emission.
1972 - Apollo 17, the last Apollo moon mission, is launched. The crew take the photograph known as "The Blue Marble" (above) as they leave the Earth.
1995 - The Galileo spacecraft arrives at Jupiter, a little more than six years after it was launched by Space Shuttle Atlantis during Mission STS-34.
Births
903 - Abd Al-Rahman Al Sufi, Persian astronomer
1810 - Theodor Schwann, German physiologist
1905 - Gerard Kuiper, Dutch-born American astronomer
Deaths
1978 - Alexander Wetmore, American ornithologist
1993 - Wolfgang Paul…
jlynch | December 6, 2007Births
1586 - Niccolò Zucchi, Italian astronomer
1778 - Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, French physicist and chemist
1863 - Charles Martin Hall, American chemist
1890 - Yoshio Nishina, Japanese physicist
1920 - George Porter, British chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1771 - Giovanni Battista Morgagni, Italian anatomist
1867 - Jean Pierre Flourens, French physician
jlynch | December 5, 2007Births
1855 - Clinton Hart Merriam, American ornithologist
1868 - Arnold Sommerfeld, German physicist
1896 - Carl Ferdinand Cori, Austrian-born biochemist and Nobel Prize laureate
1901 - Werner Heisenberg, German physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1903 - Cecil Frank Powell, British physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1907 - Giuseppe Occhialini, Italian physicist
1932 - Sheldon Lee Glashow, American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1624 - Gaspard Bauhin, Swiss botanist
1965 - Joseph Erlanger, American physiologist and Nobel Prize laureate
2001 - Franco Rasetti, Italian physicist
jlynch | December 2, 2007Events
1904 - The Jovian moon Himalia is discovered by Charles Dillon Perrine.
1967 - A transplant team headed by Christiaan Barnard carries out the first heart transplant on a human (53-year-old Louis Washkansky).
1973 - Pioneer 10 sends back the first close-up images of Jupiter.
1999 - NASA loses radio contact with the Mars Polar Lander moments before the spacecraft enters the Martian atmosphere.
Births
1776 - Johann Spurzheim, German neuroscientist
1838 - Cleveland Abbe, American meteorologist
1842 - Ellen Swallow Richards, American scientist
1886 - Manne Siegbahn, Swedish physicist and…
jlynch | December 1, 2007Births
1885 - George Richards Minot, American physician and Nobel Prize laureate
1931 - Nigel Calder, British science writer
Deaths
1987 - Luis Federico Leloir, French-born chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
1987 - Yakov Borisovich Zel’dovich, Russian physicist
jlynch | December 1, 2007
Births
1525 - Tadeáš Hájek, Czech physician and astronomer
1580 - Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, French astronomer
1743 - Martin Heinrich Klaproth, German chemist
1925 - Martin Rodbell, American scientist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1729 - Giacomo F. Maraldi, French-Italian astronomer
1750 - Johan Gabriel Doppelmayr, German mathematician, astronomer, and cartographer
1964 - J. B. S. Haldane, Scottish geneticist
jlynch | November 30, 2007Mark Borrello is a good mate of mine and an historian of biology. Greg Laden has an account of Mark publicly handing John West his ass regarding his expectorations re Darwin and eugenics.
PZ was there as well. Apparently West called him "America's Richard Dawkins"!
Nice job, Mark! It will be interesting tedious to see how the DI will spin this.
Update (12/1): And here comes the spin.
Update (12/2): And PZ responds.
jlynch | November 30, 2007Events
1974 - Lucy is discovered by Donald Johanson, Maurice Taieb, Yves Coppens and Tim White in the Middle Awash of Ethiopia’s Afar Depression.
Births
1756 - Ernst Chladni, German physicist
1768 - JÄdrzej Åniadecki, Polish writer, physician, chemist and biologist
1858 - Jagdish Chandra Bose, Indian physicist
1869 - Gustaf Dalén, Swedish physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1889 - Edgar Douglas Adrian, British physiologist
1915 - Henry Taube, Canadian-born chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
jlynch | November 28, 2007
Births
1627 - John Ray, English naturalist
1762 - Pierre André Latreille, French zoologist
1803 - Christian Doppler, Austrian physicist
1825 - Jean-Martin Charcot, French neurologist
1849 - John Ambrose Fleming, British physicist
1857 - Theodor Escherich, German pediatrician
1874 - Egas Moniz, Portuguese physician, neurologist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1694 - Marcello Malpighi, Italian physician
jlynch | November 28, 2007Events
1660 - At Gresham College, 12 men, including Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, and Sir Robert Moray decide to found what is later known as the Royal Society of London.
1964 - Mariner program: NASA launches the Mariner 4 probe toward Mars.
2004 - A male Po’o-uli dies of avian malaria in Maui Bird Conservation Center before it could breed, making the species in all probability extinct.
Births
1700 - Nathaniel Bliss, Astronomer Royal
1772 - Luke Howard, British meteorologist
1805 - John Stephens, American archeologist
1908 - Claude Lévi-Strauss, French anthropologist
1950 -…
jlynch | November 27, 2007Events
2001 - A hydrogen atmosphere is discovered on the extrasolar planet Osiris by the Hubble Space Telescope, the first atmosphere detected on an extrasolar planet.
2005 - The first partial human face transplant is completed in Amiens, France.
Births
1701 - Anders Celsius, Swedish inventor and astronomer
1754 - Georg Forster, German scientist
1857 - Charles Scott Sherrington, British physiologist and Nobel Prize laureate
1903 - Lars Onsager, Norwegian chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
1955 - Bill Nye (The science guy), American engineer and broadcaster
Deaths
1811 - Andrew Meikle,…
jlynch | November 26, 2007Births
1678 - Jean Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan, French geophysicist
1832 - Karl Rudolf König, German physicist
1898 - Karl Ziegler, German chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
1904 - Armand Frappier, French-Canadian physician and microbiologist
1907 - Ruth Patrick, American botanist
1938 - Rodney Jory, Australian physicist
Deaths
1876 - Karl Ernst von Baer, German biologist
1885 - Thomas Andrews, Irish chemist
1896 - Emil du Bois-Reymond, German physician
jlynch | November 24, 2007Events
1639 - Jeremiah Horrocks and William Crabtree separately observe the first recorded transit of Venus
1859 - Charles Darwin publishes The Origin of Species.
Births
1774 - Thomas Dick, Scottish scientific teacher and writer
1888 - Fredrick Willius, American cardiologist
1925 - Simon van der Meer, Dutch physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
2006 - ZdenÄk Veselovský, Czech zoologist
jlynch | November 22, 2007Births
1553 - Prospero Alpini, Italian physician and botanist
1715 - Pierre Charles Le Monnier, French astronomer
1837 - Johannes Diderik van der Waals, Dutch physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1887 - Henry Moseley, English physicist
1907 - Lars Leksell, Swedish physician
1924 - Colin Macmillan Turnbull, British-born anthropologist
Deaths
1902 - Walter Reed, American bacteriologist
1937 - Jagdish Chandra Bose, Indian physicist
1937 - George Albert Boulenger, Belgian naturalist
jlynch | November 21, 2007First of all, I want to wish a happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers. To everyone else, have a happy Thursday. I’ll be laying low for the next four days (a combination of Thanksgiving and grading) and am not likely to post other than a brief comment to tonight’s ASU vs USC football game. Your Today in Science follows ...
Births
1635 - Francis Willughby, English biologist
1897 - Paul Oswald Ahnert, German astronomer
1904 - Louis Eugène Félix Néel, French physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1917 - Andrew Fielding Huxley, British scientist and Nobel Prize laureate
1939 - Tom West,…
jlynch | November 20, 2007Events
1905 - Albert Einstein’s paper, "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?", is published in Annalen der Physik. This paper leads to the mass-energy equivalence E = mc².
1953 - Authorities at the British Natural History Museum announce that the "Piltdown Man" skull was a hoax.
1969 - The first ARPANET link is established.
Births
1931 - Revaz Dogonadze, Georgian scientist
Deaths
1555 - Georg Agricola, German scientist
1652 - Jan Brożek, Polish mathematician, physician, and astronomer
1881 - Ami Boué, Austrian geologist
1970 - Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, Indian…
jlynch | November 19, 2007Births
1602 - Otto von Guericke, German physicist
1762 - Pierre André Latreille, French entomologist
1886 - Karl von Frisch, Austrian zoologist and Nobel Prize laureate
1889 - Edwin Hubble, American astronomer
1910 - Willem Jacob van Stockum, Dutch physicist
1926 - Andrzej W. Schally, Polish-born endocrinologist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1704 - Charles Plumier, French botanist
1778 - Francesco Cetti, Italian scientist
1934 - Willem de Sitter, Dutch scientist
1945 - Francis William Aston, British chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
1976 - Trofim Lysenko, Stalinist biologist
jlynch | November 12, 2007
Events
1971 - Mariner 9 becomes the first spacecraft to orbit another planet (Mars). Though switched off on 27th October 1972, the probe is still in Mars orbit and stable until at least 2022.
Births
1924 - Motoo Kimura, Japanese geneticist (above)
Deaths
1606 - Geronimo Mercuriali, Italian philologist and physician
1994 - Motoo Kimura, Japanese geneticist
jlynch | November 12, 2007Events
1847 - James Young Simpson is the first to use chloroform as an anaesthetic.
1980 - Voyager I makes its closest approach to Saturn and takes first images of its rings.
Births
1795 - Thaddeus William Harris, American naturalist
1842 - John Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, English physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1896 - Salim Ali, Indian ornithologist
Deaths
1742 - Friedrich Hoffmann, German physician and chemist
1916 - Percival Lowell, American astronomer