History
razib | July 3, 2008They say that to understand the present you need to understand the past. This seems likely to be true, but when it comes to understanding human affairs in their historical and sociological detail I have to admit that I'm skeptical of much genuine positive insight. That being said, I do believe that one can constrain the blind choices and flights of intuition one has through an exploration of the sample space of data which might allow for falsification of a subset of the myriad models. In short, to call bullshit you have to know shit.
A concrete example of this are the events leading up to…
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…
pharyngula | July 1, 2008It was on 1 July 1858, 150 years ago today, that the idea of natural selection was first presented to the public in a joint reading of Darwin's and Wallace's papers at the Linnean Society of London (an event which they did not recognize as important at the time), which makes today analogous to the Fourth of July for the biology revolution. Celebrate! If you've got a some fireworks you were saving for the holiday in a few days time, set off a few early.
The Beagle Project has a summary of the significance of this day in scientific history. If you want an anchor point for the Darwin Year, this…
pharyngula | June 30, 2008Except, unfortunately, what the heck it was. The Tunguska event was the mysterious explosion of unidentified origin that occured in a remote area of Siberia on 30 June 1908, flattening trees over 2000 square kilometers, but leaving no trace of a crater. Archy has put together a thorough account of what we know, including some of the speculation about the causes.
I rather liked the idea that it was a curse by the thunder god, Ogdy, mainly because "Ogdy" is such a cute name.
oracknows | June 24, 2008If there's one thing I've learned in my years of delving into pseudoscience, quackery, and alternative medicine is that conspiracy theories are just like Lays potato chips; cranks can't eat just one. No, they have to stick their hand in the bag and pull out a huge, heaping handful and snarf it all down. Believers in "alternative medicine" quackery often also believe in New Age woo or other bizarre unscientific beliefs. Scratch a "9/11 Truther" and you'll often also find a Holocaust denier. One of my fellow ScienceBloggers, Mark Hoofnagle, has a great term for how cranks seem unable to be…
pharyngula | June 18, 2008Olivia Judson hits exactly the right note in her article about Charles Darwin and the coming centennial year of The Origin: brilliant fellow who revolutionized our thinking, but he wasn't the only one and he definitely wasn't the final word on evolution. So let's party!
This is going to be a great celebratory year for biologists, and I have to confess — I'm also looking forward to the bitter gnashing of teeth by the creationists.
aardvarchaeology | June 17, 2008With my buddies Kjell Andersson and Lasse Winroth, and supported by the amazing Ehrsson brothers Rune & Tore, I've been back metal detecting around the Harbour of the Sheaf Kings for two days. Last summer I did some work along the current shores of the harbour site, covering available flat ground and finding nothing I could definitely date before the year 1800. Then I moved inland to the landlocked part of the one-time harbour basin, and immediately found a sword from the early 1500s.
We're currently concentrating on bits of flat ground around the landlocked basin, hoping to find traces…
aardvarchaeology | June 17, 2008I have become increasingly fascinated with place names. The other day I bought my second copy of Svenskt ortnamnslexikon, "Swedish place-name encyclopedia" (ed. Mats Wahlberg 2003). One often-consulted copy is in my office, and I've missed it many times -- at home while reading or conversing, and particularly in the car when passing intriguing signposts.
Names are hardly ever nonsensical collections of sounds. We may not know what they mean any more, or if we know we don't give it much thought. (In my family, we're named He of the War God, Senior Imperial Concubine from Space, Name of God and…
aardvarchaeology | June 12, 2008At the request of Aard regular and archaeologist Mathias Blobel in Freiburg, Germany, here's a summary of a recent paper in Swedish.
In Fornvännen 2007:3, husband & wife historians of archaeology Drs Ãsa Gillberg and Ola W. Jensen note that there are currently ongoing attempts to train dogs to sniff out archaeology, much like they have proved capable of finding illegal drugs, recently buried murder victims, even cancerous tumours. Results so far are inconclusive. The point of Gillberg & Jensen's note is instead to draw attention to an obscure Swedish antiquarian, Johan Lindman, who…
evolvingthoughts | June 11, 2008
History is one of those things that the venal mine to serve their special interests, with no concern for truth or accuracy. But it takes real stupid to say this:
Contrary to popular belief, as historian David Barton points out, the theory of evolution was around long before Charles Darwin. As far back as the 6th century B.C., Greek writers Thales and Anaximander had propounded the theory centuries before the birth of Christ. Aristotle, influenced by his intellectual forbears, also advocated a form of evolution.
Other ancient writers like Diogenes, Empedocles, Democritus, and Lucretius, all…
oracknows | June 10, 2008I don't know what's going on here, but the University of Oregon got slimed last night. A truly odious little being slithered his way into the University grounds and left a stench that won't soon dissipate.
Sadly, David Irving, notorious Holocaust "revisionist" (translation: Holocaust denier) gave a talk last night at the University of Oregon. True, he wasn't invited by the university, but thanks to the fact that the founder of ultra-right wing Pacifica Forum is a retired UO professor and that retired professors can invite speakers to university facilities, David Irving spoke last night:…
evolvingthoughts | June 7, 2008
The final of my comments on this topic (see one and two here) addresses the question whether or not there is a rank of species.
Once I had a paper knocked back by a reviewer in which I argued that there was nothing unique to being species. This became my 2003 paper. The reviewer said that the paper failed to accept that there was a "grade of organisation" in biology that comprised species. This was not surprising as the paper argued that no such grade existed (and I was able to convince the editor that this was a decent argument to make). However, many biologists are convinced such a rank…
aardvarchaeology | June 7, 2008I'm not a very frequent theatre-goer, and if I don't like a play, I leave in the intermission. But I have had the good fortune to see some excellent productions through the years, notably of Shakespeare. (It is of course entirely possible to play Shakespeare poorly too, and I've seen it done both by professionals and by amateurs.) I haven't seen all his plays, and I've read only two, but dangle an opportunity to conveniently see more in front of me, and chances are I'll bite.
During my recent Orkney jaunt, I read a fascinating biography of William Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt's best-…
oracknows | May 31, 2008Ever since it appeared as an "adult" spinoff of Doctor Who, I've had a love-hate relationship with Torchwood. The first season was about as uneven as anything I've ever seen, ranging from a truly execrable (and, even worse, unforgivably stupidly and badly written) "homage" to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Countrycide) that ranks among the worst hours of television to which I've ever subjected myself to a handful of pretty darned good episodes (Out of Time, Captain Jack Harkness), with a whole lot of mediocre episodes in between. This season was generally more consistent, but a lot of problems…
razib | May 29, 2008I'm getting into an exchange with Luis below about the rise of European domination. Unfortunately with historical questions I can't "prove" my case as in mathematics, nor can I cite an empirical result that is extremely generalizable as in much of the natural sciences. I'm trying to describe a distribution of facts over time and space, and I can't really make my own position clear without plugging into Luis' mind all my priors (the inverse might apply from Luis' perspective). That takes time and is basically impossible in blog-format, though I've had better success I think in face-to-face…
oracknows | May 29, 2008As many who take an interest in this subject know, one of the most common arguments that advocates of various medical woo often make is the appeal to ancient wisdom. They seem to think that if a treatment is old (homeopathy, acupuncture, various "energy healing" methods), there must be something to it because otherwise it wouldn't have persisted. (Never mind that belief in ghosts and evil spirits, for example, has persisted for many thousands of years.)
Here is an explicit description of just what some of this "ancient medical wisdom" is, straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak, namely…
evolvingthoughts | May 29, 2008
If somebody asked me to write a short essay giving an overview of my favourite topic, the nature of species, I doubt that I could. I can write a long essay on it (in fact, several) but it would be excruciatingly hard to write a short one. For that, we need a real writer. Carl Zimmer is the guy. He has an essay on species in the current edition of Scientific American. And despite quoting some obscure Australian philosopher, it is a good summary of the issues. How he manages to get up on a topic like that amazes me. It took me a good five years.
There's a connection with this blog. A while…
oracknows | May 26, 2008
Today is once again Memorial Day. On this day in the past I have posted photo montages of, for example, the World War II Memorial in Washington, DC and link roundups, as I did last year. This year, I thought I'd simply post a link to a list maintained by the Department of Veteran Affairs of the number of Americans who have died in every war fought thus far in this nation's history, excluding the current actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those figures can be found here.
As we go about our business today, some of us going to cemeteries, others having barbecues, going to baseball games, or…
evolvingthoughts | May 24, 2008
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…