The Life Academic
jlynch | January 19, 2008
Today sees the formal start of the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference, an event which I unfortunately cannot attend. Instead of spending my Friday with Bora and other science bloggers, I was giving a public talk titled "Evolution Is ..." at Phoenix Country Day School in Paradise Valley. Basic content was to delineate some of the things evolution is (and is not) and to show some of the exciting things we can discover using fossils, molecules, behavioral studies etc. For those that might be interested, I’ve made the slides available here [PDF, 5.85M]
jlynch | January 17, 2008Coming on the end of the week here and all is good. My classes look sharp, so it should be a good semester of teaching. Various non-teaching bits and pieces have clicked together over the past few days, so it looks like a good semester.
And ASU basketball has done it again - beating Cal 99-90 in double overtime to go 14-2 (4-0 in the Pac-10). Up next is Stanford (14-3, 3-2) who beat Arizona tonight to send the Wildcats to 11-6 (1-3). Could we even imagine that ASU would go to March Madness and Arizona end up in the NIT? Only time will tell.
Good times.
jlynch | January 13, 2008The semester formally starts tomorrow. As usual, I’m teaching three courses - two sections (19 students each) of The Human Event, our "great books" seminar, and one lecture course (115 students), Origins, Evolution and Creation. I’ve also got one student finishing her honors thesis.
The big service requirement will be continuing to chair a search committee - we’re short-listing candidates tomorrow and will then seek further information before choosing the five or so candidates to bring to campus for interviews in March. Anyone who has been involved with academic searches knows how much work…
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, 2007Over at this thread, a reader asked for Behe’s publication record in a similar format to Gonzalez’s. Glad to oblige. (As always, click for a big ’un).
Note how his productivity drops off hugely once he gets publicly involved with ID in 1991. Much like Gonzalez, Behe’s most productive period occurs just before he embraces design and from then on, its all downhill.
Update: Readers might want to contrast Behe's record with that of Sean B. Carroll.
jlynch | December 6, 2007DI "policy analyst" Logan Gage tells us:
Michael Behe does biochemical research with his University of Pennsylvania Ph.D.; Jonathan Wells does biological research with his U.C. Berkeley Ph.D.; Stephen Meyer researches the history and philosophy of science with his Cambridge University Ph.D.; etc.
Not quite. Behe stopped being a productive scientist a long time ago. Wells has published a total of three peer-reviewed papers in the thirteen years since he got his PhD, the last of which in the scientific equivalent of The Onion. Meyer - to the best of my knowledge - has never published a peer-…
jlynch | December 6, 2007
If only to prove I have too much time on my hands as the semester winds to a close ... here is Michael Behe’s peer-reviewed scientific output over time (again, click for biggie). Remember, friends don’t let friends who were productive scientists become ID "theorists."
jlynch | December 6, 2007Over at Neurotopia the peer-less Evil Monkey has posted an excellent entry on Guillermo Gonzalez and how his productivity as a published scientist dropped off significantly when he began his tenure track at Iowa State and how - based on this alone - he would have probably had a rough time getting tenure.
EM provided a graph to back up his points; below is a prettified version (click for biggie). Feel free to use in any posts you might make on this issue.
The total height of any bar is the number of peer-reviewed publications Gonzalez had in a given year. Red indicates those for which he was…
jlynch | November 17, 2007I’m finally back from spending a few days in DC - my second trip to the city in the past two weeks. I was there to receive the CASE/Carnegie Professor of the Year award for Arizona. The award - presented by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education - is the only national award that recognizes professors for their commitment to undergraduate education and mentoring. I was deeply, deeply, honored to be counted among the four national award winners and the forty state winners, especially as the nomination comes from your…
jlynch | September 22, 2007There’s a common misconception about academics. It sees us as spending perhaps six to nine hours a week actually working and then sitting on our asses for the rest of the working week absorbing money from the public. Wish it were so. This week, I had nine hours of in-class time, five hours of meetings with students regarding papers that are due next week, three hours of other meetings, and eight hours of class preparation (including three hours this afternoon).
And then there is the service ... Service is one of those things that academics have to deal with, and when you are part of a self-…
jlynch | September 14, 2007PZ raises an excellent point about the hysteria being shown by Dembski and others regarding the "Evolutionary Informatics Lab" that Robert Marks was trying to host at Baylor. The Lab, you will remember, does not actually exist in any material sense - it is merely a webpage (currently here) which features the work of three individuals: Marks (at Baylor), Tomas English (with no affiliation), and William Basener (at Rochester Institute of Technology). There is no physical lab and never was. It’s a webpage that can be hosted anywhere (even the Discovery Institute). Marks and Dembski should have…
jlynch | September 14, 2007Ah, Friday. Supposedly the day I can devote to doing some research, but instead I’m attempting to distil six hours of lectures on Darwin’s life into one easy to digest three hour bolus. In short, I’m going to be busy for a while.
Around the ScienceBlogs, I will note that Mark, PZ and John Wilkins offer some musings on reforming the Office of Technology Assessment. Tim mentions that a new survey puts the death toll in Iraq at over one million. Chad weighs in on the "scandal" regarding the NE Patriots, while Ed comments on a more substantive scandal at UC-Irvine’s law school.
jlynch | September 9, 2007Did Klaus-Martin Schulte plagiarize his response to Naomi Oreskes from Christopher Monckton? Looks like it. You be the judge.
Is Monckton hanging around the comments of this blog, trying to scare people. Looks like it. You be the judge.
jlynch | September 9, 2007Just got back from my public lecture - approximately 90 secular humanists packed into the meeting room to hear me talk about the history of the Intelligent Design Movement and their recent fortunes. The talk lasted a little over an hour and there was plenty of questions and discussion afterwards. All good.
Here [swf] are the slides for the talk (minus some animations).
Update: Because the Flash seems to be causing problems for some people, here are the slides as a PDF. Also I've corrected the head count ... for some reason I had doubled the actual number.
jlynch | September 7, 2007I had the pleasure of spending Friday evening as Guest Coach for the Sun Devil women’s soccer team. The Guest Coach program honors faculty who are selected by student-athletes and allows them to get behind the scenes on game day. So 5:30pm saw my daughter and I at the soccer stadium, meeting the players & coaches, and having a good time. I will always remember the look of happiness on my daughter’s face as she sat in the locker room among the players, so a thanks goes out to everyone for making the evening so much fun.
Nine PM unfortunately saw the Sun Devils lose 1-0 to the third ranked…
jlynch | September 6, 2007This coming Sunday I will be giving a public talk on the Intelligent Design movement for the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix. Details:
Designs on Darwin: A History of the Intelligent Design Movement
September 9th @ 9:00am (Brunch to start, followed by talk)
HomeTown Buffet, 1312 N. Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale
Talk is free and open to the public.
jlynch | August 19, 2007Tomorrow is the first day of classes here at ASU and promises to begin a rather hectic week as everything slowly comes together. I’m down to teach two courses - one section of my Darwinian Revolution course (100 student lecture course), and two of the Human Event (Science Focus), a Socratic seminar. Follow the links if you want to know more.
jlynch | August 16, 2007Readers of other Scienceblogs will have noticed that many of my sciblings are heading off to New York for a grand meetup. Unfortunately, due to our semester starting on Monday (and thus a start-of-semester event on Saturday that will literally involve approximately 5 seconds of my time - walk on stage, smile, wave, walk off, repeat twice 90 minutes apart), I’m unable to be there. That and the cost of flying to, and staying in, NYC.
We need a West coast meetup.
*Big sigh*
jlynch | August 4, 2007In a follow up to this story, Virgil Renzulli (VP of Public Affairs here at ASU) has this to say:
At ASU, as at most American research universities, positions funded by external grants are completely dependent on that funding. Robert Pettit, former director of the university’s Cancer Research Institute (CRI), attempted to secure funding to continue his research, submitting proposals to both the National Cancer Institute and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, but these were not selected by those agencies from among the many competing proposals. That is the sole reason why 22…
jlynch | July 27, 2007It's just after noon here in Exeter and I'm getting ready to head off to lunch. Yesterday's session on multi-level selection was very interesting with Rick Michod (U of Arizona) giving a particularly though provoking paper on the transition to multicellularity. Today's sessions are relatively outside my interests, but I expect to catch an afternoon session on paleobiology before the General Business meeting (that most beloved of society events). Hopefully the rain will stay away!