Links to Other Conversations and Articles

Lots of Rachel Carson links of late, and understandably so, as it would've been her 100th birthday this Sunday. Elizabeth Kolbert makes her the Talk of the Town this week. (We had E.B. White on Carson from 1964 before, now more commentary from the magazine that originally published most of Silent Spring in serial form.) The point of Kolbert's comments on Carson is to suggest that the more things change the more they stay the same. Not a new lesson at Scienceblogs, certainly not a new lesson at The World's Fair, where several recent posts have ever so gently been about the historical…
"Why should a poison...spray enjoy immunity [while] endanger[ing] the public health?" Circa 1964. In The New Yorker. Right here. With nary a mention of Charlotte or her web. Add it to Tim's posts about poorly equipped, intellectually speaking, Rachel Carson critics. A quote from White: In the lower Mississippi, fish have been dying from a cause as yet undetermined. In Oklahoma, quail are not hatching their full clutches of eggs. In Maine, salmon bearing a rich payload of DDT have been taken from Sebago. In the Gulf of Mexico, shrimpers are wondering whether their catch will be next on the…
Just outside Baltimore, an Earth Ball -- "a large inflatable ball most often seen in junior-high-school locker rooms" -- may be the most trenchant voice about the utter distaste that is Sean Hannity. Ben Greenman's been compiling the Earth Ball's views. It isn't pretty. Earth Ball first brought pen to paper a few years ago, in the wake of Hannity's bizarre and hypocritical take on the post-Katrina situation. Here's an excerpt on the bizarre part (go to the full letter for the hypocritical part): There are hundreds upon hundreds of examples of Hannity's abysmal behavior. I would like to…
The June issue Harper's features Seed's (our) own Chris Mooney. In a series of short commentaries about "Undoing Bush," Chris contributes some thoughts on science. The 11 contributors all ponder "How to repair eight years of sabotage, bungling, and neglect." Although the Harper's website has vastly improved (and subscribers have access to the entire 156 run of the magazine, which should elicit a big ole, Holy Shit! I had no idea Henry Smith Williams wrote that article on the century's progress in chemistry in the October 1897 issue), it doesn't yet have the June issue's contents up. And…
'cept these folks: Slate, on Janet Browne's new edition of Origin and on Darwin as a writer. Jonah's digging it too; and so is fellow Virginian Jason. The Economist on the globalizing trend of evolution-creationism debates The Chronicle of Higher Education dishes up an essay that discusses these: Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel C. Dennett (Viking Press, 2006) The Creation: An Appealto Save Life on Earth, by Edward O. Wilson (W.W. Norton, 2006) Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, by David Sloan Wilson (University of Chicago Press…
I'm a fan of this one: list over at McSweeneys. It's so true, it's so true.
I wrote in a post last week: "I lived a good percentage of my life in Blacksburg (as recently as 2005) and won't go on about that here." But I did go ahead, writing a personal essay about it at The Morning News. Thanks for reading.
Alex Rosenberg, Philosophy Professor at Duke, argues so. John Dupre, Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Exeter, isn't buying it. I'm not either, ever averse to such reductionisms.* Here is Dupre's review of Rosenberg's Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology (University of Chicago Press, 2006), from American Scientist on-line. For your benefit, these are the first few paragraphs of the review: Alex Rosenberg is unusual among philosophers of biology in adhering to the view that everything occurs in accordance with universal laws, and…
Editorial at The New York Times today keeps the corn-bonanza trend in the spotlight. A few prior posts here at the World's Fair have broached the issue of the dangers of gung ho ethanolism (one, two, three, four). In the face of massive energy production, consumption habits, and climate change debates, the burgeoning corn boom is worth sustained and critical attention, before, rather than after, it happens. The brunt of the editorial is to put farmland conservation into the spotlight: [The] corn boom puts pressure on land that has been set aside as part of the United States Department of…
This is an article from the Christian Science Monitor: "What's happening to the bees?: Suddenly, the bees farmers and growers rely on are vanishing. Researchers are scrambling to find out why." Worth a read. Here's why we might care: While staple crops like wheat and corn are pollinated by wind, some 90 cultivated flowering crops - from almonds and apples to cranberries and watermelons - rely heavily on honeybees trucked in for pollinization. Honeybees pollinate every third bite of food ingested by Americans, says a Cornell study. Here's why it's happening: For many entomologists, the bee…
So says Czech President Vaclav Klaus, fan of Thatcher, admirer of Reagan, despiser of global warming rhetoric. Speaking to U.S. Congresspeople last week, he offered a few nuggets to chew on (but didn't mix metaphors like that). The Inter Press Service News Agency reports it here.* A few snippets: [The] Czech President asked the congressmen not to yield to pressure from environmentalists and abandon the principles of free society: "the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its various softer variants.…
This now becomes the third in an unplanned series on James Sherley's threatened, acted upon, and now ended hunger strike. I saw notice of this in Science [print issue*] last week. Then, curiosity piqued once again, I found an article ("MIT professor ends 12-day hunger strike") from the Boston Globe about it. The two reports offered different senses of what actually happened. Science made it seem that MIT administration had acquiesced and said (I'm paraphrasing) 'okay okay, we'll give your case more serious and immediate consideration.' Specifically, they said this: [MIT] agreed this…
Here's an update from a previous post about James Sherley, at MIT, who'd threatened late last year to go on a hunger strike to protest not getting tenure. According to this story yesterday at ABC News (and, I now see, as also noted by Omnbrain), the guy is going through with it. Speculation following from my earlier post was that he'd either not do it, that it was strange to wait until now to start, or that there was more to it than we knew. I still don't know anymore about the case, and honestly forgot about it. But there he is, going through with it. I wonder if anyone can help us,…
The New Yorker has an intruiging review of the life and legacy of Alfred Russell Wallace. Since 2000, there have been at least five noteworthy biographies of Wallace, bringing greater historical and public attention to "Darwin's neglected double." Beyond differences in our historical familiarity of the two men, Wallace and Darwin differed by social background, education, temperament, rhetorical skill, and methods (and certainly more). The article of course doesn't suggest that the two were intellectual equals, nor that we should all now be Wallacists, but it does shed light on how some of…
"Unhappy Meals," says Michael Pollan. That's the title of his article published in The New York Times Magazine this past Sunday. (As Jonah has already pointed to.) After last year's The Omnivore's Dilemma, about what defines/describes different chains of food production, he is speaking still about food, but now more directly about nutrition. It's a push in the same direction to write about food and ecology, about how what we know of nutrition comes from a lot of scientific research that ignores the ecological relationships between and within food and human systems. Nutrition is a great…
With alternative energy proposals, the environmental lines are certainly not clear-cut. I've already noted why I think this is the case (short answer: they foster consumption possibilities, not reductions in consumption). But now there is a precise example of the complexity of such issues in many states proposing what are called Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS). How could one resolve these tensions, when we don't know which alternative is an improvement? The go-to answer there is generally, ask science. Get the evidence to demonstrate trade-offs. But we can't assume science will…
Robert Crease, a philosopher at SUNY-Stony Brook, has a brief commentary on metaphors and science over at Physics Web. Although Pharyngula and the atheists won't want to hear it, early modern science was born of those who thought that "God reveals himself to humanity in two books - nature and scripture." That was, at least, the metaphor Galileo deployed in his "Letter to Grand Duchess Christina" in the 1610s, trying to distinguish between his study of the heavens and the Church's. Crease writes: But the image of the book of nature can haunt us today. One reason is that it implies the…
James Sherley, a biological engineering professor at MIT and a Harvard grad, was recently denied tenure. He's going on a hunger strike in February if the decision isn't reversed. So reports Inside Higher Ed yesterday. I won't weigh in on the merits of either side, since I know only what this article tells me. Just pasting a blurb, leaving the link above and two more below, and noting that I wonder how this'll turn out. It has all the trappings of a highly discussable story: race, science, an elite instutution, power structures, stem cell research, ethics everywhere. Here's some of the…
Nobody has ever accused Mel Gibson of historical accuracy. There's one victory for him. Nobody has ever accused him of anthropological accuracy either. That's two victories to his credit. He's having a good day. Next thing we know nobody will accuse him of having chosen a timeless '80s hairstyle way back when, or of wisely choosing the Lethal Weapon sequels, or of his soothing way with words. Now it's time to not accuse him of appreciating Mesoamerican astronomical technology. Here's the image, and I'll explain what this has to do with anything below. Master plan for Teotihuacan (Nat.…
Katherine and Sarah have posted a conversation Janet and I had about Sir Karl Popper. It's "inside the Seed mothership" over at Page 3.14. Run, don't walk, to check it out. But then walk, and be careful, it's getting icy, back here and read all our posts again and again and again. You see that stuff Dave posted earlier? The Canuck's good.