Politics
pharyngula | January 12, 2007Awww, poor William Dembski is puzzled by the data that shows that acceptance of evolution rises with education level. I'm sorry, guy, but that's what the evidence shows: better educated people tend to support good science more than poorly educated people, and Intelligent Design creationism derives its popularity from ignorance. Larry Moran puts him in his place.
At the risk of boring anyone with an IQ over 80, let me make the point that Dembski is deliberately missing. In 2002, if you rejected evolution you were an idiot. That's because the evidence for evolution is overwhelming. The same…
oracknows | January 12, 2007Those of you who've been around this blog for a long time probably remember Dr. Lorraine Day. In fact, I mentioned her in one of the very first substantive posts that I ever did regarding why breast cancer testimonials for alternative medicines are inherently misleading, presenting her as an example of a once respected academic orthopedic surgeon who had fallen deeply into woo. I had also been aware of her association with infamous Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel, but I had mainly thought that this was more because of Zündel's love of woo (he claimed that he had cancer and had called Dr. Day…
hrynyshyn | January 12, 2007When former Redskins quarterback Heath Shuler managed to bump off incumbent congressman Charles Taylor in November, there was much rejoicing here in western North Carolina. Many Democrats kept their hopes modest, however, as Shuler got elected campaigning on "mountain values," a not so subtle code phrase for the Christian fundamentalism that pervades the Blue Ridge Mountains. We didn't have to wait long for those fears to be realized.
Yesterday, Shuler voted against a bill to lift the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Fifteen other Democrats did the same. Why?
"I want…
razib | January 11, 2007Yesterday I watched Will Wilkinson and Ezra Klein on Blogging Heads. Will, as many of you will know, is a pragmatic libertarian (oh, they exist), while Ezra is a liberal. I was struck by (somewhat appalled in fact) by Ezra's irritation and contempt for the philosophical nerdiness of many libertarians. Ezra's emphasis on the empirical and the proximate, on a narrow sui generis fixation on a sequence of finite policies was set against a more expansive and theoretically scaffolded conception of the Good Life which Will seemed to be promoting (even a question of the nature of the Good Life).…
evolvingthoughts | January 11, 2007Sheik al-Hilaly has again made comments about Australians and their way of life. We're dishonest, unjust, and there is no freedom or democracy here.
Oddly, this is something he is entitled to say in Australia. Let him try to make comments about Saudi Arabs in that country, or attack Egyptian political institutions in Egypt, where he made these remarks.
But you know what? I don't care. He can be as nasty as he likes, so long as he does not incite any illegal acts. I don't care. Religious clerics of all religions have made equally nasty comments about Australians. Catholic, Protestant, Hindu,…
pharyngula | January 11, 2007Science magazine has just published a graph of data taken from a general social survey of Americans that quantifies what most of us assume: a well-educated liberal who is not a fundamentalist is much more likely to accept evolution than a conservative fundamentalist with only a high school education. You can see the trend fairly clearly: here we see the percent believing in evolution vs. fundamentalism, amount of education, and self-reported political views.
(click for larger image)The percentage of respondents believing in human evolution is plotted simultaneously against political view (…
grrlscientist | January 11, 2007Liberal media, my ass! If you believe that the majority of the mainstream media (MSM) is a bastion of "liberal" reporting, then you need to open your mind and read Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush by Eric Boehlert (New York: Free Press, 2006). In this book, the author examines the press coverage of the Bush administration during that turbulent year between September 2004 and September 2005.
Boehlert is an award-winning journalist who researches and writes extensively about media, politics and pop culture, and is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone. In Lapdogs, he unflinchingly…
pharyngula | January 11, 2007One of the lesser diaries on Daily Kos is calling for a boycott of Scienceblogs and is asking readers to email the gang at Seedmedia and tell them to spank one of our colleagues here. All this because Dr Charles thinks John Edwards is a piss-poor presidential candidate. Now I happen to disagree on Edwards worth as a candidate, but I do agree with some of the criticisms: Edwards sure is awfully rich, and good lawyerly arguments are often very, very bad scientific arguments. But anyone who had actually read much of Charles' site would know that he's a liberal humanist who actually wants Barack…
clock | January 11, 2007For some reason, Dr.Charles is not allowing comments on this post. If you read it and find yourself nodding your head in agreement, stop and think again. Then read this as anti-toxin. Don't fall for the rhetoric of people whose financial interests are at stake here.
Then read this book and see for yourself whose mind and heart is on the right side of the issue.
Update: Pharyngula and Dave have more. The post by Dr.Charles is now open to comments. I found myself in a very unenviable position of simultanously defending my friend Dr.Charles while attacking his post at the same time, and…
evolvingthoughts | January 10, 2007NASA Watch reports that Patrick Rhode, the deputy to Michael Brown, of Hurricane Katrina FEMA infamy, has been appointed to a NASA position. His total lack of experience at anything except getting Bush and Cheney elected makes this a very bad bit of corruption.
clock | January 10, 2007My SciBling, Mike Dunford, who is a military husband has penned an eloquent essay on Iraq and what it all means. Please read it and link it from your blogs.
pharyngula | January 10, 2007
There's an important phenomenon in development called neurulation. This is a process that starts with a flat sheet of ectodermal cells, folds them into a tube, and creates our dorsal nervous system. Here's a simple cross-section of the process in a salamander, but in general outline we humans do pretty much the same thing. Cells move up and inward, and then zipper together along the length of the animal to produce a closed tube.
It's a seemingly simple event with a great deal of underlying complexity. It requires coordinated changes in the shape of ectodermal cells to drive the changes in…
pharyngula | January 9, 2007At least I freely admit it…so here, for your viewing pleasure, a brief musical interlude:
grrlscientist | January 9, 2007tags: birds, book review, conservation, Hawai'i
Conservation is all about saving endangered species, right? Well, not always. In this book, Seeking the Sacred Raven: Politics and Extinction on a Hawai'ian Island by Mark Jerome Walters (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006), the author tells the heartbreaking story of how people who were fighting to save the endangered `alalâ, the Hawai'ian raven, Corvus hawaiiensis, actually hastened the bird's extinction in the wild.
The `alalâ is the Hawai'ian name for a sacred bird; a indigenous raven that is honored by Hawai'ians as a guardian spirit that…
drorzel | January 9, 2007A lot of people have commented on this New York Times article on science budgets, mostly echoing the author's lament about the negative effects of operating at 2006 funding levels. I really don't have much to add to that, but it's worth reminding people where the blame for this belongs:
Last year, Congress passed just 2 of 11 spending bills -- for the military and domestic security -- and froze all other federal spending at 2006 levels. Factoring in inflation, the budgets translate into reductions of about 3 percent to 4 percent for most fields of science and engineering.
Congressional…
purepedantry | January 8, 2007Daniel Kahneman and Johnathan Renshon, writing in Foreign Policy, put forward a fascinating thesis that because of the way human beings are organized psychologically we are prone to be more hawkish. Basically the thrust of their argument is that social and cognitive psychologists have documented numerous psychological errors that human beings make consistently. In this sense human beings are not exactingly rational. Where our judgment consistently differs from pure rationality we make mistakes. With respect to foreign policy these mistakes make us more hawkish because they place a higher…
j7uy5 | January 7, 2007Perhaps it is a mere coincidence, but I could not help but notice
this. As soon as Democrats take control of the House and Senate, we
see these headlines:
Return
trip for electric vehicles: automakers unveil plans for electric
cars; no need to put pressure on the auto industry!
Medicare
Drug Program Costing Less Than Estimates, U.S. Says: no need to
pressure the pharmaceutical industry!
Employers
increase hiring, wages in Dec.: no need to worry about jobs and
wages, or to put pressure on big business!
Falling
crude oil prices should translate soon to lower prices at the pump:
leave the oil…