Science Culture

One of my favorite books, "The Phantom Tollbooth," by Norton Juster, has a wonderful description of the penalties for making decisions without carefully evaluating the facts. Whenever the characters in the book arrive at a decision too quickly, they end up, literally, "jumping to Conclusions," an island far off the shore. The penalty for quick blog posts isn't so high. And, I'm pretty certain that no blogger has been stranded on a distant island for writing something without having all the facts. Still, it seems that the story of the offered "An Inconvenient Truth" DVDs, wasn't as…
This comes from Acephalous. I am happy to help: What is the speed of meme? People write in general (typically truimphant) terms about how swiftly a single voice can travel from one side of the internet to the other and back again, but how often does that actually happen? Of those instances, how often is it organic? Most memes, I'd wager, are only superficially organic: beginning small, they acquire minor prominence among low-traffic blogs before being picked up by a high-traffic one, from which many more low-traffic blogs snatch them. Contra blog-triumphal models of memetic bootstrapping…
Today's New York Times Science section includes coverage of a forum on the religion-science wars this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif. Just about everybody who's anybody in this battle was there. My favorite quote comes from Steve Weinberg: "Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization." That's quite a thing to say -- it's not the medical advances, and understanding of our place in the universe, or our kinship with all other species that will define science…
I touched a nerve in another post by mentioning molecular biology kits. Let's face it. Cloning kits, sequencing kits, and their relatives are the laboratory equivalent of frozen cookie dough. With frozen cookie dough, anyone can bake hot, steamy, chocolate chip cookies that taste great. You don't have to read a recipe, do any math, or figure out how to "cream" butter and sugar together. Just spoon the dough on the pan, put the pan in the oven, and 10 short minutes later: ummm, cookies. Lab work and cooking have much in common. At one time, only a few people were good cooks. Now,…
Anyone who's spent even a modest amount of time and effort investigating the battle over the teaching of intelligent design creationism in the country's classrooms will recognize the argument that an understanding of evolution is essential to a decent science education, let alone a degree in biology. And so it is. But many of the same proponents of banishing creationist clap-trap from public schools, myself included, often extend that argument beyond science into the wider cultural and economic spheres. And there things get a little muddy. A proper understanding of evolution is the…
Defending the status quo is not my default position, particularly in my own field of science journalism, but I think someone should stand up for our side, considering the knocks we're taking from various angles. Some of my fellow SciBloggers have stepped to the plate but as I'm one of the few actual science journalists on the roster, I'm going to take a swing at it. First, I'm not going to insist that all scientists should learn how to be better communicators. That shouldn't have to be stated explicitly. So should every professional. And that's just a lazy response to complaints about…
Reposted from the original Digitalbio. About a decade ago, I took a fascinating summer course at the UW on bioethics. We read about the Nuremburg trials and the Geneva conventions. We learned about horizon problems and eugenics. And we discussed lots of challenging scenarios with genetic testing, autonomy, family relationships, and the problems faced by people seeking to have children, trying to get insurance, or looking for a job. So naturally, when I started a biotechnology course for non-science majors (Biotechnology and Society) at our community college, I used many of those examples…
When does a little artistic license go a little too far? We don't always expect the truth in science journalism imagery. We've all seen the newspaper pictures of the famous scientist wearing a lab coat and gazing intently at a gel, looking through a microscope, or contemplating an agar plate streaked with lovely colonies of bacteria. Some of us find these pictures pretty funny, especially if we know that the subject of the photo hasn't run a gel in the past twenty years and never wears a lab coat unless they have to give a lecture to medical students. Okay, perhaps the glossified,…
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains, there's a land that's fair and bright, The handouts grow on bushes and you sleep out every night Where the boxcars all are empty and the sun shines every day On the birds and the bees and the cigarete trees, The lemonade springs where the bluebird sings In the Big Rock Candy Mountains Big Rock Candy Mountain by Harry "Haywire Mac" McClintock (Warning: this site plays the music) To some inhabitants of the ivory tower, industry looks like paradise. When I was a graduate student and my husband first started working in a biotech company downtown, sometimes I'…
Zuska never fails to make people think. And she made me wonder this and made me think that perhaps we could pass some names along to future Noble committees - you know, just in case they're having trouble coming up with names of female scientists. Maybe we can be some help. I have a few suggestions below but I would really like to see more suggestions in the comments. My suggestions for female Nobelists are: 1. Mary-Claire King She could fit in two categories - The first category would be medicine for her discovery that a common disease, i.e. breast cancer, should have a genetic cause…
Why is it that one of the top critics of religion should be a biologist? Could it be that a deep understanding of biological evolution through natural selection really does lead one inexorably to atheism? If so, creationists might actually have reason to fear the inclusion of evolution in school curricula. Better not let them read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion then, because that's one of the core messages of the book. Which is funny, because Dawkins writes that he very much would like to reach those raised in a religious environment, but are a little unsure about the whole thing. "If you…
Some of my fellow ScienceBloggers have been hotly debating the role of male science faculty in perpetuating a climate that's chilly and hostile to women. From one end of the ring, we've heard the classic complaint "It's not my fault, I didn't do it." From the other end, we hear: "It is your fault because you're not doing anything to change it." And, in the middle, we have a rational and thoughtful referee, pointing out that both writers see things from different perspectives. I think the question boils down to this: Are you automatically part of the problem if you're not part of the…
In addition to ridding D.C. of a pedophile, the resignation of Republican congressman Mark Foley last week may also be good news for defenders of science. About three years ago, Foley got himself involved with a couple of front organizations for the Church of Scientology. One report, from Cult News, says one of those front groups, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, appears to have used its connection with Foley and other legislators to defeat a series of state "pysch bills" dealing with prescription drugs. On the other hand, the only hard evidence of a connection between the pedophile…
As a freelance journalist, I don't have the luxury of turning down too many assignment offers. I was sorely tempted a few months back, though, when the potential client kept suggesting I use Wikipedia as the primary source for a series of articles. The problem was the client wasn't willing to pay a decent rate for my time, and he figured that I wouldn't demand more if all I had to do was browse Wiki. I ended up accepting the contract -- like I said, I can't afford to be too picky -- but I didn't use Wiki. And I still don't trust a source that anyone can anonymously edit, especially if "…
Former Boston Globe science columnist and college prof. Chet Raymo has written a stirring ode to the value of ignorance in his latest Science Musings. Pascal, Priestly and Popper -- he covers them all. What he's done is put his finger on a counter-intuitive definition of science, and what a definition it is: The purpose of science -- and indeed all education -- is to arrive at a state of ignorance, but an ignorance that is aware of itself. One more excerpt should be enough to convince you to read the whole thing. As long as our answers to these questions invoked the gods -- as they did for…
I've only read the few pages that Amazon offers on its website, but I'm convinced Frederick Crews' "Follies of the Wise" is the science book of the year. Jerry Coynes reviews it in The Times Literary Supplement. How can anyone resist, with a precis like this: Frederick Crews has made a much more thorough study of Freud, distilling and interpreting not only his whole corpus but also the past three decades of Freud scholarship. His conclusion is that Freud was indeed making it up as he went along. In Follies of the Wise, Crews takes on not only Freud and psychoanalysis, but also other fields of…
And now, a little self-promotion. I have a piece up on Seed's online magazine, "The Anthropogenic Trap," in which I examine the warnings of some scientists who say we're taking the whole guilt thing too far. Here's the opening. This year may be remembered as the year the weight of climate change finally began to sink in. It only took climate scientists two decades of banging their heads against the wall to accomplish it. While most observers call that cause for celebration, a few researchers are worried the climatologists have been too successful. They point to an increasing tendency to blame…
I envy Nature reporter Jenny Hogan, who's been blogging from the International Astronomical Union's big meeting in Prague for the past couple of weeks. I've always considered science journalism the most fascinating sector of the industry (that's why I'm one), but Hogan appears to be having an unusually fun time as the conference delegates lose their calm, rational demeanor in favor of an obsessive, impulsive approach to redefining the planets. Her latest post, made just a few hours ago, has a breathless quality to it: IAU: invasion! What a madhouse. I was skipping down the stairs of the…
The juxtaposition in recent news lineups of the debate over the definition of a planet and the depressing debacle in Lebanon puts the lie to the idea we live in a global village. While some of us are lucky enough to be paid to argue over whether "hydrostatic equilibrium" is enough to warrant planethood, others are trying to figure out whether it's worth rebuilding their family homestead, which has just been bombed into rubble. Again. Given this particular historical context, it only seems to fair to check on what astronomy is really good for -- other than giving us something more valuable to…
Word is the proposal on the table at the International Astronomical Union meeting in Prague calls for a new definition of planet that would widen the category to include Ceres, Charon and "Xena." I say, bring it on! Why? Because change is good. It sends a great message to schoolkids everywhere: Science does not stand still; there's nothing wrong with revising our list of planets every now and then. Mix it up a bit. I especially like the elevation of Charon from mere moon to planet, making for the system's first double-planet. Tres cool.