science reporting
clock | July 19, 2006Sometimes a metaphor used in science is useful for research but not so useful when it comes to popular perceptions. And sometimes even scientists come under the spell of the metaphor. One of those unfortunate two-faced metaphors is the metaphor of the Biological Clock.
First of all, there are at least three common meanings of the term - it is used to describe circadian rhythms, to describe the rate of sequence change in the DNA over geological time, and to describe the reaching of a certain age at which human fertility drops off ("my clock is ticking").
I prefer the Rube-Goldberg Machine…
clock | July 14, 2006Over the last couple of days, there was an interesting exchange of blogposts about the "naturalness" of sex, gender identification and sexual orientation. It is also an excellent example of the need to actually read what other people have written before jumping into the fray with knee-jerk responses. So, actually, READ all these posts before making any comments:
Jessica: Uterus: The Gaymaker
Chris: Essentialized Social Categories I: Gender Essentialism
Janet: Why I have no interest in any possible biological bases for homosexuality
Greensmile: You can't say 'Gay is OK'...
Benjamin:…
clock | July 12, 2006
This post was a response to a decent (though not too exciting) study and the horrible media reporting on it. As the blogosphere focused on the press releases, I decided to look at the paper itself and see what it really says. It was first posted on August 09, 2005. Under the fold...
I saw this on Pandagon first - a response to an article on NeuroImage about gender-specific voice recognition. Actually, it was not a response to the article itself (behind the subscription wall), but to the MSM reporting about the article. Soon, other bloggers chimed in, notably Feministing, Blondesense,…
clock | June 21, 2006
This was my December 29, 2004 post written in reaction to media reports on the "sixth sense" in animals, avoiding the tsunami by climbing to high ground:
What's Really Important? This
What's Really Not That Important, But I Can't Help It? Did Animals Sense Tsunami?
I hate it when they say "sixth sense"! Days of Aristotle and his Five Senses are long gone. Even we have more than five sensory modalities. Various animals (and even plants) have many more. The original five are vision, audition, olfaction, gustation and touch.
Photoreception is not just vision and is not a unitary modality. There…