Science
pharyngula | August 23, 2007Aaargh. When will the media learn? National Geographic is running this ridiculous headline right now: New Fossil Ape May Shatter Human Evolution Theory, in which the reporter claims a discovery of some teeth could "demolish a working theory of human evolution." It's not true. Where is this nonsense coming from?
I read the article. It's titled "A new species of great ape from the late Miocene epoch in Ethiopia." The exciting news is that the "combined evidence suggests that Chororapithecus may be a basal member of the gorilla clade, and that the latter exhibited some amount of adaptive and…
oracknows | August 23, 2007You know, even though I know he's been a Republican talker for a long time, that he worked for the Nixon administration as a speechwriter and lawyer, I've always kind of liked Ben Stein. My wife and I used to like to watch Win Ben Stein's Money, and he was quite amusing as the principal in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. He's always come across as a pleasant doofus, even though I know that image appears to be carefully calculated one.
Now I learn that he's the narrator and a driving force behind a pro-"intelligent design" movie called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which is due to be released…
denialism | August 22, 2007Go say high to Zooillogix, another two-brother team science blogging away here under the auspices of Seed. I will enjoy their blog, as long as they stay away from too many pictures of creatures with more than 4 legs (tentacles don't count). The African Booze tree should be your first stop there.
And that makes me think of another plug. Everybody should be reading Seed magazine. I got my first copy as a super-special scienceblogger last month and I love it. It's a great magazine, with beautiful graphical design, and some of the best-written general interest science articles I've read.
oracknows | August 22, 2007Thanks to Blake, I now have The Enemies of Reason, Part 2:
My review of this episode is below the fold. I managed to BitTorrent the episode and watch it on my laptop on my flight back from Chicago last night. If you don't want to be influenced by my opinion before watching, watch the episode first and then see if you agree with my assessment.
Part 2 of Richard Dawkins' The Enemies of Reason, The Irrational Health Service, is, as you might imagine, right up my alley. Moreover, it's the stronger of the two parts of this documentary in many ways, although I think it continues the theme of…
pharyngula | August 21, 2007Yesterday's discussion of future biological advances that will piss off the religious right had me thinking about other innovations that I expect will happen within a few decades that might just cause wingnuts to freak out. First thing to come to mind is that it will be something to do with reproduction, of course, and it will scramble gender roles and expectations…so, how about modifying men to bear children? It sounds feasible to me. Zygotes are aggressive little parasites that will implant just about anywhere in the coelom — it's why ectopic pregnancies are a serious problem — so all we…
pharyngula | August 21, 2007It's nice to see these casual references to PZ Myers, as if anyone would have heard of me:
The lab is at 101 Theory Drive, a developer's idea of a scientific street name that Lynch found presumptuous.
It is a mark of the difficulty of life sciences — biology and its many descendants — that to call something a theory is to honor, not slight it. Theory, evolutionary biologist P.Z. Myers has written, is what scientists aspire to. Lynch, for all of his bombast, was respectful of the intellectual protocols of his science.
"I would have called it Hypothesis Drive," he said.
The article is part of…
pharyngula | August 21, 2007Ars Technica has an article on bad science in entertainment, with a list of items that were particularly annoying:
Any time Star Trek tried to do biology. They may have been awful with all the other areas of science, but I'm a biologist, and I know they were awful with this. Note to film and TV producers: science grad students work for peanuts. Buy one.
Quixote follows through with a specific example:
Take an example from an episode of Star Trek- The Next Generation. There's a big disaster as everyone evolves backward into insects (small problem right there…) and Beverly Crusher is saying…
pharyngula | August 20, 2007Here's some exciting news: Artificial life likely in 3 to 10 years. It is exciting but not surprising at all — but of course we're going to be able to assemble entirely artificial life forms soon. It's just a particularly complicated kind of chemistry, and it's more of a deep technical problem than anything else. I wouldn't be quite so specific about the date — there are also all kinds of surprises that could pop up — but I'm optimistic, and I think the overall assertion is supported by the increasing rate of accomplishment in the field.
But of course, in addition to the usual suggestions…
pharyngula | August 20, 2007If it existed, it might also be profoundly autistic and … diabetic? So science cannot disprove the existence of a soul, but one thing we're learning is how much valued human properties such as love and attachment and awareness of others are a product of our biology — emotions like love are an outcome of chemistry, and can't be separated from our meaty natures.
The latest issue of BioEssays has an excellent review of the role of the hormone oxytocin in regulating behaviors. It highlights how much biochemistry is a determinant of what we regard as virtues.
Anyone with a little familiarity with…
oracknows | August 19, 2007Yes, I was there on Friday and Saturday, when more than half of the present complement of ScienceBloggers (a.k.a. "SB'ers" or "Sciblings") gathered in New York to meet, greet, and talk science, that is, between bouts of heavy drinking. (Fortunately, I was wise enough not to show up for the karaoke; if PZ's description is any indication, I wasn't nearly inebriated enough to enjoy it.) I didn't take nearly as many pictures as certain others there, one of whom bought a rather snazzy camera from a store on 42nd Street (something I would have cautioned him about, had I been there before Friday),…
oracknows | August 19, 2007The answer, apparently, is yes, but only for a very short time.
I guess the whole exploding heads thing when people are exposed to vacuum (Outland) or just the very low atmospheric pressure on Mars (Total Recall) is a bit of an exaggeration.
oracknows | August 18, 2007For those of you who missed it, Steve Colbert explains what DNA is with Twisty the DNA Helix:
DNA: It's what makes you you.
I do have to admit, though, that it irritated me when Colbert referred to DNA as a "wonder protein" even though I'm sure it was part of the joke...
pharyngula | August 17, 2007
I just finished Sean B. Carroll's Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo-Devo the other day, and I must confess: I was initially a bit disappointed. It has a few weaknesses. For one, I didn't learn anything new from it; I had already read just about everything mentioned in the book in the original papers. It also takes a very conservative view of evolutionary theory, and doesn't mention any of the more radical ideas that you find bubbling up on just about every page of Mary Jane West-Eberhard's big book. One chapter, the tenth, really didn't fit in well with the rest—the whole…
oracknows | August 17, 2007So, after nearly two weeks of torturing myself trying to put together an R01-level grant on short notice and make it actually competitive, I'm finally free. The grant has been submitted (amazingly, the online submission process went through without a hitch), and, sleep-deprived but still hopped up on the Sudafed that kept the mucus membranes in my nasal passages from exploding outward at a high velocity, scattering watery goo everywhere.
Not a pretty sight when it happens, hence the Sudafed.
Fortunately, the pollen has subsided to the level where I am only mildly miserable, allowing my…
oracknows | August 16, 2007Yes!
As intelligent and powerful as he is, Orac has always lacked something, and that's mobility. He's always been more or less at the mercy of the humans with whom he travels when it comes to locomotion. In short, being a clear box of blinking lights, he has to be carried everywhere, sometimes in a rather undignified fashion:
In this week's edition of the Skeptics' Circle, Bronze Dog gives Orac exactly what he needs:
Yes, a giant robot! Controlling such awesome machinery directly, finally, Orac is unshackled from his dependence on irrational humans to take him where he wants to go!…
oracknows | August 16, 2007It's here, and it's on Google Video. I watched it last night, and it was a blistering attack on the irrationality that is so common in our society:
Part I begins with Richard Dawkins sitting in on some sort of New Age chanting ceremony (the discomfited look on his face is priceless to watch), after which he goes to a New Age fair, and concludes with an attack on the crappy science that lead to the MMR vaccine scare over autism in the U.K. In between, Dawkins takes on astrology, dowsers, spiritualists, and mediums, no holds barred.
Next Monday: Richard Dawkins versus alternative medicine.…
oracknows | August 16, 2007[Note: Part I is here.]
I tell ya, I stay up all night putting the finishing touches on a grant, and what happens? Mark Hoofnagle over at Denialism.com finds a real hum-dinger of stupidity published in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately (or fortunately, given the rampant stupidity that appears to be going on in this article), I do not have a subscription to the WSJ; however, a little Googling found the whole text here. I've written about this conflict before, and it's a recurring theme in the multiple posts that I've done regarding dichloroacetate (DCA), the small…
pharyngula | August 16, 2007Jonathan Eisen dresses down university press departments that oversell science, and also hits on one of my pet peeves: the attempt to portray all scientific research as addressing human ills. In this case, it's claiming that research on shark gene expression will help treat birth defects.
In my own research, I look at the effects of alcohol (among other things) on embryonic development in zebrafish, and it is a kind of animal model of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. People always jump to the assumption that I'm trying to find a cure for FAS, and I have to correct them: I definitely am not. FAS is a…
denialism | August 16, 2007Sociologists are. Or so says Inside Higher Ed.
Sociologists -- especially those who study sexuality -- have for years done research that was considered controversial or troublesome by politicians or deans. Many scholars are proud of following their research ideas where they lead -- whatever others may think. But at a session Monday at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, sociologists considered the possibility that some of their colleagues may feel enough heat right now that they are avoiding certain topics or are being forced to compromise on either the language or…
oracknows | August 15, 2007Remember a couple of months ago, when I discussed testimony at the Autism Omnibus trial that showed how Andrew Wakefield had failed to do the controls when running PCR that would have revealed that the results that he interpreted as the presence of the measles virus from a vaccine strain in the guts of autistic children was nothing more than a bunch of false positives due to widespread contamination of the laboratory with plasmid containing measles sequences?
It turns out that it's not just autism pseudoscientists who forget to do the right controls when running PCR. Mike the Mad Biologist…