Science
pharyngula | June 1, 2007The Discovery Institute is so relieved — they finally found a textbook that includes a reworked version of Haeckel's figure. Casey Luskin is very excited. I'm a little disappointed, though: apparently, nobody at the Discovery Institute reads Pharyngula. I posted a quick summary in September of 2003 that went through several textbooks, and showed a couple of examples where redrawn versions of Haeckel's diagram were used. More recently, I posted a fairly exhaustive survey by Patrick Frank of the use of that diagram since 1923, which showed that it was rare, and that the concept of…
ddobbs | June 1, 2007
Don't count on the tropical forest gobbling up our excess carbon. Such is the warning from a recent study by Harvard's Kenneth Feeley and others in Ecology Letters, which suggests that we may not be able to count on surging tropical forest growth to slow global warming by consuming some of the excess carbon (via carbon dioxide intake). Why not? Because warming temperatures, contrary to previous thought and hope, were found to actually slow tropical forest growth in this 25-year study in Panama and Malaysia. As Feeley notes in the article's abstract, "these patterns strongly contradict the…
catdynamics | May 31, 2007NASA admin Mike Griffin noted that deciding the current climate is the best is a rather arrogant position.
Ok, there is a point there. But, we're making a choice whether we like it or not, so what should we choose?.
Not choosing is also a choice, and one no less arrogant.
The preindustrial mean atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration was about 275 ppm, plus or minus maybe 5%, with rare intermittent spikes which drew down rapidly, probably due to volcanic injections followed by oceanic and biospheric re-equilibrium.
The current concentration just went over 375 ppm and is trending inexorably…
drorzel | May 31, 2007Everybody's abuzz about the article by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg (the link goes to a reprint at Edge.org; you can find an illicit PDF of the Science article if you poke around a little) about research into why people don't automatically believe scientific explanations. From the article:
The main source of resistance to scientific ideas concerns what children know prior to their exposure to science. The last several decades of developmental psychology has made it abundantly clear that humans do not start off as "blank slates." Rather, even one year-olds possess a rich…
pharyngula | May 30, 2007The Newsweek cover story is on recent efforts to create life in the laboratory, and of course they call this "playing God". Haven't they got the message yet? "Playing God" is where you do absolutely nothing, take credit for other entities' work, and don't even exist — scientists don't aspire to such a useless status. Besides, creating life is mundane chemistry, no supernatural powers required.
It's a curious article. There's some solid discussion of ongoing work on synthetic biology, with Craig Venter and George Church as the stars. These fellows and others are confident (and rightfully so, I…
drorzel | May 30, 2007Seed is running an essay contest with a $2,500 prize, so if you like science, and think you write well, take a whack at this question:
What does it mean to be scientifically literate in the 21st century?
How do we measure the scientific literacy of a society? How do we boost it? What is the value of this literacy? Who is responsible for fostering it?
They're looking for the best essay of 1,200 or fewer words, and are offering a $1,000 second prize as well. The winning entries will be published in Seed, which is a nice bonus.
pharyngula | May 30, 2007There is a must-read article at Edge by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg—it's an attempt to explain why people resist scientific knowledge that takes a psychological view of the phenomenon. The premise is that our brains have in-built simplifications and assumptions about how the world works that often conflict with how it really works—there is, for instance, an intuitive physics and a real physics that are not entirely in agreement, and that we bring our understanding into alignment with reality through education and experience. The naive assumptions of the young brain contribute to…
catdynamics | May 28, 2007There were three profound topics that I recall debating in my first year as a graduate student.
I mean real student debates over a heterogenous assortment of alcohol and gallons of bad coffee.
One was whether the Clash were sell-outs or deeply sardonic (sold-out, clearly);
one was on the pros and cons of unionization (long story, MIT libertarians vs Europeans);
but the longest was on the Axiom of Choice
Mark C-C explains the axiom of choice
I like the "given a collection of bins each containing at least one object, exactly one object from each bin can be picked and gathered in another bin…
catdynamics | May 27, 2007It is good to observe
Shame NASA will be losing some of this capability over the next few years.
Maybe no one will notice next time.
Or you could go for the high-res version
More fun Earth Observing images
oracknows | May 27, 2007I've been a bit remiss in my blog carnival plugging; so here's my chance to make up for it. Here are some carnivals worth checking out:
Carnival of Bad History #14: The Backlog Edition (The name speaks for itself.)
Carnivalesque #27 (Ancient, medieval and early modern history.)
Tangled Bank #80 (Science.)
The Creation Museum (The blogosphere's skeptical response to Ken Ham's creationism museum, which recently opened. Unfortunately, I forgot about this, and didn't write up something suitably snarky myself, but fortunately plenty of other bloggers did. Alas, the message will be lost on the…
pharyngula | May 27, 2007Not mine—the weirder and more peculiar the food, the more likely I am to snarf it down—but those of certain other members of the Myers clan whose identities I will abstain from mentioning, lest they decide to add some really interesting ingredients to my next meal. Anyway, it's an interesting study that explains why some people get queasy at the thought of food "touching"—it's a common response to fear of contamination. It's basically documenting the psychological reality of cooties.
Now if only he had provided an explanation for how to overcome it — the prohibition on mixing too many flavors…
pharyngula | May 25, 2007We've often heard this claim from creationists: "there is no way for genetics to cause an increase in complexity without a designer!". A recent example has been Michael Egnor's obtuse caterwauling about it. We, including myself, usually respond in the same way: of course it can. And then we list examples of observations that support the obviously true conclusion that you can get increases in genetic information over time: we talk about gene duplication, gene families, pseudogenes, etc., all well-documented manifestations of natural processes that increase the genetic content of the organism.…
drorzel | May 25, 2007One of the many after-hours events contributing to my exhaustion this week was the annual Sigma Xi award and initiation banquet, at which some fifty students were recognized for their undergraduate research accomplishments.
The banquet also featured a very nice presentation on visualizing a four-dimensional cube by Prof. Davide Cervone of the Math department here. He went through a bunch of different ways to picture a four-dimensional object through analogies to lower-dimensional objects. It was as close as I've ever come to feeling like I understood how to think about higher dimensional…
oracknows | May 24, 2007Our creationist neurosurgeon, Dr. Michael Egnor, isn't going to like this one bit. No doubt he'll try to call it "artificial selection" or a "tautology" when he finds out about it, if he doesn't just ignore it because he it doesn't fit in with his view that studying evolution is "of no value" in medicine. Too bad, because, via Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline, I've found a really cool application of evolutionary biology to the development of antibiotic resistance in response to vancomycin that sheds light on the molecular mechanisms behind the development of antibiotic resistance in…
jrosenhouse | May 23, 2007And speaking of bad science journalism, here's Nature's take on the Gonzalez situation:
He's a young astronomer with dozens of articles in top journals; he has made an important discovery in the field of extrasolar planets; and he is a proponent of intelligent design, the idea that an intelligent force has shaped the Universe. It's that last fact that Guillermo Gonzalez thinks has cost him his tenure at Iowa State University.
Gonzalez, who has been at Iowa State in Ames since 2001, was denied tenure on 9 March. He is now appealing the decision on the grounds that his religious belief, not…
denialism | May 23, 2007Seed magazine profiles the recent work from John Ioannidis, author of the groundbreaking article "Why most published research findings are false".
I've written about him before in several contexts and the importance of understanding this research. The counter-intuitive thing is how much his research redeems science as an enterprise and emphasizes how denialists can abuse our literature.
I recommend that scientists take a chance to read some of his work, and ideally watch this video (it's a lot more approachable) I uploaded to google a few months ago. It is a bit long - it's the grand…
pharyngula | May 22, 2007Sad news: Stanley Miller died on Sunday. If you don't know who he was, go read this interview.
(via Evolucionarios)
pharyngula | May 22, 2007Here are three animals. If you had to classify them on the basis of this superficial glimpse, which two would you guess were most closely related to each other, and which one would be most distant from the others?
On the left is a urochordate, an ascidian, a sessile, filter-feeding blob that is anchored to rocks or pilings and sucks in sea water to extract microorganismal meals. In the middle is a cephalochordate, Amphioxus, also a filter feeder, but capable of free swimming. On the right are some fish larvae. All are members of the chordata, the deuterostomes with notochords. If you'd…
oracknows | May 22, 2007I've complained on multiple occasions about the infiltration of non-evidence-based "medicine" (a.k.a. woo) into every level of medicine in the U.S.. Worst of all, it's infiltrating medical education in a big way, starting with the pro-woo activism of the American Medical Student Association (AMSA), to various educational programs in various medical schools, to even the mandatory medical curriculum in at least one prestigious medical school. This is more than just teaching what various "alternative medical" therapies are, so that new physicians know what their patients are referring to or…