Science
pharyngula | February 17, 2007Lately, the Discovery Institute has stuck its neck out in response to the popularity of showings of Randy Olson's movie, Flock of Dodos, which I reviewed a while back. They slapped together some lame critiques packaged on the web as Hoax of Dodos (a clunker of a name; it's especially ironic since the film tries to portray the Institute as good at PR), which mainly seem to be driven by the sloppy delusions of that poor excuse for a developmental biologist, Jonathan Wells. In the past week, I've also put up my responses to the Wells deceptions—as a developmental biologist myself, I get a little…
pharyngula | February 17, 2007One of the subjects I mentioned at the Thursday Flock of Dodos discussion was that an obstacle to getting the public excited about science is the state of science writing. It's a very formal style in which the passive voice is encouraged, caution and tentative statements are demanded, adverbs are frowned upon and adjectives are treated with suspicion, and all the passion is wrung out in favor of dry recitations of data. Now that actually has a good purpose: it makes it easy to get to the meat of the article for people who are already familiar with the subject and may not need any pizazz to…
pharyngula | February 15, 2007
(This is a rather long response to a chapter in Jonathan Wells' dreadful and most unscholarly book, Icons of Evolution)
The story of Haeckel's embryos is different in an important way from that of the other chapters in Jonathan Wells' book. As the other authors show, Wells has distorted ideas that are fundamentally true in order to make his point: all his rhetoric to the contrary, Archaeopteryx is a transitional fossil, peppered moths and Darwin's finches do tell us significant things about evolution, four-winged flies do tell us significant things about developmental pathways, and so…
evolgen | February 15, 2007
Those kooky Canucks at the Science Creative Quarterly have started a new club: the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique. Anyone is free to join, provided they're not a teetotaling, lying, world-dominating, badge-hater, 'cause they're really into badges. To profess their love of badges, the Science Scouts have produced quite a collection, some of which I feel qualified to wear on my Science Scout Sash. You see, these badges aren't handed out by some higher authority; you simply claim all the badges that apply to you and post them on your website, like so…
oracknows | February 15, 2007I've written quite a bit about the role of the theory of evolution in medicine, including how it can be used to better understand disease processes such as cancer and sleeping sickness. I've also lamented the woeful state of knowledge about evolution that is possessed by all too many medical students and physicians, most recently taking to task an orthopedic surgeon named David Cook for some astoundingly ignorant statements about evolution and Dr. Geoffrey Simmons. (At least it's somewhat comforting to know that I'm not the only one who's embarrassed for his profession in this matter.)…
drorzel | February 15, 2007As usual, Scott Aaronson says it better than I did:
[M]ost of the commentary strikes me as missing a key point: that to give a degree to a bozo like this, provided he indeed did the work, can only reflect credit on the scientific enterprise. Will Ross now hit the creationist lecture circuit, trumpeting his infidel credentials to the skies? You better believe it. Will he use the legitimacy conferred by his degree to fight against everything the degree stands for? It can't be doubted.
But here's the wonderful thing about science: unlike the other side, we don't need loyalty oaths in order to…
drorzel | February 14, 2007Somebody at work had printed out a table of MCAT scores by major, compiled by the AIP. I couldn't find it on the web, but I found the original source, and made my own version of the relevant bit. This shows the average numerical scores on the three sections of the MCAT test for students majoring in biological and physical sciences (shortened to "biology" and "physics" for the table), for students who applied to med school, and students who got into med school:
The results are striking. Not only did the physics applicants do better than the biologists on the physics portion of the test, as…
pharyngula | February 14, 2007I may have to find an excuse to use this in my genetics class—I'll definitely be showing it in my intro biology course in the fall. Very groovy.
drorzel | February 13, 2007PhysicsWeb has a
story about a new theory of axions that claims to resolve some discrepancies between past experiments. Two previous experiments looking for axions-- hypothetical weakly interacting particles that might be an explanation for dark matter-- have found conflicting results: the CAST experiment looking for axions produced in the Sun found nothing, while the PVLAS experiment looking for axions by studying the rotation of polarized light in a magnetic field may have seen something. (I talked a bit about the latter here.)
Of course, the new theory is not without its complications:
Now…
catdynamics | February 13, 2007Word is that Mary Cleave's successor as director of Science Mission at NASA has been announced.
And that it is Alan Stern. PI of the New Horizons mission enroute to Pluto right now. (ignore really annoying soundtrack) (ahem, admire really interesting soundtrack)
De gustibus non est disputandum, eh?
Iiinteresting... planets and UV observer. APL and SWRI.
Here is the blurb
via NASAwatch
pharyngula | February 13, 2007The NYT has a nice article on Carl Sagan's new posthumous book—it was put together by his widow, Ann Druyan, and she makes a few good points:
In the wake of Sept. 11 and the attacks on the teaching of evolution in this country, she said, a tacit truce between science and religion that has existed since the time of Galileo started breaking down. "A lot of scientists were mad as hell, and they weren't going to take it anymore," Ms. Druyan said over lunch recently.
I'll say. It was a stupid truce, anyway, entirely to the benefit of the old guardians of mythology.
drorzel | February 13, 2007I'm having the sort of morning where I feel like lobbing a grenade at somebody, and the predictable outrage over yesterday's story about a creationist paleontologist is as good a target as any.
The issue here is whether it's appropriate for Marcus Ross to receive a Ph.D. for work in paleontology, given that he's a young-earth creationist. His scientific papers are all perfectly consistent with modern understanding, speaking of events taking place millions of years in the past, but he himself believes the earth is less than 10,000 years old, and was created as described in the Bible.
The usual…
drorzel | February 13, 2007The New York Times reports that Purdue has officially cleared Rusi Taleyarkhan of charges of scientific wrongdoing over his claim to have produced nuclear fusion on a tabletop through the magic of sonoluminescence. You might recall that these claims were made a couple of years ago, but nobody else has been able to replicate them.
Purdue has conducted some sort of inquiry into the matter, and declared that there was nothing dishonest about the results. The inquiry was not what you'd call a model of transparancey, though:
Purdue did not reveal what allegations the committee had considered. It…
drorzel | February 10, 2007Piled Higher and Deepr nails it this week:
A Pofessor's Negation Field is the unexplained phenomenon whereby mere spatial proximity to an experimental set-up causes all working demonstrations to fail, despite the apparent laws of Physics or how many times it worked right before he/she walked in the room.
I haven't been on the faculty long enough to develop a really effective Negation Field, but my boss when I was a post-doc was the absolute king of this. I eventually stopped telling him when things were working well, because he'd invariably want to come see it, and then something would go…
oracknows | February 10, 2007...that Kristjan Wager started a blog.
Kristjan, as some may know, is a frequent commenter here, and has even guest-blogged for me about the Danish studies on two occasions.
Head on over and check out Kristjan's blog, Pro-Science. I'll be adding it to my sidebar the next time I get a chance to revamp my blogroll.
pharyngula | February 9, 2007Uh-oh. Those evil scientists are up to no good again, blindly making discoveries and creating inventions without any thought to the long-term consequences. Dynamite, nerve gas, the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb…what's next? What new horror will they unleash on humanity?
Scientists are close to coming up with a vaccine against Chlamydia. The bastards.
Notice the trend? Develop better hygiene to end childbed fever, anesthetics to dull the pain of childbirth, cures for venereal diseases, the recent vaccine against human papilloma virus, and now this. It's like they don't think women deserve to…
evolgen | February 8, 2007I have previously mentioned, in passing, a pet peeve of mine: when people conflate ecology with environmentalism (see here and here for examples). It's an odd pet peeve for an admitted non-ecologist, but it falls under the umbrella of distinguishing science from technology which is at the heart of the real pet peeve. It just happens that the ecology/environmentalism issue pops up more often than other science/technology issues in my daily life (I don't deal with stem researchers or people cloning whole organism).
Before I get too far ahead of myself, allow me to define what I mean by science…
catdynamics | February 8, 2007Effect Measure has an interesting entry on cancer deaths (down) and incidence (up), which got me theorizing...
So cancer is a mess - there are multiple causes - smoking, diet, heredity, chemicals, viruses and radiation.
Treatment has improved, and some environmental insults have been reduced - like smoking - so one would expect to see improvement, on the other hand people live longer and the population is older on average (in the developed world), viruses are more widespread and some environmental insults are increasing.
So... bear with me.
If I recall correctly, mostly from having lunch…
drorzel | February 8, 2007Union is opening a new Center for Bioengineering and Computational Biology this week, and the keynote speech was given last night by Steven Vogel of Duke, on "Power from the People: Life When Muscle Was Our Main Motor." Basically, this was an hour-long survey of some speculative ideas on what biomechanics can tell us about the ancient world.
Sadly, a quick Google search doesn't turn up anything coherent about this on the web, because it was a fun talk. Vogel started with the observation that to a good approximation, humans are all the same size and shape, and can exert about the same amount…