Science
pharyngula | September 4, 2006
Good news for Minnesota! Minnesota Citizens for Science Education has been officially launched. This is a new advocacy group with the goal of promoting good science education in our state. Specifically—
A scientifically literate population is essential to Minnesota's future. To that end, Minnesota Citizens for Science Education (MnCSE) will bring together the combined resources of teachers, scientists, and citizens to assure, defend, and promote the teaching and learning of evolutionary biology and other sciences in K-12 public school science classrooms, consistent with current scientific…
oracknows | September 4, 2006Mark over at Good Math, Bad Math just posted a lovely fisking of a claim by Peter Duesberg that "all positive teenagers would have had to achieve an absurd 1000 contacts with a positive partner, or an even more absurd 250,000 sexual contacts with random Americans to acquire HIV by sexual transmission." He even gets in some jibes at one of Duesberg's defenders on this point.
It's utter poppycock, of course, and Mark does an excellent job of treating this silliness with all the respect that it deserves. It's well worth a read.
oracknows | September 4, 2006
Holy crap.
I get up on this holiday morning, and what is the first thing that I see when I check out the ScienceBlogs most recent posts, but a bunch of posts on Pharyngula, Pure Pedantry, Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge, and Evolving Thoughts, The Scientific Indian, and Afarensis?
Steve Irwin (a.k.a. the Crocodile Hunter) is dead:
BRISBANE, Australia Sep 4, 2006 (AP)-- Steve Irwin, the hugely popular Australian television personality and environmentalist known as the "Crocodile Hunter," was killed Monday by a stingray during a diving expedition. He was 44.
Irwin was filming an…
pharyngula | September 3, 2006John Wilkins is fighting the philosophical and historical fight against the Darwin's Deadly Legacy nonsense with an excellent summary of the course of the eugenics movement. I especially liked this quote from Dobzhansky:
The eugenical Jeremiahs keep constantly before our eyes the nightmare of human populations accumulating recessive genes that produce pathological effects when homozygous. These prophets of doom seem to be unaware of the fact that wild species in the state of nature fare in this respect no better than man does with all the artificiality of his surroundings, and yet life has…
pharyngula | September 3, 2006
If you've ever wondered what the heck Behe was smoking when he claims there are literal trucks trundling about on literal highways with literal traffic signals inside of cells, well, I don't have an answer for you…but there is a wonderful Flash movie that will show you the Inner Life of a Cell so you can see what "molecular machines" look like, more or less. It's a spectacular show. What you'll see is the series of events that transpire when a lymphocyte encounters a cell surface signal that triggers emigration out of a capillary and into other tissues; it zooms rather abruptly from a…
oracknows | September 2, 2006While I was catching up on some of the stuff that's happened while I was away, I noticed PZ Myer's article about animal rights terrorists who intimidated a neurobiologist at UCLA named Dario Ringach to the point where he decided to stop doing research on primates. Then I saw that Jake and Bora also weighed in on the issue (although for the life of me I can't figure out how on earth Bora came to the conclusion that animal rights is a conservative philosophy at its core--his explanation is tortured, at best). Here's what happened, as reported in Inside Higher Ed:
Ringach's name and home phone…
pharyngula | September 1, 2006Physicists get all the fun. Jennifer Ouellette has announced a book I'll definitely be buying: The Physics of the Buffyverse(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). How could I not? It will go on the shelf next to my copy of The Physics of Superheroes(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll).
So, where's The Biology of Superheroes? The creators of superheroes trample all over the principles of physiology and genetics as thoroughly as they do those of physics, so there's got to be a story in there somewhere.
pharyngula | August 31, 2006
The latest edition of the biweekly compendium of science blogging, the Tangled Bank, is now available for your reading enjoyment at Epigenetics News.
oracknows | August 31, 2006Rapidly dwindling vacation or no vacation, I have to plug the Skeptic's Circle.
Some of you may have wondered where the host of this week's Skeptic's Circle has been. After all, a few of you commented that his blog hadn't been updated in three months, even with a notice for the Skeptics' Circle. Fear not! Our intrepid host had to overcome even more than you think (in his mind, that is). Let him tell the tale in this brief excerpt:
Welcome to the 42nd meeting of the skeptics circle. Many of you have wondered where I have been over the past months and what has exactly been going on down in the…
oracknows | August 31, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
catdynamics | August 30, 2006Looks like Ioke is going to do bad things to poor little Wake Island.
That island has had a hard history, it may end tonight.
Bad Ioke on Wake.
See The Intersection and Wunderblog
bonus if you can spot the island - hint upper left...
NOAA advisory
Wake Island is 19N 167E - the eye is just about to hit...
razib | August 30, 2006In the 10 Questions for A.W.F. Edwards, a mathematical geneticist, he was asked:
Like Fisher you have worked in both statistics and genetics. How do you see the relationship between them, both in your own work and more generally?
Edwards responded in part:
Genetical statistics has changed fundamentally too: our problem was the paucity of data, especially for man, leading to an emphasis on elucidating correct principles of statistical inference. Modern practitioners have too much data and are engaged in a theory-free reduction of it under the neologism 'bioinformatics'.
This elicited a strong…
pharyngula | August 30, 2006
We're only sorta bilaterally symmetric: superficially, our left and right halves are very similar, but dig down a little deeper, and all kinds of interesting differences appear. Our hearts are larger on the left than the right, our appendix is on the right side, even our brains have significant differences, with the speech centers typically on the left side. That there is asymmetry isn't entirely surprising—if you've got this long coil of guts with a little appendix near one end, it's got to flop to one side or the other—but what has puzzled scientists for a long time is how things so…
pharyngula | August 30, 2006
How do evolutionary novelties arise? The conventional explanation is that the first step is the chance formation of a genetic mutation, which results in a new phenotype, which, if it is favored by selection, may be fixed in a population. No one sensible can seriously argue with this idea—it happens. I'm not going to argue with it at all.
However, there are also additional mechanisms for generating novelties, mechanisms that extend the power of evolutionary biology without contradicting our conventional understanding of it. A paper by A. Richard Palmer in Science describes the evidence for an…
catdynamics | August 29, 2006So, somnilista asked I comment on the Steorn claimed over-unity device.
See Grauniad story here
The claim is for a permanent magnet configuration that draws power but returns more energy than it takes in, ie it is a type one perpetual motion machine claim.
I should note that I have not seen the machine, nor have I seen diagrams or explanations of what it claims to do.
The basic design seems reminiscent of gimmick Daedalus came up with for New Scientist some years ago, to puzzle and amuse his peers.
Normally these claims are simple investment fraud, I have not seen any evidence that that is…
drorzel | August 29, 2006It appears to be a good week for non-controversial posting, so while I'm making enemies, I might as well go all out...
The recent call for book ideas from the Feminist Press has sparked an interesting discussion at Cocktail Party Physics, but I want to highlight one comment in particular:
There is a lot more of a macho-subculture in the sciences than appears at first glance. For example, the quotes "Nobody gets an A in my class!" Or "You guys aren't cut out for the sciences."
I don't know if you found those discouraging, but for young boys, those kinds of statements are challenges. They don't…
pharyngula | August 29, 2006This Newsweek article on the latest innovation in stem cell research is infuriating. The author, Michael Gerson, is a Republican hack with no competence in biology, which seems to qualify him to be a serious judge of science to this administration.
The issue of stem cells was the first test of the infant Bush administration, pitting the promise of medical discovery against the protection of developing life and prompting the president's first speech to the nation. His solution--funding research on existing stem-cell lines, but not the destruction of embryos to create new ones--was seen as a…
catdynamics | August 28, 2006 August 29th 2005 I was at a meeting in Chicago, I was up late flicking between the Weather Channel and CNN while catching up on some work and preparing to chair a session...
2:27 am August 30th 2005
New Orleans - bad news breaking on CNN
Oh dear. Tulane Uni hospital director is reporting the lake levee is breached and water is rapidly rising.
FEMA is evacuating hospitals by helicopter in the dark; deep water rushing into the business district;
this is very bad, especially with many people still stuck in houses - the water will now rise in the dark.
Earlier reports had city workers trying…
oracknows | August 28, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
pharyngula | August 28, 2006Wilkins pins the blame where it belongs: on on a medieval hierarchical concept that Darwin actively negated. It's a very thorough take-down, not that fans of D. James Kennedy will even notice.