Science
oracknows | July 25, 2006Alright, now they've gone too far.
I thought I'd seen every specious and fallacious argument and example that creationists could throw out there to annoy scientists and be gobbled up by the credulous, but I was wrong. They're muscling in on my turf now! No, they're not making fallacious arguments about how chemotherapy resistance says nothing about evolution. Been there, done that, and I doubt I'd bother if I were to see yet another such post. No, they're not twist the fact that cancer is often due to mutations in oncogenes and tumor suppressors regulating cell growth and differentiation as "…
drorzel | July 25, 2006The New York Times offers a review of several books on science and religion today, including a new screed by Dawkins, Daniel Dennett's book from a little while back, and several books attempting to find common ground between science and religion, by Francis Collins, Owen Gingerish, Joan Roughgarden, and E. O. Wilson. This is probably in the top ten least useful book reviews you'll read this year.
The problem isn't with the subject matter, though I'm sure some at ScienceBlogs will object to the very concept of all save the Dawkins and Dennett. The problem is that they're trying to talk about…
pharyngula | July 24, 2006Oh, good. I saw this WaPo article with a morphing animation of a lemur into SJ Gould, and I was mildly appalled—it's a very badly done gimmick that doesn't say anything about how evolution works, and actually grossly misleads the viewer on the morphological transformations that had to have occurred. Fortunately, I don't have to deepen my reputation as a cranky internet curmudgeon by complaining about it— Carl Zimmer has done it for me.
Transforming grid coordinates is an interesting tool in describing the transformations between forms—D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson did it well—but you need to…
catdynamics | July 24, 2006A decent article on small scale evolutionary changes in human populations in the Washington Post.
More detail and an actual Synopsis or pointer to the papers - PLoS Bio and here in Science (subscription) would have been nice.
PS as The Loom notes, the QT movie accompanying the piece is moronic and misleading.
The HapMap Web Tool looks like fun
drorzel | July 24, 2006As promised in the previous post, some thoughts on superstition in science. This was originally posted in October 2004, and astute readers may note that my opening comments about sports went horribly awry not long after. I take this as proof of my point: talking about these things only screws them up.
Long-time readers of this site may have noticed a lack of sport-related posts in recent weeks, despite the fact that my teams are doing pretty well at the moment. This is not really a coincidence-- I'm as surprised as anyone to see the Giants winning games (though you will note that they lost to…
pharyngula | July 24, 2006
Mark Chu-Carroll has a post up that does two admirable things: it deflates yet another creationist and his grandly fallacious claims, and it gives me a new toy to play with.
The first part is a debunking of Granville Sewell, a mathematician and darling of the Intelligent Design creationists. Sewell actually is a professor of mathematics, so it's somewhat embarrassing to see a fellow professional humiliate himself with such ancient, bogus creationist complaints, such as that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics, or that stepwise change can't occur. I'll also recommend…
drorzel | July 24, 2006One of the drawbacks of having the sort of day job that I do is that it's hard to blog about interesting things in a timely manner. For example, Janet's post on improving communication between scientists and non-scientists is a week old, now. That's positively neolithic in blog terms.
It's well worth a look, though, as she offers an interesting suggestion of how to improve non-scientists' understanding of science:
My best suggestion for how to get this kind of basic grasp of science (at least for those who no longer have easy access to science classes and science teachers) is to try thinking…
pharyngula | July 23, 2006Two more carnivals on this fine Sunday afternoon:
Carnival of the Godless #45
The Synapse #3
You know the drill.
oracknows | July 23, 2006Eh Nonymous has posted a first hand account of a speech by Judge John E. Jones III, who decided the Kitzmiller v. Dover case on "intelligent design" creationism in Dover. We need more judges like him. My only thought is: How on earth did this guy get appointed to the federal bench by the Bush Administration? He's way too reasonable and unwilling to let religion influence his decision-making process.
I'm sure it's a mistake the Bush Administration won't make again.
pharyngula | July 21, 2006
Just as a lark and as a little exercise in making HTML tables (and to make clear what one error was in that last post), I threw together this table of the geological time scale, taken from Mayr's What Evolution Is. I come from that generation of biologists where we were required to memorize the timescale to this level of detail; I'm a bit rusty on the dates now (but these are pretty much the same as what I had to learn in the late 1970s), and I was just realizing that we don't even mention this stuff in introductory biology anymore.
The Geological Timescale
Eon
Era
Period
Epoch
Age(Ma)…
pharyngula | July 20, 2006Books from Nobel laureates in molecular biology have a tradition of being surprising. James Watson(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) was catty, gossipy, and amusingly egotistical; Francis Crick(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) went haring off in all kinds of interesting directions, like a true polymath; and Kary Mullis(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) was just plain nuts. When I heard that Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard was coming out with a book, my interest and curiousity were definitely piqued. The work by Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus has shaped my entire discipline, so I was eagerly anticipating what her new book,…
oracknows | July 20, 2006You may have noticed that I opted out of the last two or three weeks worth of Ask a ScienceBlogger questions. The last couple of weeks it was because the questions simply didn't interest me, and the week before that it was because i just plain forgot.
This week, however, our overlords at SEED Magazine demand:
If you could have practiced science in any time and any place throughout history, which would it be, and why?
That's a pretty easy one. I'm with Stein in that I answer: Now.
Think about it. I'm a physician, and my interest is in studying cancer. I started graduate school in 1990. Since…
oracknows | July 20, 2006
Thirty seven years ago today, on July 20, 1969, Commander Neil Armstrong became the first man ever to walk on the Moon. (You can quibble and say it was July 21 by Universal Time (a.k.a. Greenwich Mean Time), but I'm an American, and to me as a child it happened on July 20.
In any case, I have two things to post that are of interest on this anniversary of the first Moon landing. First, here's an über-cool website that allows you to view a panoramas of the Moon made up of high resolution photos from the original missions digitally stitched together from photos taken during original lunar…
pharyngula | July 19, 2006How do you make a limb? Vertebrate limbs are classic models in organogenesis, and we know a fair bit about the molecular events involved. Limbs are induced at particular boundaries of axial Hox gene expression, and the first recognizable sign of their formation is the appearance of a thickened epithelial bump, the apical ectodermal ridge (AER). The AER is a signaling center that produces, in particular, a set of growth factors such as Fgf4 and Fgf8 that trigger the growth of the underlying tissue, causing the growing limb to protrude. In addition, there's another signaling center that forms…
catdynamics | July 19, 2006Our Master's Voice Speaks:
If you could have practiced science in any time and any place throughout history, which would it be, and why?...
Now. Of course.
Because we know more, we have a greater and more vibrant community than ever, we have more resources, tools and technology than ever.
I admit that it is tempting to contemplate life in Göttingen in the '20s, or in London in the late 17th century, or Athens with Socrates, but really? No.
Though I have to say, I expect it will be even better and more fun tomorrow.
Repeat as needed.
oracknows | July 19, 2006The latest Tangled Bank has been posted at a fellow skeptic's blog, Salto Sobrius, who, it just so happens, is also scheduled to host the Skeptics' Circle in September. Go catch up on the best science blogging of the last two weeks.
Speaking of the Skeptics' Circle, you still have a few hours left to get your entries to Mike. Then join him tomorrow. Nothing like a little extra dose of critical thinking and science for your week.
drorzel | July 19, 2006Scientific Curmudgeon John Horgan reads calls for more nuclear power and offers a slightly different objection to nuclear power than most people:
Five years ago, I might have considered climbing aboard this bandwagon, even though Indian Point has an imperfect safety record, but not any more. In fact, I want to whack the neo-nukers and the Times Magazine for irresponsibly downplaying the immense security risks posed by nuclear power.
On September 11, 2001, one of the hijacked jets flew down the Hudson River right past Garrison. A woman I know was gardening that morning outside her house on…
pharyngula | July 19, 2006
The newest, niftiest, most fascinating edition of the Tangled Bank is now available online at Salto Sobrius.
oracknows | July 19, 2006Here we are, five and a half years into George W. Bush's Presidency, and he's not yet vetoed a bill. Not even a single bill. All sorts of bad legislation have been passed, from the bankruptcy reform legislation that makes it harder for people to start again after declaring bankruptcy, to budgets containing huge increases in spending, to a really offensive campaign finance reform package that restricts political speech.
All passed with nary a peep from the President.
So what gets Bush's dander up enough to finally pull out his veto pen and use his power to veto a bill he doesn't like?…
pharyngula | July 18, 2006That irreverent rapscallion Larry Moran suggested that I read this article by Natalie Angier. She begins by telling us that scientists are always asking her to help out in the fight against those loony creationists, but then she turns around and chews them out for their hypocrisy. I say, give 'em hell, Natalie.
No, most scientists are not interested in taking on any of the mighty cornerstones of Christianity. They complain about irrational thinking, they despise creationist "science," they roll their eyes over America's infatuation with astrology, telekinesis, spoon bending, reincarnation,…