Science
pharyngula | February 12, 2006Niles Eldredge has a fine essay online on what it means to be a Darwinist (not the term as caricatured by creationists, but merely as someone who respects the work of Darwin while acknowledging the vast increase in understanding evolution since his time). It's also useful for explaining how creationists distort the concept of punctuated equilibrium.
The creationists of the day got into the act as well. In a clear demonstration of how thoroughly political the creationist movement has always been in the United States, Ronald Reagan told reporters, after addressing a throng of Christian…
pharyngula | February 11, 2006Carl Zimmer has never written a bad book, and he's the author I usually recommend to non-scientists looking for a gentle but substantive introduction to ideas in biology. Now DarkSyde interviews Zimmer—this is one you'll want to read.
pharyngula | February 11, 2006OK, people, this is too cruel. I was gone all day yesterday, traveling to the Twin Cities for this Darwin Day event, and the site gets 37,000 visits. Are you all trying to tell me it's better when I'm not around to clutter it up? If I take off for a week will traffic climb to Daily Kos-like proportions? (There was a link from fark that might actually explain the sudden surge.)
Anyway, I'll give a quick summary of what I was up to yesterday.
I started with a 3 hour drive to Minneapolis, which was very exciting. High winds, blowing snow, near whiteout conditions. The weather was bad enough that…
pharyngula | February 10, 2006This afternoon, I'll be at the Bell Museum at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities campus, celebrating the birth of Charles Darwin. Everyone is welcome, so come on down!
Events:
1:00P - Lecture by historian of biology Professor Mark Borrello, Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, on the history of Darwin and evolutionary theory.
2:00P - Lecture by biologist and blogger Professor P.Z. Myers, University of Minnesota—Morris, on evidence for evolution.
3:00P - Panel discussion of University of Minnesota evolutionary biologists on their cutting-edge research at the U of M titled "…
drorzel | February 9, 2006In a comment to the AP post, "hogeb" asks an excellent question about pedagogy:
I'd like to enlist your advise and the advise of any readers who can provide it. I teach physical science to pre-service elementary school teachers. I try to elucidate the somewhat subtle differences between the application of a force and the just getting in the way of, among other things, and I try to point out why this isn't just semantics but truly important conceptual skills. I'm not sure they hear me, or how well they hear me, they rarely do well on these questions on my tests. If you can try to go back to…
pharyngula | February 9, 2006…and makes a total ass of himself.
In the interview, Mr. Deutsch said that Dr. Hansen had partisan ties "all the way up to the top of the Democratic Party," and that he was "using those ties and using his media connections to push an agenda, a worst-case-scenario agenda of global warming." He said that anyone who disagrees with Dr. Hansen "is labeled a censor and is demonized and vilified in the media — and the media of course is a willing accomplice here."
And how does he know Hansen was a mere partisan flack peddling bad science? Because Deutsch almost has a bachelor's degree in journalism…
pharyngula | February 8, 2006a, b, Cranial reconstruction in left lateral (a; shaded area indicates the unpreserved portion) and dorsal (b) views. adc, anterodorsal concavity; al, anterior lamina; an, angular; aof, antorbital fenestra; d, dentary; dg, dentary groove; emf, external mandibular fenestra; en, external naris; if, infratemporal fenestra; isf, foramen on ischium; j, jugal; jp, pneumatic jugal foramen; l, lacrimal; m, maxilla; mc I–IV, metacarpals I–IV; mo, maxillary opening; mt I–V, metatarsals I–V; mvc, median vertical crest; nc, nasal crest; obf, obturator foramen; orb, orbit; pf, prefrontal; pfe, pneumatic…
pharyngula | February 8, 2006Here's some very cool news: scientists have directly observed the evolution of a complex, polygenic, polyphenic trait by genetic assimilation and accommodation in the laboratory. This is important, because it is simultaneously yet another demonstration of the fact of evolution, and an exploration of mechanisms of evolution—showing that evolution is more sophisticated than changes in the coding sequences of individual genes spreading through a population, but is also a consequence of the accumulation of masked variation, synergistic interactions between different alleles and the environment,…
pharyngula | February 7, 2006Carl Zimmer has the lowdown on leeches. The article is right, and they really are beautiful animals—I had a tank full of them last semester (gone now, in a flurry of bloody student labs), and watching them undulate through the water was mesmerizing. They were almost as much fun to watch as my fish.
pharyngula | February 7, 2006I just received my copy of the latest Seed, and although I feel a bit reluctant to say it because it may be interpreted as sucking up to the corporate masters who provide my bandwidth, it really is a very good science magazine—I'd be subscribing even if they weren't sending it to me for free. Take a browse through it sometime, there's a lot of the content available online.
Anyway, of course the first thing I turn to in the magazine is Chris Mooney's article on Learning to speak science. It's good and has some productive suggestions, and I agree with Mooney on 90% of what he says in it, but…
(…
pharyngula | February 7, 2006Argento tackles the growing man-squirrel problem…and incidentally mentions me, the apologist for man-squirrel research.
drorzel | February 7, 2006There was an article about physics blogs a little while back in Physics World, that didn't mention me by name, but did link to the Steelypips site. It mostly talks up the informal information exchange side of things.
In that spirit, here are some things I found via physics blog (mostly through Mixed States (after the cut):
If you were wondering when to expect your pony, Steinn Sigurdsson at Dynamics of Cats has an exhaustive analysis of the budget requests of various science agencies (start with that link, and work your way up through the more recent posts). Verdict: no pony for you!
Former…
pharyngula | February 6, 2006
Last week, the opening convocation for Black History Month was given by Tyrone Hayes of UC Berkeley. I was impressed: he's exceptionally personable, and despite the poor organization of his visit (UMM's fault, entirely) and having to drive for hours through a small blizzard to get here from the airport, he was gracious and fun to talk with. He gave a phenomenally well-organized, lucid talk which managed to describe all the basics of his research in terms a lay audience, most of whom were not science majors of any kind, could comprehend. And as I learned, most of his work is done by…
pharyngula | February 6, 2006There are more stories out there about the corruption of science by Republicans. The National Park Service and Department of the Interior are messed up, with the Park Service rewriting documents to be "anti-environmental, pro-privatization and corporate use of the parks," and the Interior simply making up nonsense about sage grouse.
Then we've got NCI fudging evidence to falsely support the claims of the anti-abortion lobby.
Bush has a lot of nerve claiming to be pro-science. He's pro-Big Bidness, but he can't even get that right—he's willing to promote fake science to get a short-term…
pharyngula | February 3, 2006Tara Smith is interviewed by DarkSyde on Daily Kos. It's good stuff, but be warned: epidemiologists and microbiologists are among the scariest kinds of people to have a conversation with.
drorzel | February 3, 2006I realized the other day that since moving to ScienceBlogs, I'm turning into John Scalzi (Does my new body have a brand name?), what with all the posting of cute images (and spending an inordinate amount of time taking pictures with an eye toward posting them), and assigning other bloggers homework. If I had a novel, I'd put it on the web, and make millions! Or something.
Anyway, it's nice to have at least one of those things turned around on me: RPM at evolgen is asking for the "string theory" of other sciences: the most controversial and possibly overhyped fields of study.
RPM has obviously…
pharyngula | February 2, 2006It's almost Darwin Day!
I just learned that Cornell is going all out: 5 days of events celebrating Darwin's birthday, on February 9-13. That's darned good.
The University of Minnesota Twin Cities is doing something slightly smaller in scale on Friday, 10 February, in an afternoon event sponsored by the Campus Atheists and Secular Humanists. I don't have all the details yet, other than the rather important fact (to me, at least) that I'm one of the speakers. I'm planning to talk on "What Darwin Didn't Know," giving a brief overview of some examples of the kind of evidence uncovered in the last…
pharyngula | February 2, 2006
apostropher has the link to the video: penis fencing flatworms. They are impressively athletic.
pharyngula | February 1, 2006
Olduvai George does it again: another gorgeous, art-filled post on ancient and modern crocodiles, including a reconstruction of the recently discovered Triassic Effigia.
pharyngula | February 1, 2006
I didn't listen to the State of the Union Address last night, preferring to maintain my equanimity by attending a talk on quantum physics, but I knew I could trust my readers to email me with choice weird science bits. I'm getting a lot of "WTF?" email about this statement from Bush:
Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research, human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling or patenting human embryos.
It's pure political calculus. He throws away the mad…