Social Sciences
evolvingthoughts | January 3, 2007A well-known philosopher of the emotions, Hegel, and existentialism, Bob Solomon died yesterday. He was only 59. He was instrumental in setting up the International Society for Research on Emotions (ISRE).
I met Bob when he came out to our Biohumanities Conference on emotions early last year. The photo shows him and Kathleen Higgins, his wife and profressional philosopher, at that conference. My condolences to Kathleen.
j7uy5 | January 2, 2007There have been stories and novels about the end of privacy.
1984, by George Orwell, comes to mind. I also
remember reading a science fiction short story once, about how
technology had made privacy so difficult to maintain, and so accepted
by society, that it was considered rude to want privacy. I
can't remember who wrote that one.
This post was inspired by an article in the Wall Street Journal, that
points out how little privacy there is when it comes to medical
records. More below the fold...
Time Magazine just published 25 "top-10" lists for 2006. One
of the lists is for
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jlynch | January 1, 2007This is almost too funny to be true. From the mind of Michael Westfall:
Today the use of personal computers is one of the fastest growing areas of mass communication. This technology can be used for the good of humanity or in some cases small-minded warped individuals endeavor to use it to debase and alter Judeo-Christian values. There are now multiple radical "Left Be-Hinder" web sites that make a sport of attacking those who take a stand for decency. These sites question traditional Bible based morality as they labor to twist our society towards their own confused
values. They use their web…
nisbetmc | January 1, 2007
In DC over the weekend, the conversational buzz at coffee shops, wine bars, and holiday parties has focused on the graphic reports of Saddam Hussein's execution. Friends from both sides of the political fence are using words like "banal," "barbaric," "creepy," and "grotesque" to describe their reaction to the events. Questions about the timing of the execution, the chaotic nature of the trial, and the not-so-civilized death penalty, ("Only in Iraq and Texas...), serve as fodder for much of the chatter.
The mood is a stark contrast from cable news coverage and the front page headlines…
pharyngula | January 1, 2007The declining scientific content expressed by the National Park Service has been an issue for years; the latest complaints (that I wrote about, and that Wesley Elsberry has now brought up) are just recent flareups of awareness. The National Park Service seems determined to strip out anything intellectually challenging from the experiences in their parks — the ideal seems to be Chevy Chase's reaction from the movie Vacation (if you don't know what I mean, here's a short homage). Pete Dunkelberg has brought a letter in Science from 28 October 2005 to my attention — it accuses the Park Service…
hrynyshyn | January 1, 2007What a wonderful way to begin the new year, with a responsible call for action on climate change that embraces the uncertainties rather than yet another stubborn refusal to act because of them. The New York Times' ever-reliable Andrew Revkin writes this morning of a new collective voice of scientists who say we should do something more constructive than just scare people. About time.
Among them is Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research:
Dr. Hulme insists that it is best not to gloss over uncertainties. In fact, he and other experts say that uncertainty is one…
aardvarchaeology | January 1, 2007
Back in September, R.U. Sirius's podcast turned me on to an intriguing new book. It's named The Visionary State, a big, thick and pretty coffee-table book, with text by Erik Davis and countless jaw-droppingly beautiful photographs by Michael Rauner.
Formally speaking, the book is a piece of topographical history, treating of California from the time of the first Catholic missions in the late 18th century until the last couple of years. Places are visited, described and depicted, stories and anecdotes are heaped one upon another, the names of countless people and organisations form a blur.…
drorzel | December 29, 2006Not long ago, I booklogged Odyssey, the latest of Jack McDevitt's Archeologists in Spaaaace books. When I picked that up, I also grabbed a paperback copy of Seeker, the latest in his other series of novels, these ones about, well, antiquities dealers in spaaaace. I don't believe I've booklogged the previous volumes, A Talent for War and Polaris, so we'll lump them all together here.
A Talent for War introduces the setting and main characters: Alex Benedict is a dealer in antiquities a few millennia in the future, when humans have discovered FTL travel and spread out among the stars. There…
razib | December 27, 2006John Lynch has a post up about Richard Dawkins' lack of theological sophistication in The God Delusion. John is basically reiterating the point that Dawkins did not truly engage theological arguments for theism on a very high or sophisticated level. In fact, John levels the implicit charge that Dawkins' engagement of theology mirrors the level of good faith that Creationists render toward evolutionary science. Though I am a Neville Chamberlain atheist I am ambivalent about the theological tack. I've told Chris that I think that making a stand on theology isn't the best strategic choice,…
tfk | December 27, 2006A few years ago, a number of small children got sick from E. coli infections; the bacteria were traced to petting zoos. Ms. TfK and I both thought that a smart Congresscritter could win the suburban mothers' votes by requiring better scrutiny of hygiene at petting zoos.
Little did we know that within years, we'd be seeing similar problems emerging from our spinach and green onions (and undoubtedly other veggies soon). The Baltimore Sun dug in and discovered the FDA complaining that it's research on food safety had stalled:
Recurring outbreaks of food-borne illness from contaminated produce…
jrosenhouse | December 22, 2006Evolutionary biologist H. Allen Orr has this lengthy essay in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. Officially it's a review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Joan Roughgarden's Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist, and Lewis Wolpert's Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origin of Belief. Actually, though, Orr says almost nothing about those latter two books.
Orr begins by describing his admiration for much of Dawkins' previous work. (He describes The Selfish Gene as the best work of popular science ever written).…
hrynyshyn | December 22, 2006The advent of the release of an official government study warning that robots will soon be demanding their civil rights is a sure sign of the Christmas season. Senior editors and reporters are either at home with the family or spending too much time at the eggnog trough to bother with real journalism. But I managed to find a more serious angle to the story, thanks to the near-simultaneous discovery of a piece of research that suggests we mortals are probably already primed to give said machines the benefit of the doubt.
The study, commissioned by the UK government, puts the likelihood of the…
oracknows | December 20, 2006Today is the tenth anniversary of Carl Sagan's death from myelodysplasia at the too-young age of 62. On this day, as part of the Carl Sagan Memorial Blogathon (more here), I'd like to explore three observations about Sagan.
First and foremost, Carl Sagan was brilliant at expressing the sense of wonder at the universe and how amazingly fortunate we are to be able to perceive it. Even as scientists, we often get lost in the nitty gritty and the details of what we are doing. It's all too easy to lose sight of the forest through the trees and forget about just how amazingly beautiful and complex…
evolgen | December 20, 2006This past summer, Matt Hahn presented a talk at the Society for Molecular Biology Evolution meeting and Evolution 2006 entitled "The 17% Solution: Gene Family Divergence Between Human And Chimpanzee". The basic premise was that, even though humans and chimps are ~99% identical at the DNA sequence level, they differ substantially in copy number variants. That is, the two species have different amounts of genes from certain gene families, which Hahn estimated as a 17% difference in genes between them. Given the amount of copy number polymorphism within humans, it should come as no surprise that…
revere | December 20, 2006Vietnam is once again reporting bird flu in chickens and ducks after no reports in poultry or humans since November of last year. I have not posted what I have been thinking during this lull, because I had no evidence to support it. But in truth I have suspected the virus has been quietly percolating away there beneath the radar screen. No reported outbreaks or cases doesn't necessarily mean the virus is absent.
I still have no evidence. But the virus has poked its head above water again:
At a conference held Tuesday by the National Steering Committee on Bird Flu Control, Cao Duc Phat,…
jrosenhouse | December 19, 2006Ed Brayton has the must-read post of the day.
Remember Richard Sternberg? He's the former editor of the journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. A while back he published a pro-ID paper in the journal. Sternberg was a research associate at the Smithsonain Institution at the time. It quickly became clear both that the paper itself was total garbage, and that the normal editing procedures of the journal had not been followed in its publication.
The result was a big black eye for the Smithsonian and for the journal. But things got worse when Sternberg began alledging…
jrosenhouse | December 18, 2006The New York Times has has this remarkable article about the high school teacher in New Jersey who was using his class as a mission field:
Before David Paszkiewicz got to teach his accelerated 11th-grade history class about the United States Constitution this fall, he was accused of violating it.
Shortly after school began in September, the teacher told his sixth-period students at Kearny High School that evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah's ark, and that only Christians had a place in heaven, according to audio recordings made by a student whose…
thescian | December 18, 2006A reader posted a comment suggesting that I was fanaticaly irreligious. He said,
"I am not sure why you have such a fanatic view against religion. It is man's interpretation of it that has caused religion to be a cause of conflict. The concept itself does not have any reason for the conflict."
and went on to make the customary statement about my maturity and sense of direction. The question is an important one so let me wade through my thoughts to expose my immaturity and lack of direction to a even wider audience. Feel free to counsel me.
The first of the guiding thoughts that I use while…
omnibrain | December 18, 2006
In no particular order...
1) Being a south paw promotes survival from attacks (well at least in crabs). It seems that
The left-handed advantage is realized when snails interact with predators of opposite handedness. Some predatory crabs are "righties" -- and have a specialized tooth on their right claw that acts like a can opener to crack and peel the snail shells. "The 'sinistral advantage,' or advantage to being left-handed, is that it would be like using a can opener backwards for the crab to crack and peel the snail shell,"
Does something like this apply to humans? We're still…
mikethemadbiologist | December 16, 2006While the Republican War on Science isn't doing as well as it once was, there still is too much politicization of scienctific results. Commenting on a BBC article about the UCS statement about scientific integrity, Jim at TeachtheFacts.org gives an excellent description of science (italics mine):
I am fascinated by the process, the turbulent social evolution of knowledge as researchers around the world compete and cooperate and learn from one another and teach one another, all at once. The heart of the matter is peer review, where scientists judge one another's research to determine whether…