Social Sciences
razib | October 5, 2006Radio Open Source had a show about Islam & The Netherlands. They mention one of my comments in the last 5 minutes (the download should be up tomorrow). I have cut & pasted my first comment below.
And what better place for this flourishing multicultural paradise than the tolerant Netherlands of the Church-baiting Erasmus and the Portuguese-Jewish rationalist Spinoza?
Let me be frank, this makes great rhetoric, but the reality was far less peachy. The Calvinist confession dominated Dutch society and tolerated a level of dissent, it did not accept or celebrate it. Baruch Spinoza was…
nisbetmc | October 5, 2006
Following Pope Benedict's late August seminar on evolution, the consensus view from Science magazine and intelligent design watchdogs appeared to be that the Vatican was not yet ready to endorse ID, but rather was likely to come out in support of a theological view of evolution.
Yet, the Pope, perhaps in an effort to appease conservative members of the Church, continues to send out mixed messages on the issue, and ambiguity can be a powerful communication tool for ID supporters. For example, just before the meetings, the Pope replaced George Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory,…
oracknows | October 5, 2006Over the last week or so, several of my fellow ScienceBloggers made predictions about who would win the Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology. The prize, as we know now, was awarded to Andrew Fire and Craig Mello for their discovery of RNA interference (known as RNAi, for short). I also share some of Jake's questioning as to why Greg Hannon or Tom Tuschl, both of whom played a role in discovering RNAi and making the early advances in the field, were shut out. Whatever the reasons, this particular award is of great interest to me because it's the first Nobel Prize awarded for a discovery that was…
terrasig | October 4, 2006Yesterday, we began discussing why the health care consumer should be wary of dietary supplement promotions based solely on "scientific research" cited from studies done on isolated cells in Petri dishes, pure enzymes, or other systems far removed from whole animals or whole humans.
There are many barriers to absorption of compounds from herbs, supplements, and prescription drugs, and the body's capacity to metabolize xenobiotics (and externally administered compound) is quite robust. For a compound to become a drug, it must sometimes be modified chemically to circumvent the metabolic…
pharyngula | October 3, 2006If it's quiet on Pharyngula today, it's because I'm off at NDSU giving a talk to the Science, Religion and Lunch seminar, in the Meadow Lark Room in the NDSU Memorial Union (any Fargo residents out there?). The title of the talk is "Accommodation isn't enough: why scientists need to speak out against religion", and yes, I'm expecting to stimulate people to argue with me.
My central argument is that religion and science are incompatible ways of knowing: that important decisions should be made on the basis of reason and evidence, and religion fosters the abandonment of those principles. You…
clock | October 3, 2006Some musings from February 13, 2005...
At the Triangle Blogger Conference yesterday, somebody mentioned Vernon Vinge's Fire Upon The Deep, as an example of a sci-fi novel describing future consequences of Usenet (at the time) or blog communities. Someone else suggested another book, Bloom. Another blogger (sorry, can't find it again right now, so many people blogged their impressions of the conference afterwards) thought of Terry Pratchett's The Truth as a parable of the way journalism works. I have not yet read "Fire Upon The Deep" (surprisingly, as I own a copy and generally like Vinge a…
j7uy5 | October 2, 2006Except I think it was a different DeVos. As linked by
href="http://markmaynard.com/index.php/2006/09/27/devos_the_domionist"
rel="tag">Mark
Maynard, the irascibly analytical frontman for the
href="http://www.monkeypowertrio.com/" rel="tag">Monkey
Power Trio, Rolling Stone has
href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/7235393/the_crusaders/">an
article that states:
...The godfather of the Dominionists is
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._James_Kennedy">D.
James Kennedy [link added], the most influential evangelical
you've never heard of...
...While the…
revere | October 1, 2006Now there appears to be another frontline flu antiviral on the horizon, a neuraminidase inhibitor like Tamiflu and Relenza. It's generic name is peramivir, being developed by Alabama-based BioCryst Pharmaceuticals. Tamiflu can be taken orally. Relenza must be inhaled. So far, peramivir has to be given intravenously or via injection. Much of the optimistic information that has come out in the last two days is from BioCryst, so we don't know how much is real and how much is hype. Information from researchers said to be independent of the company (what this means exactly we don't know) were…
mixingmemory | September 30, 2006One of the top ten coolest experiments ever has to be Botvinick and Cohen's "rubber hand" experiment1. I'm going to let them describe the manipulation:
Each of ten subjects was seated with their left arm resting upon a small table. A standing screen was positioned beside the arm to hide it from the subject's view and a life-sized rubber model of a left hand and arm was placed on the table directly in front of the subject. The subject sat with eyes fixed on the artificial hand while we used two small paintbrushes to stroke the rubber hand and the subject's hidden hand, synchronising the…
revere | September 30, 2006The Rockefeller Foundation's conference center in Bellagio, Italy on Lake Como is a lovely place (digression: so I'm told by people I know who have spent time there. I haven't -- yet. This is a big hint to the Foundation that I am available to take a week there and tell you what I think. Or you can find out for nothing here. But I'd rather tell you in person.).
In June Ruth Faden, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins convened a group of experts there to talk about ways to soften the impact of a flu pandemic on the world's most vulnerable:
"Within countries rich and poor, the burden will be felt…
evolvingthoughts | September 29, 2006
The Washington Post has an opinion editorial by Paul Hanle, the president of the Biotechnology Institute in Washington.
I recently addressed a group of French engineering graduate students who were visiting Washington from the prestigious School of Mines in Paris. After encouraging them to teach biotechnology in French high schools, I expected the standard queries on teaching methods or training. Instead, a bright young student asked bluntly: "How can you teach biotechnology in this country when you don't even accept evolution?"
I wanted to disagree, but the kid had a point. Proponents of…
jrosenhouse | September 28, 2006Michael Shermer answers yes in his latest column for Scientific American. He conveniently organizes his arguments in a series of bullet points, and we will consider that momentarily.
Shermer gave me my big break in the evolution biz by publishing my reviews of Ken Miler's Finding Drawin's God and John Haught's God After Darwin in Skeptic magazine. I'm usually a big fan of his writing. But in this case I'm afraid he is way off base. In fact, I have a nagging fear that he wrote this tongue-in-cheek, and that by writing a serious reply I am basically falling for a joke. Nonetheless, I will…
stcynic | September 28, 2006The more reports come in about last weekend's Values Voter Summit, the worse it gets (which is not a surprise, of course). Here's Bishop Wellington Boone:
But I want to tell you something is, they don't know, we're driven by God to deal with this stuff, and I want to say to you that, in this regard, I'm not playing with you. That when it comes to the matter of this gay stuff, I know that a family is not a man and a man or a woman and a woman. It's a man and a woman. That's the creative order, and I'm not backing down. I'm standing flat-footed on that right there. [Applause]
Everywhere I get…
stcynic | September 27, 2006The AP reports:
Gunmen on a motorbike Monday killed an Afghan women's rights activist who ran an underground school for girls during the Taliban's rule -- the latest victim of increasingly brazen militants targeting government officials and schools.
Safia Ama Jan, a provincial director for
Afghanistan's Ministry of Women's Affairs, was slain outside her home in the southern city of Kandahar as she was on her way to work, said Tawfiq ul-Ulhakim Parant, senior adviser to the women's ministry in Kabul....
Mullah Sadullah, a regional Taliban commander, claimed responsibility for the killing in a…
worldsfair | September 26, 2006The diagnosis we would all shudder to get. The below image is actually a joke (reprinted from an issue of Esquire in July of 2000)
But even in reality, Craig Venter is a piece of work. I mean it's perfect that he can be quoted as saying "People who are motivated by pure greed only get their money when they produce something that's beneficial to society."
And so, I invite you to check out an interview of Dr. Venter from The Believer which has an introduction that begins:
What would it be like to know the details of your own personal programming--every A, C, T, and G as it swirls along the…
pharyngula | September 26, 2006
We need to appreciate beer more. Alcohol has a long history in human affairs, and has been important in purifying and preserving food and drink, and in making our parties livelier. We owe it all to a tiny little microorganism, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which converts complex plant sugars into smaller, simpler, more socially potent molecules of ethanol. This is a remarkable process that seems to be entirely to our benefit (it has even been argued that beer is proof of the existence of God*), but recent research has shown that the little buggers do it all entirely for their own selfish reasons…
razib | September 25, 2006A year ago, Armand Leroi, the author of Mutants, wrote:
...We don't know what the differences are between white skin and black skin, European skin versus African skin. What I mean is we don't know what the genetic basis of that is. This is actually amazing. I mean, here's a trait, trivial as it may be, about which wars have been fought, which is one of the great fault lines in society, around which people construct their identities as nothing else. And yet we haven't the foggiest idea what the genetic basis of this is. It's amazing.
Wonder no more Armand! Some have said we are in the…
evolvingthoughts | September 22, 2006
We may believe in some doctrine of evolution or some idea of progress and we may use this in our interpretation of the history of centuries; but what our history contributes is not evolution but rather the realization of how crooked and perverse the ways of progress are, with what wilfulness and waste it twists and turns, and takes anything but the straight track to its goal, and how often it seems to go astray, and to be deflected by any conjecture, to return to us - if it does returns - by a back door. [Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, Penguin, 1973 (1931), 24…
purepedantry | September 20, 2006This is absolutely unacceptable. 6 medical workers are on trial in Libya under the accusation of infecting children with HIV, and if convicted they could be executed. While expert testimony and scientific evidence was presented at the trial, this evidence was thrown out from a combination of miscommunication and what appears to be political bias.
Declan Butler from Nature reports:
Lawyers defending six medical workers who risk execution by firing squad in Libya have called for the international scientific community to support a bid to prove the medics' innocence. The six are charged with…
tlambert | September 20, 2006The Guardian reports
In a letter earlier this month to Esso, the UK arm of ExxonMobil, the Royal Society cites its own survey which found that ExxonMobil last year distributed $2.9m to 39 groups that the society says misrepresent the science of climate change.
These include the International Policy Network, a thinktank with its HQ in London, and the George C Marshall Institute, which is based in Washington DC. In 2004, the institute jointly published a report with the UK group the Scientific Alliance which claimed that global temperature rises were not related to rising carbon dioxide levels…