Social Sciences
worldsfair | September 19, 2006
There is, it appears, a nice discussion going on over at a post that Ben recently put up regarding the use of nuclear energy. And quite a few of the commentary take a stance that the ideal for citizens to consume less, is at best unrealistic and at worst an impedent to our right towards progression.
I'm not sure if this sits well with me. It seems too easy to say that because humans have needs to expand, to produce more, to (dammit!) play around with charts and the like so that consumption needn't slow down, then why ask for the sacrifice? Indeed, no-one is really going to do it anyway.…
thescian | September 18, 2006Thanks to gaddeswarup who linked to Current Science, an academic science publication in India, I went over to read the current issue. Featured in it under "Astrology and science" is a letter from R V Karanth (of the Geological Society of India), who was commenting about an earlier article on astrology. I quote, It is true that astrology is unscientific, at least for those who do not believe in it. I being a `non-believer' vehemently used to argue against the belief in astrology and wearing stones for astrological purÂposes. Nevertheless, of late, I have a feeling that believing in…
bcohen | September 18, 2006Link to a great article in the New York Times yesterday about satire, irony, sarcasm, and our modern world. It's by Wyatt Mason, who is a contributing editor at Harper's.
"Satire, then, signals both the sickness and health of a society in equal measure: it showcases the vigor of the satirist and the debility of the satiree. As such, we might conclude, in America, that its abundance suggests a normal balance of destructive yin and creative yang, a human need to view the most vexing frailties of a culture through the liberating prism of lampoon."
All told, it's a good narrative that gets…
pharyngula | September 18, 2006This weekend, I read a couple of stories about people teaching about evolution. As you might expect, these generally aren't articles that fill me with joy.
The first is an article from Jacksonville, Texas that explicitly compares two local junior colleges, both associated with religious groups.
Lon Morris junior college is affiliated with the Methodists, and the chair of the department is Linda Allen.
“I teach evolution. Science is looking for natural causes to natural phenomena, it isn’t in the business of looking for supernatural reasons for things occurring,” said Assistant Professor Linda…
tfk | September 17, 2006Many years ago, the University of Chicago invited Amartya Sen, who had recently won a Nobel Prize in Economics, to come and speak. He appeared beside Gary Becker, a distinguished professor of the University's famed economic department, and an adherent to the "Chicago School of Economics." At one point, after the speeches, a question was posed about how the two would define the role of economics in society. Becker gave what is probably his standard Econ 101 introduction, explaining how economics studies how rational human behavior influences the aggregate behavior of markets, etc. After…
chaoticutopia | September 15, 2006The other day, I put up a small question about history. What better place could there be to put my answer, but in the form of a fractal? Patterns seem to almost repeat themselves. Sweeping changes result from a single, initial circumstance. Each point is connected to another, within the same set. Are these descriptions of events in history, or the rules defining a rippled Julia set?
Or perhaps the rings of a tree?
The trunk of a cottonwood tree, showing rings formed over many years. Cottonwood trees (below) line the bank of Walnut Creek, which appealed to Sarah H. Church when she arrived…
pharyngula | September 14, 2006"Archbishop of York"? What kind of silly, made-up title is that?
The Archbishop of York has said British Christians should see Muslims as allies in the struggle against secularism.
In a speech at York Minster, Dr John Sentamu said British Muslims were not offended by Christianity and preferred it to a secular state.
Or maybe he was just mistranslated? Apparently not.
It has often been Muslims, as well as leaders of other faiths, who have joined with Christians in refusing to accept the creeping secularisation that would replace 'Christmas' with 'Winterval', and remove references to faith…
tsmith | September 14, 2006The new vaccine against the human papilloma virus is something I've discussed a time or ten here. Reaction to the vaccine by many religious groups has morphed with time, from outright resistance to a more common stance right now that they're accepting of the vaccine, but don't want it to be mandatory. Well...
Michigan legislation would require girls to get HPV vaccine
Michigan girls entering the sixth grade next year would have to be vaccinated against cervical cancer under legislation backed Tuesday by a bipartisan group of female lawmakers.
The legislation is the first of its kind in the…
j7uy5 | September 14, 2006GARDASIL®,
the vaccine intended to prevent infection with
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_papilloma_virus"
rel="tag">human papillomavirus (HPV), was
controversial even before it was
href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/05/18/health/main1628221.shtml">approved
by the FDA.
href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/10/31/MNG2LFGJFT1.DTL">Debate
rages on use of cervical cancer vaccine Rob Stein, Washington PostMonday, October 31, 2005
(10-31) 04:00 PDT Washington -- A new vaccine that protects against
cervical cancer has set up a clash between…
scientificactivist | September 13, 2006Since I reported yesterday on a letter in Science describing the current decline in funding of NIH (National Institutes of Health) R01 grants, several others have chimed in as well. PZ Myers of Pharyngula gave the post a mention, and Mike the Mad Biologist as well as Orac of Respectful Insolence gave their own detailed commentary.
Here's what Mike had to say:
For faculty, many of whom have guaranteed salaries if they are tenure-track or tenured, this is an inconvience. For those whose salaries are dependent on this funding, this is far, far worse.
In the medium term, this is really going to…
drorzel | September 13, 2006Dylan Stiles is blogging from the American Chemical Society meeting, as only he can. He's got three daily summary posts up (one, two, three), with more presumably on the way for however long the meeting lasts.
Personally, I can't make heads or tails of the scientific content, so I can't tell you whether any of the stuff he's posting about is actually interesting to normal humans. He's way into it, though, which makes even the incomprehensible bits fun to read. Or maybe I'm just sleep-deprived.
revere | September 10, 2006There are many ways to kill innocent people. Suicide bombings against Israeli and Iraqi citizens we hear about. The starvation and strangulation of a whole population is one we don't. From The Independent:
Gaza is dying. The Israeli siege of the Palestinian enclave is so tight that its people are on the edge of starvation. Here on the shores of the Mediterranean a great tragedy is taking place that is being ignored because the world's attention has been diverted by wars in Lebanon and Iraq.
A whole society is being destroyed. There are 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in the most heavily…
evolvingthoughts | September 9, 2006Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and heretic. [Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 611]
A question I have wondered about for a long time is this: why do people become creationists? I mean, nobody is born a creationist (or an evolutionist, or a Mayan cosmic-cyclist, etc.). These are views that one acquires as one learns and integrates into society. But we live, notionally, in a society in which science has learned more about the world in 300 years than in the prior million or so. So, why do people become…
razib | September 9, 2006In the annals of they had to do "research"?, Researchers identify 'male warrior effect'":
In experiments with 300 university men and women students, Van Vugt and his team gave the volunteers small sums of money which they could either keep or invest in a common fund that would be doubled and equally divided. None of the students knew what the others were doing.
Both sexes cooperated in investing in the fund. But when the groups were told they were competing against other universities, the males were more eager to invest rather than keep their money while the number of women contributing…
clock | September 8, 2006Global Changes Alter The Timing Of Plant Growth, Scientists Say:
Different plant species mature at different times. Scientists studying plant communities in natural habitats call this phenomenon "complementarity." It allows species to co-exist because it reduces overlap in the time period when species compete for limited resources. Now, in a study posted online the week of Sept. 4 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ecologists working at Stanford's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve report evidence that climate change may al ter this delicate balance.
Mother Deer Cannot…
clock | September 8, 2006Fifth in the five-part series on clocks in bacteria, covering more politics than biology (from May 17, 2006):
In the previous posts in this series, I covered the circadian clocks in Synechococcus, potential circadian clocks in a couple of other bacteria, and the presence of clock genes (thus potentially clocks) in a number of other bacteria. But what happened to the microbiological workhorse, the Escherichia coli? Does it have a clock? Hasn't anyone checked?
Believe it or not, this question is colored by politics. But I have to give you a little background first. Latter half of the 19th…
terrasig | September 8, 2006Next month, the family Pharmboy is headed down to Beluthahatchee, Florida, to help celebrate the 90th birthday of famed human rights legend, Stetson Kennedy, the subject of some Woody Guthrie lyrics put to music by Billy Bragg and Wilco. Among ScienceBloggers, I've learned that Janet and Steinn are big Billy Bragg fans and Josh is a big Woody Guthrie fan, so it seems apropos to celebrate Mr Kennedy here. This is one post I've been meaning to move over here from the old blog, where it first appeared on 15 May 2006.
[I'm currently on the road and I've somehow screwed up the code for…
scientificactivist | September 7, 2006Robert Trivers was the first to describe the theory of reciprocal altruism and Noam Chomsky is... well... Noam Chomsky is the man (not to be confused with The Man). What happens when you bring together in one room the evolutionary theorist who changed the way we think about cooperation and social interactions with the intellectual who has probably done more to challenge entrenched power structures in our society than anyone else? A hell of an interesting conversation, that's what. From Seed magazine:
The full text of the discussion can be found here.
Chomsky and Trivers discuss the role…
evolvingthoughts | September 6, 2006And the state of nature, nasty, poor, brutish, and short, or so said Thomas Hobbes. But it seems Hobbes was wrong. Humans have always lived in society. That doesn't mean they lived in cities or nations, of course, but they've always been social animals, just like our sister species the chimps and the gorilla. But what sort of society did they live in?
Thom Hartmann thinks we were democrats in a state of nature. In an op-ed arguing (rightly, I think) that the decline of the middle class is leading to oligarchy, a "feudal aristocracy" (backed up by a recent survey of American mean incomes,…
stcynic | September 5, 2006Okay, I looked up the actual 1995 law that was being debated by Congress (you can find much of that information here). Having done so, I have to admit that there's a much stronger case for hypocrisy on the part of the Republicans than the Democrats. The warrantless wiretapping provisions of the bill, it turns out, actually only dealt with emergency wiretaps - taps that are placed in an emergency, but which still require retroactive submission to a judge within 48 hours. If the judge does not issue the warrant retroactively, any evidence obtained in that search is inadmissable in court.
That…