Social Sciences
stcynic | March 22, 2006The UN report that I mentioned the other day concerning Denmark and the uproar over the Muhammed caricatures is now available online, but not in English. Agora (not to be confused with In the Agora) has a partial translation here and a post on the subject here. It provides a good opportunity to look at how legal language can be vague enough to mean whatever someone wants it to mean. Listen to this bureaucratic nonsense from the UN representative:
Their uncompromising defense of a Freedom of Speech without limits or restrictions is not in accordance with the international rules which are based…
evolgen | March 21, 2006The Specter-Harkin Amendment passed the Senate, but this does not guarantee an increase to the NIH budged. The House must still vote on it and it must be reflected in House and Senate Appropriations Committees' allocation for the Labor-Health and Human Services Appropriations Committee. (Don't worry, I don't understand the jargon either; I'm reproducing it from an email I received from the Genetics Society of America.)
That said, an important step has been taken towards ensuring important biomedical research gets funded. The amendment passed by a vote of 73 to 27. I have reproduced a list…
drorzel | March 20, 2006To say I'm a lapsed Catholic would be an understatement. I haven't set foot in a church in years, other than for a couple of weddings. I've never cared for parts of the official doctrine, and I think they blew it when they made Giblets Pope. In terms of general attitude toward religion, I'm sort of an apathetic agnostic-- I don't know if there's a God, and I don't much care.
And yet, I make at least some effort to not eat meat on Fridays during Lent. I don't do all that well, because I'm a little absent-minded (I usually forget it's Friday until I'm halfway through a cheeseeburger), but I do…
jstemwedel | March 16, 2006My post a couple days ago about Laurentian University's lock-out of researchers from their animal care facility sparked some heated discussion in the comments. Also, it sparked an email from someone close enough to the situation to give me an update on the situations since December. The issue of how, ethically, to use animals in research, and of how the interests of animals and the interests of students should be balanced, seems to have touched a nerve. So, we're going back in.
First, here's the update, with thanks to my email correspondent:
End of December: they approved our protocols and…
cmooney | March 15, 2006Hmm, sounds like a reference to the gang here at ScienceBlogs, no?
Seriously, though: It's a quotation from Edmund Burke. You see, I'm in the process of revising RWoS, and it turns out I had used this quotation from "Reflections on the Revolution in France" to point out how conservatives like Burke were uncomfortable with the Enlightenment. This got me taken to task by Adam Keiper in National Review, who said I'd taken Burke out of context:
First, the quotation from Burke is not at all a denunciation of the Enlightenment. In context, Burke is lamenting the decline of chivalry and condemning…
razib | March 13, 2006The t-shirts which depict the "ascent of man" from hairy semi-ape to upright Homo sapiens might make you think that human evolution has been trivial since the emergence of our own species. Modern genomics suggests this isn't so, selection coefficients on the order of 1-10% are probably rather normal, and iterated over hundreds of generations that could result in a nontrivial amount of change on a quantitative trait.
I bring this up because a few days ago in The New York Times a piece was published titled The Twists and Turns of History, and of DNA. Greg Cochran (interest divulgence, a…
grrlscientist | March 9, 2006
Klamath River, Oregon.
Photo by Dave Menke, USFWS.
Click on image for a MUCH larger view in its own window.
Do you wonder what happened with that online letter to the US Senate that I posted to my blog awhile ago, soliciting scientists' signatures regarding the upcoming rewrite of the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA)?
I finally have some good news to share with you.
As some of you might remember, the 1973 ESA is currently being considered for reauthorization by congress, and a rewrite by California Congressman Richard Pombo, a Republican who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee,…
razib | March 6, 2006Evolgen points me to the fact that even our hosts here at Seed are spreading the "blondes are going to go extinct" hoax/meme which first cropped up 3 years ago. I also noticed that someone as informed about biology as John Wilkins was was taken in. An altered iteration of this hoax/meme that focused on redheads was also spreading last year. As Evolgen notes, this meme has been thoroughly debunked. To make it short, if you assume that blondness is a monogenic recessive trait (a gross simplification), its expression in the population will be q2, derived from Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium p2 +…
grrlscientist | March 6, 2006
A friend sent me this poem (below the fold), which is written entirely from actual quotations from George W. Bush. These quotes were arranged for poetic purposes by Washington Post writer, Richard Thompson. Of course, I had to share this with you, especially since it is such a powerful testament to the lasting damage resulting from habitual overconsumption of drugs and alcohol.
Make The Pie Higher!
by George W. Bush
and arranged by Richard Thompson
Washington Post
I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
And potential…
jstemwedel | March 6, 2006I had a bit of an epiphany this weekend about economics. More accurately, I had an epiphany about why it is that economics rubs me the wrong way as often as it does.
Let me get the disclaimer out of the way up front: I'm not bugged by all economists. I'm probably not bothered by all economic theory or claims flowing from it. Heck, there's a good chance, in the village of ScienceBlogs, that I am the village idiot as far as economics goes, and that what bothers me is misuse of economics rather than economics itself.
That said, I am still bothered.
What prompted my epiphany was an article in…
jlynch | March 3, 2006Over at Majikthise, a blog (on analytical philosophy and liberal politics) that I have just noticed, Lindsay has the following to say:
Being raised by academic hippies is like being raised by wolves--you can rejoin human society, but you can never integrate seamlessly.
That's probably true for being raised by academics in general. My daughter is, I fear, doomed.
Read the rest of Lindsay's post which includes this gem:
My uncle, the philosopher, used to be a heavy smoker. One day when I was about six, I said, no doubt irritatingly,
"If I were you, I wouldn't smoke."
He answered, "If you were…
jlynch | February 28, 2006The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine is partnering with Carnegie Museum of Natural History in a first-of-its-kind program that will educate medical students on the evolutionary history of humans and animals. By learning the origins of human disease, such as back pain and cancer - which existed in Jurassic Age dinosaurs - students should better understand contemporary public health concerns and think about treatment and prevention approaches that modern society may have overlooked. More here.
jstemwedel | February 27, 2006A friend who has been lurking here sent me an email the other day to get my take on the apparent attitude of American scientists toward stem cell research and toward the American public. My friend writes that he has been struck by the reaction of scientists in discussion of stem cell research that
"Gee, I just can't understand what all the fuss is about -- this is just research! The scientists in Europe are all laughing at us, because they just don't understand what all the controversy is about! We're losing ground and falling behind!" and so on.
Now, I don't have a settled view about the…
oracknows | February 22, 2006What is it about the Avian flu that seems to inspire all sorts of wild craziness? Yes, the avian flu has the potential to be a big problem in humans (but is not one yet--so far its main lethal affect has been in birds). Yes, if it ever acquired the ability to be transmitted from person to person, rather than only from bird to human, it could cause a pandemic as nasty as the 1918 influenza pandemic, but, as far as can be determined, it has not acquired such an ability yet. Nonetheless, the avian flu inspires a lot more kookiness than more likely threats, such as the return or emergence of a…
razib | February 21, 2006A few days ago Janet posted on the importance of critical faculties in science in response to a series of posts by PZ and John on how we get the public to understand science (mostly evolution in this case). Critical thinking is obviously important in science, as is experimentation, model building, reproducibility, etc. etc. If you are a fan of Karl Popper or Thoms Kuhn (or other less luminous figures like Imre Lakatos) you have an idea about how science should or does work.
All these thinkers capture essential components of Science, but I think one important point which is often forgotten…
cevans | February 14, 2006There are a great deal of things in this civilized world of ours which we accept as truth primarily out of laziness or convenience; in fact, it would not be radical to say that our fragile social universe is built upon such precepts. The structure of language, for example, is pretty much arbitrary. So is the practice of putting books vertically on bookshelves, which people did not really invent until two centuries after the arrival of printed matter. The necessity of eating meat? These things are cultural concepts -- they standardize us, and give us a sense of order in a deeply irrational…
loom | February 13, 2006Last night I drove into New Haven, Connecticut, to catch an advanced screening of Flock of Dodos, a movie about evolution and intelligent design. Afterwards I took part in a panel discussion. It was an interesting evening, not only because the movie was quite good, but because it provoked a noisy discussion.
I don't want to give away too much of Flock of Dodos, because I would prefer that a lot of people get a chance to see it for themselves. Randy Olson, the creator of the film, spoke after the film and explained that the version we saw was still a bit rough around the edges, and he's…
dmunger | February 13, 2006The TV movie Flight 93, which re-enacted the hijacking of a United Airlines flight on September 11, 2001, was criticized because it "humanized" the hijackers (despite this apparent humanity of their captors, the movie did portray the passengers and crew on that flight fighting back and eventually causing the plane to crash in a sparse Pennsylvania woodland instead of a crowded city). The critics' argument was simple: why portray the hijackers, clearly bent on destroying as much life as possible, as anything but vile murderers?
The obvious reply: can't we, as thinking human beings, overcome…
jlynch | February 12, 2006 I was going to post the text of a talk ("The Myths of Darwinism") that I gave to the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix in February 2002. But I can't find a scanned copy. I should be able to post it tomorrow, though. So, in place of that, I give you ...
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."
grrlscientist | February 9, 2006
Transmission electron micrograph of
Avian Influenza Virus.
(click image for larger view in its own window)
I just received a message from ProMED-email regarding the appearance of the avian influenza virus that was just identified in Nigeria. ProMED-email is a program of the International Society for Infectious Diseases that serves to keep medical personnel and other professionals up-to-date on emerging diseases around the world. In this message, Debora MacKenzie, a writer for NewScientist.com news service, points out that;
The article [in NewScientist.com] was posted before we found out the…