Social Sciences
stcynic | February 7, 2006I have often made the argument that gay marriage and interracial marriage are analogous, particularly in the arguments against each (no one outside the KKK thinks interracial marriage should be banned anymore, but the arguments against it were virtually identical to the arguments against gay marriage) and that the modern struggle for gay rights is the logical extension of the struggle for black civil rights in this country. Several black ministers have come out against this analogy and argued against gay rights. Others in the religious right have adopted their rhetoric and expanded on it.…
stcynic | February 6, 2006PZ Myers has posted a follow up to his post on the Muslim caricatures, and while I think he's correct to say that some have caricatured his own position, I still think the uncaricatured position is problematic. Clearly, he is not arguing for Islamic radicalism, nor is he arguing that religion should never be satirized, nor is he arguing that the Danish newspaper should be forbidden from publishing such satire. To suggest otherwise is to argue against a straw man. But at the same time, it's a little difficult to flesh out exactly what his real position is.
He clearly has a very distinct…
stcynic | February 1, 2006Eugene Volokh had a couple of posts a few days ago about anti-religious speech and a movement to regulate it around the world. It begins with the UN Commission on Human Rights urging nations to "take resolute action to prohibit the dissemination through political institutions and organizations of racist and xenophobic ideas and material aimed at any religion or its followers" that might lead to harrassment, discrimination or hostility. Volokh notes that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, has publicly condemned a Danish newspaper for publishing a dozen caricatures of…
razib | January 27, 2006Science isn't perfect, it often misses obvious truths. Consider the 2005 Nobel in medicine, awarded for the work of Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren in establishing the connection between Helicobacter pylori and ulcers. After the fact you hear many stories of doctors who had stumbled onto the solution, antibiotics, long before the scientific consensus. Many others now understood why they always saw these pathogens in samples taken from patients with ulcers. Now it all makes sense, but these sort of screw ups make you wonder how far we've gone past Galen! Falsification is a decent…
stcynic | January 17, 2006Social conservatives, advocates of "morals legislation" and Christian Nation apologists have a habit of quoting William Blackstone on the essentially moral nature of the law. For a good example, see this article by Brannon Howse. Ignore the fact that he amusingly calls Blackstone "America's foremost legal scholar at the time of the Founders" (Blackstone was British, not American; Howse might have been tipped off to that when he quoted from Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England). They love to cite Blackstone because he famously argued that there are two laws, the laws of man and the…
tsmith | January 15, 2006As I write this at 2AM sitting under annoying fluorescent lights, am I increasing my risk of developing breast cancer? Maybe, according to a recent study showing that melatonin-depleted blood can spur the growth of mammary tumors:
The increased breast cancer risk in female night shift workers has been postulated to result from the suppression of pineal melatonin production by exposure to light at night. Venous blood samples were collected from healthy, premenopausal female volunteers during either the daytime, nighttime, or nighttime following 90 minutes of ocular bright, white fluorescent…
jstemwedel | January 11, 2006Here in California, I had hoped we might be safe from the high school Intelligent Design follies playing out in other states. Turns out, not so much.
Frazier Mountain High School in Lebec, California, part of the El Tejon Unified School District, offered a class called "Philosophy of Design" which has prompted a lawsuit from the parents of 13 students arguing that the course violates the separation of church and state.
"The course was designed to advance religious theories on the origins of life, including creationism and its offshoot, 'intelligent design,'" the suit said. "Because the…
jstemwedel | January 10, 2006An interesting piece of the Korean stem cell fiasco that escaped my notice the first time around is that the Korean investigative television program, "PD Notebook," that exposed the faking of photographs for the now-discredited Science article did so using techniques that violated journalistic ethics.
Take a moment to let that sink in.
Here's a lab that is reporting what looks to be great success with cutting edge scientific research. Then Choi Seung Ho, producer of "PD Notebook," gets an anonymous email from someone who claims to be a member of Hwang Woo-suk's laboratory, claiming that…
jstemwedel | January 8, 2006I received an email from a reader in response to my last post on PETA's exposing of problems with the treatment of research animals at UNC. The reader pointed me to the website of an organization concerned with the treatment of lab animals in the Research Triangle, www.serat-nc.org. And, she wrote the following:
Some people may think that PETA is extreme. However, the true "extreme" is what happens to animals in labs. If the public knew, most would be outraged. But, of course our government hides such things very well. Those researchers who abuse animals in labs (which is ALL…
loom | January 3, 2006Tomorrow (Wednesday) at 4 pm EST I'll be a guest on Science and Society, an online radio show. You can listen live or visit the site later for a podcast. I'll do my best to be interesting on all things evolutionary, but fortunately I'm sandwiched between two scientists who should be definitely worth a listen: Steven Salzberg, who has sequenced the genomes of humans and flu viruses and just about everything in between, and Zach Hall, the president of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which was set up to make California the world's envy in stem cell research.
stcynic | January 3, 2006Sandefur posted an unusually important bit of information about the NSA wiretapping scandal at Positive Liberty the other day. Quoting Robert Levy, a constitutional scholar at the Cato Institute, he established that the FISA law explicitly said that warrantless wiretaps were only allowed during the first 15 days after war was declared:
Second, in FISA, §1811, Congress expressly contemplated warrantless wiretaps during wartime, and limited them to the first 15 days after war is declared. The statute reads: "Notwithstanding any other law, the President, through the Attorney General, may…
cevans | December 30, 2005
I'm not going to lie: this blog will rarely concern iself with Pressing Science Ethics Issues. This sort of thing -- the morality of Stem Cell Research, "Is Cloning O.K"? -- should remain where it rightly lives, which is to say, "town hall" style discussions on public television. This is not to dub these issues irrelevant. They are, of course, more relevant than anything I will bring up in this forum. However, they are also instant boresville. No one needs an in-depth analysis to realize immediately that people opposed to mild levels of stem-cell research are either conservative wack-jobs or…
tsmith | November 22, 2005I've mentioned many times on here reservations I have over the current avian flu numbers--how many subclinical or mild infections are being missed? Are they indeed offset by the number of serious disease cases we're also missing? There's a reason for these questions, and it's now out in electronic form in Clinical Infectious Diseases.
A bit of background. I work in Iowa as part of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases. One of our pet pathogens happens to be influenza virus, and we have ongoing studies looking at serological evidence of prior infection with swine and avian viruses in…
stcynic | November 21, 2005Michelle Goldberg, the terrific writer for Salon.com, has a really interesting article examining the historical roots of the "War on Christmas" idea that is getting so much play in the conservative media these days. As it turns out, this one goes back a lot longer than most of us realize:
In 1959, the recently formed John Birch Society issued an urgent alert: Christmas was under attack. In a JBS pamphlet titled "There Goes Christmas?!" a writer named Hubert Kregeloh warned, "One of the techniques now being applied by the Reds to weaken the pillar of religion in our country is the drive to…
loom | November 14, 2005This story starts in 1987, with the skin of a frog.
Michael Zasloff, a scientist then at NIH, was impressed by how well a frog in his lab recovered from an incision he had made in its skin during an experiment. He kept his frogs in a tank that must have been rife with bacteria that should have turned the incision into a deadly maw of infection. Zasloff wondered if something in the skin of the frog was blocking the bacteria. After months of searching, he found it. The frogs produced an antibiotic radically unlike the sort that doctors prescribed their patients.
Most antibiotics kill bacteria…
stcynic | November 3, 2005The battle over creationism in public schools is heading for Indiana, as lawmakers there prepare to submit a bill to mandate the teaching of intelligent design there. And in the process, they're leaving behind all sorts of evidence of the essential equation of ID and creationism.
The proposal comes a little more than a month after Bosma and a handful of other House members met privately with Carl Baugh, host of the Trinity Broadcasting Network show "Creationism in the 21st Century," to discuss bringing intelligent design to public schools.
Baugh was in town as the guest of Zion Unity…
tlambert | October 26, 2005Les Robertscomments on the shoddy reporting of his study:
I thought the press saw their job as reporting information. Most of the pieces discussing our report were written to control or influence society, not to relay what our report had documented. For example, the day after the article came out, Fred Kaplan, a defense correspondent for Slate magazine reported that, "Yet a close look at the actual study, published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet, reveals that this number is so loose as to be meaningless. But read the passage that cites the calculation more fully: We…
tsmith | October 7, 2005Thus far this week, I've discussed the history of pandemic influenza in general, and avian flu in particular. I've discussed some issues that must be addressed to prepare us for a pandemic, and the groundbreaking resurrection of the Spanish influenza virus. Today I want to end the series with a look at how prepared we currently are as a nation, and highlight some personal preparedness steps you can take.
If you recall from Tuesday, the first outbreak of H5N1 was back in 1997. The anthrax attacks were in 2001. Surely by now we're prepared for some kind of serious, large-scale, biological…
stcynic | October 6, 2005Mike Argento, a columnist for the York Daily Record, writes about the testimony of Barbara Forrest and it seems that he definitely got the point of the whole exercise, from the historical record she referenced to the shameful tactics of the TMLC attorneys. First, he writes of their attempts to impeach her testimony by questioning her about her association with humanist groups:
Along about the 658th hour of Dr. Barbara Forrest's stay on the witness stand, during Day Six of the Dover Panda Trial, I started looking for her horns.
Never did see them.
It was right about the time that defense…
tsmith | October 6, 2005I know I said I was going to discuss a bit more about pandemic preparedness today, but I think I'll hold off on that to discuss this story:
It sounds like a sci-fi thriller. For the first time, scientists have made from scratch the Spanish flu virus that killed millions of people in 1918.
Why? To help them understand how to better fend off a future global epidemic from the bird flu spreading in Southeast Asia.
Researchers believe their work offers proof the 1918 flu originated in birds, and provides insights into how it attacked and multiplied in humans. On top of that, this marks the first…