Social Sciences
tsmith | October 5, 2005The scientific community is all too familiar with the dangers an influenza pandemic could bring. The politicians and general public are starting to become aware of the issue as well; indeed, one can hardly open a newspaper or turn on the television without hearing about "bird flu." So, what's actually being done to prevent an influenza catastrophe? What are the issues? What can be done?
These are the questions that keep public health officials awake at night, because the answer is always that we're not doing enough. While we may be resigned to the fact that a future pandemic can't be…
tsmith | October 4, 2005Anyone working in the area of influenza virus epidemiology is familiar with the name Robert Webster. A virologist at St. Jude's Children's Hospital in Memphis, the native New Zealander has been leading the charge against influenza for well over 40 years. Barely out of graduate school, Webster hypothesized that something like genetic reassortment (which had not yet been discovered) occurred to cause the big changes that appeared among human influenza viruses, driving pandemics. He performed a simple experiment that cemented the course of his career: he found that serum from patients who had…
tsmith | October 3, 2005It's hard to avoid hearing about influenza virus these days. In all the noise, it's tough to sort out the facts from the rumors and conspiracy theories. I've already discussed a bit about the basic biology of the virus in this post, so I'm not going to review that here (though a good overview can be found here for those of you who need to bone up on your influenza virus biology). So, this week, as a part of Pandemic influenza awareness week, I'll be writing a 5-part series about various issues regarding influenza. Today, I'll discuss the history of influenza, focusing on past pandemics. The…
stcynic | September 22, 2005Mark Olson has responded to my reply to his post juxtaposing a "rights" position with an "ethics" position. Unfortunately, he still misunderstands the reason why I say his dichotomy is false. He concludes:
Have I answered the claim of "false dichotomy"? Clearly Rights based legal thinking exists. Clearly Ethics based legal thinking exists. Mr Brayton clearly opposes many Ethics based laws. Others, at the very least those who penned those laws, disagree. Thus dichotomy must exist, for we have two disagreeing viewpoints.
But he's missing the point of my argument. I'm not arguing that the two…
stcynic | September 10, 2005Even a stopped watch is right twice a day, right? Here's one I fully agree with the Worldnutdaily on. A Canadian minister named Stephen Boissoin has been brought up on charges before the Human Rights Commission of Alberta, his home province, because he submitted a letter to a newspaper condemning homosexuality. A professor from the University of Calgary, Darrell Lund, filed the charges and is demanding that Boissoin be fined (he could be fined as much as $7000) and be forced to apologize. This is nothing short of outrageous.
Boissoin is wrong, dead wrong, in his opinions about homosexuals.…
stcynic | September 9, 2005Sometimes I feel like I should send Joseph Farah, founder of the Worldnutdaily, a gift. The webmag he founded is such a fountain of sheer stupidity that he makes my job here so much easier. Virtually every day, I could find ample fodder for this blog just by clicking on his page. And now that he has added Alan Sears, the CEO of the Alliance Defense Fund, as a weekly columnist that job should get even easier. The Alliance Defense Fund, you may remember, are the folks who brought us the ridiculous "Declaration of Independence Banned from Classroom" lawsuit that was recently "settled" when they…
stcynic | August 27, 2005Chris Buttars, the eternally clueless Utah state Senator, certainly didn't get the answers he wanted from the Utah state school board. Buttars has been threatening to submit a bill to mandate the teaching of "divine design" - a slightly more honest version of intelligent design - if the school board doesn't issue a position statement officially denouncing human evolution. Instead, the board has gone the other direction:
The state school board's proposed position statement on teaching evolution doesn't give an inch for a state senator's "intelligent design" concepts.
That bothers Sen. Chris…
stcynic | July 25, 2005July's Idiot of the Month award goes to Judith Reisman, a nutty anti-anything-sexual crusader who is astonishingly popular with social conservatives. Reisman is one of the leading lights of the "abstinence-only sex ed" movement and a longtime anti-porn and anti-gay activist with a history of saying absolutely loony things. Her latest contribution to absurdity is the notion of "erototoxins", which she invented out of whole cloth and foisted on an unsuspecting Congress last year. "Erototoxins" are brain chemicals allegedly released in the brain when one views pornography, chemicals which,…
stcynic | July 21, 2005Since politics today is conducted primarily through the use of catchphrases and codewords, political memes are particularly fun to watch and never more than when they're first beginning to enter the public discourse. The right has long been the master of this art, building on the direct mail campaigns of Richard Viguerie and, later, Newt Gingrich's famous list of words to use when making political speeches. Particularly interesting are those codewords and phrases that really just mean "Them - everything we despise". For instance, the favorite buzzword of the religious right, beginning in the…
tlambert | July 16, 2005On June 7, the national science academies of the G8 nations and Brazil, China and India issued a joint statement saying:
Increasing greenhouse gases are causing temperatures to rise; the Earth's surface warmed by
approximately 0.6 centigrade degrees over the twentieth
century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) projected that the average global surface
temperatures will continue to increase to between 1.4
centigrade degrees and 5.8 centigrade degrees above 1990
levels, by 2100.
The scientific understanding of climate change is now
sufficiently clear to justify nations taking…
loom | June 23, 2005In the comments, Doug gets exasperated with some recent posts of mine:
Isn't it amazing how everything seems to provide evidence for evolution? The brain shrinks in some form of pygmy homo erectus. Thats evolution! Ancient genes survive millions of years unchanged. That's evolution?! Women have orgasms. That's evolution! Although not all women have orgasms and they still manage to reproduce hmm luckily with the right spin...That's evolution! We live in a civil society with people working for cooperative goals. That's evolution! Unfortunately some people murder and rape. Just an unfortunate…
tlambert | June 20, 2005Last week I wrote about
how Bob Carter was out by a factor of 20 in an estimate of how much
warming could be attributed to human activity. He has now posted the
text of anothertalk where he
gives a source for his bogus claim. It's
href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,123013,00.html"
rel="nofollow">this FOXNews opinion piece by Steve
Milloy. Carter is a
Research Professor at James Cook University, so you would have thought
he would be aware that opinion columns by non-scientists aren't the
best source of scientific information, but I guess not.
Some highlights of his talk: He said…
tlambert | June 7, 2005 Our old friend John Brignell has uncovered "The greatest conspiracy in human history". According to Brignell that's what global warming is, and:
It is not that the proponents are simply mistaken---that would be forgivable. They know that they are lying: otherwise there would be no need for all the manufactured and selective evidence, the appeal to a claimed consensus (the like of which has never had a place within the scientific method), the gross attempts to censor any contrary argument, the abandonment of the essential scepticism of science, the vilification of doubters, the direction of…
stcynic | May 17, 2005A reader named James Cameron emailed me a link to an interview with Alan Keyes that is pretty much par for the course for him (incidentally, I hope this isn't the James Cameron who directed Titanic or I shall forever have to hate him for foisting that damn Celine Dion song upon the world - your heart may go on, but your brain shut down years ago). See part one of the interview here and part two here. Keyes trots out a new argument, at least one I've never heard him use before, which is to blame abortion and gay marriage on the invention and use of contraception:
Take the issue of same-sex…
stcynic | May 10, 2005As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am a passionate advocate for the principles of natural rights as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. But I am also firmly convinced that our nation is far closer to living out those ideals today than at any time in the almost 230 years since that document was written. It has taken the extraordinary sacrifice of many great men and women, an enormous amount of social upheaval and even a civil war to put those principles into action, but it has brought us closer to making the promise of those self-evident truths a reality for a far higher…
stcynic | May 9, 2005This post is a continuation of an exchange with Patterico, of Patterico's Pontifications, that began in the comments on another post. Patterico is an assistant district attorney in LA County, so is obviously a worthy adversary and someone whose views, especially where it concerns the law, should be taken seriously. I'm going to shift gears a bit in our debate, however, because I think we were getting off on a tangent. The real disagreement between us, I think, revolves around the question of what limitations are placed upon the government (i.e. the majority) by the Constitution. We both agree…
stcynic | May 2, 2005On ABC's This Week on Sunday, Pat Robertson put on a virtuoso display of irrational claims, hypocritical flip flops and demagoguery worthy of his exalted position as one of the world's foremost leaders of the credulous and stupid. Some of what he said was astonishing even to someone who has followed his career full of manipulative nonsense. For instance, this exchange between the host, George Stephanapolous, and Robertson about Justice Ginsburg:GS: "You said also that you believe Democrats appoint judges who don't share our Christian values and will dismantle Christian culture. So do you…
tlambert | May 1, 2005 In a report on a climate change seminar, Bernd Ströher and Benny Peiser write: Particularly revealing were the almost sensational results of a survey conducted by Prof. Bray among some 500 German and European climate researchers. The results show impressively that the much-repeated claim of a "scientific consensus" on anthropogenic global warming is a carefully constructed piece of fiction: According to the survey results, some 25% of European climate researchers who took part in the survey still doubt whether most of the moderate warming during the last 150 years can be attributed to human…
loom | April 29, 2005
The feud over Homo floresiensis, the little people of Indonesia, centers on whether they were an extinct diminutive species that evolved from some ancient hominid, such as Homo erectus, or whether they were just pygmy humans, perhaps suffering from some disease. The leading skeptic, paleoanthropologist Teuku Jacob, has claimed that there are pygmies living not far from where the fossils were found, on the island of Flores. I came across a short item at Japan Today about a scientific expedition to study the pygmies, which was based on an article in Kompas, an Indonesian publication. The…
loom | April 13, 2005This morning the New York Times reported that the National Geographic Society has launched the Genographic Project, which will collect DNA in order to reconstruct the past 100,000 years of human history.
I proceeded to shoot a good hour nosing around the site. The single best thing about it is an interactive map that allows you to trace the spread of humans across the world, based on studies on genetic markers. I'm working on a book about human evolution (more details to come), and I've gotten a blinding headache trying to keep studies on Y-chromosome markers in Ethiopian populations and…