Social Sciences
pharyngula | August 11, 2007Richard Dawkins has a new television series, The Enemies of Reason, that will be broadcast in the UK. I have not heard if it will make it to the US; if it's anything like our experience with his last program, Root of all evil?, it will be buried in post-midnight showings on scattered PBS stations, with little information on when or where in any of the channel listings. The premise of discussing this new show is how Gordon Lynch begins a recent column, but then, somehow, it turns into a wild-eyed accusation in mannered language that this modern atheism stuff is a cult-like phenomenon, just…
pharyngula | August 10, 2007I know the summer is coming to an end when the Stevens County Fair opens. I'm going to be spending a good chunk of my afternoon and evening there tonight — I'll be holding down the Stevens Community Humane Society booth from 6-8pm, and the Stevens County DFL booth from 8:30-10:30pm. I'll have a whole free half hour in there to duck into the beer hall.
thusspakezuska | August 9, 2007I read this article in the LA Times about Russians racing to claim the seabed under the Arctic ice as their territory, other nations fussing that it's really theirs, and everybody ignoring that the only way they can even have this argument is because the damn ice is melting away. Only it's even worse than I realized. Because it isn't just the ice melting away.
Now the permafrost is thawing on land and along the seabeds. If it occurs in the presence of oxygen on land, the decomposing of organic matter leads to the production of CO2. If the permafrost thaws along lake shelves, in the…
retrospectacle | August 8, 2007If I'm on a date (which believe me, doesn't happen often) I can usually tell how its going by how, and how much, my date is smiling. Is the smile genuine or forced? Polite or flirty? Or worse yet, not smiling at all??
Either way, a lot of emotional content can be found in a person's smile. But wait, is smiling universal? What I mean is, is the emotional content constant across different cultures?
There isn't much to smile about when you go to the Department of Motor Vehicles, but you're still asked to when you get your picture taken for your driver's license. Most people comply. However I…
purepedantry | August 7, 2007The SciAm blog has a great discussion on current research into the neuroscience of morals. Two cool observations. First, while people tend to agree with the calculus of utilitarian moral judgments, they tend to reject them. Would you kill one person to save twenty? Even if you can morally justify that exchange, you are decidedly reluctant to do it. Second, this reluctance to make utilitarian moral judgments is neurologically based in the sense that if you lose a certain part of your brain (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex) you are more likely to accept this calculus.
Go check it out.
I…
oracknows | August 7, 2007After a long run of arguing against global warming and indoor smoking bans, it appears that our favorite Libertarian comic with a penchant for bad arguments and ad hominem attacks on scientists has temporarily left the field of blog combat in a huff of "giving up" that reminds me of a certain Black Knight telling a certain King that he's not beaten and that it's "just a flesh wound." I'm not worried; I'm sure he'll be back whenever he returns from his vacation to speak for himself. In the meantime, while the blog silence is golden, I'd like to step back a minute. I don't want to rehash old…
hrynyshyn | August 2, 2007Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers have endorsed the "OUT" campaign that encourages atheists (or agnostics, if that's your semantic druthers) to publicly declare their lack of believe in gods and the supernatural. To help make the point, the campaign comes equipped with a red letter "A" that can be worn as a T-shirt logo or displayed on a blog. While there can be no doubt that society needs more people to declare their unfaith, is this new campaign a universally good idea?
I fear not.
It all depends on the context, or more specifically, the social environment. For Dawkins and Myers, academics who…
razib | August 1, 2007In biological anthropology there is a Grandmother Hypothesis as an explanation for why adult human females live so long after their reproduction ceases, and, why menopause occurs in the first place (male fertility tapers off over time, while women undergo a concerted physiological change which shuts down their ability to reproduce). The basic idea is that beyond a particular age women can increase their own genetic fitness to a greater extent by investing in their daughters reproductive output.
The idea is pretty easy to illustrate. Imagine an allele, M, which induces menopause in an…
mementomori | July 31, 2007On any given day millions of Americans inch forward in a brutally tedious queue, staring at the big board over a Starbucks counter with the same keen look seen in a church pew around thirty minutes into the sermon. Typically they make only one major decision during this visit, viz. whether to order a caffeinated or decaffeinated drink. If they only knew that two other crucial decisions lie before them, two that could affect their health for years to come. They are:
1. Should I leave my car in the parking lot and run home?
2. Should I renew my membership in the nudist beach club?…
oracknows | July 30, 2007Saturday, I thought that I knew what I'd be writing about for Monday, which, I've learned from my two and a half years of blogging, is a great thing when it happens. A certain Libertarian comic had decided that he wanted to argue some more about secondhand smoke and indoor smoking bans, starting a few days earlier with a rather specious analogy (which was handily shredded by you, my readers) and then finishing by annoying me with a comment and a post that implied that I didn't "care about the little guy." It looked like great fodder for a post to start out the week and a chance to apply a…
neurophilosophy | July 29, 2007Black peoples' brains are, of course, no more or less peculiar than those of any other people. The human brain is an extraordinarily complex organ, and there are just as many differences between the brains of people from the same ethnic group as there between the brains of people from different groups.
Some racial peculiarities of the Negro brain is the title of a long and technical paper by the anthropologist Robert Bennett Bean, published in the American Journal of Anatomy in 1906. It is one of a series of scientific papers written by Bean in the early 20th Century, in which he tried to…
clock | July 28, 2007Being out of the lab, out of science, and out of funding for a while also means that I have not been at a scientific conference for a few years now, not even my favourite meeting of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms. I have missed the last two meetings (and I really miss them - they are a blast!).
But it is funny how, many years later, one still remembers some posters from poster sessions. What makes a poster so memorable?
I guess it has something to do with one's interests - there is just not enough time during a session to check out every single one out of hundreds (or…
oracknows | July 27, 2007Time is important. Our life is measured in it, and there's no way to reverse it. How we use our allotted time on this planet is, of course, the most important question that anyone ever faces. But how to measure time? It all seems so obvious, doesn't it? You have years, which are divided into 365 days with a leap year every four years to make up for the fact that a year isn't exactly 365 days. You're good to go, at least for as long a period of time as anyone could expect. That's all you could expect from any calendar, right?
Wrong.
If you're a woo-meister, you know that a calendar could do so…
hrynyshyn | July 26, 2007Now here's something you don't see every day: a cogent argument in defense of cloning. Not just therapeutic cloning, the better to produce embryonic stem cells, but full-on human reproductive cloning. And from a bioethicist, no less. Hugh McLachlan of Glasgow Caledonian University, doesn't actually say cloning is a good thing, but he does deftly destroy the arguments against it.
The essay is in the subscription-only section of New Scientist, and I wouldn't even think of violating copyright by re-posting the whole thing (I've written for New Scientist and want to keep that option open). I will…
grrlscientist | July 23, 2007tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
Female Snowy Owl, Bubo scandiacus.
Image: Bill Ferensen, Seattle.
Even though my blog pseudonym is "GrrlScientist", some of you originally knew me elsewhere on the internet as "Hedwig the Owl" -- a pseudonym that I have used for five years. Because of the release of the last Harry Potter book, which is where the character of Hedwig came from, I am dedicating this edition of the Birds in the News to Hedwig, my original namesake -- just because I want to make the point that it's okay to love a fictional character, even…
pharyngula | July 20, 2007John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching the theory of evolution. He used a textbook called A Civic Biology, by GW Hunter, which, if you ever seen it, is a rather awful book, and is certainly something we wouldn't want poisoining our classrooms today. Michael Egnor, as behind the times and obtuse as ever, uses the ugly racism of A Civic Biology to falsely damn evolution. He quotes some nasty bits of the book, such as suggestions to prevent breeding with the feeble-minded and its equation of civilization with white skins, and then concludes with a foolish switcheroo.
The struggle between a '…
thusspakezuska | July 20, 2007As seen in the Chronicle of Higher Education!
It all started innocently enough, with a protector acquired for a couple of bucks at the 2001 meeting of the American Chemical Society. After that he ordered some for his department. From there, the addiction -- er, collection -- grew.
And grew - to 465 and counting. Beware the ACS meetings, my children!
"I am not a weirdo," he says. "I just collect pocket protectors."
Or so he told the Chronicle...but see what he says on his own website...
"I'm not just a collector, I am also a wearer."
John A. Pojman is one bad-ass pocket-protector wearin'…
pharyngula | July 19, 2007Back when I was a youngling, I read a very exciting series of science-fiction novels called The Deathworld Trilogy, by Harry Harrison. The premise was that there was this horrifically fierce planet in the galaxy, with gravity twice Earth-normal, constantly erupting volcanoes, and savage, ravenous beasts that were out to destroy anything that moves. The humans who settled there became heavily muscled with lightning-fast reflexes and a militaristic society that provided some of the best soldiers in the universe. Now that is the setting for old-school science-fiction.
The genre isn't dead! I…
jrosenhouse | July 19, 2007I see that my fellow bloggers have not been idle during my absence. Matt Nisbet has another one of his Dawkins bashing posts up. This time his champion is philosopher Phillip Kitcher.
Nisbet quotes Kitcher as follows, from a recent podcast of Point of Inquiry:
DJ Grothe: Did you write the book to sell secular humanism, or maybe in a more limited way atheism to the public? All these anti-God books are the real rage right now, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens...your book is addressing some of the same topics, are you addressing the same audience...
Kitcher: Well I'm actually not happy with…
mikethemadbiologist | July 19, 2007I raise the question, which has rattled around in my head for a while, after reading two posts, one by ScienceBlogling Tim Lambert, and one by Scott Lemieux. Tim connects the dots of the Gore-Chilean sea bass non-story:
Allow me to connect some dots here. How did the story get from People into an Australian tabloid? And how did it get from there to Jake Tapper?
I did a Factiva search and found that this was the first time that the Daily Telegraph had ever printed an opinion piece from the Humane Society International, so I called Rebecca Keeble and asked her about the genesis of the piece.…