jlynch | July 1, 2007Events
1858 - The joint reading of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace’s papers on evolution to the Linnean Society.
Births
1742 - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, German physicist
1915 - Joseph Ransohoff, American neurosurgeon
1929 - Gerald Edelman, American biologist, Nobel laureate
1941 - Alfred G. Gilman, American scientist, Nobel laureate
Deaths
1971 - William Lawrence Bragg, English physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
2001 - Nikolay Basov, Russian physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
jlynch | June 29, 2007Events
1905 - Albert Einstein publishes the article "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," where he introduces special relativity.
Births
1817 - Joseph Dalton Hooker, British botanist and confidant of Charles Darwin.
1926 - Paul Berg, Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1709 - Edward Lhuyd, Welsh scientist
1857 - Alcide d’Orbigny, French naturalist
1919 - John Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, English physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
jlynch | June 28, 2007Births
1868 - George Ellery Hale, American astronomer
Deaths
2004 - Bernard Babior, American biochemist
jlynch | June 28, 2007In January, Michael Shermer reviewed Dawkins’ The God Delusion (TGD) for Science (see here). This weeks edition features a letter by Martinez Hewlett (Molecular & Cellular Biology, University of Arizona) which argues two points: firstly, that Dawkins' book is not a work of science, and secondly, that it is a poor piece of philosophy (a point that I have made repeatedly in the past). Shermer in attempting to reply makes a number of claims. Primarily he states:
Martinez Hewlett holds a narrow view of what constitutes a work of science--primary research only, secondary sources cited only in…
jlynch | June 28, 2007
One of a set of red ruffed lemur (Varecia rubra) triplets born at Palm Beach Zoo last month. The species is critically endangered with approximately 1000 remaining on Madagascar. Kind of screams for a LOLlemur caption, now doesn’t it?
jlynch | June 27, 2007 Births
1824 - Paul Broca, French physician
1873 - Alexis Carrel, French surgeon and biologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
1906 - Maria Goeppert-Mayer, German physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1912 - Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, German physicist and philosopher
1914 - Aribert Heim, Austrian physician
1927 - Frank Sherwood Rowland, American chemist, Nobel laureate
1943 - Klaus von Klitzing, German physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1889 - Maria Mitchell, American astronomer
jlynch | June 27, 2007The negative reviews of Behe’s Edge of Evolution continue. Kenneth Miller has a review in this week’s Nature and Richard Dawkins will have one in next New York Times Sunday Book Review (available here for NYTimes Select customers).
From the former:
Behe, incredibly, thinks he has determined the odds of a mutation "of the same complexity" occurring in the human line. He hasn’t. What he has actually done is to determine the odds of these two exact mutations occurring simultaneously at precisely the same position in exactly the same gene in a single individual. He then leads his unsuspecting…
jlynch | June 27, 2007Births
1717 - Louis Guillaume Lemonnier, French botanist
1869 - Hans Spemann, German embryologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
1931 - Martinus J. G. Veltman, Dutch physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
jlynch | June 25, 2007
Events
1948 - William Shockley filed the original patent for the grown junction transistor, the first bipolar junction transistor.
Births
1694 - Georg Brandt, Swedish chemist and minerologist
1824 - Lord Kelvin, Irish-born physicist
1904 - Frank Scott Hogg, Canadian astronomer
1937 - Robert Coleman Richardson, American physicist, Nobel laureate
Deaths
1793 - Gilbert White, English naturalist
1810 - Joseph Michel Montgolfier, inventor of the hot air balloon
1943 - Karl Landsteiner, Austrian biologist and physician, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
jlynch | June 25, 2007
Apparently, five-foot tall penguins (Icadyptes salasi) with seven inch beaks (top) roamed a warm South America 40 million years ago. Details will appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. Opus is impressed.
jlynch | June 24, 2007Births
1814 - Gabriel Auguste Daubrée, French geologist
1864 - Walther Nernst, German chemist, Nobel laureate
1894 - Hermann Oberth, German physicist
1907 - J. Hans D. Jensen, German physicist, Nobel laureate
1911 - William Howard Stein, American chemist, Nobel laureate
1928 - Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov, Russian physicist, Nobel laureate
Deaths
1671 - Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Italian astronomer
1866 - Alexander von Nordmann, Finnish zoologist
1868 - Carlo Matteucci, Italian physicist
1971 - John Boyd Orr, Scottish physician, Nobel laureate
1995 - Ernest Walton, Irish physicist,…
jlynch | June 23, 2007Births
1795 - Ernst Heinrich Weber, German anatomist and physiologist
1883 - Victor Franz Hess, Austrian-born physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1915 - Fred Hoyle, British astronomer
1927 - Martin Lewis Perl, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1637 - Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, French astronomer
jlynch | June 22, 2007Births
1750 - Déodat Gratet de Dolomieu, French geologist
1894 - Alfred Kinsey, American entomologist and sexologist
1912 - Alan Turing, English mathematician
Deaths
1806 - Mathurin Jacques Brisson, French naturalist
1832 - James Hall, Scottish geologist
1891 - Wilhelm Eduard Weber, German physicist
2006 - Harriet, a 175 year old tortoise perhaps collected by Charles Darwin in 1835.
jlynch | June 21, 2007Events
1633 - The Holy Office in Rome forces Galileo Galilei to recant his heliocentrism.
1978 - Charon, a satellite of the dwarf planet Pluto, is discovered.
Births
1871 - William McDougall, British psychologist and polymath
1887 - Julian Huxley, British biologist
Deaths
1429 - Ghiyath al-Kashi, Persian astronomer and mathematician
1990 - Ilya Frank, Russian physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
jlynch | June 20, 2007Births
1646 (O.S.) - Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, German philosopher and scientist
1781 - Siméon-Denis Poisson, French mathematician and physicist
1791 - Robert Napier, British engineer
1805 - Charles Thomas Jackson, American scientist, polymath
1811 - Carlo Matteucci, Italian physicist
1823 - Jean Chacornac, French astronomer
1828 - Ferdinand André Fouqué, French geologist
1863 - Max Wolf, German astronomer
1868 - Edwin Stephen Goodrich, English zoologist
1870 - Clara Immerwahr, German chemist
1876 - Willem Hendrik Keesom, Dutch physicist
1887 - Norman L. Bowen, Canadian petrologist…
jlynch | June 20, 2007In 2002 William Brookfield (our favorite "pleasurian" and "ID scientist") published his paper "In Search of a Cosmic Super-Law: The Supreme "Second Law" of Devolution" in Dembski’s vanity journal PSCID. Mark over at Good Math, Bad Math takes on Brookfield’s "science" here and here.
When Mark took on Behe’s math a few weeks back, Dembski accused him to being insufficiently credentialed to comment - given Brookfield doesn’t "hold any degrees from any university of any kind," yet sees fit to accuse Hawking of making errors, I doubt Billy D will be defending Brookfield on this one!