General Science
evolvingthoughts | May 21, 2007
The Smithsonian, it is being reported, toned down an exhibit on the Arctic for fear of reprisals in funding levels from the Bush Administration. While there is no evidence that the Administration directly threatened the Institute, the atmosphere of "do science our way" is so palpable that even the premier scientific institution of the United States would dumb down its knowledge... but apparently it is not the first time the Smithsonian has done this, according to the article. I guess that comes from being a political toy.
In a more general and direct case of attacking science, the…
evolvingthoughts | May 21, 2007
In honour of Linnaeus' 300th birthday, and to rescue him from the canard that he merely applied Aristotelian logic to biology, I offer up this essay on his view of classification and species. I do not think Linnaeus was an essentialist in the Mayrian sense - he nowhere specifies that species have essences, only that there are diagnostic descriptions or definitions that allow naturalists to identify species in the field or in museum collections. But I'm no Linnaean scholar, so if anyone has information to the contrary, let me know.
Not much is known about the early education of poor Swedish…
evolvingthoughts | May 20, 2007
In a paper in PNAS, Ackland et al. argue that neutral cultural features can "hitchhike" along with some adaptive practice such as farming, in a way that ends up generating hard cultural borders:
The wave-of-advance model was introduced to describe the spread of advantageous genes in a population. It can be adapted to model the uptake of any advantageous technology through a population, such as the arrival of neolithic farmers in Europe, the domestication of the horse, and the development of the wheel, iron tools, political organization, or advanced weaponry. Any trait that preexists…
evolvingthoughts | May 19, 2007"King Phillip Came Over From German Soil" - anyone remember that? It's a mnemonic, designed to make it easier to recall the Linnean ranks: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species. Unfortunately, ranks change (Phylum and Family were inserted in the 1870s at an international meeting in Paris), and a new one has been proposed (and hotly debated): Domain. So what should the mnemonic now be? "Dumb King Phillip..."?
There are a host of mnemonics for biology (and even more for medicine). Jason Grossman, sometime commentator and fulltime good guy, sent me this suggestion:
I needed a…
evolvingthoughts | May 16, 2007
Now, I have never studied at Harvard, and all universities are somewhat silly in their planning, but the release reproduced below the fold strikes me as one of the better proposals for undergraduate level tertiary education. It suggests that even science students might need to understand their world, and humanities students need to understand basic science, and so on. Kudos.
Harvard Faculty Approve New General Education Curriculum For Undergraduate Students
Cambridge, Mass. - May 15, 2007 - The Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences approved a motion that sets the stage for the…
evolvingthoughts | May 15, 2007
So, Oprah is sending The Secret back to Australia. It's starting to get TV coverage here. Oy. Look guys, when we export Woo to the US, we really don't want it returned, OK?
The Secret appears to be (backed by "leading philosophers? Yeah, right) basically the idea that if you really really want something, and visualise it, it will happen. Imagine what the universe would need to be like for that to happen...
First of all, it would need to care about human desires. The universe really, really doesn't care. The universe is entirely indifferent to us, our goals, preferences and desires. Most…
evolvingthoughts | May 13, 2007
In a number of cases recently, I have been struck at how ahistorical scientists are about their own discipline or field. For many years, working in a medical research institute, I noted that few citations in published papers were from more than five years before this paper was written. It was as if there was a rolling wall of fog following medical research at a five year remove. Some papers were cited before then - they were like distant mountains that one could see above the fog, the giants of the past.
One such paper was the paper by John Kerr and his colleagues in 1972 on apoptosis. It…
evolvingthoughts | May 12, 2007
In what is for this furriner a somewhat perplexing column, Kathleen Parker, who is supposedly one of the Washington Post stable of writers, argues that the question asked of Republican nominees for presidency - Do you believe in evolution? - was unfair.
I fail to see why. Sure, nobody expects the president to select the next generation of successful breeders for any generation, but this is a good surrogate test of whether or not the candidate thinks science is to be trusted, or whether they think, as this administration odes, that they can choose the reality in which they operate with…
evolvingthoughts | May 10, 2007
All I did was get my beloved Powerbook 12" serviced, and what happens? The Interlub goes wild with great stuff. Or was it always, and I only noticed because I was unable to blog? So, here is a rough and ready roundup of interesting things.
Before I do, I'd like to note that Paul Griffiths and I had a wonderful time last night talking to the Philosophy Students Association about Dawkins' The God Delusion. You, my loyal readers, already know my views on this, so I won't rehearse them here. But Paul made a comment I had to think about overnight. He does that. It was basically about religious…
evolvingthoughts | April 30, 2007
So, it appears that one's metabolic rate and hunger triggers are set by in utero factors. This means that leptin and insulin have different effects depending on early experiences in life, particularly the brain's desire to feed.
Worse, it seems that once you have the weight, you are unlikely to get it off, according to this release by the American Physiological Society.
I'm a lost cause. You children go eat healthily and I will be forced to consume this chocolate bar. Damn...
Silverbacks are supposed to look.. bulgy. I tain't all muscle, you know.
evolvingthoughts | April 30, 2007
Craig Miller dropped by and we got to reading some Locke, as visitors to my office are wont to find themselves doing:
The commonwealth of learning is not at this time without master-builders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity: but every one must not hope to be a Boyle or a Sydenham; and in an age that produces such masters as the great Huygenius and the incomparable Mr. Newton, with some others of that strain, it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing…
evolvingthoughts | April 28, 2007
This is a wonderful piece about a man in his late 50s learning to read. Medlar Comfits delivers again.
evolvingthoughts | April 27, 2007
I don't know from framing. Until the current to-do started up, I had merely heard the term used in the context of Lakoff, whose book I tried once to read but got too annoyed and moved on. But one thing I do think I know a bit about, based on experience in public relations, publishing, journalism (a miniscule and amateur bit, to be sure) and public debates, is communication. It's a pity I can't do it as well as I ought.
But here are some thoughts about the difference between communication and "spin". Others can tell if I am dealing with framing or not.
For a start, communication involves…
evolvingthoughts | April 25, 2007
Some phrases no science or other journalist should ever write about science:
"could rewrite theories about evolution"
"medical breakthrough"
"scientific breakthrough
Any suggestions (with links, please)?
[ht: What You're Doing is Rather Desperate
evolvingthoughts | April 25, 2007
I am not sure what exactly this is about, but it is being launched tomorrow. It appears to be a website that corrals news and information about the ecology and biodiversity, global warming and so on. I guess we'll have to wait until the launch to find out. The blurb that was sent to me is below the fold.
A dream has finally come true. After four years of hard work, the first of what will someday be thousands of the most trustworthy portals on the Web, is about to launch. It will be free of corporate/commercial bias, and FREE to the public forever!
http://earthportal.org is the result of…
evolvingthoughts | April 25, 2007
If an author publishes work and I copy it for my own purpose, then I have stolen something from the author (and publisher, if the copyright is held by both). But if I quote something of the author's for the purposes of discussion, then I have committed no theft, in pretty well every jurisdiction that is cosignatory to the Berne Convention on Copyright. It's called "fair use". In fact, the whole point of publishing is to have people discuss what you publish, right?
Not according to Lisa Richards of the Society of Chemical Industry, it isn't. She sent a nasty letter threatening legal action…
evolvingthoughts | April 24, 2007
Chris Mooney, who is too damned young and handsome, was in Sydney yesterday (well for a few days before that) so I decided the decent thing was to fly down from Brisbane to meet him, given that he travelled across some small bit of water to get here. The astonishing thing was how much he found out about the best drinking spots in Sydney after only three days on his own! He probably knows the night spots of Melbourne better than I do, even though I grew up there. Anyway, Tim Lambert also dropped by, as did a friend of mine, Chris Ho-Stuart, who only had to come 2.5 hours by train from…
evolvingthoughts | April 21, 2007
Jonathon Gottschall, in a recent piece in New Scientist (reprinted here) offers what he calls "Literary Darwinism":
Understanding a story is ultimately about understanding the human mind. The primary job of the literary critic is to pry open the craniums of characters, authors and narrators, climb inside their heads and spelunk through the bewildering complexity within to figure out what makes them tick.
Yet, in doing this, literary scholars have ignored the recent scientific revolution that has transformed our understanding of why people behave the way they do. While evolutionary…
evolvingthoughts | April 20, 2007
I sometimes wonder why anyone ever tried to make a living in Australia. Although it is the least wet continent (unless it is an island) on Earth apart from the Antarctic, where they don't grow a lot, Australians have always used water as if they were still living in Britain, or some other well watered place.
We grow rice and cotton, for gods' sakes, in some of the most arid land there is. We water lawns, and use massive amounts of water in industries and domestically. We now use five times as much water as we did back in the 1980s, in dishwashers, showers, swimming pools and toilets. So…
evolvingthoughts | April 20, 2007
Current media is reporting a relative of Cho, the VT murderer, as saying he was "autistic". I'd like to see a formal diagnosis, because the so-called "autism spectrum disorder" (ASD) scale is, in my view, a ragbag of etiologies based on an overall similarity of symptoms. But suppose he had something like high-function Asperger's...
My son has this, and so do I. Both of us spent our school years being bullied and rejected by our peers, although he had it a lot worse than I did until fairly recently. And both of us tend, when the pressure is too great, to strike out to get away. I always hit…