January 12, 2006
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De-Lurker Week According to the blogosphere this is de-lurker week. Since ScienceBlogs is a new project it would be interesting to see what our readership is...Anybody care to de-lurkify yourself?...
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Thursday Night Dog-Blogging Pretty much what it sounds like: some cute dog pictures to look at while you think about what physics experiments to nominate as the greatest ever...
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Are Deletions Deleterious? Part 3 I have been describing some recently published worked on polymorphic deletions (see here and here for the previous two posts) on the old site. I will conclude that series here at ScienceBlogs with a discussion of linkage disequilibrium and deletions....
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You wanna see arrogance? Look to a creationist Ohio State Board of Education has an ID lesson plan on the books. Ohio Citizens for Science has been fighting it, but at a recent meeting, the Board voted to maintain it's anti-science position. A friend sent this scan from...
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Josh Claybourn on the El Tejon Case Josh Claybourn at In The Agora has written a post about the El Tejon case and I'm going to respond to it here. I used to write for In The Agora, as most of my readers surely know, and I...
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Blogrolling I have started to assemble a new blogroll for this new blog--the one on my last site was extremely outdated. My general policy is going to be that I will not list blogs that are right here at ScienceBlogs, simply...
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Humane treatment of scientists While folks are often attentive to the harms scientists might do to other people (through unethical treatment of human subjects, or toxic dumping, or whatever), they seem not to worry so much about scientist-on-scientist cruelty. I'm not talking about having...
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No One Believes in Stare Decisis One of the ridiculous little rituals that has come to surround every Supreme Court nomination these days is the stare decisis dance. Everyone knows what it's really about; it's about abortion and Roe v Wade. No nominee is going to...
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And you thought Jesse Ventura was wild An exploding aardvark whispered in my ear that we have a new candidate for governor here in Minnesota: Jonathon "The Impaler" Sharkey. Honesty is very seldom heard nowadays, especially from a politician. So, I am not going to break from...
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Billion Pixel Picture of the Orion Nebula According to National Geographic: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured one of the most detailed astronomical images in history. Released yesterday, the original of this Orion Nebula image is a mosaic of a billion pixels—nearly 5,000 times sharper than...
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The Rumors Are True In my opinion, the most important aspect for you to know about this move is that, as scientist-bloggers in the Seed community, we will never be subject to any editorial oversight. So basically, we will write essays and commentary about the same topics that we always have written about, argue with IDiots, host blog carnivals (yippee!), answer memes, online quizzes and indulge in other silliness, and basically carry on as we always have done.
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Debating Ron Bailey and Wesley Smith, Part I The three way debate/discussion on science and politics hosted by the Smith Family Foundation on Tuesday night was an interesting event, to say the least. It was in some ways a difficult discussion for me, because the other participants, Ronald...
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Hemichordate evo-devo Every biology student gets introduced to the chordates with a list of their distinctive characteristics: they have a notochord, a dorsal hollow nerve cord, gill slits, and a post-anal tail. The embryonic stage in which we express all of these...
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Everyone else is doing my writing for me I'm still working on finishing up 3 manuscripts (one book, 2 journal articles) so I've not blogged quite as much this week as I generally do. Next week I should be back up to speed, and have a few topics...
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Secret messages from BLAST Well. If I were a "single-celled, parasitic protozoan known for infections that sometimes last for years, which may be accompanied by vague gastrointestinal distress or dysentery—complete with blood and mucus in the stool", I'd feel grossly insulted by this...
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Needs more squid This looks like art to me: the Pyrate Puppet Rock Opera Consortium. (via Virge)...
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Savage...tolerance Just in case anyone is concerned that I'll soften my hardline rejection of all religion just because I've assumed fancy new corporate digs, allow me to quote Dan Savage approvingly. And finally, to Rob in Albany who felt my aside...
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iSpecies Whoa…now this is a phenomenal tool. iSpecies is a simple, minimalist page ala Google, with a single text entry box. Type in any taxon name, hit enter, and it comes back at you with genomics data, images, and documents...
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Hit him where it hurts Pat Robertson's remarks about Sharon—once again blaming human suffering on divine retribution—have put a crimp in his pocketbook. He's been leading a consortium to open a Christian theme park in Israel, and finally the Israelis have noticed that Robertson...
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The (Wrong) Reason For Everything There is a nice piece in The New Republic (Jan 16th, unfortunately not online) titled "A Reason For Everything" in which Alan Wolfe reviews Rodney Stark's book The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success...
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Welcome Daily Kos Readers Last weekend I participated in an interview via email with DarkSyde, a front page contributor at DailyKos. That interview has just been posted, promising to bring a slew of new folks over here (my last link from there led to...
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Firefly squid This is a beautiful little animal with a brief and brilliant life. Watasenia scintillans is a small (mantle length,~6 cm; wet weight,~9 g), luminescent deep-sea squid, indigenous to northern Japan. Females carrying fertilized eggs come inshore each spring by the...
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Welcome to the new place! As you've figured out now, I've joined the ranks of the many science bloggers at scienceblogs.com. The plaster's still wet on the walls and there are a few things I still would like to see fixed up here in...
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Alito and "Judicial Activism" Jacob Sollum has an interesting article at Reason about the different concerns of the Republicans and Democrats when it comes to Judge Alito's track record. First, he points out how the phrase "judicial activism" has now been borrowed by the...
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New Blog Alert Longtime DFTCW reader and Texas BBQ supplier Jeff Hebert has started his own blog. It doesn't look to be too serious at this point, more of a personal blog, but it should be interesting to read. As he put it,...
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Ford, Families and Gays I reported a few weeks ago that Ford had decided, despite considerable pressure from the religious right, to continue buying ads in gay-oriented publications. Now it seems that pressure has been turned up considerably. The Worldnutdaily has a report full...
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Avian "docudrama" update I mentioned this CBC "docudrama" yesterday. Just wanted to give a quick update, since they added a lot of info to their site since I checked it out yesterday morning (including a fictional blog!). So, some resources that might be...
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Mental Rotation and Focal Dystonia, or why Scott Adams doesn't draw Dilbert upside-down There was a fascinating article in the Washington Post last May about Dilbert creator Scott Adams' battle with focal dystonia. Though the symptoms of this disorder are involuntary muscle contractions (in Adams' case, his right pinky finger), the root of...
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Truthiness A panel of linguists has decided the word that best reflects 2005 is "truthiness," defined as the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts. I'm guessing these folks have been watching the...
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Microbial Diversity Apparently, not much known about the genetic diversity of bacterial populations -- or so I've heard. As a eukaryotic geneticist, I can say that we know a whole bunch about multicellular organisms -- mostly because they're a lot easier to...
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Was Australopithecus africanus Hunted By Birds? According to this story the answer is yes: A South African anthropologist said Thursday his research into the death nearly 2 million years ago of an ape-man shows human ancestors were hunted by birds. "These types of discoveries give...
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Instant Science Library Via The Hairy Museum of Natural History comes the interesting news that the American Museum of Natural History has made their publications available online for free!...
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Must-Read Article of the Day It's by Matthew Nisbet, and it's about the changing politics of the stem cell issue in the wake of the Hwang scandal. The gist: The public had grown quite supportive of embryonic stem cell research, but the 2004 electoral campaign...
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The Blessing of Amazon.com Reviews If an alien from Mars arrived on Earth, visited the United States, and wanted to understand the issues that exist at the intersection of politics and science in this country, he, she, or it would have a problem. You see,...
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A quick tour through the vault. Because some of you may be new to "Adventures in Ethics and Science" (having found it by way of the high-powered company I'm keeping here at ScienceBlogs), and because a lot of the cool kids here are doin' it, I...
January 11, 2006
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More on Akidolestes Added later: The Hairy Museum of Natural History has more on the story, including links to more pictures and a better phylogeny... It is actually considered to be a symmetrodont, more specifically it is a spalacotheroid. You can go for...
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welcome to NoSeNada Welcome to the NoSéNada quarter of the ScienceBlogs empire. NoSéNada started in mid-2005 and was originally a collaboration of a few writers, but for all practical purposes the blog ended up being mostly me with the occasional guest post. So...
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Akidolestes - a 125 Million Year Old Mammal According to National Geographic a new - extinct species of mammal has been discovered in China: Scientists in China have discovered a fossilized small, furry animal that walked like a platypus but looked like a shrew. The unusual find...
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Decision So I've finally decided to move the whole blog over to here ... at least until I get sick of MoveableType :) You no longer will have to check my old blog, except when I link back to old articles....
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Greatest. Experiment. EVER. Over at Cosmic Variance, they're voting on the Greatest Physics Paper Ever, but all the candidates are theoretical works. Here's your chance to suggest candidates for the Greatest Physics Experiment, and restore the proper order of things.
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More of That Famous DI Position Shifting As usual, the Discovery Institute is having a little difficulty settling on a coherent position on the El Tejon ID class controversy. Their first response, written by Robert Crowther, is entitled "Darwinists Want To Ban Intelligent Design From Not Just...
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So, a Little About Me Since this is the first day of the new ScienceBlogs I thought I would take this opportunity to tell you a little about myself. If you look down to the bottom of this post you will note a name other...
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Luskin either slips up or is telling lies Casey Luskin, lawyer and program officer for public policy and legal affairs at the DI has this to say about the El Tajon creationism class: Intelligent design is different from creationism because intelligent design is based upon empirical data, rather...
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Three years old today My blog turns three today. It started as a webpage that I updated daily on the John Lott affair. (To my mind, at least, this was different from a blog.) It's been through several changes of blogging software and host...
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global average temps Received this email in December: "Dear Kevin, On December 15, they release a statement that argues that 2005 is the warmest year ever. But there's still two weeks left in the year -- how do they know what the mean...
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Welcome to evolgen at ScienceBlogs Hello again to my long time evolgen readers, and nice to meet you to the first timers who have found the new site. For my regular readers, this, for all intents and purposes, is the new evolgen. The old site...
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A Darwinian Debt While finishing up graduate school, I worked for the Irish government on on a project to study fish stocks in the Irish Sea - this involved modelling biological and economic aspects with a view to the long term survival of...
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Welcome to the New Intersection Well, here I am, now officially blogging at scienceblogs.com, with its whizzbang technical features and its awesome collection of other science bloggers. I have little doubt that this site will become a dominant--if not the dominant--locus for science blogging on...
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Please don't call that philosophy! Here 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...
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DI's Dishonest Reaction to El Tejon Case I was gonna fisk the DI's reaction to the El Tejon case, but Mike Dunford already did it quite well. The DI, via Casey Luskin, predictably tries to spin this as proof of us evil "Darwinists" and our intolerance for...
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The Truth About BoB and the Owl Yesterday, despite my illness, I managed to struggle to an upright position (someone has to feed the birds so they don't riot), checked my email, and discovered that Scientific Life is listed as a finalist in the Second Annual...
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The El Tejon Complaint Americans United has released the full complaint filed in Federal court in the El Tejon case. I'll be reading it and commenting soon....
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New Links on El Tejon ID Suit We have many media reports today on the El Tejon ID suit. The full press release from Americans United is available on their website. The LA Times has an article about the controversy that includes a couple of interesting tidbits....
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Funny Moment in Alito Hearing I just happened to catch this last night. When Sen. Lindsey Graham began his questioning of Alito, he joked about Alito having said he didn't recall something by saying something to the effect of, "We can only hope that if...
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So Who Else is Here? For those who have not gone exploring, I thought you might like to get some idea of what other blogs are part of this project. At this point there are about ten blogs total, but that will likely grow. It...
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The Scientific Image According to a story by BBC News scientist have an image problem: Examining the sketches afterwards, he (That is Professor Christopher Frayling - afarensis) is surprised to discover that the children consistently draw images from a bygone age long before...
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Hiya! As of today, Seed's new science blogs are open for business. (Be sure to check out the list of other bloggers there--it packs quite a punch). To my regular readers, thanks for following me over here, and expect to see...
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Moving Day Welcome to the new Cognitive Daily! If you've been a regular visitor to the old Cognitive Daily, then I don't expect you'll find much has changed. Cognitive Daily, whether in our old digs or with our snazzy new host, is...
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Begin at the Beginning Welcome to the new home of Uncertain Principles. If you've been reading the site over at Steelypips.org, that probably means something to you. If you're here for the first time, that might take a little explanation. I started a book...
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Avian influenza "docudrama" airs Wednesday night on CBC-TV For those of you in Canada, check this out tonight at 9. BLACK DAWN: THE NEXT PANDEMIC A fifth estate "What if..." Wednesday, January 11th at 9:00 p.m. on CBC-TV What would happen if the World Health Organization declared what...
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And there's more ... With my move over to ScienceBlogs I have been thinking about the direction I want to take my blogging. Readers of my old blog will remember that I spent a lot of the time their ranting about intelligent design, politics,...
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The state of our states' emergency departments This comes as no surprise to many health care providers and public health officials: most states are unprepared for health crises. Few states are equipped to handle emergency medical crises such as a terrorist attack, a natural disaster or an...
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Musings on the life academic One of the things which I think I'm going to do here which I didn't do at my old blog is write a little about academic life. As a scientist, I am in the relatively unusual position of not actually...
January 10, 2006
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Redating the Vindija Fossils Keat's Telescope and John Hawks both have write ups of the redating of some of the Vindija Cave Neanderthal material. A little background. Map of Croatia North of the City of Zagreb lies the city of Krapina. Some 15 miles...
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Teaching Design I have been teaching an upper-division course on Origins, Evolution and Creation since 1998; the course has been very popular and has been cross-listed as both Biology (BIO) and History and Philosophy of Science (HPS). Every year I get 40...
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Welcome to the New Digs Welcome to the new home of Dispatches from the Culture Wars. I have joined forces with a group of other popular science bloggers under the umbrella of Seed Media Group. As I've previously noted, all content here is still solely...
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Dover Part 2, With a Twist Americans United has filed suit against the El Tajon Unified School District in California over a course there that includes creationism. The twist here is that the school has placed the class in philosophy rather than science and claims to...
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The Aristocrats Okay, I finally got to see the movie The Aristocats, a documentary about perhaps the most famous - and filthiest - joke ever told. First of all, I picked the wrong day to watch it. I have a terrible cold...
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H5N1--does it live up to the hype? Redux Okay, one more quick post. I've talked quite a bit on here (and over on Panda's Thumb) about the importance of surveillance, and how the current death rates from H5N1 influenza ("bird flu") are likely to be artificially high, since...
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Aflatoxin found in pet food I've been meaning to write something up about this for awhile, but keep forgetting. Anyhoo, because my own dog is currently ill and it's stressing me out watching her (not due to this, thankfully), I thought I'd do my own...
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Using unethical means to expose unethical conduct. An 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...
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Agreeing with Clayton Cramer I came across this item on Clayton Cramer's blog and, while I typically disagree with him on political matters, I fully agree with some of what he says here. In discussing the Jack Abramoff scandal, he says: Almost all bribery...
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Volokh on "ACLU Derangement Syndrome" Eugene Volokh has an interesting, and quite accurate, post about what he calls "ACLU derangement syndrome". This notion follows on the heels of "Bush derangement syndrome", "Clinton derangement syndrome" and "NRA derangement syndrome. The idea is that some subjects prompt...
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Kennedy's Remarks on Alito Yesterday I highlighted the absurdities of Sen. Cornyn's opening remarks about Judge Alito's nomination. Today I think I'll point the spotlight at Sen. Kennedy on the other side of the aisle. His opening statement (scroll down) was no less ridiculous....
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It may not look like much but it's family So what do you see? A groove and some lines? Truth be told, this is possibly the oldest recorded chordate fossil (or, should I say, one of a number of seventeen specimens of same). It dates from the pre-Cambrian -...
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Evidence for beliefs: What matters, and what doesn't The Flying Spaghetti Monster (source: verganza.org) is a satirical retort to advocates of "intelligent design," created as a joke to mock the belief that some "intelligent designer" created life. While the Flying Spaghetti Monster is funny, no one takes it...
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Read More Novels Month I'm sort of marking time for a couple of days here, for reasons that will hopefully be explained soon. There are some interesting posts in the works, but I want to wait for a few more days. Of course, I...
January 09, 2006
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Working to do human subjects research right. Today, some news that makes me smile (and not that bitter, cynical smile): UCSF has announced that it has received full accreditation for its program to protect research participants from the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs...
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Popular Misunderstandings of Evolution, Take Twenty I have already confessed to you about a serious, debilitating weakness of mine: I like to watch crap action movies to let my mind rejuvenate itself after I've been working for a while. I don't care how bad they are,...
January 08, 2006
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Is all animal research inhumane? I 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...
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South African AIDS activists sue denialists South Africa has been a hotbed of AIDS denial, ever since President Thabo Mbeki invited noted HIV denialist Peter Duesberg and other HIV-deniers to his country to discuss "alternative" theories of AIDS. Though scientists and others (including prior president Nelson...
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More on Richard Dawkins PZ links to Discover's letters section, where there are a range of reactions to a recent article about Dawkins (aka "Darwin's Rottweiler"). "Talk about polarizing," says PZ of the letters. Precisely! In the context of this country, Dawkins is a...
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How Does a Tyrannosaurus rex Sit Down? In most movies, such as Jurassic Park (and its sequels), Tyrannosaurs are portrayed running about eating anything that moves. Presumably, at some point they require rest. So the question naturally arises as to what is the resting posture of the...
January 06, 2006
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How can we know what babies are thinking? My son Jim loved his bottle when he was a baby. By about 15 months of age, he loved baby formula so much that he was going through over a hundred dollars' worth a week -- more than the rest...
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Further Tears In The Big Tent? It appears once again that Dembski, contra the official DI position, supports the teaching of ID - rather than the "controversy" - in science class. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas has announced that ID is a "valid scientific theory" and...
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"Methodological naturalism does not yield answers" In a piece published yesterday in the World Peace Herald, Lloyd Eby (an Assistant Professorial Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at George Washington University*) writes: Even if you favor some form of ID, as I do, you should recognize...
January 05, 2006
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Lawyers and Evolution I've noted before that a significant number of lawyers not only to deny evolution but also appear to think that their training as a lawyer enables them to adjudicate scientific "controversies" (real or percieved). As Nick notes over at the...
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Just because they're out to get you doesn't mean they don't have a point. Since I'm in the blessed wee period between semesters, it's time to revisit some "old news" (i.e., stuff that I had to set aside in the end-of-semester crush). Today, a story from about a month ago, wherein the Rick Weiss...
January 04, 2006
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Video games, adolescents, and development Much of the research on violent video games, like a vast proportion of all psychological research, has focused on college students. This shouldn't be surprising, since most college psychology departments require students to participate in experiments as a part of...
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The problem with cheaters. [Finally I'm actually healthy again, and not in a hotel charging $10 a day for internet access. So, on with the blog!] It must be a law of nature that when past and current graduate students dine together at the...
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Science is Utterly Wet Posting has been (relatively) light this week because today was the first day of classes. I'm teaching introductory modern physics (relativity and quantum mechanics), a class that I've taught before, but I've been putting a significant amount of time into...
January 02, 2006
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The New York Times Says God Is Dead As you can tell from the date stamp, it's now 2006, so the World Year of Physics is over. The people behind Quantum Diaries are shutting their blog collection down (though several of the diarists will be continuing on their...
January 01, 2006
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Technorati Profile...
December 30, 2005
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Pith-Helmeted Anthropological Reporting Scott Eric Kaufman of Acephalous is blogging the MLA. (I'm sure he's not the only one, he's just the only one I'm reading...) As I understand it, the Modern Language Association meeting is pretty much the be-all end-all of humanities...
December 29, 2005
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The Year in Music It's that time of year again, when everybody who has the slightest interest in pop culture starts making "Year's Best" lists. I'm usually at a major disadvantage when it comes to this sort of thing, as I can never really...
December 28, 2005
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Value Added Testing (or "Merry Christmas, Novak") One of the more contentious recurring topics around here over the years has been education policy, mostly centering around the question of teacher evaluation and teacher's unions. It's probably the subject for which there's the biggest gap between my opinions...
December 27, 2005
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Why I Could Never Be a String Theorist I've managed to leave string theory alone for a while, but a post came across Mixed States today that I can't avoid commenting on. Lubos Motl points to a news article about a recent measurement at MIT and NIST, in...
December 22, 2005
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Allen Macneill on Dembski This is a guest post from Allen Macneill, an evolutionary biologist and writer. He currently teaches an introductory evolution course for non-majors at Cornell, and is writing an introductory evolution textbook, also for non-majors. HIs most recent article, "The capacity...
December 21, 2005
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Grad School Advice It's that time of year again, when eager undergraduates start thinking about their futures, including the possibility of graduate school. This inevitably leads to emails of the form "Hi, Professor, could you write recommendations for me for these nine schools?...
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The Anglican origins of neo-Darwinianism? In terms of the relationship between religion and "neo-Darwinianism," it is interesting to remember that R.A. Fisher, the mathematical geneticist who fused quantitative (biometrical) genetics with Mendelian theory and data, and served as the driving force and spark being the...
