Social Sciences
bcohen | March 21, 2007Season 3 of New York Public Radio's RadioLab is coming soon, in May 2007. Seasons one and two are available on-line, at WNYC.
Have you heard?
It isn't Talk of the Nation -- Science Friday, with Ira Flatow. But it is co-hosted by NPR Science Correspondent Robert Krulwich. He hosts with youngish public radio guy Jad Abumrad.
This is good stuff. Along with the very great range of forms of science communication, and of places where science, art, and humanity cannot be separated into strict academic categories (oh, for example, like this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this), radio…
tfk | March 20, 2007Cato's gang continue to push vouchers, I mean "education tax credits," as a way towards ending public education. We will note only in passing that "education tax credits" are a shell game, an accounting trick meant only to pretend we aren't giving sectarian schools big bags of taxpayer money:
Education tax credits allow every taxpayer to support the kind of education they want to and force no one to pay for education to which they object. Tax credits create a public education system where schools are accountable to the parents who choose them and the people who pay for them . . . not…
evolvingthoughts | March 19, 2007
Courtesy of Moselio Schechter's blog Small Things Considered, is a new report, downloadable in PDF, from the National Institutes of Health, together with the American Society for Microbiology, on research into bacteria, entitled Basic Research on Bacteria. The Essential Frontier.
The money quote?
“...research on topics like evolution and ecology has a direct impact on the advancement of human health.”
jstemwedel | March 19, 2007One of my students raised a really good question in class today, a question to which I do not know the answer -- but maybe you do.
We were discussing some of the Very Bad Experiments* that prompted current thinking** about what it is and is not ethically permissible to do with human subjects of scientific research. We had noted that institutions like our university have an Institutional Review Board (IRB) that must approve your protocol before you can conduct research with human subjects. At this point, my student asked:
Are there cases where researchers send protocols to the IRB that are…
voltagegate | March 18, 2007This month Conservation magazine published an article rehashing the "built landscape" hypothesis of Amazonia, which basically says that the incredible biodiversity seen in the South American rainforest is largely due to a skilled agricultural society of millions that possessed the capacity to simultaneously promote successful agriculture while maintaining biodiversity; the hypothesis states that they managed and cultivated most of the Amazon rainforest, and the region's apparent virginity is only an illusion.
This idea is popularized by Charles Mann's book, 1491: New Revelations of the…
jlynch | March 17, 2007Nearly ten years ago I started a book on Creationist misuse of intellectual history. I never finished it, which is probably for the best. The file is unfortunately MIA and all I have remaining was a section that I turned into a talk that I gave at ASU in 1999. Over the next few days, I'll be posting the text of that talk. Enjoy and feel free to comment.
"Pithecophobes of the World, Unite!"
Revisionist 'History' and Creationist Rhetoric.
"This monkey mythology of Darwin is the cause of permissiveness, promiscuity, pills, prophylactics, perversions, pregnancies, abortions, pornography,…
oracknows | March 16, 2007Ah, yes, Washington, DC.
That's where I am right now, deep in the belly of the government beast, attending the meeting of The Society of Surgical Oncology. It's usually a great meeting, except for the distressing tendency of surgeons here to act, well, too much like surgeons. For example, consider when the very first session today, which happened to be about my area of interest breast cancer, started. Was it 8 AM? No. 7 AM? No.
It was 6 AM.
I kid you not. 6 AM in the freakin' morning! The week after the switchover to Daylight Savings Time, yet! There was a time when I used to actually get up…
evolvingthoughts | March 15, 2007
So, lots of people are talking about spirituality. What do I think it is, if anything? Below the fold.
I'm a naturalist. This means, in a philosophical context (i.e., neither a scientific nor a religious context) that I think that phenomena can be given a naturalised account. I think this also of spirituality.
I had something of an epiphany when reading Alfred Wallace's essays on Spirit. For those who do not know, Wallace had an argument that ran roughly thus:
1. All humans are roughly as intelligent and capable as each other (Wallace was a true racial egalitarian, even when Darwin…
pharyngula | March 15, 2007Garrison Keillor has done it again: he's written another insipid article loaded with casual bigotry, this time against gays. I'm pleased to see that Dan Savage has savaged him, so I don't need to go on at length.
However, this really isn't the first time Keillor has done this—he has a history of unthinking stereotyping and rejection of gays and atheists. He's an excellent example of why, when I see the Religious Right and the Religious Left, I don't think the problem is the Right or Left…it's the Religious.
My criticism of Keillor from 2005 is below the fold. Not only does he reject atheism…
sb admin | March 15, 2007Warning:: There is no science whatsoever in this post. If that's going to annoy you, give this one a pass.
In a previous post, I said what role I thought religion and spirituality still could play in the modern, scientific world. All of that applied to any sort of religion or spirituality, and was not specific. However, I have claimed to be a Christian. A lot of people have been asking for me to explain just what I mean by that, since the things I have said seem to contradict most peoples' notions (Christians and non-Christians alike) of what it means to be Christian.
So why do I say that…
retrospectacle | March 15, 2007 Would you rather have a completely happy life, or a meaningful life? And are the two mutually exclusive? The topics, as well as recent neuroscience research, is addressed in a fascinating podcast over at Governomics. The podcast is here, with the transcript here.
As mentioned in the podcast, Aristotle had certain ideas of what ideal happiness was:
[He]...thought that eudaimonia was the ultimate goal of all purposeful striving. Greek for "happiness," the word eudaimonia comes from"eu" (meaning "good" or "well being") and "daimon" (meaning "spirit"). For Aristotle, "well being," or "happiness…
terrasig | March 14, 2007The new issue of Newsweek (19 Mar 2007) carried a surprise for me: former Wall Street Journal health reporter, Sharon Begley, has moved back to the magazine. In fact, Begley wrote this week's excellent discussion and cover story on the massive amount of science in support of evolution.
"The debate over human origins has been one of the most significant and controversial conversations in American society over the last 150 years. Whether they believe in Darwin's theory of evolution as it was proposed in his "Origin of Species", adhere to a literal interpretation of the Bible or inhabit some…
tqa | March 13, 2007
Warning:
This post contains commentary on an issue raised at another of the blogs on this network. The topic material involves pedophiles and first amendment rights, and is not suitable for all audiences. I know for a fact that it makes me feel pretty damn uncomfortable.
A couple of days ago, Shelley Batts put up a post discussing Barack Obama's attempts to take legal action against a self-professed pedophile who put a press release photo of Obama's kids up on his website, along with commentary handicapping the 2008 presidential election based on the "cuteness" of the candidates underage…
grrlscientist | March 13, 2007At first glance, I thought this book was too slim to accomplish its stated goal, but I was wrong. In God: The Failed Hypothesis (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), Victor J. Stenger critically examines both empirical data and scientific models for the existence of a supreme, transcendant being -- God -- and finds them to be inadequate.
Stenger begins by defining God according to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic scriptures and asserting that the existence of God is a hypothesis that can be tested scientifically. Thus, as with all hypotheses, this allows us to make predictions of what we should…
nisbetmc | March 12, 2007Over at The Intersection, Chris Mooney elaborates on a recent post to his blog that hits on many of the themes first explored at Framing Science, as well as in several of my recent studies (here and here) and lectures.
There's a basic paradox worth noting. As I've often described, every audience member is a "cognitive miser." Faced with an extraordinary amount of issues to track on a daily basis, it is actually quite reasonable for citizens to rely heavily on short cuts such as values and media frames to reach a decision about a policy debate. This natural human tendency leads to a complex…
evolvingthoughts | March 9, 2007
David Hicks, the Australian held without trial or charge for five years and tortured in Guantanamo by the American military at the behest of the clearly criminal administration in the United States (there! I feel much better now) is being charged and tried for "providing material support for terrorism", a crime that did not exist when the acts he is alleged to have committed occurred.
This raises the spectre of retrospective legislation, which is a running sore on democracy for some time now.
Retrospective legislation is the passing of laws at t to cover acts made at <t.…
purepedantry | March 5, 2007The NYTimes magazine has an excellent article on the controversy within science as to the meaning of God. This is different from the cultural controversy as to the validity of Revelation because it is concerned with why religion may have evolved as opposed to whether it evolved.
Lost in the hullabaloo over the neo-atheists is a quieter and potentially more illuminating debate. It is taking place not between science and religion but within science itself, specifically among the scientists studying the evolution of religion. These scholars tend to agree on one point: that religious belief is…
dmunger | March 5, 2007I've written a review of William Vollmann's Poor People for the spring issue of The Quarterly Conversation. Here's an excerpt:
In the U.S., the "poverty line" for 2006 was set at $9,800 per year of income for a single person, or $20,000 for a family of four. But it is misleading to judge poverty in this way: surely some people can live comfortably below those income levels, and some--those with significant medical problems, for example--couldn't pay for the necessities of life even if they earned substantially more. And doesn't $20,000 go a lot farther in, say, North Dakota, than it does in…
terrasig | March 2, 2007For those who have been asking over the last couple of days, here are the oath of a pharmacist as recited at US colleges of pharmacy and a code of ethics adopted in 1994 by the then-American Pharmaceutical Association (now the American Pharmacists Association; still APhA). There seems to be a strong focus on the patient in the code of ethics but there's also a bit of wiggle room that can be interpreted as one sees fit.
Oath of a Pharmacist
At this time, I vow to devote my professional life to the service of all humankind through the profession of pharmacy.
I will consider the welfare of…
razib | February 28, 2007A story just came out today about drinking high fat vs. low fat milk, and the positive effect on fertility that the former can have. Remember the report that drinking milk increases twinning? Issues like this should be kept in mind when considering the spread of lactose tolerance, anything that increases fitness should spread. Why didn't it? Well, it seems likely that cattle can't be raised everywhere, so you have a situation where the selective benefit is geographically constrained. Also, modern lifestyles are characterized by no scarcity of calories so comparing this to pre-modern…