Social Sciences
aardvarchaeology | February 28, 2007My friend Jesper Jerkert has edited a volume of skeptical essays, most culled from Folkvett, the Swedish skeptic quarterly we both help co-edit. This handsome book is just out from the Stockholm publishing house Leopard, whose head hombre Dan Israel is an officer of Vetenskap och Folkbildning, the Swedish Skeptic Society, just like Jesper and myself. Don't say we're not doing our bit for the Skeptical Conspiracy for World Domination!
The book's 21 contributions cover themes such as humanistic psychology, Freudianism, parapsychology, stage magic, alternative medicine, computer screen rash,…
grrlscientist | February 28, 2007Have you wondered what the big commotion is regarding bird flu? Are you still confused about how avian influenza came to be and why epidemiologists are so afraid of it? Do you wonder why I have gone on numerous tirades about how the virulent H5N1 strain did not originate in wild birds, but rather, is a product of human creation? Throughout the entire book, Doctor Michael Greger examines influenza viruses and what makes them into such killers by meticulously weaving together historical, medical, ecological, agricultural, viral, and economic factors that contributed to the "hatching" of this…
tfk | February 27, 2007Imagine you were an editor, and two stories came across your desk. One shows that chimpanzees use spears, giving insight into the origins of weaponmaking and violence in human society.
The other article shows that spider monkeys hug to avoid fights:
Hugging diffuses the tension when two bands of monkeys meet, say the British researchers who made the discovery. Without these calming embraces, the situation can escalate into aggression and even physical attacks, they report.
The researchers studied wild spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi), which live in the forests of Central and South America.…
cortex | February 27, 2007Over at Mixing Memory, Chris has an excellent post complicating the recent psychological study which demonstrated that reading selected passages from the Bible about retributive violence makes people more aggressive. He reminds us that other studies have found the opposite effect. Chris' sobering conclusion is exactly right:
Religion, like any other social institution, can cause good and bad behavior, depending on the context and the ways in which it is used. Overall, religion and similar secular institutions may serve to promote prosocial behavior, but when individuals focus on certain parts…
aardvarchaeology | February 25, 2007Should the future Constitution of the European Union make reference to Christian values? The Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel among others thinks so. Or should it be founded on secular liberal principles? I among others think so.
To that end, I have just signed the Brussels Declaration on-line.
We, the people of Europe, hereby affirm our common values. They are based not on a single culture or tradition but are founded in all of the cultures that make up modern Europe.
We affirm the worth, dignity and autonomy of every individual, and the right of everyone to the greatest possible freedom…
cortex | February 19, 2007In his most recent column, David Brooks argues that the new discoveries of neuroscience and biology have confirmed the conservative view of human nature.
Sometimes a big idea fades so imperceptibly from public consciousness you don't even notice until it has almost disappeared. Such is the fate of the belief in natural human goodness.
This belief, most often associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, begins with the notion that "everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man." Human beings are virtuous and free in their natural state…
clock | February 17, 2007While Aaron Lerner was not a chronobiologist, his discovery of the hormone melatonin in 1958 was one of the key milestones in the biological rhythm research (just see how much I mention it around here) and the chronobiological community will always regard him as one of its own.
You can learn more about melatonin here (UPI got it wrong - the discovery was not made on human skin but a skin preparation of the frog Rana pipiens).
If you are interested, here are three of the first four Lerner's papers on the discovery of Melatonin:
ISOLATION OF MELATONIN, THE PINEAL GLAND FACTOR THAT LIGHTENS…
grrlscientist | February 16, 2007Normally I do not review books that have been out for longer than a year or so, but while I was in the hospital, I decided to celebrate Columbus Day by reading a book that was sent to me by my blog pal, Tara. This book, Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis by Deborah Hayden (New York: Basic Books, 2004, 2005), turned out to be an interesting biography of a bacterial infection that has baffled doctors for hundreds of years.
In the first part of the book, the author observes that there are two main problems associated with an case history of syphilis: first, syphilis is "the…
cortex | February 14, 2007Greg Clark, an economist at UC Davis, has come out with a new paper arguing that natural selection accounts for the rise of "capitalist" attitudes. Simply put, the rich capitalists had more offspring than the poor serfs, so humans evolved a "set of preferences that were consistent with capitalism." Here's the abstract:
Before 1800 all societies, including England, were Malthusian. The average man or woman had 2 surviving children. Such societies were also Darwinian. Some reproductively successful groups produced more than 2 surviving children, increasing their share of the population,…
mixingmemory | February 14, 2007You've probably already come across this story, but just in case:
Oldest chimp tools found in West Africa
Apes could have passed down skills for thousands of years.
In the West African rainforest, archaeologists have found ancient chimpanzee stone tools thousands of years older than the previous oldest finds in the same area. The discovery suggests that chimps may have passed cultural information down the generations for more than 4,000 years.
I'm no archeologist, and since the paper doesn't seem to be on the PANAS website, as the Nature article says it should be, I couldn't evaluate the…
oracknows | February 14, 2007[Note: There is a followup to this post here.]
I've been writing a lot about dichloroacetate (DCA) lately, perhaps even to the point of becoming repetitive and risking boring my readers. Fortunately, this post is not primarily about DCA. Unfortunately, it's about a question that is related to the recent hype over DCA in that it pits the desperation of dying cancer patients who want to try out the latest drugs, even if they haven't been demonstrated to be safe or efficacious, versus the what remaining ability the FDA has to regulate drug safety and, some might argue, the scientific method…
drorzel | February 14, 2007Over at Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee celebrates everybody's favorite annoying holiday with a look at two scholars of sex: the late Gershon Legman who coined "Make love, not war" back in 1963; and Blaise Cronin, who currently studies the more respectable sort of pornography at Indiana. Personally, I half think the real purpose may have been to give him the chance to write the sentence about Legman:
Any scholar publishing a book called Oragentialism: Oral Techniques in Genital Excitation may be said to have contributed something to the sum total of human happiness.
but there is a larger…
clock | February 13, 2007Scientists Clone Mice From Adult Skin Stem Cells:
For cells that hold so much promise, stem cells' potential has so far gone largely untapped. But new research from Rockefeller University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute scientists now shows that adult stem cells taken from skin can be used to clone mice using a procedure called nuclear transfer. The findings are reported in the Feb. 12 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Manipulating Nature: Scientists Query Wildlife Birth-control Method:
Professor Cooper also raises concerns that individuals that…
clock | February 12, 2007[Moved to the top of the page. First posted at 1:43am]
Last year, I collected the links to notable posts about Darwin Day and posted them here. That was fun, so I decided to do it again.
I checked the Technorati and Google Blogsearch and took my picks that you can see below. I will update this post several times today and move the post to the top in the evening. If you want your post to appear here, please e-mail me at: Coturnix AT gmail DOT com.
Also, later today, I will update this post with a special announcement (pending the approval by the person in question) - naming the winner of…
oracknows | February 8, 2007Well, here I am in sunny Phoenix, having spent pretty much all of yesterday at the conference, sneaking in alterations to and practicing of my talk in between sessions. All in all not a bad day, although I spent the entire day indoors and didn't get to partake of the bright and cheery warmth, which is sad, because it's particularly welcome given the weather at my present abode. The conference produced one other thing for me as well: A good blogging topic. Not only that, but it's a good blogging topic that fits in with the whole "Just Science" theme of this week. Don't worry, though, no…
cmooney | February 7, 2007Well, I just got back from the Hill, where I attended the Senate Commerce Committee's hearing on Climate Change Research and Scientific Integrity. You are supposed to be able to get a Webcast of the hearing from the link above, but I haven't gotten it to work yet. [UPDATE: Now it works, click here, go to around minute 2:14:45.]
The hearing ended on a very strong note, as Senator John Kerry essentially eviscerated a hapless representative of the Bush administration, acting Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) chairman Bill Brennan [pictured at left]. With Kerry terming the administration's…
drorzel | February 6, 2007We were away for the weekend, so I'm a day behind in reading the Sunday Times. This week's magazine section has a story about the controversy over "hybrid" dogs:
Bob Vetere, president of the American Pet Product Manufacturers Association, told me, "You're going to have a real battle here" between hybrid dog breeders and "the purists who say this is all 25th-century voodoo science." The rift seems to epitomize a peculiarly American tension: between tradition and improvisation, institutions and fads. The American Canine Hybrid Club, one of a growing number of hybrid dog registries, will soon…
bcohen | February 6, 2007[Basic concepts: Epistemology.]
Adolph Quetelet, a mathematician of the High Enlightenment, explained with scientific precision how to know when lilacs will bloom (this was about the year 1800). The lilacs, he said, bloom "when the sum of the squares of the mean daily temperature since the last frost added up to (4264C) squared."
So now we know. Whew!
That's one way to put it. This, to me, offers one way to get into the basic concept of what's called epistemology. Perhaps calling it a basic concept is a bit askew, since it is complicated and philosophically thick. But it's interesting,…
clock | February 6, 2007Lots of cool stuff today:
Nature Could Have Used Different Protein Building Blocks, Chemists Show:
Chemists at Yale have done what Mother Nature chose not to -- make a protein-like molecule out of non-natural building blocks, according to a report featured early online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Nature uses alpha-amino acid building blocks to assemble the proteins that make life as we know it possible. Chemists at Yale now report evidence that nature could have used a different building block -- beta-amino acids -- and show that peptides assembled from beta-amino acids…
evolvingthoughts | February 5, 2007
I just can't escape that damned Demarcation Principle...
A fellow emailed me the other day, asking what I thought about String Theory. Was it science? He was trying to argue with Intelligent Design folk, and they brought String Theory up as a case of science that doesn't have any testable evidence yet. He responded "science is what scientists do", and ask my opinion about that claim...
I responded thus [names removed to protect the innocent]
[Name], you are stepping in deep, very cold, and very dank waters.
In public, when trying to deal with soundbite science, it is worthwhile saying…