Social Sciences
jstemwedel | June 11, 2006This post, originally posted 8 January 2006 on the old site, responds to an email I got after the last post. Given John's recent post on Pro-Test, the questions are still timely.
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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 of lab animals in the Research Triangle, www.serat-nc.org. And, she wrote the following:
Some people may think that PETA is extreme. However, the true "extreme" is what happens to…
terrasig | June 11, 2006Via Insider at Pharmagossip. This title was too good not to repost here and the story in Insider's post comes straight from a British Sunday paper.
Human papilloma virus, or HPV, is responsible for the majority of cases of cervical cancer. From the American Cancer Society website:
The disease kills more than 288,000 women worldwide each year, according to the World Health Organization. In the US, cervical cancer is expected to strike more than 9,700 women in 2006, and kill about 3,700.
Religious conservative attempts to try and deny access to the newly-approved HPV vaccine might actually…
evolvingthoughts | June 10, 2006
When I was sixteen, I was rebelling against whatever society had got by getting stoned, generally screwing up, and eventually getting thrown out of high school six months before I graduated. Laurie Pycroft on the other hand, decided enough was enough with the Animal Liberation Front's terrorism activities, and began blogging about it, leading to the foundation of, wait for it, a pro-science movement defending the use of animal experimentation.
Seed Magazine has a short item about Laurie that got me interested, so a short Google later, I discovered that not only did he set off a…
evolvingthoughts | June 8, 2006
Before we continue, let's get a few definitional matters out of the way.
First, there is the "state of nature" issue. A longstanding tradition in political philosophy is that humans existed at some stage in a state of nature, that is to say, a condition of living without the constraints of historical society. Hobbes thought it was a bellum omnia contra omnes - a war of all against all. Locke, on the other hand, thought that it was a state of free association of contractually independent agents capable of making a social contract. Both positions are just biologically unrealistic. Humans, if…
pharyngula | June 7, 2006This is very good news, but don't you wish we had a few more prominent American secularists to put on this advisory board? Welcome, Richard. Help us out!
Famed Scientist Richard Dawkins Joins the Advisory Board of the Secular
Coalition for America
Washington, DC — The Secular Coalition for America is
pleased to announce the addition of Richard Dawkins to its Advisory Board.
The Secular Coalition for America is the first lobbying organization
representing the interests of atheists, humanists, freethinkers, and other
nontheists in the nation's capitol.
Richard Dawkins is a well known…
jlynch | June 7, 2006Yesterday, the Vatican named gay marriage as one of the factors threatening the traditional family as never before.
Today, supporters of a marriage amendment could not even get together enough votes to actually get to vote on the amendment, falling eleven votes short. Seven Republicans voted to kill the amendment: Lincoln Chafee (RI), Susan Collins (ME), Judd Gregg (NH), John McCain (AZ), Olympia Snowe (ME), Arlen Specter (PA) and John Sununu (NH).
John Stewart - in tackling Bill Bennett - says it best:
Stewart: So why not encourage gay people to join in in that family arrangement if that is…
razib | June 6, 2006Chad's response to this week's Ask a Science Blogger pointed to two issues which I think need some clarification.
First, that brain drain might be good for the species in that it distributes the "wealth" of human capital around. This is not a trivial or baseless argument, but, The World Bank has done a study, and it is important to note that the impact of the "brain drain" on "donor" nations differs as a function of size. In other words, nations like China and India lose a relatively small percentage of their intellectual capital, while nations like Guyana lose a lot. So the key is…
grrlscientist | June 6, 2006
Although these fish look similar and have the same genetic makeup, they
produce very different electrical signals (right) and will only mate with fish that produce
the same signals. Cornell researchers believe that these different electrical signals are the
fishes' first step in diverging into separate species. [Image: Carl Hopkins.]
The fishes depicted in the picture above are several types of mormyrids that are endemic to some tributaries of the Ivindo River in Gabon, Africa. These fishes produce weak electrical signals from a battery-like organ at the base of the tail to communicate…
evolvingthoughts | June 6, 2006
I often wonder what goes through the minds of those who propose utopian political ideals that turn out to become the worst of all possible dystopias, like Leninism or Maoism, or for that matter the extreme laisse faire capitalist conservatism. For it appears to me that these systems would work just fine, if only they didn't involve any human beings. And that raises an interesting question in my mind, and I hope, yours too. What sorts of political systems are biologically feasible for human beings? As Aristotle said, Man is a Political Animal, but what sort of political animal?
Any…
stcynic | June 6, 2006The White House has been kind enough to put the text of President Bush's speech advocating the "Marriage Protection Amendment" yesterday on their webpage. It would make a perfect example of illogical argumentation for a logic course.
The union of a man and woman in marriage is the most enduring and important human institution.
But apparently not so enduring that it can't withstand more people getting married.
For ages, in every culture, human beings have understood that marriage is critical to the well-being of families. And because families pass along values and shape character, marriage is…
cmooney | June 3, 2006Well, the event yesterday at the Skeptics Society conference here in Pasadena went very well, I think. I'm not going to speculate on who "won" the debate between Ron Bailey and myself, but certainly a lot of people came up to me afterwards and thanked me for what I had to say.
I won't give you the full rundown here, but I will provide a written out version of roughly what I had to say in my opening remarks at the debate--comments directly inspired by the "controversy" on this blog over this conference and who the keynote speakers are (Michael Crichton and John Stossel). Here are my comments (…
razib | June 3, 2006I received an interesting email from the lead researcher on the work reported in the earlier post on prosopagnosia:
Dear Razib, I appreciate your comments (and scepticsm) about our reported work and the thoughts about continuums (aspergers/autism). One possibly clarifying point -- Face recognition is just one aspect of face specific processing. Humans are are also adept at judging emotion, mood, intention, age, attractiveness in faces. Its our experience that the majority of prosopagnosic individuals (with some notable exceptions) are pretty much normal in performing these arguably…
stcynic | June 2, 2006Jonathan Rauch has a terrific column on the politics of the Federal Marriage Amendment (now apparently called the Marriage Protection Amendment). Why would the Republican leadership bother to bring up a bill for a vote that they know has no chance of passing? Pure demagoguery:
The MPA would amend the U.S. Constitution to forbid gay couples to marry. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., says he will bring the amendment up during the week of June 5. It has zero chance of passing by the required 67-vote majority, as Frist knows. In 2004, the amendment garnered only 48 Senate votes, and…
cmooney | May 24, 2006I am not particularly impressed by his piece in the New York Times today. The evidence on global warming was in long ago; there was no particular reason for Easterbrook to hold out this long. But that's not what really troubles me about Easterbrook's argument. He writes:
Once global-warming science was too uncertain to form the basis of policy decisions -- and this was hardly just the contention of oil executives. "There is no evidence yet" of dangerous climate change, a National Academy of Sciences report said in 1991. A 1992 survey of the American Geophysical Union and the American…
oracknows | May 24, 2006One annoying thing about the blogosphere for someone like me is that a lot of things that I want to write about pop up during the day, when I'm at work. Blogging is all about immediacy and time. Wait too long to write about a topic, and the moment's passed. For me, by the time I get home in the evening, even though someone may have e-mailed me an article that they thought I'd like to comment on, I often find myself refraining from jumping into the fray, simply because so many have already commented on it already. This problem is magnified (for me, at least) by belonging to ScienceBlogs,…
razib | May 23, 2006I'm an atheist. Just like some people who are Christians but weren't always tell me that they "always believed in Christ," myself, I've never believed in God. Before the age of 7 I did avow a belief in God, but in hindsight I see only the most minimal of deisms in my conception of the world aside from the times when I was at the mosque with my family. Religion wasn't talked about in my family much aside from major festivals, and it wasn't something I ever really thought about. When I was 7 I was in the library, reading some books on astronomy, and it struck me that there was no reason for…
grrlscientist | May 23, 2006After paging through a typical field guide to the birds of North America, most people become intimidated by the many hundreds of bird species that are pictured. When one considers the myriad different plumages for juvenile, immature and adult birds, males versus females, and seasonal plumage differences, the possibilities increase into the thousands. Suddenly, a pleasant and relaxing morning spent identifying a few birds becomes stressful, daunting, impossible. In fact, faced with such a task, it is easier to give up before even getting started. This is where Pete Dunne's Essential Field…
razib | May 22, 2006Below GrrlScientist asks why The Da Vinci Code is "bad history." I believe it is bad history because someone whose work I respect and have enjoyed has pointed out manifold errors, incluing in a book which covered this ground. His name is Bart Ehrman, and he is the head of Relgious Studies at UNC. I've read two of his books, Lost Christianities and Misquoting Jesus. Erhman went through a phase of fudamentalist Christianity, but his need to know the New Testament in the original led him to learning Latin and Greek, and a Ph.D. In the process, he became an agnostic.
Here are some errors…
stcynic | May 21, 2006In discussing a legal case involving the University of North Carolina and their refusal to fund a Christian fraternity (the university later reversed themselves) the other day, Reed Cartwright asked a reasonable question:
I don't see how this is any different than the city of Berekely refusing to subsidise the Boy Scouts because they discriminate. It seems to me that there exists pretty clear precident that allows government entities to not provide freebies to discrimatory organizations. That is why I am confused that UNC thought that it was going to lose.
I didn't have time then to fully…
razib | May 19, 2006Well...the title is a little creepy, but sums up the melange in this report, Study finds that a woman's chances of having twins can be modified by diet. But there is more than diet, researchers have long known that genetics plays a role in twinning rates, it is heritable in that some proportion of the population variation correlates with genotypic variation. And we also know that the rise of fertility medicine has resulted in a boom of multiple births in the modern world. Twinning then neatly encapsulates the manifold aspects of many phenomena of interest which exhibit a biological angle.…