Social Sciences
cevans | October 17, 2007Dr. Oliver Sacks is a rare bird in the world of medicine: not only is he one the country's top neurologists, but he also has a knack for weaving clinical profiles of his most exceptional patients into lovely, thoughtful books that open up the complex workings of our minds to the peering eyes of layfolk. His charm has much to do with the fact that he's the embodiment of a long-musty archetype of scientist: blustery, with a lisp, brilliant, and eccentric, a member of the American Fern Society, and fascinated with fluorescent minerals.
His latest book, Musicophilia, tackles our intimate mental…
goodmath | October 16, 2007 A few weeks ago, I received an email about a new book, "The Faith Equation", by Marvin Bittinger. Bittinger is an author of math textbooks - including, I think, my first calculus text. The book is supposed to be Bittenger's explanation of how mathematics validates christianity. Needless to say,
I asked for a review copy - this is something right up my alley.
I've taken longer to get around to reviewing it than I intended, but life's been busy
lately. I'm going to review it in several parts: it's too dense, full of bad arguments of so many different kinds that I can't possibly do it justice…
laelaps | October 14, 2007In 1978, a paleoanthropological team including Mary Leakey, Richard Hay, and Tim White made a startling discovery at Laetoli, Tanzania; in a bed of volcanic ash that would later be dated to about 3.5 million years old were the footprints of ancient hominids. The preserved trackway, found to contain the footprints of three individuals of the same species walking in the same direction during a very short period of time (possibly walking together as a group), would become one of the most important and iconic of hominid fossils, the fact that hominids were walking upright 3.5 million years ago…
oracknows | October 11, 2007I should have guessed.
Leave it to uber-crank (a. k. a. One Crank To Rule Them All) Mike Adams, the "intellect" behind what is perhaps the crankiest website known to humankind (at least when it comes to medicine), NewsTarget.com, to try to slime Breast Cancer Awareness Month. As fellow ScienceBlogger Mark points out, in his "report" Breast Cancer Deception, Adams accomplishes this by characterizing Breast Cancer Awareness month as nothing more than part of a conspiracy by the "male-dominated" cancer industry to keep women down.
I have to admit, in the realm of sheer wingnuttery, I've seldom…
clock | October 11, 2007The other day, Kate organized a talk by Sheila Jasanoff about science communication and subsequently summarized the talk on her blog. You need to read the whole thing, but the main point is that there is a difference between a one-to-many communication of usual science communication (the 'public service model'), including science education, policy speaches, etc., more often than not presented by non-scientists, e.g., journalists, politicians, etc. and the many-to-many interactive engaging of scientists with the public in a two-way communication (the 'public sphere model'):
Thus, perhaps the…
sheril | October 10, 2007
Another global warming PSA produced by Environmental Defense in conjunction with the Ad Council. Is this a message that resonates with the readers? I expect what's alarmist to some will be poignant to others. But what I can say with certainty is that climate change will be a paramount issue in the 2008 presidential election. Consider The New York Times special politics section that highlights candidates' positions as the coming attractions of what we'll be hearing, reading, debating, and pondering over the next twelve months...
A growing environmental awareness among Americans has…
clock | October 9, 2007
Why Are Huge Numbers Of Camels Dying In Africa And Saudi Arabia?:
More than 2000 dromedaries -- Arabian camels -- have died since August 10 in Saudi Arabia. Various theories have been put forward to explain the numerous deaths. For several years, the Sahel and the Horn of Africa have also seen similar numbers of deaths. In 1995-1996, CIRAD worked on a fatal epizootic disease affecting dromedaries in Ethiopia.
Humans Unknowing Midwives For Pregnant Moose:
When it's time for moose to give birth in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, they head to where it is safest from predators -- namely…
jrosenhouse | October 9, 2007Town Hall columnist Michael Barone has a bee in his bonnet about universities:
I am old enough to remember when America's colleges and universities seemed to be the most open-minded and intellectually rigorous institutions in our society. Today, something very much like the opposite is true: America's colleges and universities have become, and have been for some decades, the most closed-minded and intellectually dishonest institutions in our society.
Fox news pundits like Barone really ought to be more careful describing other institutions as closed-minded and intellectually dishonest.…
oracknows | October 9, 2007On occasion, I've thought of inaugurating awards for the looniest quackery, alternative medicine, or antivaccination craziness of the year. I was thinking of calling them the Woo Awards, but I've never actually gotten off my lazy posterior to do the work it would take to set up some sort of voting system, and I'm not so sure that a list picked out only by me wouldn't just end up reflecting my personal idiosyncrasies. Be that as it may, with the end of the year fast approaching, if I were going to do it now would be the time to start looking for nominations.
If I were going to give a prize for…
oracknows | October 7, 2007I've had this story sent to me by a few readers over the weekend, and I think it's worth a brief comment.
I'm basically a child of the 1970s. Although I didn't watch it much, if ever, I remember Charlie's Angels when I was in junior high and high school. Like any adolescent who came of age in the late 1970s, I remember the famous and hot-selling poster of Farrah Fawcett, which graced the bedroom of more than one of my friends, although I never actually owned a copy. A while back, I heard that Fawcett had been successfully treated for anal cancer. Now, I hear from my readers that her anal…
apalazzo | October 5, 2007I'm in Italy. Over the past two weeks I've been reposting my entries on technology. Here is a related post on Le Corbusier and his conception of the modern city.
Seed is disseminating questions to its bloggers (I guess a la www.edge.org) so this week the question is:
If you could cause one invention from the last hundred years never to have been made at all, which would it be, and why?
The invention I would choose to uninvent? I spent the weekend asking some friends. Some answers were machine guns, the atomic bomb, spam, cars ...
Cars did strike something deep in me. Along the lines of…
tfk | October 5, 2007The Disco Institute's Rob Crowther is confused. Because the NCSE announced and linked to an ID statement by the National Council for the Social Studies, Crowther seems to think the NCSE has changed its own position.
This really rests on two confusions (two of Crowther's many confusions). First, the flawed notion that the one organization adopts another's position merely by pointing out that the policy exists. NCSE publishes a book full of statements opposing creationism by scientific, educational, religious and civil liberties organizations. No organization could simultaneously endorse…
cmooney | October 5, 2007
On the fifty year anniversary of Sputnik yesterday, the Center for American Progress launched "Science Progress," a new web and print publication dedicated to science policy. The editor in chief is Jonathan Moreno, a Senior Fellow at CAP and the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor and Professor of Medical Ethics and the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His introductory essay is here. It includes a mission statement:
Science Progress proceeds from the propositions that scientific inquiry is among the finest expressions of human excellence, that it is a…
razib | October 5, 2007Over the past few weeks I've been looking closely at all the skin color related genes in humans which have been studied over the past few years. A little over two years ago the evolutionary biologist Armand Leroi wrote:
We don't know what the differences are between white skin and black skin, European skin versus African skin. What I mean is we don't know what the genetic basis of that is. This is actually amazing. I mean, here's a trait, trivial as it may be, about which wars have been fought, which is one of the great fault lines in society, around which people construct their identities…
oracknows | October 4, 2007I've made no secret how much contempt I have for Kevin Trudeau, whom I have likened to David Irving, at least with respect to his respect for the truth. He has made many, many millions of dollars selling books with titles like Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About and its followups, in which he claims that there are "natural" cures for all sorts of diseases that the usual cabal of big pharma, the AMA, and the FDA are keeping away from you--yes, you!--in order to protect the profits of big pharma and the hegemony of us "conventional" physicians. Obviously, Trudeau is a total hack…
voltagegate | October 4, 2007
Heather just finished her self portrait assignment in printmaking, and while others studied pictures of their faces from all angles, she picked up a cell bio text and studied other aspects of self. Her rationale and a few of my thoughts about science and art are below the fold.
I thought her statement was both insightful and poetic:
I am an animal. I am a human. I come from a long branching line of beings, descending in a progression from prehistoric, mammalian, ancestors. Before those ancestral creatures, existed an even longer, and more branched, line of prehistoric plant, and bacterial…
vhughes | October 1, 20079.24.07 to 9.30.07
Announcements
Welcome New Sciblings
Welcome anonymous ScienceWoman, a first-year assistant professor in "-ology." Her blog's title, On Being a Scientist and a Woman, is sufficiently self-explanatory.
And second, welcome A Few Things Ill Considered, the climate blog of Coby Beck. Coby also writes at Grist.org's blog, The Gristmill, and is the author of the famed document "How to Talk to a Global Warming Sceptic."
Homepage Buzzes
9/25: Ahmadinejad on Science
On Monday, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed a packed audience at Columbia University. The president,…
neurophilosophy | September 30, 2007
The word eugenics immediately makes one think of the racial hygiene programs of the Nazis and the experiments performed by Joseph Mengele on those held in the concentration camps, but far fewer are aware that there was a large and powerful eugenics movement in the U.S. during the first half of the 20th century.
For example, by 1941, no less than 33 states endorsed policies for sterilizing "defective"members of society, such as criminals, the "feeble-minded", epileptics, the mentally ill and, of course, blacks (and non-whites in general).
Much of the eugenics research in the U.S. was…
clock | September 29, 2007
Altruism Evolved From Maternal Behavior, Wasp Genetics Study Suggests:
Researchers at the University of Illinois have used an innovative approach to reveal the molecular basis of altruistic behavior in wasps. The research team focused on the expression of behavior-related genes in Polistes metricus paper wasps, a species for which little genetic data was available when the study was begun. Like honey bee workers, wasp workers give up their reproductive capabilities and focus entirely on nurturing their larval siblings, a practice that seems to defy the Darwinian prediction that a successful…
neurophilosophy | September 28, 2007At Wired, filmmaker Ridley Scott discusses the forthcoming remastered final cut of Blade Runner. This classic 1982 film depicts a dystopian futuristic society based on artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, and was recently voted as the best science fiction film ever made by 60 top scientists.
The interview includes quotes about the film from various people, including this one, in which Craig Venter, the billionaire geneticist who has just had his genome published, gives his views on cognitive enhancement:
The movie has an underlying assumption that I just don't relate to: that…