Social Sciences
tetrapodzoology | June 13, 2007
Regular visitors will no doubt have noticed the failure of my promise to post a picture a day. Well, alas, I'm going to have to take a much more relaxed approach, as it has proved impossible to find time even for that. So, I might post a new picture every day on the blog, and I might not. My weekend was taken up with various social events, and since then there just hasn't been the time to add new stuff... other than the sheep article of course. And what about my promise to, err, stick only to the things I've nearly finished writing but have yet to complete? Well, stuff that too. Today,…
tfk | June 12, 2007Last March, the Washington Post's Shankar Vedantam reported on research which showed that, in one interviewee's words, "We are really bad about putting ourselves in other people's places and looking at the world the way they look at it." We tend to quickly assign base motives to our opponents and lofty ones to ourselves and our allies. Vedantam concluded:
It is important to note that the[se] experiment[s] do[] not establish which ... is true. It is possible ... that everything you believe about [your opponents'] motives is true and everything that your opponents believe is false. But a…
evolvingthoughts | June 11, 2007
So the record for the "world's largest organism" has again been claimed for a fungus, something Stephen Jay Gould wrote about in his wonderfully titled essay "A Humongous Fungus Among Us" back in 1992, and which was included in his volume A Dinosaur in a Haystack.
The previous fungus, Armillaria gallica, is now replaced by a related mushroom stand, Armillaria ostoyae, in Oregon's Blue Mountains. But I have my doubts. The term "organism" here has a meaning rather different to "relatively undifferentiated mass of related stands". In fact, I want to talk about the notion of an organism, and…
hrynyshyn | June 10, 2007As Tara writes at Aetiology, it's interesting that the Rwandan government, which might be excused for letting for a little blood lust taint its criminal justice system, what with the slaughter of 800,000 people on their minds, has voted instead to abolish the death penalty. Yet here in America, capital punishment remains on the books in 38 states. I have little new to add, offer these thoughts, which I wrote more than a year ago in an attempt to give the subject a local take, back in pre-ScienceBlog days. My thesis was an is that a scientific approach to justice is incompatible with state-…
jstemwedel | June 9, 2007On this blog I occasionally note a major motion picture that is (tangentially) related to ethics in science, not to mention seeking your advice on my movie-viewing decisions (the votes are running 2 to 1 in favor of my watching Flash Gordon; if I do, I may have to live-blog it).
Today, I'm going to give you an actual review* of a DVD whose subject is ethical scientific research.
Because you ought to have options when planning your weekend!
A member of the Adventures in Ethics and Science Field Team brought me a DVD to review, "Ethics in Biomedical Research". This is a DVD produced by the…
aardvarchaeology | June 7, 2007A week ago, Australian historian Keith Windschuttle gave a talk in Sydney under the heading "Postmodernism and the Fabrication of Aboriginal History". The full text is on-line, highly recommended.
"The argument that all history is politicised, that it is impossible for the historian to shed his political interests and prejudices, has become the most corrupting influence of all. It has turned the traditional role of the historian, to stand outside his contemporary society in order to seek the truth about the past, on its head. It has allowed historians to write from an overtly partisan…
sciencetolife | June 6, 2007There has been a lot of media attention on drug-resistant bacteria lately. According to the Food and Drug Administration overuse of antibiotics is the primary cause of drug resistance in disease-causing bacteria.
Researchers from Ohio State University have now uncovered another way harmful bacteria can acquire antibiotic resistance-close proximity with harmless bacteria found in foods people eat every day.
The research team led by food microbiologist Hua Wang Ph.D, an assistant professor of food science and technology in the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences, found…
stoat | June 6, 2007The Institute of Physics are holding a meeting on Climate change prediction:a robust or flawed process? Why IOP? Who knows, probably a hotbed of skeptics. Though the RMS is advertising it too. That page doesn't list the speakeres; this does: Lindzen and Thorpe. Oh dear, the traditional adversarial stuff. Rumour (thanks N) says that Piers Corbyn is also appearing on Lindzen's side, which if true indicates the entire thing is misorganised.
The blurb starts well enough with
One of the biggest concerns in contemporary society is the rise in global temperatures brought about by the release of…
tfk | June 5, 2007There's very little agreement on the immigration issue, and unlike so many issues, it is not a purely partisan issue. One area where everyone seems to agree is that illegal immigrant labor drives down wages in at least some industries.
I should point out that the evidence of economy-wide effects of immigrants seems to be neutral. We all benefit from cheaper food, so the effects on wages among fruitpickers balances out when you consider the whole economy.
People who argue that immigrants are just taking jobs that Americans won't accept are, after all, basically claiming that Americans…
denialism | June 4, 2007
Renegade Evolution encourages us to spend some time today blogging for sex education (she has a great feminist blog by the way).
I thought to further this aim I'd talk about this recent Nation article about the scam that is the abstinence education industry. Basically, it's just pork for the already-wealthy right-wing friends of the administration who use their money to attack abortion and fund denialist groups like the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America.
Following the money swirling around Ruddy offers an eye-opening glimpse into the squalor at the heart of the…
razib | June 2, 2007People often assume I'm a "genetic determinist" because of my close attention to the interface of our species' biology and behavior. I'm also focused on evolutionary science, a discipline where noise, error, and diversity generated by a constellation of variables is assumed (and to some extent, essential). From my interest in the latter it can be easily inferred that I don't think there is anything necessarily deterministic about how mind and society manifest themselves over the course of development. Rather, an understanding of human nature can make us aware of the constraints and biases…
evolvingthoughts | June 1, 2007
So in chapter 2, we shift stories. Now we have a story that is far older than the first chapter, and is regarded by scholars as the "Yahwist" creation story, and it focuses primarily on humans. The story is far more familiar than the first chapter is (the first few sentences notwithstanding), so we can be pretty brief.
Here, the deity is referred to as "YHWH Elohim", and is translated in English as "LORD God". YHWH is the ancient name for a Phoenician deity of the inhabitants of Canaan. We don't know exactly how it was pronounced, but problably it is said as "Yahweh". In the Canaanite…
clock | May 31, 2007In the May 18th issue of Science there is a revew paper by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg. An expanded version of it also appeared recently in Edge and many science bloggers are discussing it these days.
Enrique has the best one-sentence summary of the article:
The main source of resistance to scientific ideas concerns what children know prior to their exposure to science.
The article divides that "what children know prior to their exposure to science" into two categories: the intuitive grasp of the world (i.e., conclusions they come up with on their own) and the learned…
pharyngula | May 30, 2007There is a must-read article at Edge by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg—it's an attempt to explain why people resist scientific knowledge that takes a psychological view of the phenomenon. The premise is that our brains have in-built simplifications and assumptions about how the world works that often conflict with how it really works—there is, for instance, an intuitive physics and a real physics that are not entirely in agreement, and that we bring our understanding into alignment with reality through education and experience. The naive assumptions of the young brain contribute to…
clock | May 28, 2007Sex In The Morning Or In The Evening?:
Hens solicit sex in the morning to avoid sexual harassment in male-dominated groups of chickens, shown in a new study by Hanne Løvlie of Stockholm University, Sweden, and Dr Tommaso Pizzari of the University of Oxford, UK.
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Insects' Nervous Systems May Provide Clues On Neurodegenerative Diseases:
By studying the addition of sugars to proteins -- a process called glycosylation -- in the nervous system of insects, Temple University researcher Karen Palter believes she may be able to better understand neurodegenerative diseases in humans…
mikethemadbiologist | May 27, 2007From Monday to Friday, I attended the American Society for Microbiology meeting held in Toronto. Before I get to some of the interesting science, my apologies to all of the people who suggested we meet up. Unfortunately, I never look at the blog (or almost never) while I'm on the road, so I missed your messages (it's best to email me directly). Anyway, here's the list of random things:
The E. coli responsible for the spinach outbreak is found in many feral swine. Hence, feral swine are a possible reservoir of E. coli O157:H7. Of course, feral pigs roaming around California in…
evolvingthoughts | May 25, 2007
Razib at Gene Expression has a nuanced and well supported argument about the proportion of religion-supporters versus the proportion of religiosity in various European and Asian cultures. I strongly recommend it.
One of his claims is that the "default" state of humans is a kind of religiosity; I think I agree with him. Humans have all kinds of default "wild type" programs in their psyche and cognition which in a high density population will tend to fall out as religion. Does this mean that atheism is doomed? Or that secularism (which is a different thing) is doomed? I think there will be…
pharyngula | May 24, 2007Hector Avalos himself, the target of a Discovery Institute smear campaign, left a comment here, replying to some of the DI's many falsehoods. It's worth promoting up top.
The Discovery Institute has mounted the latest in a long string of creationist smear campaigns against me in Iowa. While I have never called for Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez to be fired, or even to be denied tenure, there are plenty of creationists who blatantly direct our university to fire me.
All such efforts have failed because they clearly distort the facts and my academic record. Here are some of the most significant…
terrasig | May 23, 2007The 2 May issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute has an interesting news article on the advancing use of arsenic trioxide against a variety of human malignanices, mostly cancers of the blood.
The medical uses of arsenic reach back more than 2,000 years, but only recently has Western medicine embraced its surprising rise from folk cure-all to proven cancer treatment.
The January announcement of positive results in a 6-year NCI-sponsored phase III clinical trial to treat a rare form of leukemia is merely the latest in a series of kudos for arsenic's medicinal prowess. The latest…
pharyngula | May 22, 2007Oh, dear. John West of the Disco Institute is in a furious snit because, after refusing to grant tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez, Iowa State University did promote Hector Avalos, of the Religious Studies department, to full professor. You can just tell that West is spitting mad that Iowa would dare to keep Avalos around, and thinks it a grave injustice that one scholar would be accepted, while their pet astronomer gets the axe. So now they're going to do a hatchet job on Avalos.
Never mind that the two are in completely different departments, with very different standards. Never mind that the…