The The Crafoord Prize in Biosciences has been announced. For those who don’t know, this is a very prestigious award, comparable to the Nobel prize, only not as well known. The categories are specifically designed to complement the Nobel.
This year’s winners are Richard Lewontin and Tomoko Ohta, and it’s about time.
The results of a survey of university scientists are surprising and odd.
Surprisingly, 87% of scientists think there is a scientific method that describes the way scientists do their work. Most of them believe in the old hypothesis → testing –→ theory view that hasn’t been popular among experts for many decades.
Almost half (49%) of natural scientists and 29% of social scientists thought that science was independent of social and cultural biases.
Almost half (48%) of all scientists believed that a theory becomes a law when it is proven.
You were planning to come out to Morris and visit anyway, weren’t you? January and February are the best months to tour this part of the country.
I found this picture on a site called “Wedding Flowers”, which is kind of interesting, since 30% of yellow evening primroses reproduce asexually. I think that means it’s the best wedding flower for marriages in which the partners intend to clone themselves.
Perhaps you’ve heard of these absurd creationist challenges: Kent Hovind challenge of $250,000 for scientific evidence of evolution; Joseph Mastropaolo’s challenge of $10,000 to “prove evolution”; Ray Comfort’s challenge of $10,000 to show him a transitional fossil. They all sound like easy money, but don’t try: they’ve loaded the dice in every case.
Dana Hunter gives a 19th century example I did not know about before. Alfred Russel Wallace accepted a bet to show the curvature of the earth by a flat-earther, and he did it, too, with a simple and clever observation. You’d think he’d be wallowing in the cash — £500 — that he’d won, but you don’t know denialists. They never change.
It’s got a beat you can perform emetic retroperistalsis to!
I finally got around to finishing Greta Christina’s Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God
So I guess it’s not surprising that my strategy for coping with death isn’t in Greta’s book. I take a developmental and evolutionary view of death.
An otherwise good story about Darwin’s work in South America is marred by historical hyperbole.
Reports of the botanist’s round-the-world voyage are dominated by his findings in the Galápagos. The much longer time he spent in Chile and what he saw there have been overlooked – until today.
Jennifer Raff, in her recommendations on how to read a scientific paper, dared to suggest that the scientific affiliations of the authors mattered, and flatly recommended that you dismiss any papers coming out of Seattle’s own temple of ignorance, the Discovery Institute. I agree! I have not read a single paper out of that group that wasn’t stupid, ignorant, dishonest, or all three — and I think it’s significant that just about the only place they manage to publish is in their own little hothouse journal, BIO-Complexity (a few of the authors occasionally get papers published elsewhere by a) making sure it’s not about intelligent design, or b) finding crappy journals like Life).
The creationists holler “bias!”, but what it actually is is knowledge of their track record. When all you do is publish garbage, and you have it on record that you’re going to stuff journals with your ideology, then it only makes sense to see the imprint of the Discovery Institute as a mark of trash. Also, they aren’t ignored — every once in a while, someone will take a look at their scientific output and verify that yep, they’re still churning out garbage.
Raff did just that in response to Casey Luskin whining about how unfair it was to reject their work simply on the basis of their prior slush; so she took the time to look at the latest article in the latest issue of BIO-complexity. I’ll do a little slumming and dig up one of their articles every once in a while, too — it’s a fun game.
