Reading material

Here you go, a few links with promises of interesting reading. Much more so than you’ll find here, where I’m buried beneath efforts to finish up my Seed column, prepare for a lecture tomorrow, get a lab organized for Wednesday, write an entry for an encyclopedia, and shovel through piles of administrative paperwork of various sorts…

  • Some good news for the upcoming Darwin Year of 2009 — Steve Jones will be publishing a new book, Darwin’s Garden, on time for the celebration. I have to say, though, that PR from publishers is a little disturbing: “Jones, who moved to Little, Brown from Transworld with c.e.o. Ursula Mackenzie” makes it sound like he’s had some very peculiar addresses and opens completely inappropriate speculation about his relationship with Ms. Mackenzie. It should be good anyway.

  • Other good fun can be had on the blog, Prehistoric Pulp. If you want to keep up with the latest books and games that involve primeval creatures, paleontology, and evolution, it’s a great source.

  • I was sent a link to Asimov’s The Last Question. I swear, I’ve got to have read a few dozen science fiction stories that have pretty much the same plot, and I suspect sf editors must get this one over and over. So now I’m wondering…was Asimov the first to unleash this cliche on us all (in which case, it wasn’t a cliche when he wrote it), or has it got antecedents?

Not another creationist TV blitz…

Scott* has uncovered another slick media effort by creationists: the Seventh Day Adventists are putting on a four-part series called Out of Thin Air to trumpet their fundamentalist lunacy.

What I want to know is … where are the slick media people willing to put together lovely dramatic stories of the scientists — the brave minority fighting uncowed against a wealthy and ignorant majority? Come on, there’s a real story here. We do cool stuff! We’re passionate! We are probing reality! Our stage is the entire freaking universe! We don’t have money for PR, and our support organizations are underfunded! Oh … I guess that’s the answer. We aren’t going to be able to pony up as much cash as one of the many religious cults around here, and we aren’t going to be an uncritical, captive audience. That must be why so many of the science documentaries are either a series of talking heads, all science with no heart, or they’re nature vignettes, all pretty pictures and no science.

It’s a shame. The science story is so much more spectacular than the creationist foolishness, but we’re not building the media resources and the strong narratives that we need to compete with the liars for Jesus.

*Stop making excuses for the SDAs, Scott. They’re kooks, plain and simple. Maybe they’re nice people, but they’ve been brainwashed into believing idiocy.

Clearly, bloggers need to take over science journalism

Aaargh. When will the media learn? National Geographic is running this ridiculous headline right now: New Fossil Ape May Shatter Human Evolution Theory, in which the reporter claims a discovery of some teeth could “demolish a working theory of human evolution.” It’s not true. Where is this nonsense coming from?

I read the article. It’s titled “A new species of great ape from the late Miocene epoch in Ethiopia.” The exciting news is that the “combined evidence suggests that Chororapithecus may be a basal member of the gorilla clade, and that the latter exhibited some amount of adaptive and phyletic diversity at around 10-11 Myr ago.” It concludes with a suggestion that we need to do more research in sediments appropriate to Miocene apes. There aren’t an exploding paradigms or revolutions suggested.

I read the associated news article in Nature. It’s titled “Oldest gorilla ages our joint ancestor.” It says that this discovery pushes back the time of divergence of the gorilla lineage from our own. This is just ordinary science.

Now read the blogs — they’re doing a much better job of evaluating this work than the traditional media. For one thing, they’re actually looking at it critically. Afarensis points out that these are only a few teeth, and it’s awfully thin grounds for a substantial revision of the timeline. John Hawks makes a similar point, but also highlights the fact that there is an unresolved problem — we need to reconcile paleontological and molecular dates. Even John Wilkins, a “mere” philosopher, weighs in sensibly that teeth are plastic characters in phylogeny, and deplores this peculiar media habit of taking a recalibration of a historical detail as a major reformulation of theory. All these discussions are sober and interested and most important of all, accurate.

The lesson is clear: when you see some wild and crazy claim of scientific revolutions and the demolition of long-held theories, go immediately to the science blogs for some clear-eyed sanity and informed evaluation from experts.

Galaxiki

It’s a wiki with the tagline, “It’s a fictional world purely imagined by its community”, and it isn’t Conservapædia! Galaxiki is a galaxy-building exercise that lets you create star systems and populate them with stories and details. One bummer is that they charge you for the right to create new stars — that doesn’t seem like a smart idea, since you’d think they’d want more contributions, at least early in the game — but you can edit somewhat freely, and there are swarms of randomly generated star systems to play with.