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.
Look at this: a measles outbreak in Disneyland, probably because some idiot brought their pustulent, disease-spreading child to the Happiest Place on Earth.
How could this happen?
Read this paean to self-righteous ignorance and maybe you’ll understand.
Michael Land was one of those people who totally warped my brain. I’ve been interested in science since I was a kid, but I’m embarrassed to say that I never heard a whisper about evolution in the public schools I attended. Although I read about it avidly, I came out of high school and charged off to college eager to learn about neuroscience. And I did!
His latest column chides the climate Cassandras
, and makes a really bizarre argument. Did you know that there have been severe disruptions of human activity by non-anthropogenic climate change in the past?
And if climate Cassandras are as conscientious as they claim to be about weighing evidence, how do they accommodate historical evidence of enormously consequential episodes of climate change not produced by human activity?
Dan Graur has written a good summary of genetic load. It’s an important concept in population genetics, and everyone should be familiar with it…and this is a nice 2½ page summary with only a little math in it.
I’ll try to summarize the summary in two paragraphs and even less math … but you should read the whole thing.
(via HMMI)
That paper that proposed that most cancers were due to bad luck, that is, that they were a consequence of biological factors that could not be controlled, has been surprisingly controversial. I thought it was a fairly unsurprising paper that confirmed what we already suspected, but wow, the furious pushback has been something to behold.
Today, though, a couple of MDs have responded to the paper and reinforce what I said.
