Today, we have a little something for the neuroscientists, and something for the atheists. Godless neuroscientists are especially fortunate.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Today, we have a little something for the neuroscientists, and something for the atheists. Godless neuroscientists are especially fortunate.
If you’ve read this outrageous WaPo op-ed that basically says you can’t expect moral behavior from scientists who are glorified baby-killers, you might appreciate this rebuttal at the Give Up Blog. The foundation of the fundiecrat anti-science article is that 1) Hwang Woo Suk was bad, therefore all stem cell/cloning research is tainted, and 2) alternative techniques (most of which they don’t seem to understand) and adult stem cells will give us all the answers we need.
Which actually leads into this week’s “ask a science blogger” question:
Dave Thomas explains Genetic Algorithms and demonstrates that, as usual, the Intelligent Design bigwigs don’t have any idea what they’re talking about.
Last week, I received some delusional e-mail from Phil Skell, who claims that modern biology has no use for evolutionary theory.
This will raise hysterical screeches from its true-believers. But, instead they should take a deep breath and tell us how the theory is relevant to the modern biology. For examples let them tell the relevance of the theory to learning…the discovery and function of hormones…[long list of scientific disciplines truncated]
Dr Skell is a sad case. He apparently repeats his mantra that biology has no need of evolution everywhere he goes, and has never bothered to actually crack a biology journal open to see if biologists actually do use the theory. In my reply to him, I did briefly list how evolution is used in every single one of his numerous examples, but today I’m going to focus on just the one I quoted above: hormones.
Declan Butler has a short article in this week’s Nature on the “Top 5 Science Blogs”. This was determined by identifying blogs written by scientists and determining their rank on Technorati. The top five are:
Declan asked each of us to say a little bit about why we were succeeding in this medium, and that’s given in a short summary. It’s seriously edited down, though—I have no complaints at all about what he wrote, but he didn’t use one part I wrote to him. I can’t blame him, since it undercuts the premise of the article, but I wanted to mention it here, at least.
Hmmm, reasons for my “success”…well, first of all, I have to say that I don’t measure success in terms of Technorati rank or traffic. There are great science blogs out there (check out the list at scienceblogs.com) that are more focused than mine and certainly do a better job of more sharply elucidating the niche they occupy. I’d say I have wider popularity because I do tend to wander off into many different topics, so there is a more diffuse field of potential interest, tapping into the broader areas of liberal politics and atheism. I think, also, I’ve tapped into a fair amount of resentment against the reactionary religious nature of American culture—to some, I suspect I’m one representative of opposition to the excesses of our dominant political regime. This country is strongly polarized, and my position makes it easy for many to identify with me…and those who disagree find it easy to characterize me.
Nature has made available a list of the top 50 science blogs, which will make for a useful start for anyone trying to fill up a blogroll. As Sciencebase notes, though, it does have some omissions.
Coturnix turns up a publicly accessible copy of the article.
Butler D (2006) Top five science blogs. Nature 442(7098):9.
Carl Zimmer tells us all about the recent big dodo find, in both the pages of the Grey Lady and a podcast. He’s a master of multimedia, that guy.
Here I am, in the upper midwest, and I still haven’t made it to the Field Museum in Chicago—Chicago is just far enough away that I can’t quite make the trip, and it’s close enough that it doesn’t sound at all exotic. I just have to rely on other people’s accounts. (I’ve also noticed that Megatherium is a spectacular specimen.)
The science blogosphere must be getting big if it can support biology subspecialty carnivals: now you can read collections of posts about just bioinformatics or genetics. And here I thought a general science carnival might be too narrow to draw in a wide readership, way back in the dark ages!
First, I was impressed that homosexuals had such immense power that they could trigger earthquakes, but then, darn it, someone had to actually look at the data.
