Something different this week: click the image and see David Gallo present a series of short video clips of cephalopods in action.
Nerdism run amuck!
The North looks ever more attractive — read this excellent article on the collapse of organized religion in Canada. The numbers of church members is simply plummeting up there, a state we can only dream of bringing to pass here in the US (numbers are declining here, too, but we can hope that this is an inevitable descent and that Canada is only leading us by a few years.)
One interesting hypothesis for why it’s happening is that we can thank, in part, feminism.
Women the traditional mainstays of institutional religion in huge numbers abruptly rejected the church’s patriarchal exemplar of them as chaste, submissive “angels in the house” with all of the social and moral responsibility for community and family but none of the authority.
Unable to find acceptable religious role models or religious ideals that were not painful or oppressive, they reconstructed their identities as secular and sexual beings.
As they progressed into university graduate and professional schools and entered the work force, their horizons broadened and they discovered ways of serving that were more valuable than doing dishes and running church picnics.
I don’t know how solid the data is on that claim, but it’s at least intuitively attractive. Mothers are typically far more influential on their children’s religious belief than fathers, at least in my experience, so anything that draws women away from the church is going to have strong effects.
Maybe if we want atheism to succeed, we need to promote women more. Everyone thinks of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens when we discuss the godless movement — but perhaps we should be giving more props to Susan Jacoby, Julia Sweeney, Ellen Johnson, Natalie Angier, Margaret Downey, even Madelyn Murray O’Hair … hey, have you noticed? There are lots of actively atheist women!
I just learned that Jacob Bronowski would be a century old today. I wonder how many readers here know anything about the man? Many people will praise the impact Carl Sagan had on people with his program, Cosmos, way back in the 1980s, but I have to say that Bronowski’s Ascent of Man was much, much better, and far more influential on me, at least. It’s a program that PBS ought to bring back — thoughtful, deep, and intellectually enriching.
The testimonial above opens with a great quote from the man:
The great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader and yet are his own experience because he recreates them. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.
And really, that’s what it was all about: there aren’t non-overlapping domains, there aren’t two cultures, there’s only the breadth and depth of the human mind.
Those wacky fellas behind the movie Expelled are at it again. First, we have an
interview with Ben Stein. You can tell that the interviewer has drunk deep of the Discovery Institute spring.
I want. Look at this nifty Tentacle Arm:
And they’re cheap! $15! At one for each appendage, that would be $75.
The capybara is the current champion for rodents of unusual size — it weighs about 60kg (about 130 pounds); another large rodent is the pakarana, which weighs about a quarter of that. Either one is far too much rattiness for most people to want hanging around.
Now there’s another king of the rodents: Josephoartigasia monesi, which is estimated to have tipped the scales at about 1000kg, over a ton. Don’t worry about getting bigger rat traps; these beasties have been extinct for perhaps 2 million years. I’ve put a few pictures from the paper describing this new species below the fold.
One of our regulars here is Hank Fox, and some of you may have noticed his website has been rather static lately. Check again! He’s back at it, and in case you’re looking for a professional proofreader and editor, he’s offering his services online.
Neil Shubin, recent guest on The Colbert Report, author of the cover story of this month’s Natural History magazine, author of the newly released book, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and most significantly, well known scientist and co-discoverer of the lovely transitional fossil, Tiktaalik roseae, has made a guest post on Pharyngula, describing his experiences in preparing for appearing on television — it’s good stuff to read if you’re thinking of communicating science to the mass media, or if you’re a fan of either Shubin or Colbert.
Shubin apparently reads Pharyngula now and then, and he’ll probably take a look at the comments on that article — if you’ve got questions, ask away, and maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll grace us with a reply.
I thought it might be useful for the readers of Pharyngula to get my sense of the Colbert show experience.
Being a scientist on the show carries with it some challenges. We need to convey facts of science correctly and do so in a way reveals how fun our science is to do and to think about. We need to educate, enlighten, and excite. The challenge is we need to do this in 5 minutes with Stephen Colbert sitting across the table. To make matters worse, the show does not tell you the tack Colbert is going to take in advance, largely because so much of what he does is ad lib.
Because of this, I was terrified when I received the invitation last Fri. I took a few hours to accept, largely because I needed a family conference on the strike. Once I came to terms with my decision (the readers do a good in the commentary on the various issues that swirled for us), I began to prepare for the interview.
How did I prepare for the Colbert interview? In watching successful science interviews (of which there are a number of real good examples to emulate) I saw some general patterns to a successful visit. It also definitely appears that Colbert likes scientists and he want them to be able to tell their story.
The best answers I saw responded to Colbert’s questions with a sentence that captured the essence of the science in an entertaining way. So, the day of my interview I came up with a number such answers for the questions I thought I’d get. For the most part, I prepared with answers defending evolution vs. other non-scientific approaches.
I was pretty nervous before the interview, so much so that I didn’t sleep much the night before. And, as it turned out, my predictions about Colbert’s questions were largely wrong– Colbert didn’t even touch creationism and did a number of riffs on things that weren’t even in the book (like the final questions). I was aided, though, by the experience of preparing my answers. It exercised my brain in a way that allowed me to respond to the questions he really asked.
In thinking about the experience a few days later I have one thought on language. As scientists we are very used to using language with a great deal of precision (note the string in the commentary on common ancestry, group inclusion, etc.). The challenge is adapting our highly precise vocabulary to the demands of a five minute performance on a show which is fundamentally not about science. It is a tough tightrope to walk to balance between language that is both engaging and precise. I had mixed success, but that has to be our aspiration for these kinds of experiences.
You can ask the question, a valid one, why bother with these kinds shows? If it is so difficult, and the conceptual and linguistic apparatus of science doesn’t easily conform to this venue, why do it? For me the answer is that we need to make science part of the public conversation. We live in a society where Britany Spears latest foible gets more ink than Mello and Fire’s 2006 Nobel discovery of RNAi– a breakthrough on a little worm that will likely lead to treatments of many diseases. Something is wrong here.
Thanks for your comments and criticisms and I hope my personal experience gives some perspective.
Neil Shubin
