I don’t just get ranting hate mail. I also get conversion stories and invitations to believe. These are saddest and most pathetic emails of them all—you just want to weep for the credulity of the poor victim.
This game looks like it is way too much fun.
IF ID WAS MEDICINE
I could tell you you were sick, because you *look* sick. We’d have some fantastic metric for sickness that no-one has ever used and our “sick or healthy” filter would just be a concept…. that didn’t work. I could maybe tell you you were sick, because you look sick but could make no comment about the disease causing the sickness, how it makes you sick or how to cure you. Real medicine would be a dogmatic religious belief, though.
Everyone can play! Pick your own analogy!
The Burke Museum is having some opening day festivities for their new exhibit, In Search of Giant Squid. They’re having a public squid dissection, cephalopod poetry and art (not by, I don’t think, but about) and various other entertaining and educational opportunities.
True Pharyngula phans in the Seattle area will be there. I wish I could be.
In PZ’s class we’re reading and discussing Soul Made Flesh by Carl Zimmer. This non-fiction book follows the journey that neurobiology has made throughout its history. The details of this history that most prominently catch my attention are the logic, methods, and observations upon which early discoveries were built.
Plato got the ball rolling with his theory that the body consists of three souls. The human soul resides in the head where it can sense surroundings and and divinely reason about their meaning. The vegetative soul resides in the abdomen where it initiates growth, lustful desires, and so forth; and the vital soul resides in the heart where it radiates love and compassion. (Zimmer, 2004) Plato’s theory of souls was based primarily on thought and reason but is well considered and worthy of being scribed into one of the first pages of history.
Aristotle (Plato’s student) dissected a vast array of animals, most likely seeing the importance of taking it apart to see what’s inside in understanding how they work. If I myself were, for example, asked to draw a diagram of the inner workings of a wrist watch, I would fail miserably. A few centuries after the time of Plato, Galen gained a further understanding of anatomy by studying the massive wounds sustained by gladiators. The works of Aristotle and Galen remained the dominant teachings for well over a thousand years.
Gradually, around the 17th century, new ideologies began to refute the traditional teachings on human anatomy and the mind. Descartes published Discourse on Method which presented philosophical arguments about thought and human existence. William Harvey introduced the controversial idea that blood circulates through vessels. Thomas Willis, Robert Boyle, and other members of the Oxford Circle began laying the foundations of modern neurobiology by carrying out progressive experiments that no one had ever thought of before. (Zimmer, 2004)
How exciting it must have been to watch, first hand, the beginnings of this intricate science unfold. I sometimes think about what sort of contribution, if any at all, I could have made if I could somehow have been a student at Oxford hundreds of years ago, bringing with me my limited sophomore understanding of chemistry and biology. I’m excited to continue reading Soul Made Flesh to see where history goes from here. If you haven’t read this book, it provides an excellently thorough account of neurobiology from the very beginning. I will be sure revisit this subject as I continue to read and as we continue to discuss it in class.
References:
Zimmer, Carl. 2004. Soul Made Flesh. Free Press, New York, NY.
Feathers only rarely fossilize, so the distribution of feathers in dinosaurs is difficult to determine. Sometimes feathers mark the bones, though, and bones do preserve well. Here’s an example: the forearm of a Velociraptor retains an array of small bony bumps evenly spaced along its length. What could they be?
Mark Morford has an exceptionally optimistic — dare I say, “triumphal” — article on the collapse of the religious right today. People are reacting (in the right way, so far) to the tremendous damage the Bush presidency has done to our prestige, our security, our economy, our rights, and the legacy we’ll leave to our children, and every reasonable person that Morford knows is reveling in the growing political morbidity of the Republican party. And it was all so inevitable.
T. Ryan Gregory is turning into quite the coiner of useful terms. The latest: Dog’s Ass Plots. It refers specifically to charts that try to make a case for the evolution of complexity by selectively encoding their creator’s assumptions about the topic, and especially by oversimplifying the data in a way that skews their interpretation.
I suspect DAPs are a problem in other fields as well, though.
So I’ve been sucked into a live text interview on the Raving Atheists forum — they’ve finished with me and spat my well-chewed carcass out now, so everyone else is welcome to come on over and squabble over the scraps.
Prompted by the skewed gender representation of a recent survey of science blogs, Zuska asks why there are no great women science bloggers. That’s an ironic question, of course: there are great women science bloggers, but there is a strange blindness to their contributions, just as they are neglected in the greater blogosphere, and in science, and in politics, and in everything other than raising babies and making attractive centerpieces for the family dinner table, etc. It’s a curious phenomenon that we have to try consciously to rise above, an effort hampered by the fact that there seem to be a lot of people who want to argue that you aren’t allowed to make a special effort to avoid gender bias — it’s apparently “unfair” to try to overcome a history of unfairness.
