You do not have to go to exotic places like Charles Darwin did to find evidence for evolution. In an article titled Evolution right under our noses, Carl Zimmer says that Manhattan and its surrounding areas are rich in examples, such as mice responding to urban stress, fish in the Hudson river responding to pollution by becoming resistant to PCBs, worms becoming resistant to cadmium, and so on. [Read more…]
Some years ago, I attended a seminar at our university on the ethics of genetic engineering. The panel of experts spoke about the new ability to modify the genes of people with genetic disorders in order to remove the cause of their ailments. Even when they successfully cured the child of an inherited disease, the treatment did not prevent the child from passing on the defective gene to their offspring. [Read more…]
I have been hammering away at cases of cheating in science, trying to make them more widely known. I feel that this is a really important issue for a crucial reason. [Read more…]
It is one thing that we have in the US a one-party state that serves the interests of the oligarchy, with the Republican and Democratic parties being two factions, with the Democrats projecting the kinder, gentler face. [Read more…]
I am in Washington DC and today is a nice sunny day. This city was largely spared as Hurricane Sandy seems to have gone slightly north of here, hitting severely New Jersey and New York. [Read more…]
Peer review is an important part of the academic publication process. All scholarly articles undergo peer review from at least one other person familiar with the field (plus an editor of the journal), although two is the more common number of reviewers, and sometimes may be more if there is disagreement amongst the reviewers or a strong appeal from the author of a rejected paper. [Read more…]
Some time ago, I discussed the question of whether Sherlock Holmes could be classed as a psychopath based on his behavior in the stories. In pursuing this question a little more, I came across an article in the Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders that elaborated on how psychopathy manifests itself. [Read more…]
As Halloween approaches, parents will take the usual precautions to prevent their children from being harmed by dangerous psychopaths who they fear will try to use the treats as vehicles for their attacks. But all that fear is based on myths. [Read more…]
In an earlier post yesterday, I mentioned the ‘house effect’ of polls. These are the size of the effects that a given polling outfit produces in favor of one or the other party. They are not necessarily biases in the sense of the polling firm deliberately distorting the results. It is often the result of methodologies that produce different effects such as sampling only likely voters vs registered voters, cell phones vs. landlines, robocalls vs. human calls, weighting by party affiliation, etc. Simon Jackman has an article explaining it in more detail. [Read more…]