The Neanderthals are an interesting species though unfairly treated. They are frequently portrayed as knuckle-dragging idiots, serving as a metaphor for people with retrograde views, especially with respect to gender and sexuality, though there is no reason to think that they were any worse than the ancestors of our own species at that time. [Read more…]
I have been writing about the problems of misconduct in research with academics having to resign as a result of misconduct. [Read more…]
[Sorry about the confusion about the posts! I accidentally posted the text of one post under the heading of the other!]
The comments on last week’s post on some students protesting the new nutritious food guidelines for school lunches were quite lively. So I went back and tried to find some data to see if that might clarify the situation. [Read more…]
[Sorry about the confusion about the posts! I accidentally posted the text of one post under the heading of the other!]
So I ended up watching the first debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.
I thought the format was much better than previous ones that I have seen. It allowed for much freer exchanges between the candidates and more time for direct exchanges and thus was more like a real debate. In the process, both speakers ended up running rough-shod over the moderator Jim Lehrer and some may accuse him of having lost control. But that was better than in some ‘debates’ from years past when the moderator acted like a circus ring master cracking the whip at the candidates. The less we see and hear of the moderator the better. [Read more…]
As I said earlier, journalists will use every device to persuade us that elections are closer than they are, in order to keep interest high. One of the things they do is to assert that if the difference between the predicted votes for two candidates is smaller than the margin of error of the poll, then the two candidates are in a statistical tie. This gives the impression that it is a toss-up, i.e., 50-50 chance, as to who is ahead. This is simply not true and worth reiterating during the election season, like I did back in 2008 around this time. [Read more…]
Religious people (at least the sophisticated ones) have abandoned trying to argue as evidence that god provides explanations for how things work. They have realized that this is a losing strategy as science has made god redundant as an explanation for anything, and that signs of god’s power seem to show a notable inverse correlation to the advance of science. [Read more…]
One of the most beautiful experiments in evolutionary biology is the one by Michigan State University’s Richard Lenski and his team, most recently Zachary Blount, who started out in 1988 with a single strain of E. Coli bacteria, separated it into twelve genetically identical lines, and then did experiments on them to see how each strand evolved. By now 55,000 generations have occurred, a crucial fact since in evolution it is the number of generations that is the appropriate measure of time, not years. [Read more…]
Science journalism plays an extremely important role in translating the almost impenetrable jargon and style of journal articles into languagethat can be digested by the general public. Hence it is important that they convey accurately and in a balanced way the main conclusions of the research. But in order to make their work appealing to the general public, scientists make often make passing claims in their papers that are not as well supported by their data but catch the eye of journalists who then give them undue weight. Seth Mnookin has pointed out recent examples where this practice has caused widespread public misunderstanding of the results of research. [Read more…]
The fictional detective Sherlock Holmes is notoriously rude, egotistical, inconsiderate, and insensitive to the needs and feelings of those around him, even those who are closest such as Dr. Watson. Does that make him a sociopath? Or even a psychopath? [Read more…]