Brian Dunning’s done some sketchy shit, and he was sentenced to 15 months in prison for it. If you want to know more about that, Rebecca Watson’s scathing rebuke (and links within) is a good starting point. Nevertheless, I still listen to Skeptoid, and I think this new project sounds promising enough that I chipped in ten bucks:
Looking closely you can see the individual chloroplasts inside these Pandorina Morum colonies! Credit: Linden Gledhill pic.twitter.com/fk7LMdtneO
— Olympus Life Science (@OlympusLifeSci) November 29, 2017
Hexagenia limbata, Flathead Lake, Polson, MT, July 2, 2016.
S. Lidgard & L. K. Nyhart, eds. 2017, Biological Individuality: Integrating Scientific, Philosophical, and Historical Perspectives. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Pierrick Bourrat has reviewed Scott Lidgard and Lynn Nyhart’s book Biological Individuality: Integrating Scientific, Philosophical, and Historical Perspectives for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
I’m looking forward to the next installment:
— warrior cop (@wyatt_privilege) November 15, 2017
Volvox is a popular name. Add to the list of non-Chlorophyte uses Atelier Volvox (“Volvox Workshop”), a design studio in Switzerland. They seem to sell mainly accents and small furniture, such as Brüderchen:
Donald Trump’s accusations of ‘fake news’ aren’t just disingenuous, they’re cowardly. Some of those accusations are specific, and those are usually smacked down, hard:
fact-checked as false repeatedly since 2016 –> https://t.co/eBaBgK3xmF https://t.co/HA3jP58qZl
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) October 19, 2017
Those aren’t the ones I’m talking about. At least, in those cases, he’s making a claim that can be fact-checked. More often, it’s just poisoning the well against (essentially all) legitimate news organizations:
Somebody with aptitude and conviction should buy the FAKE NEWS and failing @nytimes and either run it correctly or let it fold with dignity!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2017
By Ernst Haeckel – Kunstformen der Natur (1904), plate 17: Siphonophorae (see here, here and here), Public Domain, Link
Derek Skillings from University of Bordeaux/CNRS has a new article at Aeon about biological individuality:
For millennia, naturalists and philosophers have struggled to define the most fundamental units of living systems and to delimit the precise boundaries of the organisms that inhabit our planet. This difficulty is partly a product of the search for a singular theory that can be used to carve up all of the living world at its joints.
Skillings reviews the deep historical roots of the question, touching on the views of Charles Darwin and his grandfather, both Huxleys (T. H. and Julian), Herbert Spencer, and other 19th and early 20th century thinkers, as well as some more recent authors, including Daniel Janzen and Peter Godfrey Smith.
Local elections matter.
Just because the Presidency isn’t up for grabs this year doesn’t mean you shouldn’t vote. Here in Atlanta, we’re electing a new mayor, several city council members, board of education members, and county commissioners. The mayoral race is national news.
I like PLoS ONE. I know a lot of scientists don’t. I think there’s a niche for what my PhD advisor called ‘bricks’: papers that may not be groundbreaking, but present rigorous results that contribute to building a larger structure (he was, BTW, describing one of my papers, and it wasn’t a compliment). It’s also possible that research that may not be obviously important when it’s done turns out to have big implications that weren’t at first obvious. PLoS ONE explicitly aims to ignore the ‘impact’ of a paper in accepting or rejecting papers, focusing only on the rigor of the results:
PLOS ONE will rigorously peer-review your submissions and publish all papers that are judged to be technically sound. Judgments about the importance of any particular paper are then made after publication by the readership, who are the most qualified to determine what is of interest to them.
But a couple of recent developments are worrying. First, as I’ve previously written, a recent article reporting a phylogenetic tree for eukaryotes was published in a form that never should have survived peer review (“A cautionary tale on reading phylogenetic trees,” “PLoS ONE responds“). The article contains numerous misinterpretations of the tree, unexplained contradictions in the inferred divergence times, and, most importantly, a choice of outgroup that pretty much invalidates all of the phylogenetic inferences.
I have contacted the editors by Twitter and by email, and so far I haven’t gotten much more than “we’re looking into it.” I am very interested to see what the journal does about this, because, as I said before,
The only thing that separates a high-volume, open access journal like PLoS ONE from the dark underbelly of scholarly publishing is a rigorous peer review process.
Now there’s a whole new reason to worry.
Okay, that line above is exactly how far I got before reading the paper I’m about to write about. I’m leaving it in as a caution against rushing to judgement.