Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Gosh, @UMMorris ought to just plaster this article by Loretta Jackson-Hayes everywhere, mailing it out to the parents of prospective students. We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training, she says. Yes, we do. I agree with every point she makes. Well, except maybe the part where she mentions Carly Fiorina as a good example. But the rest…
Our culture has drawn an artificial line between art and science, one that did not exist for innovators like Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs. Leonardo’s curiosity and passion for painting, writing, engineering and biology helped him triumph in both art and science; his study of anatomy and dissections of corpses enabled his incredible drawings of the human figure. When introducing the iPad 2, Jobs, who dropped out of college but continued to audit calligraphy classes, declared: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.” (Indeed, one of Apple’s scientists, Steve Perlman, was inspired to invent the QuickTime multimedia program by an episode of “Star Trek.”)
Many in government and business publicly question the value of such an education. Yet employers in every sector continue to scoop up my students because of their ability to apply cross-disciplinary thinking to an incredibly complex world. They like my chemistry grads because not only can they find their way around a laboratory, but they’re also nimble thinkers who know to consider chemistry’s impact on society and the environment. Some medical schools have also caught on to this. The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine has been admitting an increasing number of applicants with backgrounds in the humanities for the past 20 years. “It doesn’t make you a better doctor to know how fast a mass falls from a tree,” Gail Morris, head of the school’s admissions, told Newsweek. “We need whole people.”
By all means, let’s grow our STEM graduates as aggressively as possible. But let’s make sure they also have that all-important grounding in the liberal arts. We can have both.
Now we just have to persuade the non-STEM side of campus that grounding their students in a little more science and math would be a good thing, and we can take over the world.
This is an interesting comparison from David Hillis.
I still see a lot of Ego in the Eco diagram, since humans are the only species (out of 1.8 million species that have been described on Earth) that are represented twice, and over half of the species shown in that diagram are vertebrates like us (even though only about 5% of all described species are vertebrates). I made this version to emphasize that there is a lot of biodiversity on Earth, and all species are connected through our evolutionary history to single common ancestor. The tree shown under “EVO” represents species approximately in proportion to their described diversity, and the circular shape emphasizes that we are all equally distant from our common ancestor.
The EGO diagram is a somewhat accurate illustration of one common perspective that places humans, and especially male humans, at the top of a hierarchy…although I don’t think most people would place whales so high. Cats and dogs would be somewhere just below Noble Man, but distant animals that are rarely seen in day-to-day life wouldn’t rank so highly.
The ECO diagram is a step in the right direction, but as Hillis points out, it’s still grossly vertebrate-centric. But then, the ecologists I know wouldn’t favor that diagram, either — they’d stock it with trees and grasses and insects and bacteria and fungi.
The EVO diagram is the best of them all, but has the problem that it’s also the least easily understood and the most complicated. But then if you reduced it to a smaller number of branches to make it more graphically appealing, you’d have to choose where to prune, and unfortunately for us humans, we wouldn’t be represented at all on a fair and simplified illustration of biodiversity.
No restraint or decorum, they just go at it out there in public. It’s good to be the squid.
Once again, Bill Maher (and his science expert, David Duchovny) went off on a tirade against vaccination on his show, full of ignorance and stupidity and lies. Time to read Orac some more.
Bill Maher and his apologists frequently gasp in indignation whenever someone like myself or other skeptics call him antivaccine. Unfortunately, as I showed last week, antivaccine tropes fly fast and furious out of his mouth. His misleading claim about the lack of vaccinated/unvaccinated studies is not only misleading, but objectively not not true. It simply isn’t. Also, whenever antivaccine organizations try to do such studies themselves, inevitably they’re utterly worthless and/or actually show the exact opposite of what antivaccinationists had hoped. When vaccinated/unvaccinated studies are planned, they are actually attacked by antivaccine groups because these groups know that the studies won’t show what they hope they’ll show.
Yes, the claim that there’s never been a “vaccinated/unvaccinated” study is an antivaccine trope, tried and true. What Maher said about it would have been perfectly at home on the websites of antivaccine groups, such as Age of Autism, SafeMinds, VaxTruth, and the National Vaccine Information Center. Ditto his analogies about the immune system “needing a workout” by combatting “real disease,” an analogy so breathtakingly ignorant of actual immunology and infectious disease that Maher should really just hang his head in shame.
Maher has zero credibility with me.
Uncommon Descent linked to my criticisms of the Biology of the Baroque
, Intelligent Design creationism’s latest misconception, that biologists believe every detail of every organism is the product of natural selection…but they didn’t bother to quote any of my criticisms. It’s weird. They could have quoted the gist of my complaint:
So evolution should produce only the biological equivalent of sterile gray Soviet architecture, and if you find something that is the equivalent of a Baroque church, then evolution is refuted. This entire argument is built around what Michael Denton calls the fundamental assumption of Darwinism…that all novelties are adaptive. To which biologists around the world can only say, “Fu…wha?” in total confusion. That is not one of our assumptions at all. Novelties are going to arise as a product of chance mutation; if they are not maladaptive (and sometimes even if they are), they can spread through a population by chance-driven processes like drift. And some elaborate fripperies can acquire a selective advantage, like that example of Soviet architecture, the peacock’s tail, which this video actually uses as an example of non-adaptive order.
I have many peeves, but one of them is this: the near-permanent state of anxiety some people have about fertility. Not just their personal fertility (anxieties about too much or too little of that are reasonable), but cultural fertility. We are apparently doomed if not enough of the right people, and by that they usually mean us white people, have enough babies. My annoyance is prompted by this post, in which a man-baby predicts the end of the Western world, because feminists don’t have enough children.
If you watch the Discovery Institute, you’ll discover they’re constantly playing games, trying to find that winning PR technique that will persuade the hapless ignorati. Some of them are effective, even if dishonest: “irreducible complexity” injected all kinds of misleading chaos into the brains of their followers, and “teach the controversy” was a potent slogan. They’ve been flailing about in recent years, trying to emphasize their pretense of scholarliness with tripe like West’s efforts to use pseudohistory to blame Darwin for Hitler, or Meyer’s farcical, long-winded distortions of modern biology in Signature in the Cell. Those haven’t worked so well.
The one thing that is always a constant, that has been true of everything the Discovery Institute has ever done, is that they don’t have any new ideas to offer, and everything is focused on being anti-evolution, or as they call it, anti-“Darwinism”. I really think that one of their big problems is that they’re actually anti-something-they-don’t-understand-at-all, so all their efforts fall flat. They especially fall flat with real biologists, who are gobsmacked that anyone would seriously say this crap.
There are two phrases that should compel you to immediately grab an item and throw it in the garbage. If you see them in the store, turn away; warn other people that they are a waste of time.
The two magic phrases: “detox” and “fat burner”. There are others, as well; “cleanse” comes to mind when it’s on a box of something you consume, rather than scrub dirty things with.
I just had to deliver this warning after reading this story about a man who lost his liver due to a reaction with an herbal weight loss supplement. That is a rare reaction, so I don’t consider that cause to reject a medication; well-tested, useful medications also have a degree of risk. A good reason to be suspicious of such “supplements” is that they are not well-tested or useful — “fat burner” or “fat blaster” is meaningless noise suitable for snake oil salesmen like Dr Oz, and “detox” or “cleanse” products don’t actually do either. That’s not how biology works!
Just on general principles, run away from things with lying advertisements splattered all over them. All you’re getting is the risk and none of the benefit.
The Seattle aquarium isn’t playing the matchmaking game with their octopuses anymore, for a chilling reason: they’re afraid that a date might turn into a public cannibal orgy.
I don’t recall that peril from my youth, back when I was actively dating. I’m lucky to have escaped Seattle alive!
