There is a grossly dishonest graph of climate change effects going around — it attempts to minimize temperature changes and uncouple CO2 from the effects. Fortunately, RealClimate does a good job of tearing it apart, all neatly summarized here:
New pictures of the surface of Mars, taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. They’re interesting — what looks like water eroded canyons, very familiar, and exotically odd things like cones of snow produced by windblown eruptions of geysers.
Last night, they tried to turn conservation into a Japanese game show, with a ‘documentary’ about a scientist being swallowed alive…for Science!. I didn’t watch it — I was grading papers, as I will be doing 25 hours a day for the next two weeks, I think — but the reviews are scathing.
Also, master of molluscan anatomy, and clever tool user. This paper, Homo erectus at Trinil on Java used shells for tool production and engraving, by Joordens et al. tells an interesting story from some mundane artifacts made half a million years ago.
An interesting post on The Trouble with Jim Watson. Watson and biology are victims of a successful paradigm — you could still argue that that paradigm is partly Watson’s fault! — and you can’t really kick Watson unless you also take a few swings at how molecular genetics has produced a skewed, simplistic, and deterministic view of how life operates.
The trouble with Watson, then, is not how aberrant he is, but how conventional. He is no more—but no less—than an embodiment of late twentieth-century biomedicine. He exemplifies how a near-exclusive focus on the genetic basis of human behavior and social problems tends to sclerose them into a biologically determinist status quo. How that process occurs seems to me eminently worth observing and thinking about. Watson is an enigmatic character. He has managed his image carefully, if not always shrewdly. It is impossible to know what he “really thinks” on most issues, but I do believe this much: he believes that his main sin has been excessive honesty. He thinks he is simply saying what most people are afraid to say.
Unfortunately, he may be right.
He keeps saying the same ol’ debunked crap over and over again, and nowadays when a paper comes out that shows he was completely wrong about something, he spins it into a triumphant vindication for his sycophantic fans, who are all, apparently, abysmally innumerate. The hobby horse he’s been riding for the past few years is the evolution of chloroquine resistance in the malaria parasite: he claims it is mathematically impossible. And that’s the secret of his success: he dazzles creationists with bad math. Really bad math. The kind of math creationists have been fallaciously using for decades.
Ken Miller has a tidy new article exposing Behe’s ridiculous rationalizations.
A few years ago, we had swarms of new students all wanting to go into forensic science entering our biology program — TV had made the field look cool and sexy and exciting. The flood is ebbing now, fortunately, but I still have to wonder if the effects of the fad aren’t still being felt.
Why, oh why, do EP’s defenders rely on throwing up armies of straw men to slaughter? It’s silly. Here’s how he starts:
There are some science-friendly folk (including atheists) who simply dismiss the entire field of evolutionary psychology in humans, saying that its theoretical foundations are weak or nonexistent. I’ve always replied that that claim is bunk, for its “theoretical foundations” are simply the claim that our brains and behaviors, like our bodies, show features reflecting evolution in our ancestors.
