That Stephen Hawking guy is saying that we need to get colonies out there in space to preserve the human race. I’m a space opera fan, I think space exploration is a worthy endeavor, but I have to admit that watching Chris Clarke whomp on Hawking is very entertaining, and I agree. Hawking has it all wrong.
Friday, at 3:15 ET, on NPR’s Science Friday…it’s Mooney vs. Bethell. Bethell doesn’t stand a chance.
Seed has an interview with Joan Roughgarden, somewhat controversial evolutionary biologist and author of Evolution’s Rainbow : Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Here’s the short summary of her basic thesis:
Joan Roughgarden thinks Charles Darwin made a terrible mistake. Not about natural selection–she’s no bible-toting creationist—but about his other great theory of evolution: sexual selection. According to Roughgarden, sexual selection can’t explain the homosexuality that’s been documented in over 450 different vertebrate species. This means that same-sex sexuality—long disparaged as a quirk of human culture—is a normal, and probably necessary, fact of life. By neglecting all those gay animals, she says, Darwin misunderstood the basic nature of heterosexuality.
Roughgarden is an awkward case that provokes a difficult split in people’s opinions. She is 100% right that homosexuality is common and that its prevalence ought to be regarded more seriously as an indication of an interesting and enlightening phenomenon in evolution. However, she’s completely wrong in rejecting sexual selection: in rejecting a simplistically heterosexual view of nature she swings too far the other way, adopting a simplistically homosexual view instead of a messy, complex, and almost certainly more correct mixed view. She’s rather superficial in her treatment of Darwin. And most annoyingly, she has a bad habit of playing the transgender card and accusing her critics of disagreeing with her because of some LGBT bias.
The young partisan hack appointed to NASA, who took it upon himself to filter the science a little bit to suit right-wing biases? It seems he was a demonstrably bad boy.
I wonder what ever happened that unqualified creep? I know he resigned from NASA, I’m just wondering if he has now fallen upward to a Republican think-tank or something, the usual wingnut reward for incompetence.
Not all the email I get is from cranks and creationist loons. Sometimes I get sincere questions. In today’s edition of “Ask Mr Science Guy!”, Hank Fox asks,
I was thinking recently about the fact that wax collects in one’s ears, and suddenly thought to be amazed that some part of the HUMAN body produces actual WAX. Weird. Like having something like honeybee cells in your ear.
And then I started to think about what sorts of other … exudates the human exterior produces. Mucus, possibly several different types (does the nose itself produce more than one type?). Oils, possibly several different types. That something-or-other that hardens into your fingernails. Saliva, if you wanted to count our frequently-open mouth as sort-of exterior. What else?
To continue a bit of theme, I mentioned that there were some different ways to approach biology, and that old-school systematists with their breadth of knowledge about the diversity of life are getting harder and harder to find. This is something I also bring up in my introductory biology course, where we discuss how biologists do their work, and I mention that one distinction you can find (which is really a continuum and frequently breached) is that there are bench scientists and field scientists, and they differ in multiple ways. Bench scientists tend to be strongly reductionist, tend to focus on one or very few species, and may study just one specific, highly inbred lab strain of a species, and try to minimize environmental variables. Variation is noise that interferes with getting at basic mechanisms. Field scientists, on the other hand, argue that the simplicity of the lab is unrealistic, that the proper study of organisms has to be done in the messy complexity of the real world, and think that variation, rather than being uninteresting noise, is fascinating stuff, the meat and potatoes of evolution. Both points of view have their place, and speaking for all biologists, I think we appreciate the power and necessity of both approaches. The money seems to mostly go to the bench guys, though, which does unfortunately skew the field as a whole.
Ah, the libertarian extremists have found my site and are making comments. It’s a peculiar pathology that thinks environmentalism is an evil plot, that planning is communism/socialism, and that Jesus was a good capitalist. It is particularly irksome to try and deal with people who are so far gone that they deny science warning them of environmental dangers and impending problems.
How irksome? Imagine that a scientist and one of these deranged libertarian right-wing anti-environmentalist science deniers go out for a drive one day…
Here’s more or less what I said at the YearlyKos panel today, assembled from my notes and with all the “ummms” removed. It’s very general, but hey, what can you do in ten minutes? Next time they should give me 30 minutes and I’ll flash up some genes and copulating squid and splutter out more blasphemy.
Hey, everyone! The new ScienceBlogs main page has been launched, and the Seed nerd-kings have added a whole new crop of blogs here. Take a browse, you might discover some new favorites.
After the recent struggles trying to keep up with the traffic on this site, you wouldn’t think I’d feel compelled to go trolling for more visitors, but isn’t that the nature of weblogging? The only point to it all is to rack up a bigger score than the next guy, as if we were playing pinball. So what’s a good ploy? As Lauren has cleverly pointed out, sex sells. And while it may be estrogen week, I’m going to buck the trend, since we all know what’s really important for weblog popularity: penises.
