That’s always the case. It seems a potential scandal is roiling the UK right now, with the revelation that Prince Andrew may have been led into unseemly behavior. Or, rather than “led”, ran eagerly into it. Tsk.
Buckingham Palace has resisted growing pressure to explain Prince Andrew’s association with convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, whom the royal is believed to have met on numerous occasions, including on his private jet, yacht and in stays at his New York and Florida mansions.
Since I bashed that absurd article on evolution on Salon, it’s only fair that I mention that they’ve also published a good one: The destruction of creationism: How the search for the beginning of time sparked a scientific revolution. It’s by Martin J.S. Rudwick, and I adore Rudwick’s books — he writes about 19th century geology, and how the scientists of the day struggled with the evidence to develop our modern understanding of geologic time. Gripping stuff, if you’re a nerd.
This article is all about old-time theologians grappling with the idea of a pre-Adamite history of the Earth, which is the beginning of what will eventually kill creationism as scientifically viable. Once you start asking questions of the book, and you start looking at other sources to, say, merely clarify ambiguities, you’re doomed — you’re going to have to start considering new evidence, and pretty soon the splendorously isolated purity of your source text is corrupted.
Dan Graur has written a good summary of genetic load. It’s an important concept in population genetics, and everyone should be familiar with it…and this is a nice 2½ page summary with only a little math in it.
I’ll try to summarize the summary in two paragraphs and even less math … but you should read the whole thing.
(via HMMI)
That paper that proposed that most cancers were due to bad luck, that is, that they were a consequence of biological factors that could not be controlled, has been surprisingly controversial. I thought it was a fairly unsurprising paper that confirmed what we already suspected, but wow, the furious pushback has been something to behold.
Today, though, a couple of MDs have responded to the paper and reinforce what I said.
We did a podcast together, and now you can listen to it! I recall that we talked a lot about the problems and necessity of animal research, so if that’s your thing, you might find it interesting.
Mike Huckabee is considering a presidential run in 2016. While your brain is reeling at that possibility, here’s a Huckabee-Nugent duet on Cat Scratch Fever.
Oh, look. The creationists have been routed, and the problem of the origin of life has been solved. Would you like to learn about the brilliant new science that has creationists and the Christian right terrified?
The Christian right’s obsessive hatred of Darwin is a wonder to behold, but it could someday be rivaled by the hatred of someone you’ve probably never even heard of. Darwin earned their hatred because he explained the evolution of life in a way that doesn’t require the hand of God. Darwin didn’t exclude God, of course, though many creationists seem incapable of grasping this point. But he didn’t require God, either, and that was enough to drive some people mad.
Darwin also didn’t have anything to say about how life got started in the first place — which still leaves a mighty big role for God to play, for those who are so inclined. But that could be about to change, and things could get a whole lot worse for creationists because of Jeremy England, a young MIT professor who’s proposed a theory, based in thermodynamics, showing that the emergence of life was not accidental, but necessary. “[U]nder certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life,” he was quoted as saying in an article in Quanta magazine early in 2014, that’s since been republished by Scientific American and, more recently, by Business Insider. In essence, he’s saying, life itself evolved out of simpler non-living systems.
