Note to self: don’t go easy on ’em

I see that Matt Nisbet has organized a panel for the AAAS meetings, in which he has picked a squad of people sympathetic to religion to ‘argue’ that “scientists must adopt a language that emphasizes shared values and has broad appeal, avoiding the pitfall of seeming to condescend to fellow citizens, or alienating them by attacking their religious beliefs”, and he doesn’t have a single person on the panel that might actually challenge them on that recommendation to muzzle the godless. He’s also presenting a paper on “The New Atheism and the Public Image of Science,” and we all know precisely how competent he is on that topic. Unless you’re one of those god-soaked apologists who welcomes a chance to nod approvingly at yet more whining about bad ol’ atheists, that session sounds like a real snooze. We already know what they’re going to conclude.

Remind me to show no mercy.

I’ll give this a shot…

I am currently taking the neurobiology course offered by Dr. Myers, and being as this is my first blog entry on his site, I will give a little introduction about my interest in neurobiology and why I am taking this class.
To begin, I will say that I really do not know much about neurobiology. I know the basic idea: that the brain is responsible for transmitting signals that tell the rest of the body what to do. What I would like to learn more about is the act of signal transduction, specifically the propagation of the action potential down the axon and the role of the sodium-potassium pump. This pump is involved in membrane potential and depolarization, and is also linked to HYPP, or hyperkalemic periodic paralysis. In this disorder, muscle attacks or paralysis occur due to elevated levels of potassium in the bloodstream. I wish to know more about this disorder, and I hope that learning more about neurobiology will help me to accomplish that.
I also hope that Dr. Myers’ experiment will toughen up my skin a bit.

Deranged creationists: here are your instructions

Oh, that little scamp, Billy Dembski. He’s all upset about his shabby treatment at Baylor, and he’s displacing his anger into a defense of Robert Marks.

President John Lilley of Baylor appears to have made up his mind that Prof. Robert Marks’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab is to have no place at Baylor. There is only one court of appeal now, the Baylor Board of Regents, who can reverse Lilley’s decision and even remove Lilley as president. Here is the list of board members. I encourage readers of UD to contact them (respectfully) and share their concerns about this gross violation of academic freedom.

One amusing bit of background, though: the Evolutionary Informatics Lab didn’t exist. It was a web page, nothing more, so it’s a little strange to complain that it doesn’t have a place at Baylor. What’s actually been refused is that the Evolutionary Informatics Lab doesn’t get to pretend that it’s a Baylor initiative. It’s a bit excessive for Baylor to refuse to host a faculty member’s wacky web page, but there’s nothing to stop them from putting it up on, say, the DI’s servers. It’ll be just as effective there as anywhere. Or, hey, does geocities still exist and offer free hosting?

The other thing, though, is that Dembski then goes on to list all the members of the board of regents, including home phone numbers and addresses. I guess Dembski responds to the fact that he has been Expelled with Intimidation and Incitement, which must be the next two movies in the creationist trilogy.

Oh, and no more links from me to UD while Dembski has his hit list online.

About student posts appearing here

I expected that my students would get a little trial by fire in the furious life of the public intellectual, and the commenters here certainly provided that. Maybe a little too much of that. Dial the ferocity back a notch, OK? Constructive criticisms are greatly appreciated, but the nasty stuff is not. I suppose it’s useful in the sense that it’s going to toughen up the students, but it doesn’t reflect well on you. One thing I’ll be doing in class next week is making up some lists and handing them out in class: a list of the jerks (“You can ignore these commenters, they’re wasting your time”) and a list of the good people (“These commenters say useful stuff, pay attention to them”). That’s right, we’ll be talking smack about you.

Here are some other clarifications and concerns.

[Read more…]

An Introduction

To be quite honest, I’ve never written for a blog before. That seems as good of a sentence as any to start off with. Each week my fellow neurobiology students and I will be writing about something to what we’re studying in class. We may write thoughts on our discussions of the non-fiction books we’re reading, or perhaps things in our everyday lives that pertain to neurobiology that we may not have noticed before. The only instructions we’ve been given are to have fun writing about anything that relates to neurobiology.

Backtracking a bit, I’m a college sophomore majoring in chemistry and biology. The reason I’m taking neurobiology is that I would like to learn more about the biophysics behind nervous systems. So far our neurobiology class is very interesting and enjoyable. I hope that everyone enjoys reading and/or critiquing our compositions over the next few months.

Bring back the OTA

Mark Hoofnagle is urging everyone to get behind a simple, non-partisan goal that would greatly benefit science policy: bring back the Office of Technology Assessment.

It used to be, for about 30 years (from 1974 to 1995), there was an office on the Hill, named the Office of Technology Assessment, which worked for the legislative branch and provided non-partisan scientific reports relevant to policy discussions. It was a critical office, one that through thorough and complete analysis of the scientific literature gave politicians common facts from which to decide policy debates. In 1994, with the new Republican congress, the office was eliminated for the sake of budget cuts, but the cost in terms of damage to the quality of scientific debate on policy has been incalculable. Chris Mooney described it as Congress engaging in “a stunning act of self-lobotomy” in his book the Republican War on Science.

Spread the word. Build a drumbeat of support for this idea in the blogs. Write to your congresspeople. Write op-eds for your newspaper. It’s a simple idea that everyone should agree on: we want our government to be well-informed and to be able to make decisions based on evidence, and having an advisory office dedicated to providing information from the scientific community would be a real boon.

New kid on the block

Hello! I’m a student of Dr. Myers here at the lovely University of Minnesota Morris and will be blogging weekly for the next few months about whatever I find or dream up that relates to Neurobiology.

This week I suppose the most interesting finding I have comes from 89.3 “The Current,” an off-branch of the popular MPR radio station. There is a program called “Radio Lab,” in which a couple show hosts review scientific work done in broad categories while they converse and explore the work of scientists who actually did the research. One of the categories for the week was on sleep; why do we need it? What does it really do? The show hosts revealed that very little research has been done in this field (despite its necessity to all living things) except for Dr. Allan Pack, a biologist at the University of Pensylvania.

Pack has been looking at sleep from a cellular level and has found some interesting activity with proteins in cells inside the brain. He found that when we don’t sleep, proteins fold irregularly and lose much of their primary functions. However, when we sleep, the proteins are unfolded and allowed to work normally. Even more intruiging is that the folding of these proteins might be correlated to memory. For instance, when you memorize or think about a difficult math problem or guitar riff, you fold proteins. But that means that when you look at the grass and use your brain to determine the grass’s color and shape you are folding proteins as well.

When we sleep this unfolding of proteins allows some of the garbage memory, such as shape and color of grass, to be disposed of in the unfolding of proteins, which also amplifies the things we truly scrutinized all day on such as the math problems or guitar riff as these proteins are left folded. This may be why when you’re studying one day on a tough problem and can’t quite get it but go to bed and look at it again the next, the problem sometimes comes much easier. I thought that this was a cool idea, and well worth looking into.

If anyone finds any of this interesting and does some further (or actual) research on the topic, you should respond and we can exchange ideas. But untill that day, take it easy and God bless.
~Bright Lights