We won’t have Dianne Mandernach to kick around anymore

Our Minnesota Health Commissioner, a Republican appointee who was supported by our Republican governor through a number of startlingly clueless incidents, has finally resigned. Here’s a short summary of her career:

This summer, Mandernach was criticized over her suppression of a state study about 35 cancer deaths related to taconite mining on Minnesota’s Iron Range.

In 2004, her credibility suffered when a website posting by the department suggested that abortion might have a role in breast cancer. Critics denounced those claims as junk science, and the wording was removed from the website.

So she hid real cancer risks and promoted fake cancer risks. She got it wrong coming and going! How could that be? Could it be…ignorance and arrogance?

Marty said his misgivings began about a year after her appointment, when Mandernach was forced to remove the wording on the website that claimed a link between abortion and breast cancer.

“She told me it was her judgment to override all of the scientific information at the time,” Marty said.

What were the qualifications of this paragon to override scientific evidence? She was “a former nun and teacher, was chief executive of the Mercy Hospital & Health Care Center in Moose Lake”. Doesn’t that fill you with confidence?

I think I know what’s going to be featured in Expelled

I’ve been trying to recollect what horrible thing I said in that interview with that film crew … what juicy, ghastly, evil comment I might have made that will be plucked out and impaled on a stick and waved to the audience to inflame them. It’s a waste of time, of course — I tend to be far too mellow in person, despite occasional brief declamations that religion is crap, and they’re going to have to strain a bit to find anything sufficiently inciteful.

And then I remembered — the interviewer was mildly obsessed with one thing that he brought up several times. It was a quote from this interview, otherwise most memorable for the way that kook John A. Davison turned the comment thread into a maelstrom of inanity.

[Read more…]

Another year, another collection of dreck from AiG

Last year, Answers in Genesis ran an essay contest for young creationists — the prize was a $50,000 scholarship to Liberty University (second prize must have been a $100,000 scholarship). Well, they ran it again this year, and the ‘winners’ have been announced, and a sorry lot of recitations of bogus creationist talking points they are. Evolution turns people into immoral killers! Darwinism leads people to abortion and Hitler! Cells are full of little machines created by Jesus! It’s really sad to see young people led down the path of stupidity like that.

If you really must read them, you can … but Zeno has read and summarized them so you don’t have to. Maybe I should read them more myself — since a new semester is beginning next week, they’d recalibrate my brain to have lower expectations, and all of my freshmen students will be brilliant, literate geniuses by comparison.

Nah, I don’t have to. They already are, and I know it.

Atheist fires a shot across scientists’ bows

Sam Harris has a letter in Nature today, urging scientists to unite against religion — even the moderate religion that so many are willing to support.

But here is Collins on how he, as a scientist, finally became convinced of the divinity of Jesus Christ: “On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains… the majesty and beauty of God’s creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ.”

What does the “mode of thought” displayed by Collins have in common with science? The Language of God should have sparked gasping outrage from the editors at Nature. Instead, they deemed Collins’s efforts “moving” and “laudable”, commending him for building a “bridge across the social and intellectual divide that exists between most of US academia and the so-called heartlands.”

He seems to feel the same way about Collins that I do.

Clearly, bloggers need to take over science journalism

Aaargh. When will the media learn? National Geographic is running this ridiculous headline right now: New Fossil Ape May Shatter Human Evolution Theory, in which the reporter claims a discovery of some teeth could “demolish a working theory of human evolution.” It’s not true. Where is this nonsense coming from?

I read the article. It’s titled “A new species of great ape from the late Miocene epoch in Ethiopia.” The exciting news is that the “combined evidence suggests that Chororapithecus may be a basal member of the gorilla clade, and that the latter exhibited some amount of adaptive and phyletic diversity at around 10-11 Myr ago.” It concludes with a suggestion that we need to do more research in sediments appropriate to Miocene apes. There aren’t an exploding paradigms or revolutions suggested.

I read the associated news article in Nature. It’s titled “Oldest gorilla ages our joint ancestor.” It says that this discovery pushes back the time of divergence of the gorilla lineage from our own. This is just ordinary science.

Now read the blogs — they’re doing a much better job of evaluating this work than the traditional media. For one thing, they’re actually looking at it critically. Afarensis points out that these are only a few teeth, and it’s awfully thin grounds for a substantial revision of the timeline. John Hawks makes a similar point, but also highlights the fact that there is an unresolved problem — we need to reconcile paleontological and molecular dates. Even John Wilkins, a “mere” philosopher, weighs in sensibly that teeth are plastic characters in phylogeny, and deplores this peculiar media habit of taking a recalibration of a historical detail as a major reformulation of theory. All these discussions are sober and interested and most important of all, accurate.

The lesson is clear: when you see some wild and crazy claim of scientific revolutions and the demolition of long-held theories, go immediately to the science blogs for some clear-eyed sanity and informed evaluation from experts.

The most daunting numbers I’ve seen yet

This week’s Nature has a horribly depressing article. If you’re a graduate student, don’t read any further.

Really, stop. I hate to see young biologists cry.

NSF data show that the number of students in US graduate programmes in the biological sciences has increased steadily since 1966. In 2005, around 7,000 graduates earned a doctorate. But the number of biomedical PhDs with academic tenure has remained steady since 1981, at just over 20,000. During that period the percentage of US biomedical PhDs with tenure or tenure-track jobs dropped from nearly 45% to just below 30%.

7,000 students per year casting a covetous eye on a total of 20,000 positions? You’re all waiting for me to die, aren’t you?

What about the post-docs?

Although numbers of applicants for postdoctoral fellowships awarded by the NIH increased between 2002 and 2006, the percentage who were successful dropped sharply (see graphic). And the average age of scientists earning their first R01 grant — the NIH’s bread-and-butter grant to an independent researcher — has risen from 34 in 1970 to 42 now.

i-046279d60bd7c66173626225ef60d57a-fellowships.gif

A suggestion:

A posting to an online careers discussion group puts the matter bluntly: “If you aren’t thinking about ‘alternative careers’ before ever setting foot in graduate school, then you’re being foolish.”

The article does mention that the number of Ph.D.s going into industry has tripled in recent years, so it’s not totally hopeless … but we are seeing a shift in the biology profession, that’s for sure.

Check, E (2007) More biologists but tenure stays static. Nature 448:848-849.