Birdbrains no more

Birds rise in intellectual pecking order
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/news/story/0,12976,1402910,00.html

The skylark could be going up in the world. The crow
has something to crow about. Scientists could be about to think again about the
little grey cells of the grey goose. From now on, a bird's brain may no longer
be classed as birdbrained.Mammals have complex brains, including a neocortex for
learning tricks and nerve cells called basal ganglia which control instinctive
behaviour.Birds, until now, have been thought to have only basal ganglia. But
the avian nomenclature consortium - an international team of 29 neuroscientists
led by Erich Jarvis of Duke University medical centre in North Carolina - argue
today in Nature Reviews Neuroscience that it is time for a change."We believe
that names have a powerful influence on the experiments we do and the way in
which we think," they write. "Our current understanding of the avian brain
requires a new terminology."Birds have repeatedly shown human experimenters that
they deserve a higher place in the intellectual pecking order.Songbirds can
learn up to 2,000 different melodies. Scrub jays can remember things which
happen at a specific time or place, something once thought unique to
humans.African grey parrots can use words and numbers correctly in conversation
with humans. Pigeons can memorise up to 725 different visual patterns, choose
between man-made and "natural" objects and most astonishingly of all,
distinguish between Picasso and Monet, and cubism from impressionism.New
Caledonian crows in the wild routinely make and use two different kinds of tool
to get food and a crow reared in an Oxford laboratory stunned scientists with
its command of Archimedean physics when it picked up a length of wire, bent it
into a hook and started fishing out titbits from a tube.So the international
avian thinktank has proposed names that reflect the new thinking about the
brains of ptarmigans and tits, bitterns, budgerigars and buzzards."Many people
have outdated notions of what bird brains are like but there are lots of very
smart birds who do amazing things which it would be difficult to get mammals,
such as rats or dogs, to carry out," said Tom Smulders, of Newcastle
University."It's about time that people, not just scientists, appreciated birds
for what they are - a group of species which has independently evolved brains
and cognitive abilities comparable to those of mammals."

...and an even better article here:

Minds of Their Own: Birds Gain Respect
http://nytimes.com/2005/02/01/science/01bird.html

Birdbrain has long been a colloquial term of
ridicule. The common notion is that birds' brains are simple, or so scientists
thought and taught for many years. But that notion has increasingly been called
into question as crows and parrots, among other birds, have shown what appears
to be behavior as intelligent as that of chimpanzees.
The clash of simple
brain and complex behavior has led some neuroscientists to create a new map of
the avian brain.
Today, in the journal Nature Neuroscience Reviews, an
international group of avian experts is issuing what amounts to a manifesto.
Nearly everything written in anatomy textbooks about the brains of birds is
wrong, they say. The avian brain is as complex, flexible and inventive as any
mammalian brain, they argue, and it is time to adopt a more accurate
nomenclature that reflects a new understanding of the anatomies of bird and
mammal brains.
"Names have a powerful influence on the experiments we do and
the way we think," said Dr. Erich D. Jarvis, a neuroscientist at Duke University
and a leader of the Avian Brain Nomenclature Consortium. "Old terminology has
hindered scientific progress."
The consortium of 29 scientists from six
countries met for seven years to develop new, more accurate names for structures
in both avian and mammalian brains. For example, the bird's seat of intelligence
or its higher brain is now termed the pallium.
"The correction of terms is a
great advance," said Dr. Jon Kaas, a leading expert in neuroanatomy at
Vanderbilt University in Nashville who did not participate in the consortium.
"It's hard to get scientists to agree about anything."
Scientists have come
to agree that birds are indeed smart, but those who study avian intelligence
differ on how birds got that way. Experts, including those in the consortium,
are split into two warring camps. One holds that birds' brains make the same
kinds of internal connections as do mammalian brains and that intelligence in
both groups arises from these connections. The other holds that bird
intelligence evolved through expanding an old part of the mammal brain and using
it in new ways, and it questions how developed that intelligence is.
"There
are still puzzles to be solved," said Dr. Peter Marler, a leading authority on
bird behavior at the University of California, Davis, who is not part of the
consortium. But the realization that one can study mammal brains by using bird
brains, he said, "is a revolution."
"I think that birds are going to replace
the white rat as the favored subject for studying functional neuroanatomy," he
added.
The reanalysis of avian brains gives new credibility to many
behaviors that seem odd coming from presumably dumb birds. Crows not only make
hooks and spears of small sticks to carry on foraging expeditions, some have
learned to put walnuts on roads for cars to crack. African gray parrots not only
talk, they have a sense of humor and make up new words. Baby songbirds babble
like human infants, using the left sides of their brains.
Avian brains got
their bad reputation a century ago from the German neurobiologist Ludwig
Edinger, known as the father of comparative anatomy. Edinger believed that
evolution was linear, Dr. Jarvis said. Brains evolved like geologic strata.
Layer upon layer, the brains evolved from old to new, from fish to amphibians to
reptiles to birds to mammals. By Edinger's standards, fish were the least
intelligent. Humans, created in God's image, were the most intelligent. Edinger
cut up all kinds of vertebrate brains, noting similarities and differences, Dr.
Jarvis said.
In mammals, the bottom third of the brain contained neurons
organized in clusters. The top two-thirds of the brain, called the neocortex,
consisted of a flat sheet of cells with six layers. This new brain, the seat of
higher intelligence, lay over the old brain, the seat of instinctual
behaviors.
In humans, the neocortex grew so immense that it was forced to
assume folds and fissures, so as to fit inside the skull.
Birds' brains, in
contrast, were composed entirely of clusters. Edinger concluded that without a
six-layered cortex, birds could not possibly be intelligent. Rather, their
brains were fully dedicated to instinctual behaviors.
This view persisted
through the 20th century and is still found in most biology textbooks, said Dr.
Harvey Karten, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, and
a member of the consortium, whose research has long challenged the classic view.
There is a bird way and a mammal way to create intelligence, Dr. Karten
said. One uses clusters. One uses flat sheet cells in six layers. Each exploits
the basic design of having a lower brain and a higher brain with mutual
connections.
In the 1960's, Dr. Karten carried out experiments using new
techniques to trace brain wiring and identify the paths taken by various brain
chemicals. In humans, a chemical called dopamine is found mostly in lower brain
areas, called basal ganglia, which consist of clusters.
Using the same
tracing techniques in birds, Dr. Karten found that dopamine also projected
primarily to lower clusters and no higher. Later studies show numerous
similarities between clusters in the mammalian brain and lower clusters in the
avian brain. Experts now agree that the two regions are evolutionarily older
structures that lie underneath a newer mantle.
Where the experts divide is on
the question of the upper clusters in a bird's brain. Agreed, they are not
primitive basal ganglia. But where did they come from? How did they evolve? What
is their function?
Dr. Karten and others in the consortium think these
clusters are directly analogous to layers in the mammalian brain. They migrate
from similar embryonic precursors and perform the same functions.
For
example, in mammals, sensory information - sights, sounds, touch - flows through
a lower brain region called the thalamus and enters the cortex at the fourth
layer in the six-layered cortex.
In birds, sensory information flows through
the thalamus and enters specific clusters that are functionally equivalent to
the fourth layer. In this view, other clusters perform functions done by
different layers in the mammal brain.
A second group, including Dr. Georg
Striedter of the University of California, Irvine, a consortium member, believes
that upper clusters in the avian brain are an elaboration of two mammalian
structures - the claustrum and the amygdala. In this view, these structures look
alike in bird and mammal embryos. But in birds they grow to enormous proportions
and have evolved entirely new ways to support intelligence.
In mammals, the
amygdala is involved in emotional systems, Dr. Striedter said. "But birds use it
for integrating information," he said. "It's not emotional anymore."
Meanwhile, examples of brilliance in birds continue to flow from fields and
laboratories worldwide.
Dr. Nathan Emery and Dr. Nicola Clayton at the
University of Cambridge in England study comparisons between apes and corvids -
crows, jays, ravens and jackdaws. Relative to its body size, the crow brain is
the same size as the chimpanzee brain.
Everyone knows apes use simple tools
like twigs, Dr. Emery said, selecting different ones for different purposes. But
New Caledonian crows create more complex tools with their beaks and feet. They
trim and sculpture twigs to fashion hooks for fetching food. They make spears
out of barbed leaves, probing under leaf detritus for prey.
In a laboratory,
when a crow named Betty was given metal wires of various lengths and a four-inch
vertical pipe with food at the bottom, she chose a four-inch wire, made a hook
and retrieved the food.
Apes and corvids are highly social. One explanation
for intelligence is that it evolved to process and use social information - who
is allied with whom, who is related to whom and how to use this information for
deception. They also remember.
Clark nutcrackers can hide up to 30,000 seeds
and recover them up to six months later.
Nutcrackers also hide and steal. If
they see another bird watching them as they cache food, they return later,
alone, to hide the food again. Some scientists believe this shows a rudimentary
theory of mind - understanding that another bird has intentions and beliefs.
Magpies, at an earlier age than any other creature tested, develop an
understanding of the fact that when an object disappears behind a curtain, it
has not vanished.
At a university campus in Japan, carrion crows line up
patiently at the curb waiting for a traffic light to turn red. When cars stop,
they hop into the crosswalk, place walnuts from nearby trees onto the road and
hop back to the curb. After the light changes and cars run over the nuts, the
crows wait until it is safe and hop back out for the food.
Pigeons can
memorize up to 725 different visual patterns, and are capable of what looks like
deception. Pigeons will pretend to have found a food source, lead other birds to
it and then sneak back to the true source.
Parrots, some researchers report,
can converse with humans, invent syntax and teach other parrots what they know.
Researchers have claimed that Alex, an African gray, can grasp important aspects
of number, color concepts, the difference between presence and absence, and
physical properties of objects like their shapes and materials. He can sound out
letters the same way a child does.
Like mammals, some birds are naturally
smarter than others, Dr. Jarvis said. But given their range of behaviors, birds
are extraordinarily flexible in their intelligence quotients. "They're right up
there with hominids," he said.

Am I glad I work on bird brains?

Related: Did Crows Eat Your Brain
Hat tip: Eric Gordy
Tags: evolution
cognitive science

Carnival of the Godless

The first inaugural issue of the Carnival of the Godless is now online. Go read all the entries, bookmark/blogroll all the contributing blogs and, while you are still inspired, write your own entry for the issue #2.


Update:
Hey, another carnival is starting, the Carnival of Bad History. And if you are ineterested in the bad history of how that carnival got started, go here. Archy apparently did bad Balkan history in grad school, and I ran away from the bad history actually happening in the Balkans, thus I feel there is a connection there, somewhere....

...and Eric Gordy actually went into the Balkans to see first-hand the bad history happening. As a result, he is now doing some really good Balkan anthropology (actually, sociology, but I am not trained to understand the difference, ... anyway, read his book!). He is blogging over at East Ethnia (http://eastethnia.blogspot.com/) and is starting a Carnival of the Balkans (http://balkania.blogspot.com/), so, if you are from there, or you write about the Balkans wherever you are, submit a post to Eric.

Update:
Some recent issues of various Carnivals:

Carnival of the Carnies
http://polyscifi.blogspot.com/2005/01/carnival-of-carnies.html

Bonfire of the Vanities #82
http://sharpmarbles.stufftoread.com/archive/2005/01/25/2277.asp

Carnival of the Recipes #24
http://kinskouch.virtualsushi.us/archives/000676.html

Carnival of the Cats #45:
http://www.sbpoet.com/2005/01/carnival_of_the.html

Carnival of the Dogs #?
http://mickey.ondragonswing.com/archives/006252.html#006252

Philosopher's Carnival #8
http://uniofnewphilosophyclub.blogspot.com/2005/01/8th-philosophers-carnival.html

Poetry Carnival #1:
http://danweasel.com/archives/2005/01/24/poetry-carnival/
(homepage:http://poetrycarnival.blogspot.com/2004/12/poetry-carnival.html)

Vox Apologia #2
http://razorskiss.net/wp/index.php?p=75
(next: http://mrdumpling.easingthebadger.com/2005/01/vox-apologia-iii-i-have-privilege-of.html)

Christian Carnival #54
http://www.neiluchitel.com/index.php?p=362

Do We Need An Anti-Creationist Think-Tank?

( Image: Sexism and Creationism , thanks All-Knowing Orac)

Previously, I have made a comparison between the challenges facing the reality-based community in politics and the challenges facing the reality-based community in science (some of it perhaps related to the underlying idea of the image above). Not everyone appeared to have liked it, as this guy who is "a mathematician, a libertarian, and a science-fiction fan" wrote this in response. I still do not understand from that post if he likes or hates what I wrote - it's pretty ambiguous - and I wonder why he picked that short paragraph (in which I paraphrase Matt Cartmill's thesis as Matt's, not mine) on Christian theology as so important to highlight out of such a very long post.

The Election 2004 brought a new awareness of the way Republicans invested billions of dollars into think-tanks in which the only thinking that is going on is thinking up the deceptive language for swindling the electorate to buy into the Reverse Robin Hood economics and Medieval ideology. The response on the Left is that liberal think-tanks are needed to counter this effort (with an added bonus that the language need to reflect the actual truth), for instance the Rockridge Institute.

Now, Mike the Mad Biologist writes:

What we need to do is get some private money and fund an
institute, "The Institute for the Study of Evolution", whose purpose is to
publicize evolution and attack creationism and ID. With luck, there would also
be national and state lobbying arms, as well as educational outreach and 'rapid
reaction teams.'

I agree, but most scientists want to do the science and not waste time on fighting the old tired meaningless ideological battles all over again. For instance, a new Center is opening this Monday: NESCENT (National Evolutionary Synthesis Center). If you look around the website, or read the Editorial, you will see that the main effort at the Center will be doing research (particularly meta-research, e.g., comparative genomics) and getting people with different backgrounds together hoping for a cross-fertilization of ideas and approaches.

Perhaps the last four years of head-on assaults on science by the Right Wing, led by the Bush Administration, will get more scientists to feel a need to devote more time and resources to counter the current anti-intellectual sentiment. An important element of NESCENT appears to be Outreach and Education. The language is not explicit, but it appears to be driven in part by the revolt against the anti-science nonsense, and leaves enough ambiguity to let people associated with the Center, if they are so inclined, pursue anti-Creationist activities.

Is this what needs to be done?

Relevance of Superman To The Right-Wing Assault On Science

Everyone bothered by renewed efforts by Creationists, by Global Warming deniers, or the general anti-science sentiment in the Red half of the country (headed by the White House) needs to understand the language of contrarians, and why such language taps into some common misconceptions about science in lay population.

Here (
thanks Will for theheads-up and link) is a scholarly article on popular vision of science, as seen through the prizm of super-hero comic strips:


Fantastically reasonable: ambivalence in the
representation of science and technology in
super-hero comics
by Simon Locke

http://pus.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/14/1/25

I Have A Friday Cat, Too

Well, everybody does it, and I have resisted so far, posting pictures of strange animals instead, but today I succumb...and here's my cat:

BISCUIT

We adopted her (under the name Caroline) about two years ago, when she was about 6 months old. It took her about 6 months to get out of the closet. Now she owns and runs the house, is the best friend with the dog, and rotates her sleeping choices among all family members' beds on consecutive nights. As you can see, she loves the books, particularly about art.

The Spawn Of Vanities

Excellent! Excellent! New Carnivals are starting everywhere.


The first Carnival Of The Godless is coming out in two days:
http://www.brentrasmussen.com/archives/2005/01/carnival_of_the.html


You can start submitting your entries for the first issues of The Skeptics' Circle:
http://stnate.blogspot.com/2005/01/yall-like-round-ups.html


And, another one is about to get started, devoted to blogging from and about the Balkans ("Balkania Carnival"?):
http://eastethnia.blogspot.com/2005/01/turns-out-there-are-lot-of-good.html#comments

Measure Lakoff's Effect

If all you have read by Lakoff is "Don't think of an elephant", you either reject him or do not know how to use it because you do not really understand where it all comes from. If you do nto have time, money or enthusiasm to read "Moral Politics", at least do yourself a service and follow this ongoing series of posts at Effect Measure:

Lakoff - XI: the moral toolbox http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2005/01/lakoff-xi-moral-toolbox.html

Lakoff - X: thinking about morality metaphorically http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2005/01/lakoff-x-thinking-about-morality.html

Lakoff IX: moral accounting http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2005/01/lakoff-ix-moral-accounting.html

Lakoff VIII: entering the thicket of morality http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2005/01/lakoff-viii-entering-thicket-of.html

Lakoff VII: his important contribution to political discourse http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2005/01/lakoff-vii-important-contribution-to.html

Lakoff VI: prelude to politics http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2005/01/lakoff-vi-prelude-to-politics.html

Lakoff V: setting the stage http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2005/01/lakoff-v-setting-stage.html

Lakoff IV: complex metaphors http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2004/12/lakoff-iv-complex-metaphors.html

Lakoff III: embodied concepts http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2004/12/lakoff-iii-embodied-concepts.html

Lakoff II: preliminaries http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2004/12/lakoff-ii-preliminaries.html

Lakoff I: who is George Lakoff? http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2004/12/lakoff-i-who-is-george-lakoff.html

Religious Vanities Etc.

Carnival Of The Vanities #123 is up on "Raving Atheist":

http://ravingatheist.com/archives/2005/01/carnival_of_the_vanities_123.php

...and of course, RA organized them by religious affiliation of the posters, giving the atheists the prime position.


Grand Rounds XVIII is here (inexcusably without permalinks):

http://cut-to-cure.blogspot.com/

and the homepage of the Carnival is here:

http://izzy.typepad.com/undisclosedlocation/2004/10/grand_rounds_ar.html



I see that Carnival of Sin has changed its rules somewhat, expanding from just Lust to all of the Seven Deadly Sins. So, if you have written something recently about Greed, Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Anger or Sloth, send your entry to:

http://www.nyhotties.com/carnival.php/

Update:

Also, Mick apparently fixed the homepage for the Blog Tower. Hopefully, this means the issue #3 is coming soon. Until then, you can read #1 and #2 here:

http://mysite.verizon.net/vze7rlxx/bthome/

Fizzler on the Roof

I have seen "Fiddler on the Roof" on stage more than 20 times in my life, starting at about the age of seven. Since I was about 24, I saw the movie a few times. I have had, over the years, LPs, tapes and CDs of several different renditions. I can play a few of the tunes on the piano. I love it. That is my favourite show of all times.

I have heard the music so many times, my brain is so wired to it that I cannot stop myself from crying every time I hear it (that is why I don't listen to it in the car - it is a traffic hazard). And it is not just a little bit of a teary eye, but full-blown sobbing. Shows my sensitive side, I guess, not something I am afraid of displaying in public. In the theater, I start while the orchestra is tuning. Watching a movie at home, it takes me about 10 minutes into it to begin.

I have never seen Topol as Tevye live. I just barely missed it one year, but I had to leave London and go home one day early as the ferries across the Channel were going on strike. Still, he is IMHO the best Tevye ever.

The second best was Mica Tatic, in Serbo-Croatian, in the Terazije theater in Belgrade. He was an unusual Tevye in that he is short and skinny. That actually made for a great effect, something that the usual big fat Tevyes cannot pull off. But he had SOOOOO much energy and was such a good actor, a famous comedian, and prety darn good singer as well. I loved the Belgrade show. It was staged only once a year due to expensive copyright. I believe they did it because the cast wanted to do it. At the end of the run, half of the actors were retired and only walked onto the stage that one time per year. It took quite a lot of make-up to make 50-year old actresses look young enough to be Tevye's daughters. But they acted and sang their hearts out. They did it because they wanted to have fun for themselves. They gave a 200%.

The Belgrade Golde, Zeljka Reiner, was, imho, the absolutely best Golde ever. Again, an unusual casting - she was taller than Tevye, thin and absolutely gorgeous, with a strong and beautiful voice. She had just the right kind of spunk for the role. I've never seen anything quite like it ever since.

Another interesting rendition was at Enloe High School here in Raleigh a few years ago. It was much less amateurish than expected, and every member of the cast put so much energy into the role. And I think that is the key to a good "Fiddler" - loads of energy.

Which leads me to the real reason I am writing this. We went to see "Fiddler" at the Raleigh Memorial Auditorium last night. Paul Servino played Tevye and he was, by far, the worst Tevye in history. If I climbed up on the stage right there and then with no rehearsal, I would have done a better job. At least I know the lyrics. And I can sing, too. Servino does not seem to. And he was so nya-nya and wimpy and flaccid. Where's the energy. "Tradition", in the very beginning, was a shock. "If I Were A Rich Man" was a blasphemy. "Do You Love Me" was scary - I half-expected them both to just stop and apologize for not being able to hit the high notes.

Without a good Tevye, the whole show just has to be a flop. The three older daughters were superb, but they do not have enough stage-time to be able to carry the show. Their stuff was really good: "Matchmaker" was fantastic; "Far From The Home I Love" was beautiful until Sorvino ruined it in the end. The "daughters" segment of "Tradition" was the only good part of it. Why? It had energy. Those three girls have energy. They loved their roles. The rest of the cast was there to do a job. You cannot have a good "Fiddler" with that attitude.

Once the experience was ruined from the very start (and I did not shed a tear), everything else about the show grated my nerves. The choreography was excellent, but they could not find the dancers that could actually do it. Scenography was great for "Sabbath Prayer" - one wishes Topol was there to sing it. The "Dream" sequence had scenography fitting for "Showboat", not "Fiddler". Remember, it's happening in Anatavka, little poor village somewhere behind God's spine in Czarist Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. Such a village would have grey-brown wooden houses surrounded by gray-brown mud. Scenography for Fiddler has to be gray-brown and absolutelly minimalistic: a few items made of rough wood like a table and a chair and Tevye's cart. Not three carts. Not seven tables. It was just far too flamboyant for the period. Not to mention that a couple of things were, quite inappropriatelly, stolen from the movie!

Still, we had a great dinner at Est!Est!Est! before the show, and had fun being smug critics afterwards, so, all in all, last night's date with my wife was a brilliant success! So, let me finish with the painting entitled "No Fiddler on the Roof":


Tag:balkania

Cool Science Blogging

The Tangled Bank #20 is now up:
http://blog.jasminecola.com/archives/tangled_bank_20.html
Go and read the coolest stuff from the science blogospehere.


Also, someone should ask this blogger to submit this today’s post for the next Tangled Bank:

On orgasms, epilepsy and the lack of sexual neuroscience
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2005/01/on_orgasms_epilepsy.html#more

"Considering that sex is one of the most important human
activities, and the current findings have been thrilling to say the least, why
is it that we know so little about how the brain handles sex ?"

Degradation of human genome?

Evidence for Widespread Degradation of Gene Control Regions in Hominid Genomes
http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0030042

Although sequences containing regulatory elements located
close to protein-coding genes are often only weakly conserved during evolution,
comparisons of rodent genomes have implied that these sequences are subject to
some selective constraints. Evolutionary conservation is particularly apparent
upstream of coding sequences and in first introns, regions that are enriched for
regulatory elements. By comparing the human and chimpanzee genomes, we show here
that there is almost no evidence for conservation in these regions in hominids.
Furthermore, we show that gene expression is diverging more rapidly in hominids
than in murids per unit of neutral sequence divergence. By combining data on
polymorphism levels in human noncoding DNA and the corresponding
human–chimpanzee divergence, we show that the proportion of adaptive
substitutions in these regions in hominids is very low. It therefore seems
likely that the lack of conservation and increased rate of gene expression
divergence are caused by a reduction in the effectiveness of natural selection
against deleterious mutations because of the low effective population sizes of
hominids. This has resulted in the accumulation of a large number of deleterious
mutations in sequences containing gene control elements and hence a widespread
degradation of the genome during the evolution of humans and chimpanzees.

The phrase "low effective population sizes", I assume, refers to the early hominid evolution. But relaxed selection on regulatory regions in many (most, all?) genes does not sound right. Those are the most important parts. It is not that a mutation will produce a low-efficiency enzyme, it will produce a new piece of information: where, when, and how many copies, if any, of a gene to transcribe. This alters the identity of a cell. That would have profound effects on development, as well as physiology.

Are hominids evolving evolvability? Have hominids invented a novel mode of regulation of gene expression in which 5' ends of genes are not that important? Any molecular biologists in the audience who can explain this to me?


Update:

PLoS-B has published a commentary which does not answer my questions, or even go any further than the paper itself:

Hominids Lose Control
http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0030073

The Koufax Awards: Best Series

Hey, this is the only category where I made it onto the roster. If you like either my Lakoff series, or my Darwin series, make your voice heard here:

http://wampum.wabanaki.net/archives/001599.html

Will somebody buy me this:

INVENTING SHERLOCK HOLMES

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17718

On The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Volumes 1 and 2
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, edited with a foreword and notes
by Leslie S. Klinger, and with an introduction by John le Carre

Lance Mannion writes this about Sherlock Holmes:
http://lancemannion.typepad.com/lance_mannion/2005/01/sherlock_holmes.html
but I have always understood that it was Sherlock Holmes who retired to the country to raise and study honeybees, while Dr.Watson realized that he needed the hustle and bustle of London. Who is right?

The Satin Pajama Awards

Awards for best blogs from/about Europe:

http://fistfulofeuros.net/afoeawards.php

Go vote for East Ethnia in a few categores, and where it is not a contestant, hey, there are chezNadezhda, Draxblog, Helmintholog, Histologion, Flogging The Simian....

Round-Up of Carnivals

I love Blog Carnivals. So, I went on a search of the latest installments, and here is what I found. It is interesting to see how many issues some carnivals have, how big some of them get, while others languish and die.

First, the original Carnival:

The Carnival of the Vanities #122

http://intellectualize.org/archives/006156.html

That was the best of blog writing. For the worst of blog writing, go here:

Bonfire of Vanities #81

http://worldwarbush.blogspot.com/2005_01_01_worldwarbush_archive.html#110617732009297686

Another old and established carnival:

Best of Me Symphony #60

http://gcruse.typepad.com/the_owners_manual/2005/01/best_of_me_symp_3.html

and also this one: Sneak's Wide World of Blogging #17:

http://www.sneakeasysjoint.com/sneakeasy/2005/01/sneaks_wide_wor_1.html

Blog Tower is having technical difficulties, so the issue #3 is temporarily lost:

http://omnium.blogdrive.com/archive/211.html

It appears that the previous issue #2 is unavailable if not lost, but you can see some great writing at #1:

http://mysite.verizon.net/vze7rlxx/bt01/id5.htm

The Tangled Bank, carnival about biology, nature and medicine had the last issue here, so just scroll down. The next issue, #20, is coming out this Wednesday (here: http://blog.jasminecola.com/), so perhaps you can still submit your entry in time for it. For more information, go here: http://tangledbank.net/

Indian scientists have their own carnival:

ScianMelt #6

http://geomblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/scian-melt-6.html

And so do Indian non-scientists:

Bharteeya Blog Mela #?

http://www.selectiveamnesia.org/archives/2005/01/bharteeya_blog.html

Doctors and nurses meet at Grand Rounds #16:

http://medicalmadhouse.blogspot.com/2005/01/grand-rounds-welcome-to-scut-hall.html#comments

Philosopher's Carnival #8 is here:

http://enwemetablog.blogspot.com/2005/01/8th-philosophers-carnival.html

The brand new History Carnival #1:

http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emn/index.php/archives/2005/01/history-carnival-1/

Carnivalesque #3 (sometimes erroneously refered to as Early Modern Carnival) is getting big, so it is in two parts:

http://chlgeorge.blogspot.com/2005/01/early-modern-carnival-part-1.html
http://chlgeorge.blogspot.com/2005/01/early-modern-carnival-part-2.html

Hungry? Check this out:

Carnival of Recipes #23

http://caltechgirlsworld.blogspot.com/2005/01/carnival-of-recipes-23rd-edition.html

No politics, no science, just well-written stories:

Storyblogging Carnival #10

http://www.donaldscrankshaw.com/posts/1105981197.shtml

You can find Christians here:

Christian Carnival #?

http://sidesspot.blogspot.com/2005/01/christian-carnival-its-finally-up-no.html

...and Jews here:

Haveil Havalim #6

http://willowgreen.mu.nu/archives/064141.php

...and the Carnival of the Godless is starting next week:

http://www.brentrasmussen.com/archives/2005/01/carnival_of_the.html

Although I am a biologist, I am not so certain about handling dangerous animals, though. I tried to help my colleagues once, taking blood samples from copperhead snakes, and that may have been the last time...I'll stick with nice, cute and cuddly species for now. That is why I will not provide the link to the latest Carnival of Bush Bloggers - they seem like such an alien, venomous and dangerous species. But we can have some cute animals, can't we? Here are the cats:

Carnival of Cats #44:

http://musicandcats.blogspot.com/2005/01/carnival-of-cats-44-we-love-cats-here.html

...and here are the dogs:

Carnival of Dogs #?:

http://mickey.ondragonswing.com/archives/006255.html#006255

This one is new but it is exploding! Warning, not work-safe! Also, this is the only one, I believe, where the editor actually has to refuse some entries, as there are too many (is that true?):

Carnival of Sin #9:

http://www.nyhotties.com/archives/2005/01/carnival_of_sin_11.html

In a similar vein, The Carnival of Capitalists #?:

http://www.business-opportunities.biz/archives/2005/01/24/9718.php

Some carnivals have died. Apparently this is the last Carnival of Pajamas (#11):

http://badexample.mu.nu/archives/058940.php

What happened to the Kissing Booth? It's nowehere to be found.

Snarkfest was supposed to be here:

http://www.electricvenom.com/oldvenom/003071.php

but I cannot find it.

Cul de Sac was supposed to start here:

http://www.suburbanblight.net/archives/000478.html

Are there any more issues?

Carnival of Consumers is officially dead:

http://www.jeffdoolittle.com/archives/000407.php

Carnival of Families may never have really taken off, as I cannot find any recent issues:

http://desertlightjournal.blog-city.com/read/985278.htm

The Carnival of Rugrats apparently met the same fate:

http://www.thezeroboss.com/archives/003431.html

And the same appears to be true of the Carnival of Poetry:

http://liverevolt.com/seldomsober/archive/poetry/005362.php

The most recent Carnival of Canucks I could find is #23, back in June:

http://movershakerbirthdaycakebaker.blogs.com/generation_exhausted/2004/06/its_carnival_ti.html

If you know where to find recent issues of these Carnivals, let me know. Also, if you know of Carnivals not listed here, let me know.


Update:


This one links to some of the Carnivals (including the Family Picnic starting this week):
Carnival of Carnivals #44
http://king-of-fools.com/blog/weblog/posts/carnival_of_the_carnivals44/

These are blogs from Iraq (by both Iraqies and Westeners):
Carnival of the Liberated
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1106062818.shtml

Watcher's Council:
http://www.watcherofweasels.com/archives/001497.html

Christian Apologetics? It's called Vox Apologia. Who are they apologizing to? I know what they are apologizing for, but that will take a very long time as the list is long:
http://razorskiss.net/wp/index.php?p=49
http://dory.typepad.com/wittenberg_gate/2005/01/this_and_that_1.html
http://steigerblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/calling-all-apologetics-bloggers.html

Carnival of the Commies is a carnival put together by the nuttiest, creepiest Wingers, Freepers and Foozballs so they can "monitor" the Leftie Blogosphere. Watch out!
http://tigerhawk.blogspot.com/2005/01/carnival-of-commies-best-of-left-in.html


Update 2:

Funny, I already had my fingers on the Ctrl-V to post this, when Brandon chimed in with the same information:

Poetry Carnival
http://danweasel.com/archives/2005/01/24/poetry-carnival/

Update 3:

Catholic Carnival #14:
http://www.deoomnisgloria.com/mt/archives/000493.html

Why Creationists Need To Be Creationists

I always loved animals and always loved science. I read the kids' science and nature books and encyclopedias, as well as adult stuff, like huge volumes about animals e.g., "The Life of Animals" by Alfred Brehm. The best present I ever got was a chemistry set my brother brought me from a trip to Egland.

I started learning English when I was five years old. No surprise here, as my parents met at the University, both studying English. It took a while until I was capable of reading serious books in English, though. The first one, at the age of eleven, was a biography of Bruce Lee, followed by "Jonathan Livingstone Seagull" and "Karate-Do: My Way of Life" by Gichin Funakoshi, then a bunch of books about horse-training. The next big one, at about the age of thirteen, was Darwin's "Origin of Species". That was a tough read and I don't remember if I ever made it to the end. But it certainly made an impression. Growing up an atheist in an atheist family in an atheist country meant that reading the "Origin" did not create or resolve any cognitive dissonances as none were present. It was just so fascinating. And reading it was a turning point of sorts: moving from reading fun stuff about animals to actually understanding nature, moving from description to explanation, from one's intellectual childhood to adulthood. Now, I am certainly not the Raving Atheist, I just grew up with it and never had to really think about it very hard. I lamented how, of all the numerous drawbacks, the biggest single factor that would prevent me from being elected to any office in the USA is my open atheism (also: On Religion and Power of Internal Pollesters).

All of you interested in the whole evolution/creation debate probably know the ubiqutous little book with light-blue hard covers by Henry Morris, the kind you can find in every church bookstore. Well, I got one from an old lady in a remote village in Eastern Serbia and read it in Serbo-Croatian translation when I was a teen. I just laughed at it. I wish I still had the copy for historical and sentimental purposes (I got myself an English-language copy here - that was easy).

I did not take this seriously until I arrived in the United States in 1991, and soon afterwards realized how many people here truly believe that crap. I was astounded. I could not believe it, even less understand it. I started reading about the phenomenon, then got sick of it, then got back into it when I started blogging last year and encountered the news of renewed efforts to push IDC into the school science curricula. I was still resisting immersing myself into the old tired controversy until I heard that the Minister of Education in Serbia tried to push evolution out of schools there. As a Serb, and as a biologist, I felt I had a responsibility to cover the whole saga on this blog (I Take This Personally, Saga Continues, Serbs Like Darwin After All, Darwin In Serbia, and More On Darwin In Serbia) and then, I could not stop any more (Definition Of Theory As In Theory Of Evolution, Evolution/Creation Debate, Evolution/Creation Discussions On DailyKos, Skeptical Or Not Skeptical Enough, Sweaty After Debating Creationists, and IDC Blog Craze).

As regular visitors to this blog know, I spend most of the time here trying to understand the Red/Blue divide, what makes a conservative a conservative, or a liberal a liberal. I have read Lakoff, Ducat, Carse and Parenti, as well as many good blogs and articles on this question, trying to get into the psychology of one's ideology. At the same time, I am trying to understand the psychology of people who reject evolution versus the psychology of people who reject creationism. And I see some parallels. Of course, not every creationist voted for Bush, and not every rational person voted for Kerry, but still, some similarities are emerging.

I want this post to be a philosophically sound one. However, I have absolutely no formal training in philosophy (or religion). I have read the cartoon book "Philosophy for Beginners" and a couple of collections of popular essays by Bertrand Russell. I had Marxism in school and barely remember reading the "Manifesto" in high school. As a kid, I started to read the Illustrated Bible for Children, but abandoned it as boring once I got into the New Testament. The only serious philosopher I
found useful to read a lot, including thick obscure volumes full of boring details, was Charles Darwin. Yet, I have been quite a regular participant in bi-weekly meetings of the Duke University Philosophy of Biology group and found that a sufficient philosophical training for my purposes as a biologist. I hope that commenters will set my arguments straight.

One of the assumptions of my argument will be that George Lakoff's model of political ideology is correct. If there is a good fit between his model and the groundwar rhetoric of anti-evolution and anti-creationism camps, this will strengthen his theory. Let's use this case as a test of Lakoffian theory.

I have no idea how this post is going to end. I will think-as-I-go and hope to be surprised by the final conclusion. What I intend to do is start with a hypothesis that the core motivator for rejection of evolution is some kind of fear or anxiety. First, I will try to list all the reasons that creationists, as well as their critics, have put forward to explain rejection of evolution. I will try to look at each of those reasons in the context of fear: what kind of fear it addresses, and what kind of mechanism for coping with fear it provides. Then, I will look at the reasons why evolution appears to be such a threat while other scientific theories do not. Next, I will look for reasons people not just reject evolution, but also accept various types of creationism, ranging from the most primitive Young Earth Creationism all the way to the most sophisticated Intelligent Design Creationism. Finally, by the time I finish, I will probably have developed some ideas of the ways we can fight back, and why. So, buckle up and join me for the ride.

Arguments Put Forward By Creationists

Argument From Logic

Yesterday on NPR, on Science Friday with Ira Flatow, a caller stated that she arrived to her IDC position via logic. Steven Weinberg, in the studio, told her to go back and re-examine her logical steps.

Logic is not as easy as it seems. If you really want to arrive at a particular conclusion you can easily miss an error in your logic. For instance, when Daniel Dennett's book "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" first came out, I bought it and started reading it. Dennett builds his argument in a series of logical steps and his starting points are things everyone will agree with. The scheme of most of the first half of the book was: A thus B, B thus C, C thus D, .....Y thus Z, with Z= Stephen Jay Gould is a lyer and a moron. It all sounded neat and impressive, but his final conclusion raised a red flag. I understand (thus like) Gould too well to accept Dennett's conclusion so easily. So, I went back and re-read every logical step, thought about it, and discussed it in a group of several very smart biologists and philosophers of biology, until I finally found which logical step was not as logical as it seemed at first reading. There was, after all, a step P thus Q, where "thus" was not warranted, and everything after that was just plain wrong. Please don't force me to torture myself by re-reading first 200 pages of Dennett's writing again just so I can find the exact P=>Q step all over again after all these years. Take this as a homework assignment - find out for yourself.

If a professional philosopher who is also an extremely intelligent person like Dan Dennett can be blind (to this day, and in spite of criticisms) to his own illogical step, and it is so difficult even for a bunch of well educated and trained people to detect that logical error, how can an average person ever trust his or her own un-trained logic? So many smart people have read Dennett's book and were misled by his good writing and impressive rhetoric to agree with him. Likewise, so many people are impressed by apparent logic of the IDC argument. In the age when rationality is held at high esteem, it is great personal PR to assert one arrived at one's conclusions by logic. It tags the speaker as an intelligent and educated, thus credible person even if that is not exactly the case. Buyer beware.

The argument from logic (or the related argument from "facts") is not very informative about the person who voices it. It does not readily reveal the real motivation behind one's rejection of evolution. Thus, it is impossible to diagnose the type of fear motivating such a person, and how the argument from logic acts as a coping mechanism. It, perhaps, shows that there may be a fear of being seen as stupid and uneducated in a world in which intelligence and education are held in highest regard, but this cannot be the primary fear.

Argument From Morals

People who have grown up religious assume, without much thought, that ethical behavior of humans is dependent on a higher being giving humans the rules of ethical conduct. This view is dependent on a hierarchical view of the world, including the hierarchical view of moral order, in which ethics stemming from basic human emotions, mental make-up, and evolutionary theory are unfathomable.

Impuning immorality to atheists is a logical conclusion from a Strict Father worldview sensu Lakoff, and evolution is seen as particularly dangerous due to its misperception as a theory that removes God from science. This misperception is due to deliberate propaganda by Creationists' PR machines, like the Discovery Institute, as well as to the generally horrendous state of science education in the USA. It also harks back to the time when Darwinism was seen as removal of humans from the center of God's attention, just like Galileo removed the Earth from the center of the Universe and, later, Freud, took us off the pedestal of rationality.

Is the "argument from morals" actually an argument from fear of modern civilization? Is the world becoming too confusing? Is this a nostalgic pull towards some imaginary Golden Age in the past? Or is this a fear that humans, left to their own devices, cannot build a reasonable moral code? After all, conservatism as a worldview is based on the (outdated and erroneous) view that people are inherently bad and that only strict upbringing through harsh (Dobsonian) discipline can build "character" and lead to moral behavior in adulthood. If people get their morals from strict childrearing practices of their parents, and parents get their moral guidance from God, then removing God will, logically, lead to the emergence of a whole generation of immoral brutes incapable of raising another generation of moral people. The precarious chain has been broken and there is no way to put it back together again.

This is a fear of what the world would look like if people behaved according to their "animalistic" instincts (ah, what a confusion - belief in animal nature of humans leads to rejection of animal ancestry of humans). In the conservative worldview, the world is very dangerous as it is, and will always be dangerous no matter what people do. This is why a threat of terrorism works on psyches of people living in rural Idaho where no terrorist will ever invest time, money and energy to attack. The only thing we can do is prevent the world from becoming even more dangerous than it already is, an almost unthinkably dangerous world of total chaos, murder and mayhem. This is fear of not being in control of external events and blaming other people's inherently bad natures for such a bleak state of things.

Need for Literal Reading of the Bible

This is a direct offspring and an extreme position of the argument from morals. If the Bible is not to be read literally, that means the Bible is not a Word of God, thus there is an opening for disputing God's existence, thus there will be no source of moral code, thus the world will be run over by people "behaving like animals" (which is a misunderstanding of the way animals behave, as the intraspecies murder and cannibalism are quite rare in the animal kingdom). Everybody who has read first two chapters of the Bible can see that it is impossible to read the Bible literally: which of the two accounts of Creation is correct? Yet, the insistence on literal reading of the Bible reveals an extreme insecurity about one's own strength in dealing with the external world, the complexities of the human civilization, and the vagaries of nature.

The extreme Dobsonian Strictfathering results in an extreme need for an external locus of moral authority. As American children (unlike their counterparts in most of the world) are kicked out of the house to fend for themselves at the age of eighteen, the reliance on one's father for moral guidance is forcefully replaced by a need for reliance for moral guidance on one's Higher Father (isn't this something Bush said to Woodward?). This type of childrearing leads to people too insecure to find strength of moral conviction within themselves, thus the idea that our code of ethics stems from our psychological make-up honed by our evolutionary history is not just unfathomable, but extremely threatening. The notion of internal moral locus is just not something that people raised this way can comprehend.

Need for an Activist God

A couple of years ago I invited Dr.Matt Cartmill to give the traditional Darwin's Birthday Seminar in our Department of Zoology. I have not found his argument online or detected if it was ever published somewhere, so I am not able to provide a link. You will have to trust me that I am not completely butchering his account (though, perhaps I am, so only Matt would know).

Christian theology postulates a God who is omnipresent (i.e., aspatial) and atemporal. God is not just everywhere, He is also everywhen. Christian God does not travel in time with us, from past through present to the future. When God created the Universe, he did not create just its beginning, he created ALL of it, including the whole HISTORY of the Universe, much of it is still in the future from our perspective, but can be seen all at once by God. When God is looking on his Creation, he is SIMULTANEOUSLY seeing the primordial soup, Galileo's trial, bomb exploding in Hiroshima, you praying, and your great-great-grandchildren going on a school field-trip to Mars. Why would He make changes in his Perfect Creation just because someone is praying for something? A little tweak of the fabric located just after the act of the prayer? Why? Our future has already been created for us long time ago, and that future is exactly what God wanted all along. No free will. No reward. No punishment. And remember that a folk behaviorism of stick and carrot is the core of strictfathering childrearing philosophy and a core conservative understanding of human nature (thus need for death penalty, more prisons, tougher laws and more invasions of other countries, as well as the "enabling" frame of welfare).

However, majority of Christians, especially the vocal conservative creationist kind, do not see the Christian God in this way. They want a God that is like Zeus: travelling through time with us and, being a God, having some superhero superpowers ("miracles") he can use to make some changes in the way history proceeds. Such a God can be potentially mollified through prayer and adoration. Such a God could be expected to occasionally intervene. Such a God would be expected to craft living species one by one in his basement shop. Such a God gives us free will to do whatever we want and that is scary, as other people may choose to do nasty stuff if they want, making the world a dangerous place. Such a God demands that we, of our own choosing, behave morally, as He will personally punish or reward every individual. A Zeus-like God makes us tremble - he is too interested in our day-to-day lives and our behavior. A Zeus-like God behaves like a Father. A person raised by a Strict Father grows up to believe in a Zeus-like father-like God, not the disiniterested God of Christianity who, in his wisdom and creativity (if He exists at all) created the evolutionary process as a mechanism for creation of all living things. Finally, people who believe in such a Zeus-like God are quite open about it. They do not see it as being un-Christian (while the theologians cringe), but as a badge of honor that they are serving in the army of an activist vengeful God. Thus, "Left Behind" books get sold by the millions....


Arguments Put Forward By Critics Of Creationists


Need for a Benevolent (yet Strict) Father

While conservative Christians think their belief in an Activist God is great, the liberals see it as dependence and cowardice, something to ridicule, something akin to the "just followed the orders" excuse at the Nurenmberg Trial. This attitude comes from the liberal dependence on internal locus of moral authority derived from one's Nurturant Father upbringing, which, in turn, stems from the core liberal belief that people are inherently potentially good and that childrearing is an exercise in honing this goodness, not an eradication of inherent badness. From here comes the notion that the world is not THAT dangerous after all (thus much less fear of terrorism by liberals even in places such as NYC - the obvious target for terrorists) and that it can be made less dangerous by human activity. This is basically an optimistic and future-oriented view of the world. Liberals tend to look to the past in horror and look to the future with hope. They see an arrow of time denoting progress. They see evolution as a process that hones the good to become even better. Conservatives, on the other hand, invent a beuatiful pastoral past they keep trying to bring back. They see history as a cycle of time, bringing more and more chaos and danger with each cycle. They see evolution as a process that prunes and kills the perfect and imperfect alike. The world has been going downhill ever since its inception (i.e., being kicked out of the Garden of Eden).

Need For Belogning In A Community

I have written a lot about the way conservative upbringing leads to the "Village" mentality: the need to belong to a tightly knit community of like-minded people. Group selection theory, as exemplified by David Sloan Wilson's application to the origin, evolution and adaptive function of religion, wonderfully explains the way Strictfathering engenders the Village mentality.

One of the most interesting properties of a Village-like community is the importance of a shared "secret" language. This is phatic language, used not to exchange information but to form emotional bonds between the group members. Various code-words and phrases are important components of such language, as they reveal shared membership. For instance, there was a recent analysis of the code-word Dude as it is used in the phatic language of membership in youth cultures. Other recent examples are Dred Scott and Maternity Group Homes, phrases that GW Bush used in the debates to signal the membership in the evangelical, anti-abortion and mysoginist crowd.

Bashing evolution is an example of phatic language. Words like "Darwinist" and "evolutionist" that are never used by actual evolutionary biologists serve as code-words for belonging to the Creationist Village, just like saying "Democrat party" instead of "Democratic party" immediatelly signals one's political party affiliation (GOP). These two words, ending with "-ist" also serve to provide equivalency between creationist belief and evolutionary methodology, infering that evolutionary theory is a religious belief instead of a method for understanding the material world. If the two are seen as two opposed religions, they can have a war on equal footing in which "my religion is better than yours" contest can take place and Christians, due to sheer numbers and the tight community spirit are confident in victory. This kind of rhetoric also allows the creationists to show up on TV as equals to evolutionary biologists, as the naive media misreads phatic language as logical language and, following the American fairness sentiment, indulges in destructive "He said/She said" pseudo-journalism.

Inability To Grasp Complex Non-Hierarchical Systems

I have written about this quite a bit here, here and here. Briefly, conservative/churchy upbringing leaves people at a Piagetian developmental stage in which they can make correlations and perhaps some linear (thus hierarchical) cause-effect relationships, but are incapable of grasping complex system of many interacting parts producing emergent complexity. Perhaps some people are afraid of evolution because they are incapable of understanding how it works. It is a complex system, after all. Fear of incomprehensible complexity?

Being in a Pre-Conscious State

Related to the previous argument, the notion that conservative Strict-Father upbringing does not lead to the breakdown of the bicameral mind (sensu Julian Jaynes), thus the envious fear of fully-conscious people by semi-conscious people .

Lack of Education and Sheer Stupidity

These two are probably the most often invoked reasons to understand why some people reject evolution. I do not think that Creationists are stupid, even if my whole Lakoff/Piaget/Jaynes construct is correct. The upbringing may have severely impaired their ability to understand the complex-system nature of evolutionary theory, but they are not stupid. Lack of education is definitely an important factor, but it is an argument of a different kind. It does not reveal anything about the psychology of anti-evolutionists. It deals with a lack of a possible remedy. But, if the Lakoff/Piaget/Jaynes scheme is correct, then it is extremely difficult to turn a creationist into an anti-creationist by schooling alone. The victims need not just remedial education, but remedial upbringing, something that may or may not be possible once a particular developmental age (and stage) has been passed.

Postmodernism As A Self-Inflicted Wound

We live in a post-modern world. Science is passe, so yesterday... On the other hand, creationism is fully postmodern, thus more in sync with the mood of the times.

Barely-Hidden Racism

There is nothing I can add to what these smart people have written about this idea:Creationism and Racism, Creationism Implies Racism, William Gibson on Creationism and Re Creationism. There is something to this argument for sure, though I do not think that this has been fully explored and understood yet.


Anxious Masculinity

If you have read the links just above, under the previous heading, you have seen that racism is, in fact, a stand-in for sexism stemming from anxious masculinity. Since I have written about this A LOT, let me just give you a couple of the best links instead of repeating myself and making this post even more ridiculously long:
Femiphobia
Bush, Frogs, Baboons, Horses
Two Americas: Past, Present and Future
Enslaving Women: Not Just Fundies
I'm Gone Country
Rent Wars: It's Sex, Stupid
Hypocrisy Or Natural Order Of Things
Conservative Manly Men: What Are They Afraid Of
Conservatives Are Crazy And Dangerous

Science In General Or Just Evolution?

The same caller to the NPR Science Friday show who said that she arrived to IDC by logic was also asked by Steven Weinberg if evolution is the only scientific theory that bothers her, or if there are any other parts of science that she objects to. Her answer was a fast and strong "Just evolution!". So Copernicus, Galilei, Newton, Freud, Einstein and Weggener are no threat, but Darwin is. Why? And to whom?

I guess the biblical literalists would also object to all the other stuff: after all, the Earth is flat, static and in the center of the Universe. Having harems and enslaving enemies are good ideas, too. But the more sophisticated folks object only to evolution. If their problem was that it is "just a theory", they would have problems with other theories as well. If their problem was biblical inerrancy, they would have problems with all of science. If their problem is dethroning humans from the pinnacle of Creation, at least Freud would also be problematic. And here may lie the key.

Why is Freud OK, but Darwin is not? Is it because Freud affirms the basic notion that humans are born bad and have to be trained to become good? According to their reading of Freud, men have animalistic natures that can be tamed. According to their reading of Darwin, humans have animalistic natures that cannot be tamed. Both readings are wrong, but popular and consistent with their embrace of Freud and fear of Darwin. They do not understand the naturalistic fallacy to be a fallacy. If what "is" determines what "ought to" be, and we are basically animals, then nasty social Darwinism will take over society, and aggressive brutes will come and kill nice white rich boys. Nice white girls will choose big muscular brutes to marry. Freud is also understood to affirm male superiority, making anxious males much more comfortable with him than with Darwin. Thus racism and femiphobia seem to me to be extremely important motivators for rejection of evolution, and all other reasons, including those based on God and religion, are just add-ons to boost the argument or make it more palatable to the modern (e.g., "PC") social environment.


Mapping Types of Fear to Types of Creationism

All of the discussion so far examines the reasons for rejection of evolution, not reasons for acceptance of creationism in any of its forms. First, let's revisit the taxonomy of creationisms - read this article:
The Creation/Evolution Continuum and keep in mind the graphic from the article, reproduced right here:



If all of the discussion above makes any sense, only the biblical literalists would go for the Young Earth Creationism. Everybody else, no matter what arguments they present and what fear drives them, should be perfectly OK with Intelligent Design Creationism. This is the Age of Enlightement, the post-Darwinian Age in which the language of science, education and sophistication is held in high regard. If wrapping one's fears into scientific rhetorical pita-bread helps push one's anxiety-driven agenda, then by all means, go for it.

What Can Be Done?

If my thesis is correct, the motivation for rejection of evolution is not cerebral but visceral. It does not come from stupidity, miseducation or economic (or political) self-interest (though all of these can help). It is not motivated by religion (although religious rhetoric is used to defend the stance). If one is liberal, brought up in a Nurturant Father's home, and is a Christian, then something like Thestic Evolution is just fine. But Theistic Evolution is evolution, not creationism (see the Figure). Rejection of evolution is, instead, motivated by basic emotion of fear of the dangerous world inhabited by dangerous people. It is motivated by sexual anxiety. It is a coping mechanism for people who cannot bear the thought of losing control over the external events and do not trust in the natural goodness of other people.

Anti-evolution rhetoric is phatic language. We speak a language of logic and reason. We use language to convey information. They use language to share emotional bonds. It does not matter how hard we try to explain the facts about science, scientific method, scientific meaning of the word "theory", or details of evolutionary biology. This they cannot hear. We are speaking Martian to them. We are using the faculty of language in a strange way. It scares them when we talk like that. More we insist more fobic they get, thus more strongly they need to believe what they believe.

It is now obvious why the political leadership of the new Republican party is pushing the battle over evolution in schools so hard. This is a potent way to induce fear OF LIBERALS, as opposed to fear of foreigners and terrorists. This is also a way to induce a racist, sexist and anti-gay frame in conservatives and rally them to the cause. This is also a way to replace the current "Nurturant" model of education (from elementary to graduate school) that undermines their ideology, with a "Strict Father" model of education (a la Dobson) that will ensure the continuous dominance of their ideology.

Thus, we need to see the battle over evolution not as a separate battle, but as a part of a bigger war between Enlightement and Anti-Enlightement. One cannot be won without the other. And while some battles in this war can be and should be fought at the level of national politics, the battle over education, including the battle over evolution, requires us to get at their kids. For that, we need to go local. Winning cases in court works only for the short term - they will come again and again and, with conservative activist judges being appointed left and right, they will start winning soon. Getting elected to school-boards, teaching in schools, teaching the teachers, pushing for non-test-based educational systems, pushing for tests of critical thinking (including evolutionary thinking) in schools as well as for home-schooled children, ...those are the ways to fight them long term, thus the only way to win this battle. Winning this battle - the battle over childrearing and education - will be the key for winning the whole war long term. Without new recruits from the new generations of children, the forces of Anti-Enlightement will dwindle in numbers, lose power, and finally die out. As a liberal, I am an optimist, a believer in progress, and cannot see how, in the long term they can win and we can lose. But in the meantime we need to fight to prevent them from incurring too much damage while they still have the power. Explaining evolution over and over again is not the way to do it.

My Blogosphere Namesakes Going To India To Do Some Good

Prof to aid tsunami relief effort in India
http://www.statenews.com/article.phtml?pk=27728

Varghese said he plans to supply residents with coturnix, small quail, to use as food and income. The quail are able to lay eggs 35 days after it hatches and is considered a delicacy.
Varghese is the president and founder of Coturnix International Ministries Inc., an organization formed in 1990 to "provide food for the body and soul."
"God gave me the quail to give to poor people," Varghese said. "It takes one pound of feed - which costs at most 10 cents - to raise a quail to maturity. They are so small they don't need space."
In this plan, those affected by the tsunami can sell the female quail eggs and slaughter the males for food.

And yes, these quail are a delicacy! Hungry graduate students can attest to it.

What Are Gonads For (Among Else)?

This really cool science post:

Speaking of sex differences…
http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/speaking_of_sex_differences/

...reminds me of a seminar I attended a few years ago, about a parasitoid wasp that injects a single egg (together with some toxins and a DNA virus) into a (somewhat larger) egg of its moth host.

The speaker spent his 50 minutes describing his painfully difficult and inconclusive molecular experiments, trying to figure out where the DNA (from the injected viruses) inserts itself into the host genome and how does that insertion affect the host. The effects of parasitism were some small changes in size and head-to-body proportions, complete loss of gonads (in both sexes), and a developmental change: instead of going through four instars before pupation, the parasitized host went through five instars and then, after a very long period in the fifth instar, died during the process of pupation.

Everyone in the room, including the speaker, made an assumption that DNA virus somehow disrupts development, ensuring sufficient time for the parasitoid to hatch inside the host and eat its way out of it. That is why the guy tried so hard to find the insertion place. Of course, the inevitable question arose during the Q&A session: why are the hosts castrated? Neither the speaker, nor anyone in the audience had a faintest idea. It seemed quite superfluous: all of the hosts die before adulthood, so there is no sense in preventing them from breeding after they are dead anyway.

I thought of it completely differently. My understanding (a testable hypothesis, I guess) was that viral DNA inserts in such a way that it induces castration. Perhaps it inserts smack in the middle of one of the genes responsible for the embryonic development of the gonad. But then, the lack of gonads and their hormones results in botched-up development. After all, a number of hormones, including juvenile hormone, ecdisone and some gonadal steroids are involved in control of metamorphosis (both from one larval instar to the next and from larva to pupa). While others saw castration as a mysterious side-effect, I saw it as the main mechanism by which the parasitoid manipulates the developmental timing of the host.

And if I am right, all that expensive and inconclusive molecular tinkering was unneccessary. Remembering the photo of the larva from the slide-show, I remember the gonads being huge and just below the surface (cuticle). Surgical castration should be technically relatively easy. Removing the gonads would then, if I am right, result in the appearance of the fifth instar and death in pupation in non-parasitized larvae. Injections of gonadal extracts, or candidate hormones, into the castrated hosts at approriate times would recover the normal pattern of development. Actually , such work could help discover what the "appropriate times" are, thus helping us understand insect development better.

So, (as I wrote before on the difference between US and Russian science:http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2005/01/blogs-and-future-of-science.html), don't automatically switch on your PCR machine. Think first!

Here's One For The Birds!

Cool research at my University:

http://www.ncsu.edu/news/press_releases/05_01/015.pdf

Relatives of Living Ducks and Chickens Existed Alongside Dinosaurs More Than 65 Million Years Ago

A reconstruction by well-known dinosaur artist Michael Skrepnick shows Vegavis in the immediate foreground with a duckbill dinosaur (hadrosaur) in the background. Copyright Michael Skrepnick 2005.

Newly published North Carolina State University research into the evolution of birds shows the first definitive fossil proof linking close relatives of living birds to a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Research by paleontologist Dr. Julia A. Clarke, an assistant professor in the marine, earth and atmospheric sciences department at NC State, and colleagues provides unprecedented fossil proof that some close cousins to living bird species coexisted with dinosaurs more than 65 million years ago. Information from a new avian species called Vegavis iaai indicates that these birds lived in the Cretaceous period and must have survived the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) mass extinction event that included the disappearance of all other dinosaurs.

Analysis of fresh evidence from computed tomography (CT) scans of the fossil – which uncovered new bones deep within the rock matrix – and recovery of latex peels made of the specimen just after its discovery in Antarctica in 1992 revealed its importance to avian evolution and that it represented a new species. This partial skeleton is the most complete specimen from the Cretaceous to be found to have its evolutionary relationship to a living bird group. These new data show Vegavis is within the group Anseriformes, which includes ducks and geese.

The research is published in the Jan. 20 edition of the scientific journal Nature.

The question of whether relatives of living birds existed alongside non-bird dinosaurs has evoked intense recent controversy in scientific circles. Some scholars, arguing from some “molecular clock” models and new DNA sequence data as well as the distribution of living bird groups, have concluded that relatives of living birds must have existed alongside non-avian dinosaurs and survived the mass extinction of dinosaurs at the K/T boundary, about 65 million years ago. Until the discovery of Vegavis, fossil data to support this hypothesis was weak at best.

Other scientists have claimed this limited previous data was unreliable and that the fossil record showed no evidence of living bird lineages in the Cretaceous. In a “big bang” theory of bird evolution, these scientists have proposed that relatives of today’s birds came on the scene only after non-avian dinosaurs became extinct at the K/T boundary.

“We have more data than ever to propose at least the beginnings of the radiation of all living birds in the Cretaceous,” Clarke says. “We now know that duck and chicken relatives coexisted with non-avian dinosaurs. This does not mean that today’s chicken and duck species lived with non-avian dinosaurs, but that the evolutionary lineages leading to today’s duck and chicken species did.”

The fossil’s fragility – the specimen was damaged as it was being prepared for study – led to difficulties in conducting a full examination in 1992. Earlier this year, Clarke received a grant from the National Science Foundation to give the fossil – named for the location it was discovered (Vega Island in western Antarctica) and for the name of the party that made the discovery (the Instituto Antártico Argentino, or IAA) – a second look with a team of colleagues from Argentina and the United States.

Clarke and her fellow scientists conducted new analyses on the fragile partial skeleton. CT scans were performed on the fossil for the first time; these X-rays uncovered new bones in the rock matrix, including a number of vertebrae, pelvic bones, and arm and leg bones. The researchers also found the original latex peels – applied to the fossil before any other preparation had been done – that provided a mirror image of the bones originally exposed on the rock surface.

The newly discovered bones and latex peels allowed the scientists to compare features of Vegavis to other birds and determine its evolutionary relationships. Clarke and her colleagues used some of the largest data sets available and all placed Vegavis within the radiation of living birds – as most closely related to ducks and geese. Histological analysis of the bone tissues present in a cross section of a Vegavis arm bone not only indicates that Vegavis was an adult at the time of death but also supports inference of its evolutionary relationships from the independent phylogenetic results.

The data place Vegavis within Aves, which includes common ancestors of all living birds we have today and all its descendents – that is, the radiation of all living birds – and specifically within one group of Aves called Anseriformes, the waterfowl, which includes ducks, geese and allies. Within this group Vegavis is positioned close to the lineage leading to true ducks and geese, called Anatidae.

Clarke will now continue her search for more clues to the evolution of birds. “Looking to the Cretaceous for more parts of extant avian radiation is essential,” she says.

Funding for the research came from an NSF Office of Polar Programs Small Grant for Experimental Research.

Abstract of the Nature paper:

“Definitive Fossil Evidence for the Extant Avian Radiation in the Cretaceous”
Authors: Julia A. Clarke, North Carolina State University; Claudia P. Tambussi, Museo de la Plata-Conicet, La Plata, Argentina; Jorge I. Noriega, Centro de Investigaciones Cientificas y TTP-Conicet, Entre Rios, Argentina; Gregory M. Erickson, Florida State University; Richard A. Ketcham, University of Texas

Published: Jan. 20, 2005, in Nature

Long-standing controversy surrounds the question of whether living bird lineages emerged after non-avian dinosaur extinction at the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) boundary or whether these lineages coexisted with other dinosaurs and passed through this mass extinction event. Inferences from biogeography and molecular sequence data project major avian lineages deep into the Cretaceous period, implying their “mass survival” at the K/T boundary. By contrast, it has been argued that the fossil record refutes this hypothesis, placing a “big bang” of avian radiation only after the end of the Cretaceous. However, other fossil data – fragmentary bones referred to extant bird lineages – have been considered inconclusive. These data have never been subjected to phylogenetic analysis. Here we identify a rare, partial skeleton from the Maastrichtian of Antarctica as the first Cretaceous fossil definitively placed within the extant bird radiation. Several phylogenetic analyses supported by independent histological data indicate that a new species, Vegavis iaai, is a part of Anseriformes (waterfowl) and is most closely related to Anatidae, which includes true ducks. A minimum of five divergences within Aves before the K/T boundary are inferred from the placement of Vegavis; at least duck, chicken and ratite bird relatives were coextant with non-avian dinosaurs.

See also:

Mother of all ducks shared a swamp with Tyrannosaurus Rex
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1447705,00.html


Birds scientists in a flap
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1284938.htm

Ethics Not Based on Religion

Duke/Chapel Hill Kenan Workshop On Naturalized Ethics

February 12-13, 2005

Overview:

This workshop is dedicated to recent trends in naturalized ethics. It is a follow-up to last year's workshop, which focused on the contributions of Allan Gibbard and others who argue that emotion is important to moral judgement. Here, we are bringing together two philosophers who are using the methods of experimental psychology to examine moral judgments and judgments of responsibility; a philosopher who has been investigating morality using the resources of evolutionary game theory; and a psychologist who has studied abnormal moral reasoning in psychopaths and other clinical populations using behavioral and neuroscientific methods. All of these researchers are leading voices in the emerging subfield of naturalized ethics.

For more information and conference schedule go to:

http://www.unc.edu/~prinz/NaturalizedEthics.html

The Self-Organization of The Blogosphere

There are two new blog Carnivals that look very promising:

The History Carnival
http://historycarnival.blogspot.com/

Carnival of The Godless
http://www.brentrasmussen.com/archives/2005/01/carnival_of_the.html

I see Carnivals as ever-strengthening nodes of blogosphere network, places where people of similar, often very narrowly specific interests, go to find each other and, through each other, to find rare and hard-to-find information coupled with expert evaluation of such information. Some of those nodes will be more tightly connected to each other than to some other nodes. Thus Tangled Bank, Scian Melt and Grand Rounds are already tightly connected through multiple "members" that send their contributions to (and get blogrolled by) each of the three. There is already overlap between some of the same people from these three carnivals and the Philosopher's Carnival, Carnival of History and Blog Tower, and I truly expect to see some of the same people on Carnival of the Godless, but not on the Carnival of Bush Voters. On the other hand there is overlap between The Philosopher's Carnival, The Christian Carnival, Carnivalesque and Early Modern Carnival.

The jelly-like mess that blogosphere is now, is slowly starting to coagulate and organize around the seeding sites called "carnivals". Here, from Silflayhraka, is a list of carnivals in existence so far:

Carnival of the Vanities http://intellectualize.org/archives/006156.html
The Bharteeya Blog Mela http://www.madhoo.com/
Bonfire of the Vanities http://wizbangblog.com/archives/cat_bonfire_of_the_vanities.php
Carnival of the Capitalists http://www.elhide.com/solo/cotc.htm
The Kissing Booth http://www.singlesouthernguy.com/archives/000443.html
Carnival of the Canucks http://blog.davidjanes.com/carnival_of_the_canucks/index.html
The BestOfMe Symphony http://www.snoozebuttondreams.com/archives/cat_bestofme_symphony.html
The Carnival of the Cats http://carnivalofthecats.com
Carnival of the Dogs http://mickey.ondragonswing.com/archives/006091.html
Carnival of The Consumers http://www.jeffdoolittle.com/archives/000203.php
The Tangled Bank http://tangledbank.net/
The Carnival of The Liberated http://www.soundfury.us/archives/000486.html
The Christian Carnival http://www.patriot-paradox.com/
The Philosopher's Carnival http://philosophycarnival.blogspot.com/
The Early Modern Carnival http://worldupsidedown.blogspot.com/2004/08/carnival-of-early-modernists.html
Carnival of The Recipes http://www.thedonovan.com/beth/archives/cat_recipe_carnival.html
Sneak's Wide World of Blogging http://www.sneakeasysjoint.com/archives/cat_sneaks_wide_world_of_blogging.html
Carnival Of the Bush Bloggers http://www.blogsforbush.com/carnival.html
The Storyblogging Carnival http://www.donaldscrankshaw.com/posts/1095090596.shtml
Carnival of Carnivals http://king-of-fools.com/archives/001306.php
Grand Rounds http://blogborygmi.blogspot.com/2004/08/grand-rounds.html
Carnival Of The Pajamas http://badexample.mu.nu/archives/cat_carnival_of_the_pajamas.php
Carnival of Poetry http://liverevolt.com/seldomsober/archive/poetry/005362.php
The Carnival Of The Rugrats http://www.thezeroboss.com/archives/003431.html
Haveil Havalim http://soccerdad.baltiblogs.com/archives/004560.html
The Scian Melt http://www.thescian.com/melt/
Carnival of the Families http://desertlightjournal.blog-city.com/read/985278.htm
Carnivalesque http://worldupsidedown.blogspot.com
Carnival of Sin http://www.nyhotties.com/carnival.php/
The History Carnival http://historycarnival.blogspot.com/
Carnival of The Godless http://www.brentrasmussen.com/archives/2005/01/carnival_of_the.html

When Wimps Lose Their Minds

Earlier, I wrote this:

Whenever a big black SUV with a "W" bumper sticker passes me
on I-40 going 90mph in the work zone, my first thought is: "What is this guy
compensating for?"

(http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2004/10/femiphobia.html)

Now, there is this in The New Yorker:

Big and Bad: How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety.
http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_01_12_a_suv.html
(hat tip: http://www.dennistcheung.com/blog/archives/2005/01/why_cupholders.html)

According to Bradsher, internal industry market
research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure,
vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their
marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills. Ford's S.U.V.
designers took their cues from seeing "fashionably dressed women wearing hiking
boots or even work boots while walking through expensive malls." Toyota's top
marketing executive in the United States, Bradsher writes, loves to tell the
story of how at a focus group in Los Angeles "an elegant woman in the group said
that she needed her full-sized Lexus LX 470 to drive up over the curb and onto
lawns to park at large parties in Beverly Hills." One of Ford's senior marketing
executives was even blunter: "The only time those S.U.V.s are going to be
off-road is when they miss the driveway at 3 a.m."
~~~~~~~~~~~~snip~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Over the past decade, a number of
major automakers in America have relied on the services of a French-born
cultural anthropologist, G. Clotaire Rapaille, whose speciality is getting
beyond the rational--what he calls "cortex"--impressions of consumers and
tapping into their deeper, "reptilian" responses. And what Rapaille concluded
from countless, intensive sessions with car buyers was that when S.U.V. buyers
thought about safety they were thinking about something that reached into their
deepest unconscious. "The No. 1 feeling is that everything surrounding you
should be round and soft, and should give," Rapaille told me. "There should be
air bags everywhere. Then there's this notion that you need to be up high.
That's a contradiction, because the people who buy these S.U.V.s know at the
cortex level that if you are high there is more chance of a rollover. But at the
reptilian level they think that if I am bigger and taller I'm safer. You feel
secure because you are higher and dominate and look down. That you can look down
is psychologically a very powerful notion. And what was the key element of
safety when you were a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was
warm liquid. That's why cupholders are absolutely crucial for safety. If there
is a car that has no cupholder, it is not safe. If I can put my coffee there, if
I can have my food, if everything is round, if it's soft, and if I'm high, then
I feel safe. It's amazing that intelligent, educated women will look at a car
and the first thing they will look at is how many cupholders it has." During the
design of Chrysler's PT Cruiser, one of the things Rapaille learned was that car
buyers felt unsafe when they thought that an outsider could easily see inside
their vehicles. So Chrysler made the back window of the PT Cruiser smaller. Of
course, making windows smaller--and thereby reducing visibility--makes driving
more dangerous, not less so. But that's the puzzle of what has happened to the
automobile world: feeling safe has become more important than actually being
safe.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~snip~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The S.U.V. boom
represents, then, a shift in how we conceive of safety--from active to passive.
It's what happens when a larger number of drivers conclude, consciously or
otherwise, that the extra thirty feet that the TrailBlazer takes to come to a
stop don't really matter, that the tractor-trailer will hit them anyway, and
that they are better off treating accidents as inevitable rather than avoidable.
"The metric that people use is size," says Stephen Popiel, a vice-president of
Millward Brown Goldfarb, in Toronto, one of the leading automotive
market-research firms. "The bigger something is, the safer it is. In the
consumer's mind, the basic equation is, If I were to take this vehicle and drive
it into this brick wall, the more metal there is in front of me the better off I'll be."

This is a new idea, and one largely confined to North
America. In Europe and Japan, people think of a safe car as a nimble car. That's
why they build cars like the Jetta and the Camry, which are designed to carry
out the driver's wishes as directly and efficiently as possible. In the Jetta,
the engine is clearly audible. The steering is light and precise. The brakes are
crisp. The wheelbase is short enough that the car picks up the undulations of
the road. The car is so small and close to the ground, and so dwarfed by other
cars on the road, that an intelligent driver is constantly reminded of the
necessity of driving safely and defensively. An S.U.V. embodies the opposite
logic. The driver is seated as high and far from the road as possible. The
vehicle is designed to overcome its environment, not to respond to it. Even
four-wheel drive, seemingly the most beneficial feature of the S.U.V., serves to
reinforce this isolation. Having the engine provide power to all four wheels,
safety experts point out, does nothing to improve braking, although many S.U.V.
owners erroneously believe this to be the case.
~~~~~~~~~~~~snip~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Perhaps the most troublesome aspect
of S.U.V. culture is its attitude toward risk. "Safety, for most automotive
consumers, has to do with the notion that they aren't in complete control,"
Popiel says. "There are unexpected events that at any moment in time can come
out and impact them--an oil patch up ahead, an eighteen-wheeler turning over,
something falling down. People feel that the elements of the world out of their
control are the ones that are going to cause them distress."

Don't you think Lakoff and Ducat would have a ball with this?

posted by coturnix @ 1:48 PM | permalink | (1 comments) | Post a Comment | permalink

Importance of Bad Timing

Central portion of North Carolina suffered a complete traffic paralysis today. Some people remained in their cars for over eight hours (some are still there, I guess) across highways and byways of the Triangle Area, especially roads going into Raleigh . A number of kids are having dinners and sleepovers at their schools because the school buses could not get anywhere, and parents couldn't either. What happened? Just 3/4 inches of snow.


Well, I've been living here for 14 years and I can tell you - it snows here every winter. And every year the locals are surprised! "What? Snow! Here? This is South! How can it be? What global warming!?" Schools, churches and businesses close, stores are emptied of bottled water and firewood, local news stations are making a big deal out of the whole thing.


How is this night different from all the other nights? It is all a matter of timing. Even when we get a couple of feet of snow (like last year), it all falls during the night. The city wakes up in the morning to see the beautiful white blanket. Everyone stays at home and builds a snowman and it is all fine. But today, it started out about noon. And the first snowflakes seemed so tiny and insignificant. Then it suddenly got bad and, of course, schools, churches and businesses let everyone out on the roads simultaneously. As a result, everyone with a motor vehicle suddenly showed up on the road and on a very slippery surface. The city bulldozers and salt-trucks could not pass through the stopped traffic. Everything came to a standstill except for a few 16-wheelers slowly and elegantly sliding off the highways into ditches.


I thought I had it bad, but I was actually lucky. I started from Raleigh early enough. It took me 40 minutes to pass the first mile, out of the little side streets, my station wagon spinning out of control on every corner at 1 mph. I then stopped to refuel, get my bearings, and some Coke, and used the drugstore phone (I am the last person on Earth still without a cellphone) to call my wife and tell her about early school closings and the whole situation.


It took another 1 hour and 20 minutes for the next 5 miles, getting on I-40 and driving on it till about the Airport exit. People were actually quite smart about their driving. Instead of stop and go - a dangerous thing on thin ice - everyone just drove continuously but very slowly. The last 22 miles took only about 40 minutes. That part of I-40 was cleaned up, and all the streets in Chapel Hill were pretty dry and clean. Only the downhill on my street down to my house appeared treacherous, but it worked out fine.


Driving for 2:40 hours on ice, completely surrounded by cars that are slipping and sliding as much as your car does is so physically draining. It requires 100% concentration. You have to be absolutely focused on your driving and "feel" every inch of your each tire as it treads the surface. It is like flying a jet fighter in formation at an air show, I guess.


I got home completely drained. The local TV news stations asked people not to use the phone or dial-up connections without absolute neccessity, as the phone lines were so busy, people could not even get their 911 calls through (and there were 340 minor accidents between noon and 5pm in Raleigh alone). Thus I remained offline until now. And now I am too tired to think, write and post something as brilliant as usual. Y'all will just have to suffer, I guess. In the meantime, go to Legal Fiction (http://lawandpolitics.blogspot.com/) and read last few posts by Publius and a guest post by Eric Martin (of http://tianews.blogspot.com fame)- REALLY good stuff!

Bad Science, Bad Fiction

Excellent review of Chrichton's latest "novel":

Bad Science, Bad Fiction
by Chris Mooney
http://www.csicop.org/doubtandabout/crichton/

In Michael Crichton's work, the two are intimately
connected.

Monday Cool Insectivore Blogging

A Star Is Born
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/exploration/news/news_mammals.htm

Monday Late Night Bird Blogging

Japanese Quail (Coturnix japonica):

Coturnix - Super Hero (again)

Coturnix SuperHero

I am trying to figure out the monstrosity that is Hello/Picassa, so, as a test, here is me, as a Super Hero. Swiping images of the Web and posting on the blog is easy, but uploading images from the Desktop is such a pain in the....

It's Carnival Time

Hey, it appears that The Tangled Bank was not the only beneficiary of the holiday break. Some other carnivals are also very big and very good this week. Check them out:

The 8th Philosopher's Carnival is here:
http://enwemetablog.blogspot.com/2005/01/8th-philosophers-carnival.html


History Carnival is new:
http://historycarnival.blogspot.com/

The first issue is here (and believe it or not, PZMyers got in there, too):

http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emn/index.php/archives/2005/01/history-carnival-1/


The newest edition of Grand Rounds (medicine) is here:
http://medicalmadhouse.blogspot.com/2005/01/grand-rounds-welcome-to-scut-hall.html

The hosts for the future Rounds can be found here:
http://blogborygmi.blogspot.com/2005/01/administrivia.html

A more or less complete list of all carnivals can be found here:
http://silflayhraka.com/archives/006050.html

Sweaty After Debating Creationists?

What Am I Reading....

Since the Election, I have sharply reduced my TV watching. The box is mostly dark and silent, though I switched it on a couple of times since Nov.3 rd, so I saw a couple of good panels on C-span, a couple of movies on HBO, about 30 minutes of tsunami footage, and last night, the amazing pictures of the surface of Titan.

Likewise, instead of NPR all the time, there is now silence (or a nice CD) at home and an even mix of NPR, music stations and old tapes in the car. I almost completely stopped reading the newspapers, both hardcopy and online, and spend way less time on blogs and forums (and gradually gravitating more and more towards science blogs).

I am working on my Dissertation, catching up on scientific literature, and returning to BOOKS! I used to be a kind of reader who starts a book, reads it through until the last word, then picks up another. These days I am so scattered, I have a number of books in various stages of reading. Here they are:

Book I am currently enthralled with and reading at full speed:

"Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" by Jared Diamond
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0670033375/qid=1105835142/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-0331478-1525604?v=glance&s=books

Here are some related articles and reviews:

Will We Ever Learn?
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/play.html?pg=5?tw=wn_tophead_3

The Ends of the World as We Know Them
http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010205Y.shtml (originally here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/01/opinion/01diamond.html)

Are we doomed?
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2005/01/08/jared_diamond/


Books I started, then stalled...

Joe Trippi's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televized". Never being a Deaniac, I quickly skimmed through the first half of the book or so and concentrated on the last couple of chapter in which Joe extrapolates from specific to general and has thoughts about the future role of the Internet in politics. I am unlikely to go back and re-read the early chapters ever, so this book will remain forwever on an "not read" list, though I got out of it what I was looking for.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/ref=dp_searchBox_1/002-0331478-1525604?url=index%3Dbooks%26dispatch%3Dsearch%26results-process%3Dbin&field-keywords=Joe+Trippi+Revolution&x=10&y=13

John McWorther's "Doing Our Own Thing: the degradation of language and music and why we should, like, care", started out really well, but will have to wait awhile until I get to it again, as there is so much other exiciting stuff to read....

Books I started and can't wait to continue...

Marjorie Kelly's Divine Right of the Capital

Cathleen Schine - "Rameaus's Niece". I loved her previous novel, "Evolution of Jane" and the beginning of this one is already gripping....

Clayton Christensen - "The Innovator's Dilemma". I am afraid it will be economics above my head later in the book, but I like the beginning and will forge through with focus and determination. Useful for understanding the Long Tail phenomenon and acting in a way that may pay off in the future.

Nicholas Davidoff - "The Fly Swatter". This has been waiting for two years for me to pick it up again but other things always somehow took precedence. I may have to start from the beginning, as I barely remember what was it all about....

Books I read in bits and pieces every now and then...

"Shock and Awe: The War on Words" is a collection of short pieces by a variety of authors, thus a perfect book to read one piece at the time.

"Men Writing Science Fiction As Women", and "Women Writing Science Fiction As Men", are two collections of stories edited by Mike Resnick and are just perfect reading when you have just 10 minutes in a waiting room, or are stuck in traffic....

Re-reading "Collected Stories" by Mark Twain is always a good thing whenever one's sense of humor needs re-tuning....

Books I Feel Obliged To Read....

Of course, those are new books and textbooks in my field. The first skims do not promise exceptional reads, so it is easy to postpone the inevitable. "Rhythms of Life" by Russell Foster, "Chronobiology" by Jay Dunlap, Jennifer Loros and Patricia DeCoursey, "The Mind at Night" by Andrea Rock, "The Promise of Sleep" by William Dement and "The Living Clock" by John Palmer are all waiting patiently for my attention....

I also feel obliged, as someone who writes about Red/Blue divide a lot, to read Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas?". I'll get to it one day....

Books I Can't Wait To Start....

First, two new arrivals on my sci-fi shelf: "Ursus" and "Time for Sherlock Holmes" by David Dvorkin.

I just ordered "Biased Embryos and Evolution" by Wallace Arthur . Earlier Books by Wallace were always gems, kinds of books that make you think outside the box...
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0521541611/ref=olp_product_details/002-0331478-1525604?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance

"The Scientist in the Crib" by Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl, comes to me with great recommendations from trusted people....

Three books by David Harvey, "The New Imperialism", "Justice, Nature & the Geography of Difference" and"The Condition of Postmodernity" also come highly recommended by trusted people...

The Perils of Ideological Continua and Coordinate Systems

We use the words Left and Right to describe Liberal and Conservative ideological and political leanings. The phrases stem, if I remember correctly, from the seating arrangement in the first French Parliament in the late 18th century. That was a long time ago. By now, most people realize that a straight Left/Right continuous line does not represent the ideological spectrum very well, yet the terms are still in constant use and, more importantly, concept is still the bedrock of our gut understanding of politics (bad mixed metaphors, I know, sorry, but I love mixed metaphors!). This is how we instinctively think, except when we explicitely focus on this problem. It looks somewhat like this:




(for those of you with Macs who cannot see my images, it is a straight line. The left end is blue and labeled Liberal, the right end is red and labeled Conservative, while the middle portion is purple and labeled Moderate).

Well, solution to the problem is simple - deleting the middle portion altogether - but I will get to that later. What most people who thought about this noticed was that many people did not fall neatly on this continuum. A person may be quite conservative on taxes and liberal on the environment, for instance. The issues tended, or so appeared, to cluster together for most people in such a way that one would be consistent on most economic issues and again consistent on most non-economic issues. The way to represent this graphically was invented that looks somewhat like this:





(An XY coordinate system. X-axis represents economic issues, moving from liberal left to conservative right. The Y-axis represents social issues, moving from liberal top to conservative bottom.)

This has quite a few problems. First it assumes that economic issues are monolithic within each person. Second, it assumes that all non-economic issues are social (how about foreign policy?). Third, it assumes that all non-economic issues are monolithic within each person. Fourth, it continues the fallacy of the continuum, i.e., assuming that someone's view of an issue can be "moderate" or "extreme". There are no moderate stands on issues. On each issue, there are several possible stands. Some of the stands are consistent, and I mean 100% consistent, with a liberal view, and the other stands are 100% consistent with a conservative view of the world.


See my classification of foreign policy views (here: http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2004/08/kerrys-foreign-policy.html), for an example. Isolationism is a stand completely consistent with a conservative worldview, epsecially in the past. We are presumed to be better than the rest of the world (http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2004/09/moral-order.html), we are safe from Canada and Mexico, and protected by oceans from the rest of the world, thus we can enjoy our lives in our big castle here smack in the middle of the North American continent and let the rest of the world go to hell if they are so inclined. Rabidly aggressive neoconservatism is also 100% consistent with conservative worldview. It is also more modern, as it takes into account the effects of globalization on our safety - intercontinental missiles, computer hackers, terrorists with box-cutters can all get at us easily - the oceans do not protect us any more. Thus, in order to keep the proper moral order in the world, i.e., the "we are better than them" way of thinking, we have to go around and bomb other countries all into submission, just like kicking a dog after someone beat you, and call it "spreading democracy". On the other hand, isolationism can be a 100% liberal stand, if it is inspired by the notion that we are one of 200 equal countries in the world and that, particularly due to our size, wealth and power, we need to be specially humble and benevolent. On the other hand, "the new military humanism" as insane as it is, is completely consistent with the liberal mind. There are no middle-ground, "moderate" stands.

Another problem with this scheme is a misunderstanding of what exactly are liberal and conservative economic stands. Common wisdom is sterotypical and wrong. It states that free markets are a conservative value, while governmetal control is a liberal value. I explained that in detail before (http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2004/12/science-free-market-and-is-lakoff_03.html and http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2004/08/free-market.htm), but the opposite is the case. Liberals are for well-regulated free market. Conservatives are for monopolistic, top-down, oligarchic elite-controlled economics. And, since the money elites are de facto running the government, conservatism is the ideology of governmental control.

You will see in a minute why this XY-system scheme is unrealistic and wrong, but let me show you another way of graphical representation first, popularized by websites like Political Compass (http://www.politicalcompass.org/). This one is most favoured by libertarians:





(Another XY coordinate system. X-axis is a standard Liberal to Conservative continuum. Y-axis is a continuum between "more authoritarian" on top to the "less authoritarian" on the bottom.)
Now, how do you do the math on this system? Liberal is already "less authoritarian" and conservative is already "more authoritarian" so you can have data points only in the lower-left and upper-right quadrants. This is exactly what you see if you do the test on Political Compass and compare your results with other US and world politicians, who ALL fall onto a pretty straight line cutting through the middle of these two quadrants at about 45-degree angle. This system is utter nonsense. Plus, it keeps all the wrong assumptions of the previous coordinate system described above.

Libertarians love this scheme for their own emotional reasons. Their core value is anti-authoritarianism (frankly, it is also mine, but I am a liberal). But, if you follow the libertarian logic to its full conclusion, you will end in tragedy. If libertarians ever took control of the government, there will be two possible outcomes. First one will start with anarchy, leading to dog-eat-dog world, leading to nationwide murder-fest, leading to emergence of a few most unscrupulous murderous thugs as "leaders" of the new totalitarian regime. We've seen this happen in many places, including in post-communist Eastern Europe. The second possible outcome is a more ordered system, something I like to call "dictatorship of the proletariat", an illusion of personal freedom similar to that fostered in the past by Mr. Stalin and Mr. Zedong. For more on libertarians, see http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2004/12/what-bout-them-libertahrians.html.

I have played before with (and saw others do, too) circular representations of ideology. But all such representations seem to reflect the amount of aggression one is willing to exert for one's cause. Thus on one end of the circle are the fearful middle-class "status quo" people. Go around the circle 180 degrees and you meet anti-abortion doctor-killers, animal-rights lab-rat-killers, classical neo-Nazis, virulent wacko-environmetalists, militia-men, anti-war protesters, etc. - a strange assortment of both liberal and conservative extremist people with more emotional problems than common sense. Circular graphs, apart from also buying into the "continuum" fallacy, and mapping political methodology rather than ideology, are so useless I will not even bother drawing one - - you all know how a circle looks like: it's round.


Now, after all these months of thinking (following my reading of Lakoff's "Moral Politics" and "Don't Think of an Elephant", Ducat's "The Wimp Factor" and Parenti's "Superpatriotism"), I prefer something that looks like this:






(a blue dot labeled "liberal" with radial "spokes" of different lengths coming out of it, some spokes labeled as "DLC", "postmodernists", "animal rightists"; etc.; and a red dot labeled "conservative" with radial spokes labeled as "libertarian", "old GOP" etc. The spokes emenating from the two centers never touch, cross, or overlap, as they are not in the same plane - which is hard to draw in MSPaint!)


According to this bimodal scheme, one is, at one's core, either a liberal or a conservative. There are no intermediates or moderates as such. However, members of one "tribe" may disagree on a particular issue, or even a particular piece of legislation, due to a multi-step thought process emanating from one's ideological core, but modified by one's personal experiences, particular expertise, or acces to special infromation. These multi-step thought processes lead individuals to diverge away from the core along the radial spokes. Just as in the case of foreign policy I described above, one can start at the same core and reach different, even completely opposite conclusion on the issues, thus choosing to support or oppose a particular piece of legislation. Thus some liberal groups and some conservative groups may occasionaly join forces in pushing for or against a particular law, although they are ideologically so different they may just as well belong to different hominid species. The fact they agree on particular piece of legislation does not mean they see eye to eye ideologically. The two groups did not reach their conclusion following the same kind of reasoning and they most definitely did not start from the same core set of beliefs about human nature and the way world works.

Now, to this complexity, add another level. As Lakoff points out, many people are capable of switching, at moment's notice, between liberal and conservative modes. One may be a liberal at home and conservative at work (in a derived sense, of course, as in Strict Father vs. Nurturant Parent modes), thus it is possible for one person to have a view on an issue derived from his or her liberal core, while holding views on other issues derived from his or her conservative core. It must be awfully conflicting being such a person, almost like being a pious Christian and an evolutionary biologist - you have to work hard to keep two persons within you apart.

So, every person's ideology can be visualized as a jigsaw puzzle in which every piece represents a stand on a single issue. Some people will have puzles with very few pieces as they generally do not care or pay attention, do not have opinions on many issues, or are rabid about one single issue and ignore the rest. Others, usually better educated, will have one of those 1500-piece puzzles. Very few people will have all puzzle pieces blue, or all of them red, even if different hues denote radial deviations from the cores. The deeply ingrained erroneous stereotype of free-market conservatives and government-control liberals will produce a mix of blue and red puzzle pieces in many Americas' puzzles. An occasional grey piece may be found here and there, denoting a strong and complete indecisiveness on a particular issue (as many have about guns or abortion, for instance).

Having one's jigsaw puzzle all of one color makes one feel good - the puzzle is "solved" and there is harmony in the world. Political campaigns are efforts to get the people to exchange puzzle pieces: red for blue or vice versa, in order to make a more consistently colored puzzle. Republicans want more people to have more red-colored puzzles and they have been very good at this lately. Democrats have to find a way to get people to buy more blue pieces. Good understanding of what is a red and what is a blue stand on an issue is crucial (as opposed to the meaning of various hues of the same color). Clear understanding that there is no such thing as a purple puzzle-piece is another key to winning in the future. There is no such thing as "moving to the Right" - you just fall into the Nth-dimensional empty space between the two core ideologies. You are selling transparent puzzle-pieces that nobody wants - they want color: red or blue.

An Embarrassment Of Niches

From Nadezhda (of Chez Nadezda fame), from her own personal blog (Nadya's basket), another look at Long Tail, something I briefly mentioned before (http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2005/01/blogs-and-future-of-science.html), but Nadya's is totally up to speed on the whole issue, so go look around her blog:

More Long Tails - Iraq elections "newswire" blog
http://crosstheglobe.typepad.com/nadya/2005/01/more_long_tails.html

From that post, a great short summary of the essence of the Long Tail concept:

"An embarrassment of niches."

And niches there certainly are... There is interest in everything. I am not the only one writing about sleep, though others tend to write from a more personal perspective, e.g.,:

Sleep is for lazy people
http://nomadichermit.blogspot.com/2005/01/sleep-is-for-lazy-people.html
http://nomadichermit.blogspot.com/2005/01/sleep-is-for-lazy-people-ii.html

Sauna-Ukko
http://suana-ukko.blogspot.com/

Speaking of strange niches to be filled, how about these blogs:

PoopReport
http://www.poopreport.com/Ask/Content/squares.html

Sphincterine
http://www.mintyass.com/

Good search engine for blogs (thanks Nadezhda again):

Waypath
http://www.waypath.com/index

...and how about the concept of niche-construction, i.e., changing the environment in a way that increases your fitness, but in turn makes you evolve new adaptations to the new niche you constructed. The new adaptations, in turn, may prod you to construct your new niches differently...and the cycle goes on. Apply this to blogosphere.

The End of the World

I am becoming a Rapturist - the End of the World is Near. Why?

McDonalds has conquered the planet, thus effectively setting the stage for the Second Coming. It has opened a franchise at the physical End of the World (now that Flat Earth is official science) - in Kosovo. After that, the abyss. If you step off the edge of Kosovo, it's all turtles all the way.





Are they trying to kill the terrorists by raising their cholesterol? Happy Meals for the local Al Qaeda cell, with a side of depleted uranium, please!

[While I am having trouble with posting images here, you can see the same picture at:
http://eastethnia.blogspot.com/2005/01/fries-with-that.html]


balkania

Tangled Bank #19

It is my great pleasure and honor to host the first Tangled Bank of this year. The best blog writing on science, nature and medicine is here after a brief hiatus for the winter holidays (for past issues go here: The Tangled Bank., ). We are back in full strength with a large number (largest so far - the last record was 14 entries) of excellent contributions, many from new contributors. Initially, I attempted to organize the entries according to some classification scheme (ah, we button-sorters and bottle-washers!), but due to the great diversity of entries I ended up just having a separate category for each post, something that looked like Borges' Chinese Classification of Animals. So, I was forced to abandon the entire scheme and present the articles in no particular order, though I did not go to the pain of using the Table of Random Numbers, so the order is not officially random. There is something for everyone, enjoy the wonderful writing, and look around all these blogs - surely you'll find some worthy of bookmarking and blogrolling for future reference.

1) We start off with Andrew from Universal Acid and a thoughtfull article on ethics of reproductive cloning: Who's Afraid of Reproductive Cloning

2) Jennifer Forman Orth delights us once again with an invasive species. This one may not extinguish all of US agriculture in one fell swoop but, boy, does it smell bad: That Stinks

3) Josh Rosenau has some Thoughts From Kansas. And although Kansas has been scientifically proven to be smoother than an IHOP pancake, evolution has been having some rough spots and uphill battles there recently. So, it is appropriate to hear about the court battles from someone who is right there at a source, particularly as his thoughts were prompted by a trip, a child, and some shark teeth: Evolution in Schools

4) Richard Meisel from Evolgen is a lucky guy. He got to go to the meeting in honor of Ernst Mayr's birthday and hear a lot of good talks. He was especially impressed by a talk about niche-construction...but then, is there anyone who is not impressed by niche-construction: Evolution of Genotype and Phenotype

5) May the Creationists recoil in horror. Carl Zimmer from The Loom kills two of their favourite "case-studies" in a single post: The Whale and the Antibody

6) Two thought-provoking posts from Reason Founder at Fight Aging blog. About the first one he says: "The flashy stuff in medical science gets all the press, but upgrading the infrastructure makes just as much of a difference. Curing cancer should make you drool, but so should cutting the costs of obtaining, moving and processing medical data by a thousand": Those Unromantic Infrastructure Improvements

7) Here, Reason Finder believes "that actively working to prevent medical research is morally equivalent to actively preventing sick people from traveling to buy an available cure. Those who deliberately set out to block the advance of science bear responsibility for deaths caused by delays in making therapies available.": The True Cost of Delay

8) Wesley R. Elsberry from Austringer reports on some cool (and jealousy-inspiring) dolphin research he was a part of: Biosonar and Behavior

9) Orac from Respectful Insolence (aka Orac Knows) sent two related posts on alternative medicine that will make you run to your real doctor. First is about the way alternative medicine is sold: Understanding alternative medicine "testimonials" for cancer cures

10) The second Orac's post is about the way alternative medicine is bought (by some) - bait, hook and sinker: What is an "altie"?

11) Certain to engender (bad pun intended) an emotional response, Joe Dunkley on EvoWiki comments on the fallacy of the Nature vs Nurture dichotomy in: The Gay Gene

12) From the Mad House Madman of Chronicles of a Medical Mad House (I'm not telling what it is about - go and read, you'll love it): My Future Intern (Part 1)

13) My fellow North Carolinian, Bigwig from Silflayhraka (which, if translated from Lapine into Serbo-Croatian language means "Jedi govna") does some impressive detective work on an Ebola-like virus in Africa: Hunting The Elusive Marburg

14) From the Girlscientist comes a thorough wake-up call about the way people construct their own doom, or is it niche-construction again: Tsunamis and Mangroves: The Shrimp Connection

15) If you did not think that science can mix with poetry and art, you must have missed the work of Matt Celeskey and Ray Troll from the Hairy Museum of Natural History: The Evolutionist's Prayer

16) And we have more beautiful poetry today. Anan from ...and there was the time... wrote:
In The Great Fields

17) When smart people design new equipment, they often have no idea how some other smart people may put it to a really different yet cool use. Here, Sumerdoc describes how radiologists solve archeological mysteries using CT scans: MSCT unwraps mummy’s mysteries

18) Saint Nate analyzes the recent news that butterbur can be used to prevent migraine and gives a numerical reason why you should not buy any from the alternative medicine vendors who pop up when you search through Google: Butterbur Buzz

19) From PZ Myers at Pharyngula, cool science as always, a story about the role of a specific class of mutations in generating morphological diversity in dog breeds: Tandem Repeats and Morphological Variation

20) Gaw3 from the Keats' Telescope talks about the ability of bacteria to grow almost anywhere, and specifically the recent publication of the genome of a bug which can eat chlorinated organics: Mighty Motes

21) Mike from 10000 Birds sent a two-parter. First, a look at a bird that is currently garnering a lot of attention: The Greater Sage-Grouse

22) Next, what the fuss is all about, a saga of political expediency and selective science, the decision to keep the grouse off the USFWS Threatened and Endangered List: Grouse Decision Not Sage


23) Socar Miles at Ratty's Ghost says: "it's about my big fat rat, who really likes to bite me. On the day in question, she bit me seven times, and probably would've gone for an eighth, if I hadn't locked her in her cage.": ...And Then a Rat Bit Me!

24) This one is from Syaffolee. It's about bacterial suicide. Does not involve microscopic Colt 45s. Nuff said: Death In Vitro

25) Radagast from Rhosgobel covers the big noise over the new FSU School of Chiropractic in: FSU Chiropractic?

26) Good timing is essential for a good joke. Chris from Mixing Memory applies cognitive science to both humor and time-perception. It is up to you to make the connection between the two in the deep recesses of your Brain and see if, perhaps, your timing is a little off: Time Perception, part I and Time Perception, part II

27) And the humorous part is here: Cognitive Science of Humor

28) While we are on the subject of time, Sean Carroll of Preposterous Universe wrote an (what he calls "semi-philosophical") article about memory and the arrow of time: What we know, and don't, and why

29) Still talking about time, from a third perspective, my own article on biological, technological and social aspects of sleep, posted on my other blog, Circadiana: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)

30) And if you do not get enough sleep, as when you are working endless hours at the hospital, strange things happen. From The Examining Room of Dr.Charles: Ode to Residency, Part 2

31) I hope the last two posts did not put you to sleep. Of course, while you are here you should take a look around Science and Politics, but first read my official entry for The Tangled Bank, the meta-blogging look at science blogs, a purposefully polemical piece I hope will start a lively discussion: Blogs and the Future of Science

Thank you all for coming here. The next edition will be hosted at JasmineCola

Submissions can be sent to: TB host, or PZMyers, or using the contact form at JasmineCola.

Also, if you are interested in hosting one of the future issues of The Tangled Bank., contact PZMyers at the above e-mail address.

Shady Book Lists, Influential Blogs, Cognition of Religion, and some more Lakoff

THE 100 BEST NON-FICTIONBOOKS OF THE CENTURY
http://www.nationalreview.com/100best/100_books.html

Holy cow! OK, some are good. Perhaps some have been in the top hundred most INFLUENTIAL books even if they were not that good. But any list that contains Behe's "Darwin's Black Box" can only be called "Top 100 Most Delusional, Deranged and Dangerous Books of the Century". But, of course, the Righties like those....(hat tip, Siris: http://branemrys.blogspot.com/)

Publius is back in form with these two posts:

THE INTERNET & TSUNAMI RELIEF - A Foreshadowing of the Distant Future?
http://lawandpolitics.blogspot.com/2005_01_01_lawandpolitics_archive.html#110542245099352966

BILL O'REILLY - Master of Pathos
http://lawandpolitics.blogspot.com/2005_01_01_lawandpolitics_archive.html#110533324846166706

Chris from Mixing Memory is on a roll. A whole series of great posts that I highly recommend:

What, If Anything, Can Evolutionary Stories Tell Us About Human Cognition?
http://mixingmemory.blogspot.com/2004/12/what-if-anything-can-evolutionary.html

Religion, Morality, and Posner
http://mixingmemory.blogspot.com/2004/12/religion-morality-and-posner.html

Do Children Attribute False Beliefs to God?
http://mixingmemory.blogspot.com/2005/01/do-children-attribute-false-beliefs-to.html

An Interesting Contrast (between theists and atheists responses to the tsunami)
http://mixingmemory.blogspot.com/2005/01/interesting-contrast.html

I Typoed a Whole Post for the Language Log
http://mixingmemory.blogspot.com/2005/01/i-typoed-whole-post-for-language-log.html

A Comprehensive Theory of Religious Cognition
http://mixingmemory.blogspot.com/2005/01/comprehensive-theory-of-religious.html

What the Cognitive Scientists Believe
http://mixingmemory.blogspot.com/2005/01/what-cognitive-scientists-believe.html

Intelligent Design Inferences in Children
http://mixingmemory.blogspot.com/2005/01/intelligent-design-inferences-in.html

"One of the Grossest Oversimplifications of All Time"
http://mixingmemory.blogspot.com/2005/01/one-of-grossest-oversimplifications-of.html

Spanish Rats Learn Japanese
http://mixingmemory.blogspot.com/2005/01/spanish-rats-learn-japanese.html

The Schematicity of Religious Thought
http://mixingmemory.blogspot.com/2005/01/schematicity-of-religious-thought.html

Words of Wisdom on the "Christian Nation"
http://mixingmemory.blogspot.com/2005/01/words-of-wisdom-on-christian-nation.html


Paul Rosenberg, over on Daily Kos, continues his series of Lakoffian analysis:

Uniting DKos #4: The Rightwing Power Grab
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/7/13638/90999

Uniting The DKos Community #5: The Social Skills of Democracy
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/8/191214/3713

Uniting the DKos Community #6: Cognitive Development
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/10/152131/446

...and people at Effect Measure continue their excellent series on Lakoff:

Lakoff - VI: Prelude to politics
http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2005/01/lakoff-vi-prelude-to-politics.html

Lakoff - VII: An important contribution to political discourse
http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2005/01/lakoff-vii-important-contribution-to.html

Science News

Rats Can Tell Human Languages Apart, Study Shows
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=753&e=1&u=/nm/20050109/sc_nm/science_rats_dc

Rats can use the rhythm of human language to tell the
difference between Dutch and Japanese, researchers in Spain reported Sunday.
Their study suggests that animals, especially mammals, evolved some of the
skills underlying the use and development of language long before language
itself ever evolved, the researchers said.
It is the first time an animal
other than a human or monkey has been shown to have this skill.

I bet birds can do it, it's just that nobody thought to ask them.


Hey, I have already written a critique of the "sixth sense" in animals (http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2004/12/sixth-sense-give-me-break.html, http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2005/01/not-just-non-human-animals.html), but here it is again, pretty much the same argument as mine, from the Washington Post:

A Sense Of Doom: Animal Instinct For Disaster
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57653-2005Jan7.html?nav=hcmodule
...and on the similar topic:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/9/125432/0632


[For news about sleep and circadian rhythms you have to go http://circadiana.blogspot.com which is exploding with hits, now that Andrew Sullivan has also linked to a post there.]


Update:
Science-related news and diaries on dKos are summarized here (corrected link):

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/9/212930/2913

Kaufax Awards for Best New Blog are now up for voting - I picked Total Information Awareness.

Update2:

Visits to date:
Science and Politics: 7917
Circadiana: 10870

I guess I will have to give Circadiana some more attention - play with links and blogrolls and the "look".

I have largely refrained from energetic political rants over the past few days here, as I am cleaning the house for some very special guests. Tomorrow late at night I will post the next Tangled Bank. Some very delicious entries have been submitted so far - make sure to come back on Wednesday for the real intellectual feast!

I am also trying to get some very smart people who are close to me to guest blog here soon, and I will certainly get back to Lakoff and rabid political rants along with more science news in the nearest future.

Next Tangled Bank

It is time to send your blog submissions for the next edition of Tangled Bank, to be published right here, on this blog this Wednesday, January 12th, 2005. Please send them by Tuesday night (actually by 5pm would be great) to host AT tangledbank DOT net, or pzmyers AT pharyngula DOT org, or Coturnix1 AT aol DOT com, containing the words "Tangled Bank" somewhere in the subject line, and a link to your article, along with a sentence or two of descriptive summary.

If you have written recently, or intend to write until January 11th, something - anything - that has to do with Life, natural history, medicine or any other area of biology, let me know. You saw a cool creature last night? Write about it. History or philosophy of biology? Great. Science education? Fine. Conservation biology, pet nutrition, medical diagnosis of ailments of fictional characters? All fits here.

Go to http://tangledbank.net/ to check out the rules. Also, go and read the previous issues - there is some waaaaay cool writing there.

Not Just Non-Human Animals

I have already deconstructed the big "sixth sense" nonsense about animals surviving the tsunamis (http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2004/12/sixth-sense-give-me-break.html). As it turns out, in some places, actually, many animals were killed.

On the other hand, some "primitive" people survived by being "in tune" with nature:

http://progressivetrail.org/articles/050104Leupp.shtml

Merry Christmas

...to my Eastern Orthodox Christian readers.

Blogs and the Future of Science

I have done meta-blogging, i.e., written about the phenomenon of blogs, very, very little. Actually, I found only five posts in the archives that are specifically about blogging. The first three are very early and are entirely about political blogs (http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2004/08/smoke-signals-blogs-and-future-of.html, http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2004/08/deanomania.html, http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2004/08/why-edwards-blog-was-better-than-dean.html), and only the most recent two are tackling the phenomenon as a whole (http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2004/12/blogging.html, http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2005/01/meta-blogging.html). With a new blog being started every 7.5 minutes, and about 2 million blogs in existence right about....now...I want to start thinking about them a little bit more, particularly in the context of my own interest - science. What follows is likely to be an incoherent rant, but I need to write this in order to organize my own thoughts, so bear with me and please post comments. First, a bit of thought about blogs in general, then some thoughts about science, then later I will be putting the two together to try to see the role of blogs in science and how they may affect the way science is done in the future.

Borges's Chinese Classification of Blogs

If you have ever browsed blogs by clicking "Next Blog" on Blogger or using BlogXplosion, you have probably noticed that quite a large chunk of blogs have been last updated in March 2003, and even then, it was just the first, one and only post on that blog, stating: "I am Mike. My friend Amy persuaded me to try this thing called blogging. I guess I will write something about me here later." So, the figure of 2 million also contains quite a lot of "dead" blogs.

Then, an even larger chunk of blogs are frankly too boring for anyone but the owner. Those are expressions of personal adolescent angst, worries about the math test tomorrow, navigating first dates, dealing with mean parents and siblings, hatred of school....that is, if you are capable of reading it at all, as many such blogs are virtually incomprehensible as they are written in some garbled gobbledy-gook version of street English, unrecognizable to anyone older than 18 (http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2004/08/language.html). It is no surprise that such blogs receive approximately three random hits per day, i.e., these online diaries are read about as much as the old leather-bound diaries with a little golden lock and key. Yet, I do not consider these to be "junk blogs" (like "junk DNA"). I think of those as training grounds for the new generation (source of new "functional genes" to continue the metaphor). Teenagers with existential anxieties will grow up to be an army of serious bloggers of tomorrow, people who feel as natural on the Internet as fish in the water, as I certainly do not and probably never will. Of course, some of these personal journals are quite good and have garnered quite a following. Sarah Dessen's blog comes to mind, but she is a professional writer and a professor of creative writing so even when she writes about what she had for breakfast it is interesting, at least for some people. Well-written diaries of people who primarily discuss their sex lives also have a decent audience.

The first, original blogs were mainly collections of links to mainstream media articles with very little editorial commentary. Many blogs today continue with this tradition. While I personally find them a waste of time (if an article is really that important, it will reverberate throughout the blogosphere and I am bound to bump into it over and over again as I visit my favourite places and will, thus, be inclined to give in and click on the link), they obviously perform a valuable function as first morning sources of news that other blogs pick up and disseminate for the remainder of the day. The goal is fast dissemination of information, and these blogs, as news aggregators, are doing a remarkably good job at this. I guess that a subset of this category are various humor, photo, audio and video blogs, as this is information, too.

Political group blogs, forums and campaign blogs are the novelty of this election cycle and serve a completely different function: getting like-minded people together, fostering groupthink which for a political campaign in the middle of an election is an important and positive trait, building ferocious loyalty to the cause or candidate, exchanging information that is useful for campaigning and, most importantly, rallying the troups to actually go out in the freezing weather of Iowa in January and knock on a million doors. It is very much about organization. This is the most usual entry into the world of blogging for most current users (owners/readers) of blogs. My estimate is that for about a half of today's bloggers, the campaign blog/forum is "The Blog", i.e., the main, archetypal kind of blog. They were not around before to read the old blogs as personal journals or news-aggregators. They may not really like the idea of a blog dominated entirely by just one person. For many of them, blog is essentially a collective effort. This mindset is likely to have an effect on the direction blogs go in the future. Just look at the transformation of DailyKos. The rightful owner, Markos Moulitzas aka Kos, insists it is his blog. Others think of it as a group blog (and nominate it as such for Kaufax Awards despite Kos's protests). My bookmark to dKos is not to the front page which I visit only occasionaly and even then rarely read what Kos posts himself. My bookmark is to the Diaries of members. That is where all the interesting action is occuring.

Of course, there are forums, group blogs, newsgroups and chat-rooms that have nothing to do with politics but are connected by a different common interest. Their role in the future of the society depends on their topics, of course. What I find fascinating is that bloggers residing in the same geographic area feel a need to find each other, aggregate their blogs, and even meet in person. The Greensboro, Seattle and NYC bloggers do this, for instance. Ah, the power of place! Isn't this antithetical to what Internet is all about? Not being tied to a place, but being omnipresent? Haven't you all read Cory Doctorow's "Eastern Standard Tribe"? On the Internet, Place is not defined by geography, but by Time.

Blogs I have classified so far probably account for 80-90% of all existing blogs. While they serve their functions in the blogosphere, and some are fun to read, I do not see such blogs as being able to "change the world". They are online versions of personal notebooks, newspapers, coffee-shops, and farmer's markets. They may keep more people better informed faster, but do not seem to be able to change the organization of the society at large. Wait a minute, you'll say, not so fast, and you'll point to the rise of the Monika Lewinsky story, and disgraceful fall of Trent Lott and Dan Rather, as examples of earthshaking events caused by blogs. Yup, but this is local politics. USA is one of 200 countries in the world. Fall of Trent Lott does not and cannot reverberate throughout the world. It will not "change the world" in any way. The rest of the world does not give a damn. The way the world works will not change. It would have to be really big - something on the level of impeachment of Bush, for instance - for this to have any effects beyond our borders.

Which brings me to the last category of blogs in this taxonomy - the expert blogs. You don't need a PhD to be an expert on something, although having one helps (BTW, the good folks at Wampum have posted the list of "Expert blogs" for Kaufax Awards - go vote for Pharyngula like I did). Here again, there are experts and there are experts, and I am not talking just about quality, but also about the area of life in which a person is an expert. A blogger/journalist who is an expert on domestic politics, or a blogger/editorialist who writes very smart pieces about local politics, is going to have just as much effect on the World as the political blogs I mentioned before. All politics is local, so being an expert on politics makes you a local expert with unlikely global consequences of your writing. I am not putting these people down, au contraire - those are the kind of people I like to read the most as I am a local political animal, too. That is why I start every day with Legal Fiction and Total Information Awareness, and read a number of such blogs at least weekly. Also, come of the expert blogs are group blogs, or forums, newsgroups or chat rooms. If the people posting there are experts, then it does not make much difference.

It appears that most blogs were started recently and were devoted entirely to the coverage of the US election 2004. Once election was over, many blogs shut down. Some continue to follow politics. Some are turning into personal diaries. All those are gradually being deleted from my blogroll. Blogs that remain are those whose owners took a deep breath and asked themselves what original content they could contribute to the online conversation, and found their own professional expertise as core strength of their renewed (and often renamed) blogs.

Just look what happened to me today (previous post) - my expert blog, Circadiana, in the first day of its existence, outperformed this, five-months-old, well-respected, general-store blog about twenty-fold in the number of hits. There is a definite need for bloggers with expertise. The Connection@411 site (http://411blog.net/) is an example of an attempt to pool together blogs written by experts, classified by field of expertise. The PhD weblogs (http://www.phdweblogs.net/) is a similar endeavor. I see the rise (and clustering) of expert blogs as the next big development in the blogosphere.

Geography of Science

So, I have finally reached the point of this post where I introduce science. Science is one of those areas of life (sex being another) where nationality does not really matter. Let me be perfectly clear here that I am not talking about technology, engineering, or most of the applied science - those can be quite well kept within the borders of one country (and strictly enforced by patent and property laws, or kept secret within the confines of the DOD). I am talking about the pure, basic science driven by curiosity about the way world works.

The global nature of science is, of course, an ideal not quite yet supported by reality. There are rich and poor countries, countries with rich scientific traditions and those with none, countries in which science is highly regarded and those in which it is frowned upon. This means that different kinds of science are done in different parts of the world.

I always loved animals and science. Darwin's "Origin" was one of the first books I have read in English (after biography of Bruce Lee and "Jonathan Livingstone Seagull") when I was about thirteen. But I was living in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Doing science there means being a glorified technician, told from above what to do research on, then not given supplies to do it, leaving one to spend time gossiping with colleagues in the lounge over many cups of Turkish coffee and cigarettes. Instead, I went to vet school and was on my way to becoming local God of equine medicine, horse training and riding instruction (yup, I was good). I was already eyeing a nice piece of land just north of Belgrade to build my business in the geographical area in which I was already well-known and respected.

Then the war broke out and I came to the USA and realized that there are thousands of equine vets and thousands of horse trainers here who are so much better than me. And it is not just my inner drive to be at the top, but the situation here is so competitive that being at the top is almost a requisite for being able to make a living as a vet or a trainer. Then I thought "When in Rome...." - hey, I am in the USA. This is the place to do science - the ONLY place in the world where one can do really serious science, where it is possible to get to the top without a need to squash competition as there is enough space and money for everyone, and a place where I can certainly be able to make a living. Here, I could do what I really wanted to do all along - be a professional scientist.

When I published my first papers a few years ago, I received only very few requests for reprints from bigwigs at big US Universities. Most requests were from people working at small colleges and, surprisingly for me at the time, from people working in places like Argentina, Algeria and Poland. I was wondering why. Well, it is obvious, big Universities in the States have money to subscribe to many scientific journals. Small colleges and foreign schools cannot afford such a luxury.

Science and the Internet

Over the past five years or so, Internet has dramatically changed this picture. Almost nobody sends requests for reprints any more. People at big schools log into their online libraries and download PDF files. People from smaller places and abroad send e-mails asking for the PDF to be sent as an attachment. Search engines like ISI Web of Science and Medline bring to one's fingertips almost everything published in science practically as soon as it is published. Google Scholar is allowing people not affiliated with big Universities to find literature online. More and more journals are starting their online editions. Even big rich schools, like Harvard, are dropping expensive subscriptions for hardcopy versions of top scientific journals (e.g., those published by Elsevier). Henry thinks that one of those monsters of science publishing will fold this year (http://weblog.blogads.com/comments/P947_0_1_0/), but I think that will take a couple of more years due to institutional inertia, e.g., importance of publication in highly-indexed journals for PhD students and post-docs for future job prospects (evaluated by an old guard not tuned in to the Internet or receptive to the novelty of online publishing). Though, he may turn to be right after all (http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/121004ohanluain/). These days I get to read the new issue of the Journal of Biological Rhythms (top in the field) before I receive the hard copy via snail mail. Lesser journals, like Chronobiology International and Biological Rhythm Research are also starting to put their stuff online. The new Journal of Circadian Rhythms does not even exist as a hardcopy - it is entirely an online journal. Online journals, like PubMed Central and PLoS Biology are fast becoming as respected as any print journal in the field.

So, the obvious conclusion from the above paragraph is that, how great and wonderful, researchers in small colleges and abroad can access the literature as easily as someone at Stanford or MIT. Good for them. Now they'll be able to keep abreast with what we're doing here in our big labs at Stanford and MIT. Whoa! Say that again! But first let some air out of your head.

American Science vs. Global Science

Until about WWII the global centers of science were in Europe. Since about the 1950s, the USA had an absolute primacy in the world of science. We are experiencing another shift right now. The number of foreigners coming to the USA to study has about halved in the last couple of years. There are a number of reasons for this. The Patriot Act certainly makes it more difficult for people, especially from some countries, to get visas to study here. The anti-scientific atmosphere in the country is certainly a repellent. Creationist actions in Dover, PA, Cobb Co. GA, and Kansas are certainly not great PR for the state of our science (and science education). Slashing of funding for science (except for defense-related research and the crazy Moon/Mars project) does not look promising for a potential foreign student. Outright ban on some types of research (e.g., stem cell research) has even lured some American-born scientists to move to Singapore and similar places abroad.

But it is not just a repellent effect of today's America that is keeping all those smartest foreigners from coming here. They are also attracted to the new possibilities for success at home. Fall of communism, unification of Europe, lightning-fast economic development of a number of Asian nations, all these factors contribute to a new sense of optimism in so many parts of the world. One can, these days, actually do good science in many countries in which it was impossible a decade earlier. Universities and Institutes are being built, money is coming in, the old ways of doing science business are being rethought and reformed in many places, thus luring many young people to choose countries other than the scary USA for their professional development.

These kinds of concerns have been voiced repeatedly here in the States, and science has been quite politicized lately. Many articles in mainstream media, as well as posts on blogs, have been written lamenting these recent developments. Organizations have been formed (e.g., the Union of Concerned Scientists), and some blogs are almost entirely devoted to this problem (e.g., Chris Mooney's Intersection). However, the scientists themselves are feeling more conflicted. On one hand, being good Americans, they would like to see the US retain its leading role in the world of science. They want to continue being able to do good science in this country. On the other hand, being good scientists, they feel that the globalization of science is a good thing. While most other human endeavors are parochial, science is universal, and the latest trends promise an internationalization of science never before seen in history. The increased communication and collaboration between scientists in many countries, coming from different scientific traditions, will lead to creative cross-pollination that can be only good for the progress of science.

What are the differences between science as done in the USA and science done elsewhere? Every time I received a reprint request from abroad I checked out the person. What is (s)he working on? Can I look at their publications? Invariably, my response to their work was "Wow! This is cool stuff! So creative and smart!". Then, my second thought would be "But there's no way NIH or even NSF would ever fund something like this - it is too risky, too unusual, too low-tech, actually, it is too creative".

My brother once said that the difference between American science and Russian science is that, given the problem, the American scientist goes to his lab, turns on his glitzy Star-Wars-like machines and gets started. After two years and two million dollars he has the answer to the question, although the very complexity of the methodology leaves some people suspicious of the results as the stuff is too difficult and expensive to replicate. The Russian scientist, on the other hand, locks himself in his office with a pencil and a piece of paper. After two days, he emerges with an idea. After two weeks of experimentation that involves some clever use of coathangers and duck-tape, the Russian has the final, definitive, uncontroversial answer. It cost him a total of twenty roubles at the corner store, and the finding goes straight into textbooks.

What he is trying to say is not Big Science Bad, Small Science Good. He is just paraphrasing GWF Hegel about the neccessity being the mother of invention, or in other words, "need teaches you to think" (actually, we had that inscribed on our bathroom door, "need" being an euphemism for what you need to go to the bathroom for, and of course, bathroom being the best and quietest room in the house for deep thinking). American science is expensive science. If you ask for a lot of money to do a lot of high-tech research, you will likely get it. So why bother thinking about quicker, cheaper ways of solving the same problem, when it is much easier to get millions of dollars and employ twenty technicians and students in the lab to do all the busy work. Of course, some questions can be answered only through expensive high-tech research. But most American scientists are not trained to even stop and think if a cheaper alternative is a viable, if not even better, way to arrive at the answer. More high-tech a lab is, less likely it is that the students, and even post-docs, will be allowed to be creative. Too much money is at stake. Advisor's reputation is at stake. In biology, this means that more molecular the lab, more the students and post-docs are just glorified technicians. As one moves away from molecules to oranismal biology, behavior or to field work, more creativity the students are allowed to show, as less money and egos are at stake (http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2004/12/wwdd-what-would-darwin-do-or_02.html). Molecular data are just hypotheses to be tested in whole organisms. Do these molecules really interact in the animal the same way they did in the test tube? We do the expensive part here - we run the gels. The foreigners then take our data and do the creative whole-organism work that really nails the issue down, as well as results in a patentable product.

Warning: here comes another metaphor. US science is like Microsoft. Science in other places is Open-Source. Science in Europe is like a typewriter factory that suddenly realized that their product is defunct, ditches the whole operation and has a chance to start from scratch (and notices that open source is better). US science is like a big company that sells the best product of the day according to the desires of the customers, thus constitutionally incapable of risking innovation into areas for which there is no demand. The demand is set by funding agencies who want to see, at the very beginning of the grant proposal, what practical application the research can have. There is no funding for projects that are driven by pure curiosity, asking novel questions, going into dark alleys that may turn out
to be blind. Jumping on bandwagons (e.g., using the most modern molecular techniques) is the only way to get funded. Bandwagons, though, tend to travel on well-beaten paths. Really revolutionary scientific findings were never produced on a bandwagon. That is why the new and emerging scientific powers in Asia and Europe are producing such exciting stuff, while we produce endless papers with pictures of gels.

US science is the head of the beast, while the science in the rest of the world is the Long Tail (http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/): fast, cheap and out of control. Think of a lizard. The head is big and clumsy, but the tail is flexible and easily regenerates if it gets injured. Not to mention that the tail is more than half the length of the lizard. Shall I mix some more metaphors? It is not just the whole societies that rise and fall, but also various elements of those societies rise and fall, when institutional inertia prevents adaptation to novel circumstances (http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2005/01/08/jared_diamond/index_np.html).

What Would Blogger Do (WWBD)?

So, what is the role of blogs going to be in the future of science? I believe the blogs are going to speed up the internationalization of science, with positive effects for both American and foreign scientists. What expert science bloggers are doing right now and will do even more in the future is take expensive information and make it free. People with access to expensive journal subscriptions will link, excerpt, and comment on technical papers as soon as they are published, thus making them available to scientists in small schools, in foreign countries, and, importantly to, gasp - blasphemy! - amateur scientists. That is exactly what I intend to do with Circadiana. My scientific colleagues in Algeria, Argentina and Poland can contact me (or each other) and start fruitfull collaborations, not just read an occasional paper two months after its publication.

Science teachers in middle and high schools will have the information at their fingertips. Textbooks will probably become a little less than ten years out of date at the time of publication, I hope. Journalists will know where to go to find correct information about a topic that requires scientific explanations. Random blogsurfers will pop in and see some really cool science-stuff with who knows what consequences - perhaps piquing an interest in science in a kid? The best science bloggers will be able to also write well, translating difficult scientese into ordinary language, thus removing some of the mystique that keeps people afraid of science, as well as demostrating how science works and how controversies and food-fights are the best generators of new ideas and cool findings.

Pharyngula, Intersection, The Loom, Quark Soup, Panda's Thumb,...are just the beginning. While many expert blogs will garner interest only locally within borders of a single country, science blogs by definition do not recognize borders. This blog (as well as Circadiana already!) has regular visitors from EVERY continent. The science-blog node of the Internet, with its own clusters and subclusters, its own blog-journals like The Tangled Bank is growing to be, will be THE place to be in years to come, the home of The Planet Earth, where Knowledge really is Power.

Holy Cow!!!!!

This blog has been around for about 5 months. It took a lot of linking and blogwhoring over that period for it to reach the current level of readership. I certainly have fans, check this great compliment out:

http://notapipe.blogspot.com/2005/01/web-log-rolling.html

…or these wonderful words here:

http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2004/12/i-have-fans.html

As of last night, my stats for this blog looked like this:

Science and Politics (inaugurated on 8/17/2004)

Sitemeter:
Visits
Total ........................ 6,922
Average per Day ................ 108
Average Visit Length .......... 2:23
This Week ...................... 755

As of 1:47pm EST today:
7,040 visits

Technorati:
214 links from 187 sources

TTLB Ecosystem Status: Large Mammal

But look at this now. Her are the stats for my other blog that I just started a couple of days ago, Circadiana (http://circadiana.blogspot.com)

Circadiana (inaugurated on 1/6/2005)

As of last night:
Sitemeter:
Visits
Total ............................ 3
Average per Day .................. 2
Average Visit Length .......... 0:00
This Week ........................ 3

As of 1:43pm EST today:
1,084 visitors

Technorati:
24 links from 20 sources

TTLB Ecosystem Status: Crunchy Crustacean (this will change tonight for sure).

What! Circadiana got more hits in half a day than Science and Politics gets in its best week! Why? OK, a link from Boing Boing is a good thing, of course. But why did it happen?

I think that there is a glut of generalists’ blogs out there, but a real hunger for specialists blogs (http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2005/01/meta-blogging.html). Experts draw audiences due to their expertise. On matters of law you ask a lawyer, you ask a philosopher your philosophical questions, and a professional programmer how to fix your nifty blog template. If you are interested in circadian biology, you come and ask me. You don’t trust quacks of the blogosphere, you trust me. And so far, Circadiana has just one post which is a fusion and edit of two posts I have already published on Science And Politics. Circadiana just seemed so empty, I decided to post the thing there as a place-holder. I have collected information for further posts and will start posting arcane circadiana there regularly.


More, much more on this tonight. Fix some coffee and get ready to read a very long post on this very matter: blogs and (scientific) expertise).

UPDATE:
The same "Circadiana" post is now on del.icio.us, thus thousands of blogs carry the link to it right now. The current tally, at about 6:10pm, is over 1800 hits. Interestingly, "Science and Politics" is over 200 for today already, most arriving from "Circadiana" (as I smartly posted some links there).

Also, please submit your science/nature/medicine posts to me for the next issue of Tangled Bank. Scroll down or use the link on the blogroll for more info (http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2004/12/call-for-submissions.html). I would appreciate it if you could e-mail me your link by about 5pm on the 11th of January.

New categories for the Kaufax Awards are up on Wampum. It was really difficult to choose the Best Blog Writing - there are so many - but I picked The Common Ills. Also, I voted for Pharyngula for the Best Expert Blog, Chris Mooney's Intersection for the Best Single Issue Blog, Legal Fiction for the Best Non-Professional Blog, Panda's Thumb for the Best Group Blog, and Rude Pundit for the most humorous blog. More categories (e.g., Pro-Blog, New Blog, Best Series, Best Post, Funniest Post, etc.) will be coming over the next couple of days so keep checking over there.

Update2:

Total hits:

Science and Politics

Yesterday: 309 Today: 147 (@12:40pm EST)

Circadiana

Yesterday: 2106 Today: 1106

The sleep post on Circadiana was rated as the 15th most virulent post in the blogosphere at one point (by blogdex). Most hits of Sci/Pol were coming from Circadiana again.

50 book challenge

The 50 book challenge is spreading around the blogosphere. Many blogs are discussing it and here are some of the rules:
http://blogs.salon.com/0001092/2004/01/27.html
I have been thinking in these terms for a long time now and did some calculations. Let's say that I can read 50 books per year. Let's also say that I will be alive and capable of reading for another 50 years. 50 x 50 = 2500 books total. I have about twice as many at home. If you go to a big library, this is one side of one aisle. I have to choose really carefully what to read. Out of millions of books out there, millions still to be published, how does one choose the best and most important 2500 (adjust for your age and life expectancy)? It is a tough choice, to say the least.

I have been really bad at writing down what I read in the past year or two, and also had to read so many scientific papers (that does not count for the reading list, unfortunately, nor do the textbooks). Also, my criterion is tough - I count a book as read if I have read EVERY word in it. Thus, many books that I skim through or read important parts do not count. This elminates many books this year, as I have started or skimmed through many. I also do not count repeats, unless it's been 20 years since the last reading. So, here is the list reconstructed out of memory of the stuff I am sure I have read in 2004 (some of them perhaps as early as 2003 - who knows?).

Non-fiction

Lakoff, George (2002) Moral Politics
Lakoff, George (2004) Don't Think of an Elephant
Graff, E.J. (1999, 2004) What Is Marriage For?
Ducat, Stephen (2004) The Wimp Factor
Parenti, Michael (2004) Superpatriotism
Howard Gardner (2004) Changing Minds
Roughgarden, Joan (2004) Evolution's Rainbow
Ivins, Molly and Dubose, Lou (2003) Bushwacked: Life in George W. Bush’s America
Chomsky, Noam (1999) The New Military Humanism
Kipnis, Laura (2003) Against Love: a polemic
Moore, David S (2001) The Dependent Gene
Roach, Mary (2003) Stiff
Wilson, David Sloan (2002) Darwin’s Cathedral
Edwards, John (2003) Four Trials
Stephen Jay Gould (2002) The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (yes, I read every word!)
Hanauer, Cathi (Ed., 2002) The Bitch in the House
Marks, Jonathan (2002) What it means to be 98% chimpanzee
Fox Keller, Evelyn (2000) The Century of the Gene

Fiction and Science-fiction

Pratchett, Terry (2000) The Truth
Slonczewski, Joan (1989) The Wall Around Eden
Snicket, Lemony (1999) The Bad Beginning
Snicket, Lemony (1999) The Reptile Room
Snicket, Lemony (2000) The Wide Window
Snicket, Lemony (2000) The Miserable Mill
Snicket, Lemony (2000) The Austere Academy
Snicket, Lemony (2001) The Ersatz Elevator
Snicket, Lemony (2001) The Vile Village
Snicket, Lemony (2003) The Slippery Slope
Snicket, Lemony (2004) The Grim Grotto
Arthur, Robert (1964) The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot
Arthur, Robert (1965) The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy
Arthur, Robert (1966) The Secret of Skeleton Island
Arthur, Robert (1972) The Mystery of the Singing Serpent
Bear, Greg (1979) Psychlone
Bear, Greg (1987) The Forge of God
Bear, Greg (1992) Anvil of Stars
Bear, Greg (1999) Darwin’s Radio
Bear, Greg (2003) Darwin’s Children
Dessen, Sarah (2000) Dreamland
Dessen, Sarah (1999) Keeping the Moon
Dessen, Sarah (2002) This Lullaby
Sheffield, Charles (2002) Amazing Dr.Darwin
Bradbury, Ray (1951) Fahrenheit 451
Dick, Phillip K.(1967) Counter-Clock World
Dick, Phillip K.(1956) The Man Who Japed
Frankowski, Leo (2002) Conrads' Time Machine
Houllebecq,Michel (2000) The Elementary Particles
Vanderbes, Jennifer (2003) Easter Island

I will take the challenge and post a short book review on this blog about once every week.

New Hampshire news

This is from Washington Times, thus snarky tone, but it sure excites me:

"And, finally, in our '08 roundup, we have this
nugget on John Edwards from one of our best New Hampshire sources," John
Mercurio writes in the Morning Grind column at www.cnn.com. " 'Word has it that
John Edwards has been making calls to NH Democrats already, starting with the
state senators just before the holidays,' this source said. 'And he will be the
keynote speaker at the New Hampshire Democratic Party's 100 Club dinner in
Manchester on Feb. 5. He also sent Christmas cards to activists around the
state. Looks like the 2008 N.H. primary is under way.' "

Blog Carnivals

As I said before (http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2005/01/meta-blogging.html), blog carnivals a re a great way to see and be seen in the blogosphere and to form the nodes/knots of blogs connected by mutual interests, as well as digitally connected through links and blogrolls.

So, here are some carnivals I found. Go read them, submit stuff, make knots:

Carnival of the Vanities

http://silflayhraka.com/archives/001460.html

http://www.vesselofhonour.com/archives/000830.php

Blog Tower

http://mysite.verizon.net/vze7rlxx/bthome/

The Bharteeya Blog Mela

http://www.madhoo.com/

Bonfire of the Vanities

http://wizbangblog.com/archives/cat_bonfire_of_the_vanities.php

Carnival of the Capitalists

http://www.elhide.com/solo/cotc.htm

The Kissing Booth

http://www.singlesouthernguy.com/archives/000443.html

Carnival of the Canucks

http://blog.davidjanes.com/carnival_of_the_canucks/index.html

The BestOfMe Symphony

http://www.snoozebuttondreams.com/archives/cat_bestofme_symphony.html

The Carnival of the Cats

http://carnivalofthecats.com

Carnival of the Dogs

http://mickey.ondragonswing.com/archives/006091.html

Carnival of The Consumers

http://www.jeffdoolittle.com/archives/000203.php

The Tangled Bank

http://tangledbank.net/

The Carnival of The Liberated

http://www.soundfury.us/archives/000486.html

The Christian Carnival

http://www.patriot-paradox.com/

The Philosopher's Carnival

http://philosophycarnival.blogspot.com/

The Early Modern Carnival

http://worldupsidedown.blogspot.com/2004/08/carnival-of-early-modernists.html

Carnival of The Recipes

http://www.thedonovan.com/beth/archives/cat_recipe_carnival.html

Sneak's Wide World of Blogging

http://www.sneakeasysjoint.com/archives/cat_sneaks_wide_world_of_blogging.html

Carnival Of the Bush Bloggers

http://www.blogsforbush.com/carnival.html

The Storyblogging Carnival

http://www.donaldscrankshaw.com/posts/1095090596.shtml

Carnival of Carnivals

http://king-of-fools.com/archives/001306.php

Grand Rounds

http://blogborygmi.blogspot.com/2004/08/grand-rounds.html

Carnival Of The Pajamas

http://badexample.mu.nu/archives/cat_carnival_of_the_pajamas.php

Carnival of Poetry

http://liverevolt.com/seldomsober/archive/poetry/005362.php

The Carnival Of The Rugrats

http://www.thezeroboss.com/archives/003431.html

Haveil Havalim

http://soccerdad.baltiblogs.com/archives/004560.html

The Scian Melt

http://www.thescian.com/melt/

Carnival of the Families

http://desertlightjournal.blog-city.com/read/985278.htm

Carnivalesque

http://worldupsidedown.blogspot.com

Carnival of Sin

http://www.nyhotties.com/carnival.php

NC Blogging, etc.

If you go to Blogs-by-City you'll be floored how many blogs are from North Carolina, especially Greensboro - a big blogging hub. It is amazing to live here, in bloggers' Paradise. I have signed up for the next Triangle Bloggers Conference 2005:
http://mistersugar.com/tamtam/blogtogether/show/Triangle+Bloggers+Conference+2005
Follow the various links there and be amazed.

In other news, Paul Rosenberg is continuing his series on framing:
Uniting the DKos Community--Part 3
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/6/101029/9172

and the new installment of the Lakoff series is now available on the Effect Measure:
Lakoff - VI: Prelude to politics
http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2005/01/lakoff-vi-prelude-to-politics.html

Circadiana

I have started my second blog, Circadiana (http://circadiana.blogspot.com), where I will follow the news and advances in all areas of biology that involve timing. Circadian (and other circa-) rhythms will likely dominate, but developmental timing, evolution via heterochrony, fast oscillations in the nervous system, behavioral timing, cognition of time perception, and ecological cycles will also crop up every now and then.

On the other hand, this blog, Science and Politics, will continue being this weird concoction of politics, cognitive psychology, Creationist-bashing, country music, movies, horses, humor, cute animal pictures, education, cool links to other blogs, environment, medicine, Balkans, media, spitting llamas, spitting cobras, spitting images, meta-blogosphering, etc. and I will considering asking some very smart people to do some guest-blogging here occasionally. In one word, it is two words: Life, Universe and Everything Else.

Kaufax Awards

The first round of voting for Kaufax Awards has started over on the Wampum blog. They are putting longer lists to be trimmed down to a short list for the final vote later on. Not all categories are up yet but they are adding them on one at a time. Go vote (just add a comment). It is really difficult to choose - there are so many good blogs. Choosing the best non-professional blog was really hard. I picked Legal Fiction, assuming that Pharyngula will come up again in the "expert blog" category. Group blog was easier - Panda's Thumb, and for the humorous blog I picked Rude Pundit mainly because I am not as familiar with the others yet.
Link:
http://wampum.wabanaki.net/

Good reads

An excellent trio of Diaries about framing from dKos:

A Fighting Faith: OH, Democracy, Lakoff & Chris Bowers
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/4/174730/3632
Uniting The DKos Community
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/4/23636/42748
Uniting The DKos Community-Part 2
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/5/185020/6924


...and from one of them I stole a link to this great article:

What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It? http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/conservatism.html

Bloggers Are Back In Town

Jonnybutter is back from his long blog-break. His "Not A Pipe" blog has been renamed "Crush All Boxes".

He 'gets' the problems of "Intelligent Design" and adds some interesting twists of his own in this two-part post:

http://notapipe.blogspot.com/2004/12/but-first.html

http://notapipe.blogspot.com/2005/01/cozy-footies.html


On the other hand, Amanda Doerty's understanding of evolution is quite sophomoric, which is OK as she is, actually, a sophomore. With the first tools and terms of philosophy proudly hanging from her tool-belt, she is putting them to use in a series of posts on evolution (as well as drugs, gay marriage, racism, affirmative action etc.) that is utterly confusing. Sometimes she uses typical creationist arguments to argue FOR evolution. The next minute she repeats some of the ancient, million-times-rebuffed, IDC arguments to argue against evolution. Then in the next paragraph she debunks another typical IDC argument. In the end she surprises by saying she believes evolutionary theory is correct but NOT scientific!!!! Well, most of the stuff on her blog is incoherent like this, but I would rather see this - that she is learning and thinking about the big issues of the world - than doing what most of her peers do at her age: get drunk, get high, get laid. With some reading, discussing, and thinking, she has a chance. Most of her peers do not.

Is Evolutionary Theory Scientific?
http://hotabercrombiechick.blogspot.com/2005/01/is-evolutionary-theory-scientific.html

Is The Limited View of Evolution Scientific?
http://hotabercrombiechick.blogspot.com/2005/01/limited-evolutionary-theory-scientific.html

Man Living with Dinosaurs?
http://hotabercrombiechick.blogspot.com/2005/01/man-living-with-dinosaurs-fossil.html

Is the More Comprehensive View of Evolution Scientific?
http://hotabercrombiechick.blogspot.com/2005/01/comprehensive-evolutionary-theory.html




Publius is back in town and has written several posts, including these two, the first one touching on a topic close to my heart - the perception of time in politics (jonnybutter also touches on that in one of the posts above), and the other on the future Progressive strategies:

DELTA BLUES, ROBERT JOHNSON, AND THE PROBLEM OF "GOLDEN AGES"
http://lawandpolitics.blogspot.com/2005_01_01_lawandpolitics_archive.html#110472935147039768

THE VISION THING - "Reform" and a Plan for 2006
http://lawandpolitics.blogspot.com/2005_01_01_lawandpolitics_archive.html#110481994207239749


Dr.Neiwert is also back in town, and his travellogue is a Dark And Stormy Night:

Headin' for the big roundup
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2005/01/headin-for-big-roundup.html

and his analysis of the WA gubernatorial election is detailed and excellent:

Replaying Florida in Washington
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2005/01/replaying-florida-in-washington.html

Carl Zimmer has two great scientific stories to tell:

The Whale and the Antibody
http://www.corante.com/loom/archives/the_whale_and_the_antibody.php

All the News That's Too Big To Print
http://www.corante.com/loom/archives/all_the_news_thats_too_big_to_print.php


...and PZMyers is also back in town with a great scientific story about genes, noses and dogs:

Tandem repeats and morphological variation
http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/tandem_repeats_and_morphological_variation

In the meantime, DarkSyde was guestblogging and everyone had great fun debating creationists and everything else, so go over to pharyngula and have fun reading.

Here are a couple of new posts about Creationism:

Creationist e-mail: Phil Skell
http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/creationist_e_mail_phil_skell/

A Christian educational institution
http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/a_christian_educational_institution/


...and trashing religion in general:

Christmas in NYC
http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/christmas_in_nyc/
Inflaming the godly
http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/inflaming_the_godly/

Finally, don't forget to submit your entries for the next Tangled Bank (http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2004/12/call-for-submissions.htm
)

Today: Rockridge Forums Open to Public; Tomorrow: DFA MeetUp on Framing

Go and register, if you are interested in framing the core ideology and the message of the Progressive movement and the Democratic Party.

"The Rockridge Institute would like to invite concerned Americans to join an online discussion on framing and policy issues. The Rockridge Action Network (http://forum.rockridgeinstitute.org) is a pilot of an online community focused on framing and public policy based on progressive principles. Since the 2004 elections, many activists and others have been asking us when we'll have an online forum, and today, January 4, is that day.
The Rockridge Action Network is a place where activists, journalists, policy makers, and framing experts can come together and discuss how to frame their values, ideas and policies. The discussion will take off from where George Lakoff's book, Don't Think of an Elephant, began and will put those ideas into everyday practice. On the boards users will find a place to discuss framing, talk about real life examples of framing, strategize, and note how both progressive and conservative frames are being used in the media.
"Come to the Rockridge Action Network and be a part of the development of this important step in advancing the progressive vision for America."

Come and talk about framing, see Lakoff's DVD and meet the activists in your community:

Democracy for America, the 150,000-member nationwide progressive activist group, is holding 350 meet-ups on January 5th, 2005 in cities across the United States, to educate its members on the strategic framing ideas of George Lakoff http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/people/lakoff, Senior Fellow at the Rockridge Institute. Says Professor Lakoff: "Framing is more than finding 'better' words. It is the way you think about the world. Good framing reflects your values and your beliefs, and connects them to issues in ways that have self-contained arguments built in. If you are framing honestly, then the arguments will be ones that you believe in." To find a meet-up near you, go to
http://dfa.meetup.com/ and enter your zip code. For more info on Democracy in America and their work on framing, see http://democracyforamerica.com/framing.
The Rockridge Institute is a non-partisan think tank that reframes and rethinks public policy to promote a more just, democratic, humane, and environmentally sustainable society. Founded by leading west coast thinkers, it steers clear of the daily skirmish of inside-the-beltway politics to focus on long term education and change in the public consensus. For more information, please visit the Rockridge website at http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org.
Democracy for America is a political action committee dedicated to building a grassroots network to support socially progressive and fiscally responsible candidates at all levels of government.


Plus, two interesting loosk at framing:


Time for Progressives to Grow Up
http://www.guerrillanews.com/articles/article.php?id=1010
Beyond Lakoff’s strict father vs. nurturant parent, a strong community manifesto

Who Needs George Lakoff?
http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/archives/2004/12/who_needs_georg.htm

Hey, teacher, leave us kids alone (to sleep late)

Now this is interesting... to me, at least. Especially as a developmental follow-up on my previous post about sleep and clocks (http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2004/12/sleep-repression_27.html).

It has been known that adolescents are quite extreme “owls” no matter what their chronotype may be earlier and later in life (and fortunately, school districts are starting to recognize this). This has been attributed to the surge of sex hormones in early adolescence. Responsiveness of the circadian clock to sex hormones has not been studied much (virtually not at all, though I should be able to publish my data within a year or so, sorry for not being able to divulge more detailed information yet), yet most people in the field believe this to be the case, even if no details are available yet.

Now this paper suggests that the end of adolescence should be defined as a time when the circadian clock goes back to its “normal” state. But, wait a minute, the hormones do not disappear at that time. Thus, if the clock is responding to the hormones at the onset of the adolescence, does this mean that the end of adolescence should be defined as the time when the clock becomes UNRESPONSIVE to the hormones? How does that happen and how is that triggered?

Anyway, I still have to look at the study itself (this is just a press release). I want to see if females both become “owls” AND quit being “owls” earlier than males [OK, I took a peek at the paper and yes, they do]. Also, in women, hormones (mostly estrogen and progesterone) surge in monthly cycles that end abruptly at menopause, while in men testosterone (mainly) is pretty high (with a small circadian variation) continuously and only gradually declines in old age. The lifelong sex difference they found in the study is quite interesting in this light.

Also, I like the way they tried to tease away social influences from pure biology, though they are correct to warn they do not know in which direction causation flows: do the teenagers sleep late because they party, or do they party because they are wide awake…..and now a closet sociobiologist is waking up somewhere in my head trying to explain why would it be adaptive for teens to stay up late and play, including perhaps experimentation with sex while elders are asleep (squash, bad sociobiologist…go back to sleep…there, good boy)….

Wake Me When It's Over
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2005/103/2

"Societies define adulthood in different ways, from entering puberty to entering the workforce. But circadian clock researchers now suggest that adolescence ends when we stop sleeping in.

Teenagers are more likely to have trouble getting out of bed in the morning than are young children or adults--a finding many studies attribute to a chronic lack of sleep. But researchers at the University of Munich wondered if a more fundamental biological factor played a role.

Using a brief questionnaire distributed in clinics, universities and online, Till Roenneberg and colleagues collected data on sleeping patterns from more than 25,000 people in Germany and Switzerland. As part of their analysis, the researchers determined each person's "chronotype" by calculating the mid-point of their sleep--halfway between going to bed and waking up--on days when the subjects slept as late as they wanted.

A surprising pattern emerged. Average chronotypes drift later and later
during the teen years, but then begin to move steadily earlier after the age of 20, the researchers report in the 28 December issue of Current Biology. It still isn't clear why, says Roenneberg. Teenagers may sleep late because they've been out partying or they may go out because they're wide awake at 11 pm. However, he says, the team also saw a similar pattern in teenagers in rural valleys in South Tyrol--where nightclubs are relatively scarce. There, the average chronotype was
about an hour earlier, but the overall age pattern was the same. The researchers also saw differences between the sexes, with females having an earlier average chronotype than males until around age 50--consistent with menopause--when the correlation between age and chronotype seems to break down. This suggests, Roenneberg says, that biological factors such as hormones have an important influence on the tendency to sleep late.

Sleep researcher Mary Carskadon of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, says that both social and biological factors are likely involved. Finding the biological trigger--if any--could lead to a better understanding of what drives circadian rhythms, she says."

Of course, the study was done on Germans. Even in disco-less South Tyrol there is electricity and modernity. It would be cool to see a similar study performed in a culture where sleep is divided in two parts (late-night sleep and afternoon Siesta), like in Mediterranean and Latin American countries, as well as in a real primitive society in which sleep is divided into two parts (early-night sleep and late-night sleep with a break for sex around midnight).

Get Published

Call for Papers (via Bitch, PhD: http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/)

This is a call for papers for a special theme issue on "blogging" to be published as a threshold issue in the journal Reconstruction.

The editors of this theme issue are looking for papers/projects/manifestos on the subject of "blogging." Possible topics:

Theorization of the Blogosphere
Blogging Manifesto
Politics and/of Blogging
Aesthetics of Blogs
Activist Blogging
Auto/Biographical Blogs
New Media/Communication Theories and Blogging
New Journalism Blogging
Civil Rights of Bloggers
Global Culture and Blogging
Local Culture and Blogging
Education and Blogging
Gender and Blogging
Race and Blogging
Collective Blogs
Community of Bloggers
Unrealized Potential of Blogging
Critiques of Blogging
Representations of Space/Place on Blogs
Purpose of a Unique Individual/Collective Blog
Audio and Visual Blogs

We are especially interested in the experiences, theories and perspectives of those who actually blog.

Feel free to propose other topics to the editors:Michael Benton (University of Kentucky; founder of the blog Dialogic; editor at Reconstruction) and Nick Lewis (co-founder of the Progressive Bloggers’ Alliance)

Send all queries, proposals and manuscripts to mdbento@gmail.com. Deadline for completed essays is June 1st, 2005.Read below about the journal Reconstruction and threshold special theme issues and their deadlines. The editors expect this issue to fill very quickly due to the importance of this subject.

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture http://www.reconstruction.ws (ISSN 1547-4348) is an innovative culture studies journal dedicated to fostering an intellectual community composed of scholars and their audience, granting them all the opportunity and ability to share thoughts and opinions on the most important and influential work in contemporary interdisciplinary studies.

Manuscripts may be written from any number of perspectives, and with any end in mind; possible sites for articulations may focus on the urban, the rural, the natural, the social, local and global "culture," politics, (auto)biography, medicine, the body, science, texts (music, cinema, literature), media (the internet, television), myth and religion.

Submissions are encouraged from a variety of perspectives, including, but not limited to: geography, cultural studies, folklore, architecture, history, sociology, psychology, communications, anthropology, music, political science, semiotics, theology, art history, queer theory, literary criticism, ecocriticism, criminology, urban planning, gender studies, etc. All theoretical and empirical approaches are welcomed.Information on the preparation of manuscripts for submission can be found here. http://www.reconstruction.ws/style.htm

Reconstruction is published quarterly (January, April, July, and October) and is currently indexed in the MLA International Bibliography.

Enter Dialogic http://dialogic.blogspot.com
Progressive Blog Alliance http://progressivealliance.blogspot.com/

Skeptical? Or not skeptical enough?

I stole the above cartoon from a dKos Diary. The Diarist reprinted it with permission from this wonderful site: http://www.nearingzero.net/

I know this is old, but for those who are new to the Creationism controversy and have a problem with teaching evolution, read the following article:


The Creation/Evolution Continuum
by Eugenie C. Scott
http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articles/1593_the_creationevolution_continu_12_7_2000.asp



That article (with an even niftier look of the graph) was reprinted in Skeptic, Vo.10, No.4, 2004.

If you still have a tin-foil hat on, read this for a sobering thought:

The Truth is Out There…Way Out There
by George Case
http://skeptic.com/eskeptic12-30-04.html






...and if you are still skeptical of Lakoff, read this wonderful series:

Lakoff - I. Who is George Lakoff?
http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2004/12/lakoff-i-who-is-george-lakoff.html
Lakoff - II: Preliminaries
http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2004/12/lakoff-ii-preliminaries.html
Lakoff - III: Embodied concepts
http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2004/12/lakoff-iii-embodied-concepts.html
Lakoff - IV: Complex metaphors
http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2004/12/lakoff-iv-complex-metaphors.html
Lakoff - V: Setting the stage
http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2005/01/lakoff-v-setting-stage.html



...and, if you want to see everything connected to science that was posted on Daily Kos over the previous week, check this meta-Diary:
Nerd Network News
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/2/212349/5039

Meta-Blogging

Some blogs have thousands of daily visitors because they were there first. It is like carbonated drinks. Even if you make a drink that is much better than Coke or Pepsi, you are doomed to bankrupcy because they pre-empted you. And sure, even in the early days there was competition, and people like Kos, Atrios, Billmon, Drum, Marshall etc. were probably better than their competition, thus they are now deservedly the stars of the blogosphere. That does not mean they have managed to retain the high quality of writing that perhaps characterized their early years. Being at the helm of such a big blog gives the owner a sense of responsibility to his/her audience to produce something every day. It is also interesting how small the blogrolls are of the "Big Blogs" - they tend to only link to each other. It also appears they also read just each other, and have quit commenting on other people's blogs (if they ever did it). Thus, a knot in the network appeared, formed out of about a dozen or so Big Old Blogs that only link and refer to each other. This is the blog aristocracy.

Some blogs have thousands of daily visitors because the owner was famous before even starting a blog. Journalists like Adam Nagourney, Matt Yglesias, and Keith Olberman were immediate hits as soon as they started blogging. Sci-fi writers, like William Gibson, Greg Bear and David Brin would never have the kind of audience-size as they do if they were not famous to begin with. People with real expertise, who can do more than provide links to NYT and a couple of lines of personal opinion are also magnets for traffic. For questions about law, you go to Juan Cole or the new Posner blog. Science? Carl Zimmer, PZMyers, Saun Carrol and David Appel have made their names in science circles way before they started their blogs. Philosophy? How about Brain Leiter or Sahotra Sarkar? I am glad to see more and more experts blogging and attracting large audiences. It is important for widespread dissemination of information that it occasionaly gets "vetted" by people who are trained to evaulate a particular type of information.

New blogs have a harder time. It is New Coke. It takes some really good writing, a dose of rare expertise, and a novel way of thinking for a new blog to start penetrating the blogospheric consciousness. That is why Legal Fiction and Total Information Awareness are, for instance, gaining more and more readers as the time goes by. I have received quite a lot of nice e-mails recently, incidentally more for my mini-"expertise" on Lakoff's scheme and logical continuation of it, than for my real-world expertise in circadian biology. But it took a lot of shameless blogwhoring in the beginning to get off the ground at first.

While old Big Blogs are themselves centers of the Universe from which all opinion radiates, small blogs have a different strategy. Large blogrolls, lots of blogwhoring, commenting on each others blogs, linking to each others post - those are all strategies to gain one's visibility, with a consequence of new knots forming. These new knots are much larger than knots of Big blogs. Several dozens of blogs in each knot keep linking to each other all the time, and the knots get bigger and bigger, connecting to each other, forming a really extensive web which only tangentially includes the Big Old Ones.

Joining group blogs and blog alliances is another way the knots (or nodes, if you prefer that term) expand, each individual blog vying for increased visibility in ever greater competition. One new way of spreading the knots are Blog Carnivals. The original is The Bonfire of the Vanities (http://wizbangblog.com/archives/cat_bonfire_of_the_vanities.php). My personal favourite, of course, is Tangled Bank (http://www.tangledbank.net/), collecting posts about biology, nature and medicine (if you have a post like that, submit it to me until January 11th: http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2004/12/call-for-submissions.html). Blog Tower is a collection of some of the best writing of the "small" blogosphere (http://mysite.verizon.net/vze7rlxx/bthome/). There is a medical carnival (http://izzy.typepad.com/undisclosedlocation/2004/10/grand_rounds_ar.html), a philosophers carnival (http://philosophycarnival.blogspot.com/), a Christian Carnival (http://mediasoul.typepad.com/mediasoul/2004/12/christian_carni_2.html), an "early modern history" Carnivallesque (http://worldupsidedown.blogspot.com/) and many others, including a carnival of erotic stories (http://www.nyhotties.com/archives/2004/12/carnival_of_sin_8.html).

Apart from Blog Tower, all the carnivals tend to bring together bloggers interested in a particular field, including the experts in that field. Is that going to result in "Departmentalization" of the blogosphere? Or is it just a natural process of organizing a complex system, so everyone knows where to go for what kind of information. It is useful to have all of your liver in one place and all of your pancreas in another - that way the nervous, immune and endocrine systems know what to do and where to send their signals. In the same vein it may be useful to be able to find all the philosophers in roughly one place, all lawyers in another, all biologists in yet another place, and all meta-bloggers (blogs about blogging) in another.

I bet people are writing their dissertation about this as we speak. I hope those dissertations get posted on their blogs once they get done and defended. It will be interesting to see how the system evolves in the future.