Just a quick but heartening note from the airport: a new article in Religion Dispatches, “Are atheists the new campus crusaders?”, discusses the growing influence of the secular movement on American college campuses. It highlights the Secular Student Alliance, but also mentions the Richard Dawkins Foundation, the Center for Inquiry, and the Secular Coalition for […]
UPDATE: Malcolm Gladwell has been nice enough to come here and defend his methods in a comment. As always, be polite if you want to respond to that comment. ___________ Over at his eponymous website, writer and corporate consultant Eric Garland takes up an issue which has started to bother me lately: “science-lite” books that […]
My paper on the relationship between acceptance of evolution, religion, and societal health is finally available for free at Evolution (you can see the early publication section here and download my pdf here; if the second link doesn’t work, just go to the first link and download my paper directly—it’s the 9th one down). There are […]
In the latest EMBO Reports (EMBO = European Molecular Biology Organization) there’s a piece by Howard Wolinsky, “More than a blog,” describing the new wave of blogging by scientists. It discusses the genre, detailing all of its benefits and perils. And it quotes, among others, Rosie Redfield (exposer of the arsenic-bacteria problems), P. Z., Bora Zivkovic, […]
One of the onerous parts of being a research scientist is the pressure to publish lots of papers, which ranks second only to getting grants as a prime inducer of stress. To obtain tenure or promotion, young scientists now must publish prolifically. I remember that Mel Green, one of my mentors as a postdoc at […]
I’ve always thought that two of the most overpriced things in the world are lattes at places like Starbucks, and the prices of some academic journals. Most laypeople, whose taxes go to fund scientific research through institutions like the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation, aren’t aware that if they want to […]
I’ve rarely seen a critique this strong in the reviewed scientific literature. It’s about Wolfe-Simon et al.’s paper in Science suggesting that a bacterium could incorporate arsenic instead of phosphorus in DNA and biomolecules. Simon Silver and and Le T. Phung take strong issue with this in a piece in the “current controversies” section of […]
by Greg Mayer At least since Socrates explored the meaning of the Greek maxim “Know thyself”, and Alexander Pope added that “the proper study of Mankind is Man”, we have been interested in knowledge about ourselves. But who are we? A paper in press in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Ron […]
For those of you keeping up with the flap on kin selection, there’s a new paper online in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology by F. Rousset and S. Lion. It’s a critique of the Nature paper by Nowak et al. that attacked both the coherence and importance of inclusive fitness theory (“kin selection”), a theory […]
This is a really cool result: a paper published 66 years ago, speculating about the evolutionary history of a group of butterflies, has just been vindicated by a combination of new molecular and ecological work. But what is even cooler is that the author of the earlier paper was Vladimir Nabokov. You know Nabokov (1899-1977) […]
