The "teaching the controversy" canard that many anti-evolutionists roll out concerning fairness is something that irks me to no end. I always fall back on the point that disagreeing with a viewpoint is not a controversy, and now a Christian and religious scholar from Butler University has brilliantly put my thoughts in his own words. Is it "indoctrination" if we teach the history of the Holocaust and do not give equal time to the deniers of the Holocaust?
Is it indoctrination if we teach astronomy and make no mention of astrology?
Is it indoctrination if we teach the heliocentric view of the solar system without giving equal time to geocentrists?
Asking for equal time for "alternatives" to evolution is in exactly the same category. It is asking that a point of view with nothing but questions and complaints to offer be treated as the equal of a scientific field of research that has been remarkably productive and consistently confirmed by all sorts of evidence not available when the theory was first formulated. The media makes much of being "fair" in trying to always hear another side of the story, and there is something indeed laudable about checking to see if there is an opposing viewpoint. Too many of us forget to do that, and forget too often. But not every opposing viewpoint has merit, and the reason we have education standards is to ensure that educators do not waste time on nonsense to the detriment of things that are truly important, valuable, and (ultimately) true.
Tonight on the History Channel the first episode in a new series is coming on Evolve: Eyes.
They are one of evolution's most useful and prevalent inventions. Ninety five percent of living species are equipped with eyes and they exist in many different forms. Learn how the ancestors of jellyfish may have been the first to evolve light-sensitive cells. Discover how dinosaur's evolved eyes that helped them become successful hunters. Finally, learn how primates evolved unique adaptations to their eyes that allowed them to better exploit their new habitat, and how the ability to see colors helped them find food.
I'm going to record it and check it out, hopefully I'll enjoy it more than it will anger me, these types of shows seem to do it to me with their overgeneralizations and inaccurate story lines. The History Channel though has pretty high standards and I am looking forward to checking this one out.
The Texas Republican Party Convention has just ended and their platform has been set for this election cycle. The Texas Freedom Network has delved into the document and highlighted some key points, but really this is the same document the party has used for the last three election cycles. The platform calls for religious zealotry and the destruction of separation of church and state. The party's assault on religious freedom for all people, regardless of beliefs, has been renewed once more. The far-right extremists once again pushed a platform that calls on government to promote their own religious views above all others, here are some highlights.
The Texas GOP declares that "America is a nation under God founded on Judeo-Christian principles" and that the party is pledged "toward dispelling the myth of separation of church and state." [pp 18]
"We support school subjects with emphasis on the Judeo-Christian principles upon which America was founded and which form the basis of America's legal, political and economic systems." [pp 17]
"We oppose any governmental action to restrict, prohibit, or remove public display of the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) or other religious symbols." [pp 11]
The platform also reaffirmed support for policies that undermine public schools, sound science and medical research.
The GOP would challenge the teaching of evolution in science classes by promoting "intelligent design"/creationism and the so-called "weaknesses" of theories such as evolution. [pp 17] The platform does not recognize that evolution is the foundation of all biological sciences.
Texas Republicans "oppose any sex education other than abstinence until heterosexual marriage." This position prohibits teaching students age-appropriate, medically accurate information about birth control and the prevention of sexually transmitted infections. [pp 17]
The party not only rejects medical research involving embryonic stem cells, it calls for imposing criminal penalties on medical professionals and scientists who engage in such research. [pp 14]
The state GOP supports shuttling millions of dollars from public schools to pay for private and religious school tuition through tax-funded vouchers. It opposes requiring that private and religious schools, even those receiving tax-funded vouchers, meet any state standards and other regulations set for public schools. [pp 16] The platform also calls for the abolition of property taxes, which provide nearly all local funding for public schools in Texas. [pp 21]
The party supports granting the heavily politicized State Board of Education sole authority over content in and the adoption of public school textbooks. [pp 16] In 1995, due to hundreds of changes in textbooks to meet personal, political and religious objections by the state board, the Legislature limited the state board's authority.
Texas Republicans call for the abolition of the U.S. Department of Education and government-sponsored programs that deal with early childhood development. [pp 16, 17]
Page 19 of the platform declares that Texas Republicans "deplore all discrimination." Yet the platform also calls for widespread and systematic discrimination against those who are not heterosexual.
The platform calls to support "sodomy" laws in order to fine and/or imprison adults who engage in private, consensual sexual intimacy with someone of the same gender. [pp12]
The party would push for a federal constitutional amendment banning any state from permitting same-sex marriages or any other legal recognition of or benefits for same-sex relationships. Issuing marriage licenses or performing civil ceremonies for same-sex couples would constitute a felony charge. [pp 12]
The party supports the repeal of the state's hate crime statute. [pp 19]
And to top it all off we have the platform trying to trash what good the Texas government has done or is trying to do.
The Texas GOP opposes any taxes or regulations designed to deal with the serious threat of climate change. [pp 21]
The platform calls on the state Legislature to transfer the powers and funding needed to investigate and prosecute charges of government corruption (such as former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land) from the Travis County Public Integrity Unit to another body. [pp 11]
The party opposes mandatory vaccination programs for infectious diseases that endanger children in public schools and the general public outside them. [pp 16]
The state party reaffirmed its hostility toward the international community by calling for the U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations as well as the World Trade Organization. It also opposes measures, such as the Endangered Species Act, that protect the environment. [pp 9]
The party supports the repeal of the minimum wage laws. [pp 22]
There are many more topics including opposing women's reproductive rights, threatening judicial independence, and weakening civil/equal rights that are included in the document and if you have a few hours and are ready to get your mind blown I suggest you try and read the full document. Then maybe you'll have a better understanding why the school system in Texas is about to get blown to shit, because it is run by neocons who are in bed with the religious right and the GOP to steer education toward their spiritual beliefs.
In all honesty this isn't a new document, but you would think that eventually the party would come to terms with the fallacy of Judeo-Christian superiority.
So I really am tired of dealing with the evolution and vaccine denialists, but the climate change denialists have taken it to a whole new level. Here's an example of someone claiming that greenhouse gases can't cause global warming.
Kate McMillan has officially given up on reality. Here's my favorite line of the whole piece:
Moreover, the actual trapping of heat cannot raise an object's temperature in the first place. It only slows down heat loss.
Really, Kate? Here's a little experiment for you. Car, rolled-up windows, sunny day, then get back to me on how heat transfer works. Holy mother of Jesus that woman is an imbecile, but guess who else is willing to swallow the same utter bunkum? You guessed right, the fundie republicans.
Now for everyone out there that hasn't been schooled in physics or chemistry I'll go into the basics of greenhouse gases and why this argument, that trapping heat can't raise an object's temperature, is completely false (and another example of people who don't understand science using it as a justification for their beliefs). First we'll talk about what a greenhouse gas is. Water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and ozone are the major players in the greenhouse effect, with the above being listed by their relative abundance and importance. There are many other gases considered greenhouse gases, including: nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, chlorofluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride, but they are not major players. The mechanism of their effect is very simple. As the sun is very hot it emits very short wavelength energy that has enough energy to pass directly through the atmosphere. When the energy waves hit the Earth some of it is absorbed and warms the surface while most of it is reflected back out to the atmosphere. As the Earth's surface is much cooler than the sun's, it radiates energy at much longer wavelengths, peaking in the infrared at about 10 micrometers. The atmosphere (read: greenhouse gases) absorbs these longer wavelengths much more efficiently than the shorter wavelengths from the sun. The absorption of this energy warms the atmosphere as does the transfer of latent and sensible heat from the surface of the Earth. Greenhouse gases also emit longwave radiation both upward to space and downward to the surface. The downward part of the emitted radiation from the atmosphere is the "greenhouse effect." The major atmospheric components (nitrogen, N2 and oxygen, O2) are not greenhouse gases because homonuclear diatomic molecules (a molecule made of only two atoms of the same chemical element) neither absorb or emit infrared radiation.
So now that we've had a very very short primer on greenhouse gases (you could write books about their properties and actions) let's look at Kate's arguments again to see what science has to say about it.
Kate uses the example of a coffee thermos for this comparison. "Neither does coffee in a thermos get hotter because its heat is trapped. It just retains its temperature for a longer time. Otherwise...the thermos would self-ignite."
You're right Kate, heat can only be transferred from a hotter object to a cooler one, and being trapped in a container will cause the heat transfer to happen slower. But you've missed one big part of the problem, the coffee is warmed to a certain temperature and then no net heat or energy is transferred to it, unfortunately we can't get the sun to warm up the planet and then stick it in a thermos to keep the temperature the same, the sun is always adding new heat.
Correcting Kate's example, if you took the thermos and placed it over a burner (a constant energy source) your coffee would heat up and yes, eventually self-ignite. But if you took the top off of the lid (ie. removed the greenhouse gases), the coffee could radiate more of its heat energy back out into the air and maintain a cooler temperature for longer.
This is just another example of why science should be left to the professionals, you wouldn't trust someone who learned how to pull teeth from a youtube video to be your dentist and you shouldn't allow those with little understanding and training in the sciences to be the guiding voice on the subject. This is all getting a little ridiculous, and its unfortunate that so many experts have to spend their time debunking a bunch of stupid theories and outright falsehoods instead of working on gathering more information.
You see what I did there. It is really easy to do and the intelligent design and denialists (of all sorts, evolution, vaccines, science based medicine) have become very good at it. Let me continue a little.
Back in 1962 (Engel v Vitale, 370 U.S. 421) the Supreme Court said teachers and other public school officials may not lead their classes in prayer, devotional readings from the Bible, or other religious activities. This essentially started the path toward eliminating prayer from schools. By 1992 the Supreme Court had pretty much put the wraps on school prayer (Lee v Wiseman, 505 U.S. 577, 599) saying officials couldn't attempt to persuade or compel students to participate in any religious activities.
At the same time this was happening cancer had become a national problem. Scientists were working on treatments and cures but nothing was really working and we still don't have a cure for cancer. But nonetheless this is what happened. That's right, as our Supreme Court continued to chip away at the religious stronghold in our schools the probability of surviving a childhood cancer rose by over 80%! Obviously its about time we start eliminating prayer from other aspects of our life as well. If children benefit so well from removal of prayer, maybe we should ban prayer from church, there are a lot of old people there and they tend to have a lot of cancers.
Ok, that almost made my head explode, but I think its a pretty good example of how to misuse science. Data is just data, numbers mean nothing without context. That's what scientists are there for, and it's why some guys make a whole hell of a lot more money than others. The ability to read into the data and determine the significance of certain trends, design further experiments to elucidate unknowns, and combine this new data with the old and make sense of them is truly what science is. Honestly anybody can sit in a lab and repeat procedures and fill stacks of notebooks with data, but if you can't find out truly what that data means then you have done bad rather than good.
Hence the argument I made earlier, that declining school prayer has led to a better survival rate among children, is a logical fallacy. I combined two unconnected sets of data into an overreaching statement about how the two data trends are causally related. Some people have become really good at doing just this thing (I'm looking at you Creationists and anti-vaxers), but in much more subtle and non-inflammatory ways. There are some pretty good theoreticists (they aren't scientists) who work for creationist institutions (The Discovery Institute), scouring the literature to find two points of data which will prove that Darwinian Evolution has failed as a theory. But these guys do exactly what I did to make my earlier argument.
I had previously decided that school prayer causes cancer deaths. Now I know that cancer deaths have declined for most cancers due to effective treatments and therapy, but that is irrelevant to the argument, because I am choosing to dismiss the rest of the body of cancer literature stating our social evolution has had little to do with the rate of cancer deaths. Creationists are great at this, finding two simple data sets and saying they connect to prove the theory they already believed. Here's the difference between a belief and a scientific theory; A belief doesn't need data and discovery for you to accept it, which is why creation by a god or the denial of evolution, is simply a belief. There is no data needed for people to believe this. But evolution is an idea that was borne out of data. An idea that did not exist prior to the years of observation and idea synthesis that has led us to where we are today. It is easy to state the opposite of science, by definition science is the exploration of the unknown, so at some point science will always struggle to define every detail and question. But it is much harder to understand the provided data and the holes in the data to come up with the correct theory, which is why the guys who push the hardest for core ideas such as evidence based medicine and Darwinian evolution make the big bucks.
This week Washington played host to the anti-vaccination movement. Everybody was decked out in their "Green our Vaccines" shirts talking about the harm vaccines are doing around the US. I still have yet to find out what the absolute goal of the march was but according to their website the purpose was to:
"Demand Congress take action to Green our Vaccine Supply while reassessing our current vaccine schedule. Ask Congress to reenact legislation that would eliminate mercury and other toxins from our children's vaccines, study the instance of Autism and other neurological disorders in vaccinated versus unvaccinated children, and to extend the state of limitations to allow all children affected by vaccine induced Autism to file in the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP)."
First, you demand that Congress take action on vaccine includants and schedules. I'm not entirely sure what Congress has to do with either of these issues as there is a full agency set up to deal with chemical threats (whether in Food or Drugs, aptly named the Food and Drug Administration). They happen to have a whole host of scientists and policy makers that use the science (I know, what an ugly word) to determine the best benefit to society.
Secondly you ask that Congress "reenact legislation that would eliminate mercury and other toxins from our children's vaccines. Now Jenny, I'm trying to give you some leeway on the science aspect of this whole argument since Google University usually puts out some pretty weak scientists, but take a fucking history lesson. In 2003 all mercury and mercury derivatives were removed from vaccines, and yet autism rates continue to climb (its what we in the science community like to call a negative association). Now as for these "toxins" in vaccines, do you mean that list of "chemicals" in some of your literature---since everything is "chemicals", I'm not sure which ones are "greener".
In your push to find harmful substances in vaccines your website lists "anti-freeze", and yet there isn't any in vaccines. Now some do have a compound with a similar name (polyethylene glycol vs. ethylene glycol---that little part "poly" makes a big difference, but its kind of "scienc-y" so I'll leave it out). There is also mention of "formaldehyde", which is used to inactivate the viruses in some vaccines, but its present in such small amounts, that common environmental exposures are much more significant.
My favorite in the list of chemicals if probably "chick embryos". Jenny, I'll share a little secret with ya, that's just a synonym (that means "means the same as") "egg". Eggs (yeah, the kind we eat, totally) are used to make flu vaccines. Maybe we should consider taking them out of supermarkets too if they're so harmful.
The next statement just kills me too. "Study the instance of Autism and other neurological disorders in vaccinated versus unvaccinated children". To complete a study of "vaccinated vs unvaccinated" children is possibly one of the most morally reprehensible studies that could be conducted. Maybe this is a bad analogy but a study like this is equivalent to placing two groups of people in a room. One group surrounded by a cage and the other group not. A lion is then released into the room and you measure how many people hit their head on the bars of the cage, ignoring how many people outside the cage get mauled or eaten. This is a classic example of placing an unethical and unrealistic goalpost on researchers and then claiming failure that the researchers cannot morally institute the experiment. Anyone who would willingly submit a very large group of children to the dangers of being unvaccinated (I truly hope I don't have to enumerate those dangers) should question their integrity. I would be ok with the study if the children could consent with their own volition, but that isn't the case. Does anyone else not see how stupid this goal is?
Jenny, a bit of advice, you are probably a good mom, a mediocre actress, and a damn good naked blonde bimbo with fake tits, but what you aren't is a science person. Your degree from Google University doesn't mean you're good at understanding any of what science has to offer. If anything you are giving hope to a bunch of people in a false location, they don't deserve that. Hopefully I can stop writing about why one of my Playboy Playmate fantasies keeps popping up in the news spouting stupid opinions about stuff she doesn't understand, but I sincerely doubt Jenny has any intention of doing so.
Although it doesn't look like much, this image is a first in science. The white spots you see are individual HIV particles assembling on the surface of an infected cell. A biophysicist and a virologist from Rockefeller University used a specialized microscope that only illuminates the surface of a cell. The work was published in the May 25 advanced online issue of Nature.
First a quick look at why this is groundbreaking. Usually light microscopes work by shining light directly through the cell, illuminating everything, inside and at the surface of the cell. The researchers brought the beam's path to a steeper angle which reflected the light's energy off of the cell's surface instead of passing through it. The result is an incredibly detailed look at what is going on at the cell's surface without having to filter out all of the other things going on inside the cell. The two researchers were the first to see a real-time view of a single particle of the HIV virus. A single infectious unit of the disease that has killed over 25 million in the last 25 years. This is the first time a virion has been imaged, and it just happened to be one of the most debilitating and worrying diseases of our time. The researchers found that it takes five to six minutes to assemble a single HIV particle.
This isn't going to be life-changing (although it may be groundbreaking) but it will help to confirm some details about virion production that have been inferred through other techniques. I just like the image and think it was a pretty innovative approach for visualizing virus assembly. The experiments definitely weren't hard or complicated and the simplicity of the experiment captures the elegance of innovation. Simply looking at a familiar process from a slightly different perspective gave simple and clear images of exactly what's going on at the cell surface, pretty cool stuff.
The Right in this country long ago hitched their wagon to the Christian Religious movement, from Ronald Regan all the way to Dubya Bush. This ideological merger generated, and continues to generate, a great deal of votes for the GOP due to the absolutist viewpoint and divine motivation faith tends to lend to politics when the two are mixed. Yet the party was sullied in the process, defining the Republican platform in terms of Christian theology to this day. Conservatives, in general, tend to oppose the biological rights of women, equal rights for gays and lesbians, and adequate, age-appropriate sex education for children.
Bush, the Great Intellectual, followed in the pandering proud footsteps of science-denying fanatics of all creeds and exclusively supported abstinence-only programs during his presidency, to the detriment of public health. $170 million a year on abstinence-only programs, and that was for 2005, and not a penny for any programs which include offensive language and ideas, such as "condoms" or "birth control."
Lawmakers cited government statistics showing that one in four U.S. teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease and 30 percent of U.S. girls become pregnant before the age of 20.
Hmm, doesn't sound like those programs are working. Maybe we should look into funding comprehensive sex education, right? Wrong.
Rep. John Duncan, a Tennessee Republican, said that it seems "rather elitist" that people with academic degrees in health think they know better than parents what type of sex education is appropriate. "I don't think it's something we should abandon," he said of abstinence-only funding.
How dare those "educated" people, the ones who dedicate their lives to the study of public health and issues of sexual health, attempt to advise the government about sex ed! Of course, we should listen only to the "value-voter" population segment, the ones who think the Earth is 6,000 years old and that evolution is all a hoax. I think Waxman (D-CA) said it best.
"We are showering funds on abstinence-only programs that don't appear to work, while ignoring proven comprehensive sex education programs that can delay sex, protect teens from disease, and result in fewer teen pregnancies."
This is a question that has always perplexed me. On one hand I know I make decisions everyday (what to wear, what to eat, which friends to visit) but on the other hand I don't know how those decisions are made. Society has adopted the mind-body duality and the underlying meaning that one can be separated from the other. But that doesn't sit well with me, when it comes down to it your brain is subject to the same set of physical and biochemical processes whether it is decoding hunger, pain, drowsiness, and even decisions.
Long before you're consciously aware of making a decision, your mind has already made it. If that's the case, do people actually make decisions? Or is every choice -- even the choice to prepare for future choices -- an unthinkable, mechanistic procedure over which an illusory self-awareness is laid? These questions are raised by a study conducted at the Max Planck Institute and published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience. Test subjects chose to push a button with their right or left hand; seven seconds before they experienced making the choice, their brain activity already predicted their final decisions.
Seven seconds before Hayne's test subjects chose to push a button, activity shifted in their frontopolar cortex, a brain region associated with high-level planning. Soon afterwards, activity moved to the parietal cortex, a region of sensory integration. These patterns were monitored using a functional MRI machine.
These results show that decisions are unconsciously prepared much longer ahead than previously though. But we do not now yet where the final decision is made. The decision could be reversed at some point which is totally reasonable.
Maybe "free will" isn't a sensible concept, and you don't need neuroscience to reject it -- any mechanistic view of the world is good enough, and you could probably argue on purely conceptual grounds that the opposite of determinism is randomness, not free will. Maybe we should replace the concept of free will with the concept of rationality -- that we select our actions based on a kind of practical reasoning, and there is no conflict between rationality and the mind as a physical system -- After all, computers are rational physical systems.
I feel that the very existence of neuroscience and physchology precipitates the idea that free will is not that large of a component in our lives. As with chemisty and physics, observation with predictable outcomes has shaped these sciences. People placed in a set of conditions will usually come up with a predictable response or action.
Mental illness offers another look into the idea of free will. Being able to predict how someone with depression, bipolar, or any other number of conditions will act is rather an easy task for phychiatrists. But these are easy to observe since they are out of the social norms. Who says that a healthy brain doesn't precipitate the same kind of predictive actions but they are less noticable since they fall within the frame of social norms.
I'll end the diatribe here but will be revisiting this later on this week I hope.
Wow, I almost threw up watching this. Unfortunate really that a bright group of kids is going to have to deal with some issues about this later in life because their parents want confirmation of their own beliefs.
And I really have no problem with religion, I actually attended Easter Mass yesterday (maybe one of the all-time peruasive arguments by a girl) but I believe an understanding of science and religion is not mutually exclusive. And how do I know that teeth evolved from scales you ask? How do I know? Well... "It has been contended that Reif's odontode regulation theory is a rival and alternative to Stensio and Orvig's lepidomorial theory as means of explaining the evolution of development of the vertebrate dermal and oral skeleton. The lepidomorial theory is a pattern-based theory that provides a homological framework that goes further than the odontode regulation theory in comparing dental papillae and their products, and it provides an explanatory mechanism for such relationships a posteriori. In contrast, the odontode regulation theory is process-based and observes only developmental similarity providing no means of identifying homologies beyond this. The lepidomorial theory is superior to the odontode regulation theory in its ability to trace homology through the evolution of development of the dermal and oral skeleton. The criteria proposed to identify homology between scales-either within a given individual or taxon, or between different individuals or taxa-are, primarily, vascular architecture and, secondarily, external morphology. External morphology may be excluded on Reif's argument for the overarching principle of differentiation, a hypothesis supported by recent advances in the understanding of dental morphogenesis. Vascular architecture is potentially useful but appears to be determined by tooth/scale morphology rather than reflecting historical (phylogenetic) constraint. Data on the development of epithelial appendages, including teeth, scales, and feathers, indicate that individual primordia develop through progressive differentiation of originally larger, homogenous morphogenetic fields. Thus, there is no mechanism of ontogenetic developmental concrescence, just differentiation." Read the full article here (has some great references).
If that doesn't scream empirical evidence and rational deduction based on a body of data then I don't know what does. And when it comes down to it, that is science, the collection of empirical evidence. A lot of theories get thrown out and many get shot down, but over time the data from experiments doesn't change and eventually a theory encompassing the whole of the body of data will arise to explain the underlying mechanisms.
Pay careful attention to what the curator of the museum says at about the 5:20 mark. "Without evolution the whole of biology does not make sense." That seems like a pretty bold statement, but one that you will find little argument with in any biology professor's office or research lab. Evolution is the framework for every life science there is, it is inescapable regardless of your religious views. Your physician, pharmacist, psychiatrist, hell even your landscaper all rely on evolutionary theory to drive their understanding of their craft. Here's one example for the stupid emails I'm gonna get saying "show me one example." Ok, methyllin resistance Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is about to surpass AIDS as the number one killer around the world because it has EVOLVED the ability to resist almost all antibiotics we use. God did not create this bacteria and it did not exist 100 years ago, and we can show you from where it evolved. And in the future we're going to have to learn a whole hell of a lot more about its evolutionary tacticts to defeat it.
Global Warming has become a hot button issue over the last few years. A vision of huge hurricanes, ice sheet loss, and extreme drought are brought up frequently in the media as the true story of global warming. But to truly understand global warming we must analyze it through the larger scope of climate change, because it is only one mechanism at work in large machine which drives the world's atmosphere.
In 1993 a paper came out detailing how radiation from the sun had decreased by 0.33% yearly from 1967-1986 (Stanhill and Moreshet). This was a little understood phenomena and in the past 15 years has been dubbed "global dimming". Global dimming has the opposite effect of global warming. As pollutants such as Sulphur Dioxide, soot, and ash are released in the air they collect with clouds causing a dense mass to form and reflect much of the suns light. This in turn causes the oceans to cool a bit and changes weather patterns.
A large effect of this was seen in the 1990's in Africa as the waters which regularly evaporated from the Northern Atlantic and brought upon the rainy season on the Sahel in Northern Africa disappeared. In a January 15, 2005 BBC documentary titled Horizon a chilling conclusion was offered: "what came out of our exhaust pipes and power stations [from Europe and North America] contributed to the deaths of a million people in Africa, and afflicted 50 million more" with hunger and starvation.
Scientists believe that Asia may be hit soon with effects from dimming. Every year the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia receive nourishing rains from a "monsoon season". If the evaporative mechanisms which produce these rains are altered the irrigation and sustenance of not only farming ventures but wildlife reserves may be threatened.
Another mechanism affecting dimming is called the "Contrail Effect" where the "condensation trails" of jets are leaving behind remnants that form cirrus clouds which block sunlight but also trap heat. Studies have shown that contrails from just six aircraft can expand to shroud some 7,700 square miles. Just after September 11, 2001 scientists had an opportunity of a lifetime to study the contrail effect as all commercial flights were grounded due to the terrorist attacks. During those three days that commercial aircraft were grounded the days had become warmer and the nights cooler, with the overall range greater by about two degrees Fahrenheit. David Travis of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and two colleagues measured the differences and say the results suggest "that contrails can suppress both daytime highs (by reflecting sunlight back to space) and nighttime lows (by trapping radiated heat)." In skies usually crosshatched with condensation trails, the only contrails seen in this image from September 12, 2001, were left by the plane returning President Bush to Washington from Nebraska and several escort fighters (image credit: NASA).
In this true-color satellite image shot above northwestern Europe, the contrast between skies with contrails and those without offers a striking sense of the influence these pseudo clouds might have on regional climate.
This phenomena of global dimming is not the hot new issue or the latest thinking about global climate change, it is simply a cog in the understanding of how our climate is shaped and what we are doing to alter its natural cycles. This is the same way we should consider global warming. Everything we throw into the atmosphere is going to have a different effect with secondary and tertiary cascading effects which we may not understand for another 20 years. There are going to be mechanisms discovered which will shift the way we think about global warming and dimming, and that in turn will shape what we know about climate.
Fire and brimstone fear induction should stop now. This is something that is serious and with enough research our scientists will begin to understand the complex workings of our climate. But it is important to realize that we are affecting the world around us and that everyone, whether you are rich or poor, or republican or democrat, needs to agree that right now the Earth provides for us very well and we have to make an effort to maintain our relationship with that equilibrium or be forced to adapt when our safety net of normality is shifted. The reality is that the public needs to be aware that we may face a global crisis very soon because of our interaction with the planet, for millions of years the Earth has shielded our fragile bodies from the harshest of conditions and let us tread on favorable ground. But now we must show the same respect and care that has been given to us, we are a powerful force with the overreaching ability to manipulate and alter our surroundings. Attention must be paid to how we tread and our minds must be open to new discoveries and a shift in the way we think.
More people, especially public school teachers, ought to be aware of the Ask a Biologist website--it's an excellent and easy resource. Kids (and adults) can fire off a quick question that gets tucked into the database, and then someone on their team of volunteer professionals will try to answer it. There are some big names on that list!
AAB also turns one year old today, so let's celebrate by getting more schools to send in questions.
Susan Jacoby of the Center for Inquiry may have summed it up best.
"Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing their hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations." - Pittsburgh Tribune Review
Ideas are being expressed in shorter and shorter time frames as the video generation moves into adulthood encouraging more simplistic thinking. And while this pushes information sharing and global communication forward where does Science stand in the buzzsaw of the information age? If following the major intellectuals and researchers gives us any clue we're not heading to a good place. The White House has fallen into this trap and has waged a silent war for 10 years against many funding agencies. The best example would be the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Scientists have even coined a term, "broken pipeline", to describe the situation with federal funds to the NIH. In the last 5 years the dollar amount of funding has remained flat, not even keeping up with inflation, when it should have been increased further, even further than inflation. And this complaint isn't just belly-aching by those wanting more funding, there are some important effects other than just having an inadequate supply of research dollars. After 15 years of pushing fresh, new researchers into the field the funding per researcher is achingly low and many people are being pushed out of the field all together.
In the Science community there is a fear circulating among the upper echelon of the major US research institutes that we are moving towards a day when there would be roughly ten major research universities nation wide, through various forces.
"You can't throw a rock around Harvard without hitting a scientist who is having trouble getting funding," Anne Giersch, a Harvard Medical School Assistant Professor studying the genetics of hearing loss, told a Boston Globe reporter writing about the funding crisis.
So taking these fears of a ever-dwindling pool of research dollars and exodus of young and old minds alike from the field what will the Presidential candidates do? Well I can't answer for the Democrats (although hopefully they will participate in ScienceDebate2008, which I have blogged about here, here, and here) but I do know where John McCain stands on research dollars.
He has talked with horror about the government spending $3M to study grizzly bear DNA. "I don't know if it was a paternity issue or criminal," he says, "but it was a waste of money. Three million to study the DNA of bears in Montana. Unbelievable." Katherine Kendall's work (which McCain is referencing) showed the great recovery of grizzly bears and confirmed that the conservation mechanisms put in place are working. It was a great accomplishment to survey an area that large for that little money, and there is no other way to do it than go in the field. And this is important stuff, we've spent far more than $3M on recovery efforts for the bears and this study confirms that our money has been well spent (something scientists can claim and very few politicians can).
But this isn't the first time McCain has bucked the scientific community. Earlier this month he publicly took up the cause of autism linked to vaccines (blogged here). Unfortunately for John there is tons of scientific evidence against his claim, but that matters little to him. As long as he can stand against he scientific community and for the reduction in scientific costs then he will say it.
And we know where McCain wants to spend money, but I'll leave him with this warning from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." (poor healthcare, cutting science funding, and we spend $2B a day in Iraq, I'd say we're approaching spiritual bankruptcy).
This is a picture of bacteriophage Epsilon15 taken at a 4.5 angstrom resolution, the highest resolution achieved for a living organism of this size. To give you a size scale about 1 million angstroms is the diameter of a human hair. That is incredibly small and the researchers want to push it to 3 or 4 angstrom resolution, which would allow them to visualize individual amino acids in a protein chain. This work will probably be invaluable in determining just how viral infections take place at the cell to virus surface. Stay tuned...
So the Presidential Primary in Texas was yesterday, but another equally important vote was won in the Texas School Board.
Barney Maddox ran a weird campaign where he spent $120,000 to the incumbent Pat Hardy's $10,000. But Maddox refused interviews and really only put forth one statement of purpose and that was to include creationism in the state textbooks (and thereby leverage national bookmaking companies to sell creationist edited books, more here). Hardy won handily.
Mary Helen Berlanga, also challenged by a right-wing creationist soundly defeated her in District 2.
Later this year the Texas School Board will come together to adopt new science curriculum standards, and these two nutballs luckily won't be there to spew their creationist agenda.
There's a school board election in District 11 of Texas that has a clear choice: Pat Hardy is the pro-science candidate, despite being a conservative, religious Baptist, while her opponent is a deranged lunatic who is quietly outspending her 12:1 while avoiding the public eye altogether. You do not want to vote for Barney Maddox — he is an "ill-informed nutcase".
What's weird is how people across the country and tuning in to see how this Texas thing goes. In Minnesota a fellow blogger covering the situation said, "we're affected by the outcomes of local school board races in Texas — allowing ignorant, raving lunatics to make textbook decisions there is going to shape the choices we get to make here." So if you know any Texans, spread the word: Barney Maddox is bad news.
As a little background, Texas, along with Florida, buy more textbooks than the rest of the nation combined so creationists are looking to change the Texas curriculum to include creationist information. Most likely to save costs, the book companies will print only the versions with creationist info and distribute it around the country. This is why many scientists and policy makers are watching Texas and Florida closely about this issue.
I'll give you a list of the 20 craziest experiments ever conducted and you can click the title if you want to read the full article. This article comes up on the net every few months and it always gets some crazy responses. Let me know what you think, leave some comments.
1. Elephants of Acid 2. Obedience 3. Demikhov's two headed dogs 4. The initiation of heterosexual behavior in a homosexual male 5. The isolated head of a dog 6. Human-Ape hybrid 7. The Stanford Prison Experiment 8. Facial expressions while decapitating a rat 9. The Vomit-drinking Doctor 10. Beneficial Brainwashing 11. Monkey head transplant 12. The Remote-controlled Bull 13. The Ape and the Child 14. "My Fingernails taste terribly bitter" 15. The Electrification of Human Corpses 16. Seeing Through Cat's Eyes 17. Stimuli eliciting sexual behavior in turkeys 18. "Would you go to bed with me tonight?" 19. Shock the Puppy 20. Heartbeat at death
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