|
Give Up Blog - for scientists like these!
You hid my archives, didn't you Steve!
Maps and Figures "Hitler or Coulter?" QuizMap1 - Teen Pregnancy Map2 - Incarceration Map3 - Homicide Rates Map4 - Drop-out Rates Map5 - Bankruptcy Rates Map6 - Driving Distances Map7 - Energy Use Map8 - Gonorrhea! Map9 - Tax Burden Map10 - State GDP Map11 - DHS funding Map12 - Adult Illiteracy. Map13 - Abortion Bans: Map14 - ER Quality Map15 - Hospital Quality Map16 - Coal Burners Map 17 - Infant Mortality Map 18 - Toxic Waste Map 19 - Obesity Map 20 - Poverty Map 21 - Occupational safety Map 22 - Traffic deaths Map 23 - Divorce Figure 1 - Wages vs Right to work Figure 2 - Unemployment vs Right to work Give Up Shopping guide  
link to xml feed
|
Thursday, December 01, 2005
This week in Science and Nature
Not a whole lot of general interest except this Nature article describing how one of the predictions of global warming, the paradoxical slowing of transatlantic circulating currents, might be occurring. Nature also has a news article on this and for nonsubscribers a Guardian article.
I'm not convinced they've studied it for long enough as even the authors acknowledge the change is not very far outside the error in the measurements although they say the effect is "robust." The Guardian article strikes a slightly panicky tone in the first few paragraphs that isn't justified by the results (which they then acknowledge at the end of their article). Science has an article on finding a well preserved archaeopteryx skeleton. Not super-exciting, but it's still one more article on actual evolution compared to a grand total of zero so far for intelligent design. Oh and the Chinese might be lying about how many human bird flu deaths they've had. A senior Japanese virologist and adviser to the World Health Organization (WHO) roiled the influenza field last week when he suggested--during what he believed was a private gathering in Germany--that China had concealed hundreds of human bird flu deaths. That's how several people, including two reporters, interpreted a talk by Masato Tashiro, director of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases in Tokyo. But Tashiro denies that he made any such allegation, saying he only meant to say that surveillance in China is poor. According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) newspaper, Tashiro stunned an audience on 18 November that had gathered to mark the retirement of University of Marburg virologist Hans- Dieter Klenk. FAZ reported that Tashiro showed a table documenting several dozen outbreaks of the bird flu strain H5N1 in China, whose toll included at least 300 human deaths, seven cases of probable human-to-human transmission, and more than 3000 people in quarantine. "We are systematically being deceived," the story quoted Tashiro as saying. Official records list only three confirmed human cases of H5N1 in China, two of them fatal. Given the number of avian outbreaks, many virologists wonder why China hasn't seen more human cases, says virologist Peter Palese of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. |
6 Comments:
Actually, I think that the archaeopteryx skeleton is more interesting than you give it credit for. One of the buttresses of ID is the lack of 'missing links', i.e. fossils of transitional animals with characteristics of the ancestor and the descendant. And now we have a bird that looks like a dinosaur. It's only a matter of time before we find, say, a facially modern human with H. erectus body morphology, or something of that sort.
9:44 AM, December 02, 2005
Remember though, plugging a gap in the fossil record actually always leaves you with two gaps: one on either side of the new fossil!
ID-ers don't really go in for "evidence." Dozens of new, widely varying australopithecine
skeletons would do little to win over the openly unscientific.
--Jeff
11:13 AM, December 02, 2005
I agree that you end up with two gaps, but those gaps are, by definition, smaller than the original.
And as for ID-ers, I would argue that they actually break down into two camps. One is the mass of ID-believers; I would agree that they would fail to be swayed even by the discovery of a chimpanzee with a human head. But remember - ID isn't some grass-roots effort. It's a well-funded enterprise being driven by a number of small organizations and spearheaded by (misguided) intellectuals. These are the people that promulgate the arguments regarding lack of fossil record, co-evolution, etc. Most people couldn't tell you what organisms possess CheA, let alone what it does.
So give up on the majority of ID-ers, sure. But lop off the head of this monster (i.e. destroy the intellectual basis of its arguments so thoroughly that it has nothing left to stand on), and it will go back to being just a sectarian issue again.
The only reason ID is making such a splash now, as I see it, is that a series of anti-evolution 'intellectuals' have seized upon scientific uncertainty and lack of evidence and stuck their ideas into those gaps. Close those gaps, and the issue goes away, since it's being driven in a 'top-down' fashion.
11:38 AM, December 02, 2005
Nah, that's not the Give Up philosophy. We say, screw those people. If they want to be ignorant and misinformed so be it. It just means more jobs, better schools and better educated individuals in the blue states. We should only fight it in instances like in Dover, where it invades our territory (which succeeded). Arguing with irrational people or even their irrational intellectual leaders is a waste of time.
4:24 PM, December 02, 2005
I'm surprised my science article about the Chinese hiding bird flu deaths hasn't generated more interest. I have seen this nowhere else in the mainstream media.
4:25 PM, December 02, 2005
That's because I posted the first comment, and thus directed the course of the conversation, and I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was a kid. I'm not an epidemiologist.
5:16 PM, December 02, 2005
Post a Comment
<< Home