Lazy Linking

"Psychopathy seems to be caused by specific mental deficiencies"

• The Economist reviews research that used the venerable Wason selection task to reveal psychopaths seem unable to understand social contracts. This suggests (albeit weakly) that psychopathy is a frequency-dependent adaptation. 

"Uganda: Debating God in a God-Fearing Country"

• A Time magazine profile of the courageous James Onen, head of Freethought Kampala, an organization dedicated to science and reason in a highly superstitious country.

"The Shadow Scholar"

• Disturbing Chronicle of Higher Education profile of an 'academic mercenary' paid to write essays and other academic work for students. Scary stuff.
• It seems to me that there is little academics themselves can do about this problem. If I suspect a student has paid someone to do her work for her, then what? I... hack her email account? The only long-term solution, it seems to me, is to criminalize the companies that provide these services - after all, they're arguably committing (or at least abetting) fraud. When the companies' records are seized, guilty students should be tracked down and punished. Degrees should be withdrawn, etc. I'm not saying this will solve the problem completely, but it'll at least lessen it, and provide some deterrent. 

"Freaks, Geeks, and Economists"

• The subtitle says it all: "a study confirms every suspicion you ever had about high-school dating".

"Taxonomy of Logical Fallacies"

• Fallacies categorized and their family relationships mapped. Good stuff. 

"This Is Your Brain on Metaphors"

• Robert Sapolsky does great work, and this piece is as good evidence of that as any. He reviews a bunch of research which demonstrates that the brain conflates the literal and metaphorical. That is, certain 'higher' mental functions (like morality) is simply bolted onto 'lower' mental functions (like disgust). 
• "Nelson Mandela was wrong when he advised, “Don’t talk to their minds; talk to their hearts.” He meant talk to their insulas and cingulate cortices and all those other confused brain regions, because that confusion could help make for a better world."

"Tanzania's first elected albino MP fears for life"

• What's the harm? This. This is the harm. 

"South African rhinos pay the price of new cancer myths"

• Quacks + poachers = rhinos in trouble.

"Not so fast... What's so premature about premature ejaculation?"

• Jesse Bering strikes again. Premature ejaculation from an evolutionary perspective... Be sure to read the incisive comments.

"SA's urban myth storyteller strikes again"

• Profile of Arthur Goldstuck, premiere cataloger of South Africa's urban legends. I attended the book launch, and I've read his latest book (The Burglar in the Bin Bag). Very good stuff. 
• Arthur is on Twitter as @art2gee and blogs at Urban Legends.

"What’s In Placebos?"

• Apparently placebos are not all alike. Steven Novella covers the fascinating details and discusses the consequences. 

"Palestinian Blogger Angers West Bank Muslims"

• It's not exactly surprising that an atheist is unwelcome in the West Bank, but (1) it's still lametable that he isn't but (2) heartening that he exists at all. 

"10 Bizarre Medical Discoveries"

• Sample: symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller coaster ride... 

"Kasparov versus the World"

• The fascinating story of Gary Kasparov's epic game against the rest of the world (well, a huge number of chess players who collaborated online). Kasparov called it "the greatest game in the history of chess".

"The glorious mess of real scientific results"

• This is written by Ben Goldacre. Go, read.

"Calculate the Effect of an Asteroid Impact on Earth"

• Go on, what are you waiting for? You know you want to...

"Putting a Hex on Hitler, 1941"

• Life covers a batty attempt to defeat Hitler... with witchcraft. 

"There Are 5,000 Janitors in the U.S. with PhDs"

• :-(

"Atheism and the Enlightenment: In the name of godlessness"

• Another Economist piece, this time a review of the book A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment. According to the review, the book is the story of the salon presided over by the (unjustly forgotten - but not by me) Baron d'Holbach. 

"The Fascinating Story of the Twins Who Share Brains, Thoughts, and Senses"

• The most interesting conjoined twins since Chang and Eng Bunker. Truly remarkable story.

Pretty / WOW / heh

"'Dance Your Ph.D. 2010' Winner Announced"

• This is just wonderful. Watch the video, srsly.

"National Geographic's Photography Contest 2010"

• Must see gorgeousness from Big Picture.

"Wildlife through the lens"

• Beautiful wildlife photography.

"The Difference Between Jesus and Zombies"

• heh

"What I Think About Atlas Shrugged"

• Sci-fi author John Scalzi rips into Ayn Rand. Hilarity results. 

Lazy Linking

"This is a news website article about a scientific finding"

• Martin Robbins' absolutely wonderful parody of bad science reporting. I really can't recommend it enough. 
• Also: read the superb comments (well, some of them at least - there are over 500). 

"An Ode to the Many Evolved Virtues of Human Semen"

• Jesse Bering on the psychological effects of semen (mostly on women). He covers tons of fascinating research, including the finding that semen may have an anti-depressant effect. (Though, as this comment points out, there is a serious confound). 
• Best line: “I’m not a medical doctor, but my testicles are licensed pharmaceutical suppliers”. (Said in jest, by the way). 

"There Is No Such Thing As Sexual Intercourse" 

• Anthropologist Pascal Boyer pwns lefty/po-mo academics. 

"U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey"

• Pew surveys Americans about their knowledge of religion. Shocking ignorance found. (You can take a quiz featuring some of the questions in the survey. FWIW, I got 13 out of 15...)
• Amazingly, only 85% of the respondents knew that an atheist is a person who doesn't believe in God. A finding consistent with the existence of 'atheists' who believe in God. (Yes, that is a contradiction in terms, but there you go).

"I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat – but farm it properly"

• I'm not linking to this for the content, but for George Monboit's wonderful demonstration that there is honor in saying "I was wrong". I've never been a fan of Monboit's, but his willingness to write this column certainly sways my opinion more to the positive side. 

"Should science journalists take sides?"

• Yes, says Ed Yong. They should (do their best to) side with truth. 

"Power Leads Us to Dehumanize Others"

• BPS Research Digest reviews research that vindicates Lord Acton. (Not that there was much doubt to begin with). 

"Ratzinger is an Enemy of Humanity"

• Richard Dawkins brilliantly responds to the Pope's deeply idiotic comment comparing atheists to Nazis. Read it. 

"Confirmation Bias in Science: How to Avoid It"

• Excellent piece at Ars Technica by Chris Lee on the evils of confirmation bias - our tendency to see only what we expect to see. Lee looks at the topic through the lens of various scientific controversies, including Jacques Benveniste's 'water memory' nonsense. 

"'Science Cop' Mugged"

• China's answer to Ben Goldacre, Fang Shimin, gets beaten up and threatened, apparently by plagiarists and/or charlatans who stand to lose from being exposed. Shocking. 

"Religion causes a chronic biasing of visual attention"

• Another fascinating study covered by BPS Research Digest.
• The researchers compared 'global' vs. 'local' thinking among "Dutch Conservative Calvinists (a form of Protestantism), Liberal Calvinists (who aren't so strict), Conservative Calvinists turned atheist and life-long atheists." 
• The results were surprising: "the life-long atheists showed the strongest bias for the big picture, followed by the Liberal Calvinists, and then the Conservative Calvinists and the former Conservative Calvinists turned atheist. The latter two groups performed similarly suggesting that more than seven years without religious practice wasn't enough to remove the effects of the religion on a person's attentional mindset."

Heh / LOL / Wow

"The Real Stuff White People Like"

• Absolutely fascinating analysis of 526,000 OkCupid profiles reveals the differences in tastes between White, Black and Asian males and females. 
• The sample is unlikely to be representative, but it's interesting nonetheless. 

"The Data So Far"

• Classic xkcd... (For xkcd n00bs: read the mouse-over text).

"2010 Astronomy Photographer of the Year"

• Astronomy porn at its finest. #7 and #11 are especially good.

"The Future of the Universe"

• ...as an animated GIF. 

"Orations of a Pre-Post Colonial Oompa Loompa to His Revolutionary Brothers-in-Arms"

• Need I say more?

Technology Quarterly

So it's time again for the Economist's Technology Quarterly... My picks:

• Mining social networks for useful information. Fascinating work being done - especially by cellphone companies. 
• Quantum cryptography is unbreakable in theory; not so much in practice.
  
• Rewiring the nervous system to give patients better control of prosthetic limbs. 
• New ways to provide power to the world's poor. Think LEDs and biofuel-powered micro-grids, with a healthy salting of new business models. 
• Engineered geothermal electricity generation. Drill hole, insert water, collect steam, generate power. Just beware the earthquakes...

Lazy Linking

Some stuff that may (or may not) Be Of Interest....

"Letting Go: What Should Medicine Do When It Can't Save Your Life"

• If you haven't yet read Atul Gawande's riveting, humane, insightful and magisterial New Yorker piece, do so now. 
• Then read Ed Yong's analysis of Gawande's writing techniques. 

"Are We Phalluses?"

• Jerry Coyne's most excellent response to Phil Plait's much-discussed "Don't Be A Dick" speech. See also: Richard Dawkins' comment on that post, PZ Myers' takedown and Daniel Loxton's spirited defense (featuring references to actual scientific research!!). 

"The Ten Commandments of Science Journalism"

• Excellent.
• "Each time a journalist writes “just a theory” or “only a theory” or “merely a theory” — or insinuates pseudoscience (astrology, parapsychology, acupuncture, etc.) is a scientific theory — I cry. And Carl Sagan rolls over in his grave. And a furious hobgoblin emerges from some deep crevasse to defecate on concepts such as gravity, electromagnetism, plate tectonics, evolution, antibiotic resistance and so on."
  
• Via Ed Yong.

"The Power of Anecdotes"

• Premiere quackery-smacker Ben Goldacre (again) catches the media being irresponsible (again). Cue lesson on the evidentiary status of anecdotes (something I have written about myself).

"The Only Thing the Drug Gangs and Cartels Fear is Legalization"

• Johann Hari: exactly right. There are few things in the world that would yield society as large an immediate gain as the decriminalization of drugs. This is how to do it.

"fMRI in 1000 Words"

• Erm... the title says it all. What do you want from me??

"How Much Proof Do the Global Warming Deniers Need?" 

• Another Hari piece. Despite what some scientifically illiterate people may think, the science is beyond question at this point. 
• Note: Hari attributes the calving of a giant ice island off Petermann Glacier to global warming, but this is  premature. 

"Journal Editor Questions Harvard Researcher's Data"

• The Hauser misconduct case continues to unfold. Bad, very bad.

"Ray Kurzweil Does Not Understand the Brain"

• PZ Myers absolutely nails Kurzweil's silliness. Kurzweil responds (badly) and PZ responds to the response. Steven Novella also wades into the debate.
• Takeaway: Kurzweil doesn't understand the brain. 

"24 Things You Might Be Saying Wrong"

• Finally the difference between farther and further makes sense! Also... please people, don't say "beg the question" when you mean "raise the question". Srsly. 

"Man Shot... But Only Notices Years Later"

• Yes, really. Even more evidence that drinking copious amounts of alcohol is good for you... 

"Malaria, Sea Grapes, and Kidney Stones: A Tale of Parasites Lost"

• The most excellent Carl Zimmer writing excellently about a parasite that decided to forgo a life of crime... 
• Ok, "decided" and "crime". 

"Why I Quit Chiropractic"

• Not only is (straight) chiropractic sheer pseudoscience, some chiropractic schools mercilessly exploit their students (while teaching them to exploit patients).   

"List of Wars Extended by Diplomatic Irregularity"

• Wikipedia in all its glory. 

"Top 100 Fundamentalist Quotes"

• There are some real gems here. I learnt, among other things, that God has a "Holy, Righteous Penis," that apes do not exist, and that women subconsciously want to be hit and told to shut up. 

Lazy Linking (the return)

I haven't done a Lazy Linking post for quite a while. I figure it's time to reinstate it...

"Topic of Cancer"

• A wonderful, poignant, piece by Christopher Hitchens on his recent cancer diagnosis. Must read.
• "To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?"

"The CSI Effect: An infographic"

• TV shows on forensic science (the various CSI's, NCIS, etc.) grossly distort reality. Hardly breaking news, but especially disturbing in light of recent reports about the shaky science behind forensics. 

"Foldit – tapping the wisdom of computer gamers to solve tough scientific puzzles"

• The most excellent Ed Yong on 'citizen science' at its best: a computer game that lets anyone help work out how protein folding works. Cool and important. 
• Also: the paper Ed reports on apparently holds the record for the most authors ever: ~57,000. 

"Chiropractic" (1924)

• Great little piece by H.L. Mencken. Ignore the odious Social Darwinism. 
• "That pathology is grounded upon the doctrine that all human ills are caused by pressure of misplaced vertebrae upon the nerves which come out of the spinal cord -- in other words, that every disease is the result of a pinch. This, plainly enough, is buncombe. The chiropractic therapeutics rest upon the doctrine that the way to get rid of such pinches is to climb upon a table and submit to a heroic pummeling by a retired piano-mover. This, obviously, is buncombe doubly damne"

"Dinosaur-alien link unearthed"

• Heh - maybe even lol. 

"Faith and Foolishness: When Religious Beliefs Become Dangerous"

• The indefatigable Laurence Krauss on how evil in religious clothing should be called evil. Obvious, but many deny it and wish to exempt religious claims and institutions from criticism. 
• "I don’t know which is more dangerous, that religious beliefs force some people to choose between knowledge and myth or that pointing out how religion can purvey ignorance is taboo."
• "Keeping religion immune from criticism is both unwarranted and dangerous. Unless we are willing to expose religious irrationality whenever it arises, we will encourage irrational public policy and promote ignorance over education for our children."

"Complacency has blinded the Vatican to the gravity of the abuse crisis"

• The Economist on the Vatican's inability to respond appropriately to the continuing abuse crisis. It turns out a bunch of old men cloistered away from society is out of touch with it. Gasps of surprise. 

"Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber"

• This is an old story, but not one I've heard before. It turns out Ted Kaczyinski participated in brutal (and deeply unethical) psychology experiments during his undergraduate years at Harvard. Cue speculation about whether it was causally related to his terrorist campaign. 

"Visually depicting the disconnect between climate scientists, media and the public"

• Scary stuff. Defer to the experts, people. 

"New study clinches it: the Earth is warming up"

• Well, it was clinched before... so call it re-clinched. Phil "the Bad Astronomer" Plait reports. 

"Betting on Science: Odds and Ends"

• The Economist on the weird and wonderful 'novelty bets' bookies are now offering. I just love this. The LHC finding evidence of God before the end of this year is at 100/1. The discovery of alien life before 2013 is at 33/1. That Mt. Vesuvius will be the next major volcanic eruption is at 12/1. The WWF declaring the world's polar bear population to be less than 10,000 individuals is at 20/1. 
• Not quite as cool as a bet a bookie once offered that Michael Gorbachev is the Antichrist: if I recall, at something like a trillion to one.  

Three Radio Shows You Should Listen to as a Podcast

Podcasts are one of the coolest and most useful products of Web 2.0: I think I've learnt more from podcasts over the last five or so years than I have from nearly any other source. In case you're a touch behind the times, a podcast is essentially a radio show syndicated over the web - but, thanks to the long tail the web makes possible, there are podcasts on nearly every conceivable topic, the vast majority of which would never make it onto radio. (Hint: use iTunes to subscribe to your podcasts).

Luckily, the rise of the wonderful amateurs has not put the professionals out of work - well, at least not yet. And since many stations now release their radio shows online as podcasts in addition to broadcasting them, it's possible to listen to radio shows from anywhere in the world and at a time of your convenience. Here are three great podcasted radio shows I highly recommend:

• In Our Time is the single most unabashedly cerebral show I've ever come across. In a typical episode, the host Melvyn Bragg gathers half a dozen or so Oxford and Cambridge dons, who then discuss some topic in history, science, philosophy or art. Bless the BBC. There have been episodes on Darwin's Origin of Species, Munch's "The Scream", the Battle of Agincourt, Machiavelli and the Italian City State, the Zulu Nation, and much, much more. I simply cannot recommend this show enough. (Bonus: you get to laugh at British academics' preposterous affected accents). 
• Like In Our Time, Material World is a BBC production, but its host Quentin Cooper takes himself far less seriously, and the show is a lot lighter as a result. Indeed, I suspect I love listening to it as much for the comedy as for its interviews with working scientists at the heart of important recent developments. It's as entertaining as informative, so it's an absolute joy to listen to. 
• Radio Lab is hard to describe. Produced for NPR and hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, this show is into telling stories and doing so compellingly. Not just fascinating, wonderful stories (it's not This American Life), but fascinating, wonderful stories about science. I'm not sure how to describe it further, so here are some episodes I particularly liked: "Placebo", "Limits", "Parasites" (featuring the wonderful Carl Zimmer), and "Famous Tumors". 

Oh, and just for the hell of it, my Top 5 (non-radio) podcasts:

• The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. (My all-time favorite - hosted by the incomparable Steven Novella. Listen to this podcast. Srsly).
• Astronomy Cast. (All things astronomy, hosted by professional astronomer Pamela Gay and Universe Today publisher Fraser Cain).
• Skeptoid. (I wasn't a huge fan of Brian Dunning's popular offering until recently, but it has really grown on me. Short, sharp and impeccably researched). 
• Point of Inquiry and For Good Reason. (I list two here because I recommend Point of Inquiry until DJ Grothe left and started For Good Reason. The early Point of Inquiry interviews are just wonderful). 
• Nature Podcast. (The podcast of the journal Nature consists of interviews with authors of recent Nature papers, news and so on. Highly recommended. Science, by the way, also has a - somewhat less good - podcast). 

(Hat tips: Simon Grest for introducing me to In Our Time; Clint Armitage for telling me about Radio Lab and some random commentator on a Facebook atheist group many years ago for telling me about The Skeptics Guide - the very fist podcast I listed to). 

Three websites, three answers (aka Very Lazy Linking)

The web is a wonderful thing. Three questions, three wonderful resources to answer them:

1. How does homeopathy work?
2. Is there a God?
3. What happens after I die?

Problem. Solved.

3 Quarks Daily science blogging award

The three winners of 2010 3 Quarks Daily Prize in Science, judged by Richard Dawkins, have been announced. The winning posts:

1. "Gut bacteria in Japanese people borrowed digesting genes from ocean bacteria" by Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
2. "Skullcaps and Genomes" by Carl Zimmer of The Loom.
3. "The Evolution of Chloroplasts" by Margaret Morgan of My Growing Passion.

All three articles are most certainly worth a read, so do check them out.

A slight criticism... As I pointed out in the comments at 3 Quarks Daily, the winning entries this year are rather similar - too similar. Not only are all three on biology, all three two concern horizontal gene transfer. The chances that the 'real' best three science blog posts of the year just happened to be on a single two closely related topics is infinitesimal. Both Dawkins, and the editors who whittled down the entries to the nine semifinalists, frankly, ought to have been more ecumenical. I thought "MSL: Mars Action Hero" deserved to be in the top three...

Technology Quarterly

The Economist released the latest edition of their wonderful Technology Quarterly a while back. Here are my very belated picks:

• MIT biomechanic Hugh Herr (fascinating profile and overview of his work).
• Sexing chickens (a new biochemical method to determine the sex of chickens - alas, the end of the human chicken sexers is in sight).
• The Net Generation (on whether it's useful or meaningful to talk about a new generation of "digital natives").
• Translating the web (machine translation and human translators working together. Related: this)

Times Online's Top 30 Science Blogs

Note: as PZ Myers points out, the list includes one Anthony Watts, a crank global warming denialist. That's rather dumb of The Times.

Times Online has released their choice of the 30 best science blogs. Several of my favorite blogs got the nod, including, Carl Zimmer's The Loom, Vaughn Bell's Mind Hacks, Ed Yong's Not Exactly Rocket Science, Orac's Respectful Insolence, and Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy.

The picks are, I think, pretty biased towards British blogs, but maybe that's understandable. There are a couple of oversights, though. Arguably, some of these may have deserved it more than blogs that made it onto the list (*cough*Intersection*cough*). Some of the overlooked science blogs are Steven Novella's NeuroLogica, Mo's Neurophilosophy, David Colquhoun's  Improbable Science, John Hawks' Anthropology Weblog and Science-Based Medicine.

Lazy Linking

"Growing Up in Ethology" - Richard Dawkins

• Richard Dawkins' autobiographical essay, published as part of Drickamer and Dewsbury's Leaders of Animal Behavior - The Second Generation. The Dawkins piece is highly recommended.
• An important titbit: "As for the idea of The Selfish Gene being an advocacy of either selfishness or niceness, both were absurd, and good examples of the inflated importance of titles. The 'selfishness' we are talking about is of genes. From selfish genes, either altruism or selfishness at the individual organism level might flow, depending on the economic conditions that obtained. That was the whole point!"

"Desire influences visual perception"

• The human mind is really weird. Mo of Neurophilosophy reviews a study that found another example of this: among other things, thirsty subjects (who were given lots of pretzels to eat) thought a bottle of water placed a set distance away was closer to them than did non-thirsty controls. 
• "These findings demonstrate that higher order psychological states can have a significant effect on visual perception. Specifically, they show that our desires have a direct influence on the perception of distance, such that desirable objects are perceived to be closer than they really are. This mechanism would serve to guide behaviour in the optimum way, by encouraging the perceiver to reach out and acquire the desired object."

"Adapting to the new ecosystem of science journalism"

• Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science on the future of science journalism in the age of the internet.
• The good news: "Thanks to new media, everyone with a computer and a connection has the ability to write about science or to comment on what others have written. The ability to produce content has been thrust into the hands of a broad range of people who are keen to talk about science to a mass audience. It's a Cambrian-style explosion in the practice of journalism. This adaptive radiation has also brought in an influx of expertise, people who have both the skill to explain science and the knowledge to talk about it correctly. That means greater accuracy when reporting the findings of studies. It also means better choices in terms of what gets covered. I have argued before that this process of critically analysing a story before the point of publication is vital to ensure that bad science doesn't contaminate the public's news diet. A greater diversity of writers also means more coverage for smaller stories that might fall through the gaps of more mainstream publications. As an example, interesting papers on controversial issues like race, gender equality and religion are widely ignored, while the most recent panacea-of-the-day or evolutionary just-so story has no trouble in grabbing headlines."
• The bad news: "Enthusiastic amateurs will not compensate for a decline in mainstream news reporting or the vast audiences that it reaches. Even the most successful blogs have readerships that are orders of magnitude lower those of mainstream publications. If such publications decline, the worry is that fewer people will be exposed to science stories, save those who actively go in search for it. Communities like ScienceBlogs or Discover Blogs provide a good model for pooling individual audiences and offering diverse content but, again, they largely target people who are already interested. As Dan Gillmor has repeatedly said, we have a problem with demand rather than supply. There is a risk that the science writing of the future will only reach the eyes of the converted."

"100 Best (Free) Science Documentaries Online"

• Title says it all. Note that some flaky stuff is unfortunately included... (via Ben Goldacre).

"Teaching scientific knowledge doesn't improve scientific reasoning"

• Not exactly surprising, but interesting. There are, however, a bunch of potential flaws. The researchers relied on a 'natural experiment' (Chinese students knowing a lot more science facts than US students), and this means subjects weren't randomly assigned to the groups. The bottom line finding, for example, is that though Chinese students knew many more science facts, they were no better at scientific reasoning than American students. This, argues the authors, suggests science education focuses too much on facts, and too little on a 'deep understanding of scientific reasoning'. But hold on. Maybe US culture (pluralist, individualistic) is more conducive to the emergence of scientific reasoning skills, but the US education system bad at teaching it formally. And maybe Chinese culture (conformist, hierarchical) is bad at fostering those skills, but better at teaching it formally. In other words, it could be that Chinese education does teach scientific reasoning skills, which partly overcomes various cultural biases against it. Granted, it would be a coincidence that the magnitude of this change happens to make it statistically no different from the Americans' skills, but this is not impossible, nor is it the only problem with the study.
  

"Robots evolve to deceive one another"

• Another Not Exactly Rocket Science piece, this time on an awesome study that used a genetic algorithm to study the evolution of communication.
• "[The researchers] think that similar processes are at work in nature. When animals move, forage or generally go about their lives, they provide inadvertent cues that can signal information to other individuals. If that creates a conflict of interest, natural selection will favour individuals that can suppress or tweak that information, be it through stealth, camouflage, jamming or flat-out lies. As in the robot experiment, these processes could help to explain the huge variety of deceptive strategies in the natural world. "

"Americans’ Role Seen in Uganda Anti-Gay Push"

• I blogged a while back about Uganda's shocking child sacrifices. Now it seems American evangelicals have fanned the flames of anti-homosexuality extremism in the country. A Ugandan lawmaker has actually proposed the death penalty for homosexuality. Evil and religion, who would've thought?

"Let’s Talk About Faith"

• NY Times columnist Ross Douthat on tolerance. He points out, correctly, that tolerance (in its valuable and defensible sense) isn't about mealy-mouthed, relativistic "acceptance". It's about a lack of compulsion - i.e. coercion - in matters of belief and conscience. Vigorous debate is certainly compatible with tolerance.
• "Liberal democracy offers religious believers a bargain. Accept, as a price of citizenship, that you may never impose your convictions on your neighbor, or use state power to compel belief. In return, you will be free to practice your own faith as you see fit — and free, as well, to compete with other believers (and nonbelievers) in the marketplace of ideas."
• "That’s the theory. In practice, the admirable principle that nobody should be persecuted for their beliefs often blurs into the more illiberal idea that nobody should ever publicly criticize another religion. Or champion one’s own faith as an alternative. Or say anything whatsoever about religion, outside the privacy of church, synagogue or home."

 "Homeopathy by the (mind-boggling) numbers"

• Breaking: homeopathy is bollocks.
• "To put homeopathy in a medicinal context, if you wanted to consume a normal 500mg paracetamol dose you would need ten million billion homeopathic pills. Where each pill is the same mass as the Milky Way galaxy. There is actually not enough matter in the entire known Universe to make the homeopathic equivalent of a single paracetamol pill."

Lazy Linking

"Seeking Lotto riches, South Africans smoke vulture brains"

• Astoundingly stupid. What is worse, vultures are endangered. 
• "Smoking dried vulture brains to have a vision of winning Lotto numbers -- that's why customers come to Scelo, a vendor of traditional medicines, but it's a trend being blamed for killing off South Africa's vultures."
  

"Heavy Brows, High Art?: Newly Unearthed Painted Shells Show Neandertals Were Homo sapiens's Mental Equals"

• This is a very significant find, if the interpretation turns out to be correct. It has long been thought that behavioral modernity - abstract thought, symbolism, language, etc. - emerged in a kind of 'great leap forward' about 50,000 years ago. I've never liked this theory - it smacks of cultural saltationism and is an argument from ignorance. If Neandertals did indeed display (kinds of) behavioral modernity, the continuity hypothesis suddenly looks far more parsimonious than the great leap forward (since the latter would presumably have to invoke convergent evolution). Add evidence that modern human behavior may have emerged some 150,000 years ago, and the case for continuity looks even better.
  

"Dealing with data of the damned"

• Vaughn over at Mind Hacks on a Wired article (which you should read) on the neuroscience and psychology of science. A bunch of interesting stuff emerges, including that breakthroughs in science are not, in general, made by lone geniuses. It is when scientists are confronted by their peers that breakthrough hypotheses emerge. Not exactly surprising to the initiated: science is a deeply social activity.

"The year in nonsense"

• Ben Goldacre, quackery smacker of note, summarizes 2009's bollocks. Well worth reading.

"In Memoriam: Margo Ings Wilson" (paywall)

• A tribute to Margo Wilson, a trailblazing evolutionary psychologist who died recently (as I noted, very sadly, a while back).

"Not Exactly Rocket Science Review of 2009"

• Ed Yong is one of the best science writers around (read his blog, srsly). This piece is his review of 2009, the content of which was selected through a series of 9 polls by his readers. There is a lot to feast on.
  

"Still On That Low-Carb Diet"

• Pseudoscience and scams abound in the dieting and nutrition industries, so a good dose of science will be good for you. The incomparable Steven Novella covers the complex literature concisely and comes to the following bottom-line recommendations (based on current evidence):
• 1. Eat a varied diet, mostly plant-based. 2. Limit carbohydrates with a high glycemic index (simple sugars and starches). 3. Do not diet for weight loss. Rather, employ reasonable portion control and exercise regularly. 4. Whatever you do for weight control, make sure it is sustainable long term. You should be happy with your diet and exercise should be fun and convenient. Anything that seems burdensome will likely not last and be of no long term utility. 5. And most importantly – completely ignore diet fads, diet books, or any product that promises easy weight loss. They are scams.
• Compare the bottom line of Reynold Spector's Skeptical Inquirer article (which I liked to previously): "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants".

"Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts"

• More on how eyewitness testimony is flawed.
• "Since the 1990s, when DNA testing was first introduced, Innocence Project researchers have reported that 73 percent of the 239 convictions overturned through DNA testing were based on eyewitness testimony. One third of these overturned cases rested on the testimony of two or more mistaken eyewitnesses."
• "The uncritical acceptance of eyewitness accounts may stem from a popular misconception of how memory works. Many people believe that human memory works like a video recorder: the mind records events and then, on cue, plays back an exact replica of them. On the contrary, psychologists have found that memories are reconstructed rather than played back each time we recall them. The act of remembering, says eminent memory researcher and psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, is “more akin to putting puzzle pieces together than retrieving a video recording.” Even questioning by a lawyer can alter the witness’s testimony because fragments of the memory may unknowingly be combined with information provided by the questioner, leading to inaccurate recall."

"The Golden Woos #2"

• Skeptico's second annual Golden Woo awards, awarded for "outstanding work in the promotion of Woo in the previous year". Funny stuff.
  

"Darwin's illness and other Christmas tales from BMJ"

• An LA Times blog piece on the BMJ's always-amusing Christmas issue. Studies covered include one that suggests Darwin's illness was due not to Chagas disease (as is often claimed) but to cyclical vomiting syndrome and one that reveals, among other things, that the healthiest individuals' ratio of systolic to diastolic blood pressures was 1.618 on average, damn close to the Golden Ratio of 1.618033...  

"To Media Covering Science: An Open Letter"

• Short version: Dear Media: reference the articles you're covering. Provide a link or, at a minimum, the name of the paper and its authors. It's not hard. 

Lazy Linking

Some (much delayed) lazy linking...

"To Science!"

• Heartwarming piece, roughly, about "leaving science". Must be read to be appreciated.

"A slow evolution of theory" - Phillip Tobias

• The doyen of South African evolutionary science and anthropology, Phillip Tobias, on Darwin's theory of descent with modification. It's a Good Thing that scientists are reaching out to the South African public about evolution. 

"Questions Odd and Profound"

• A wonderful article in the NY Times on some fascinating history of science. It turns out early scientists ('natural philosophers') conducted some truly weird experiments. 
• By the way, I love the Royal Society's motto: nulluis in verba or "Take nobody's word for it".
  A distinguishing feature of science is the acknowledged supremacy of experimentation: the ultimate arbiter of truth is empirical demonstration, not authority or abstract ratiocination. This motto nearly sums up that ideal.
  

 "On the Origin of Religion" (subscription required)

• A News Focus piece by Elizabeth Culotta in Science on the various hypotheses about the origin of religion. Interesting, but it's clear we are a long way away from having a robust consensus account.

"Fair play: Monkeys share our sense of injustice" - Frans de Waal

• Frans de Waal on various animal studies that seem to demonstrate that a concern with fairness is not uniquely human, but is widespread among social species.
• "All of this shows that our hostility to conspicuous consumption and excess at the top is only natural. It is part of a long evolutionary history in which cooperation and equity go hand in hand, even though it is undeniable that we have also a hierarchical streak. This is equally true for other primates, not to mention for canines, but no species accepts these vertical arrangements 100 per cent of the time."

"Creating God in one's own image"

• One of the more annoying theist arguments is that it is impossible to be moral without God. This idea has remained popular despite powerful rebuttals, most notably Euthuphro's Dilemma. 
• Anyway, the most excellent Ed Yong covers a study that concludes people decide what God wants largely by inspecting their own beliefs. Not exactly surprising, but a fascinating study nonetheless.
• "People may use religious agents as a moral compass, forming impressions and making decisions based on what they presume God as the ultimate moral authority would believe or want. The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing. This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God's beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing."
  

"Life on Mars?!"

• Remember the to-do back in the 90s about the meteorite that supposedly contained alien microbes? Well the same team that published the original study in 1996 have now released two new papers that again defend their conclusion. Very interesting stuff. I sure hope they're right, but obviously we'll have to wait and see what the experts think of the recent stuff.

"National Geographic's International Photography Contest 2009"

• Big Picture with a gorgeous set of nature photographs.
  

"Meet the Ex-Jihadis"

• Johann Hari interviews a bunch of ex-Islamists and tries to understand what attracted them to radicalism, and what made them give it up.
• "I realise how far all my interviewees – and new friends – have travelled. They have burned in this fire of certainty. They have felt it consume all doubt and incinerate all self-analysis. And they dared, at last, to let it go. Are they freakish exceptions – or the beginning of a great unclenching of the jihadi fist?"

Lazy linking...

Your semi- quasi- pseudo- weekly dose of Lazy Linking...

"Grandma Plays Favorites"

• A report by ScienceNOW on fascinating research on grandparent kin-altruism. According to the grandmother hypothesis, older women survive well past menopause (or have it in the first place) because over evolutionary time the marginal benefits of taking care of grandchildren were larger than the marginal benefits of additional children (possibly because the chance of having a healthy baby decreases dramatically with age).
• Various studies have been done to test this hypothesis, but the results have been mixed. Now Fox et. al. have a proposal that could account for these mixed findings: that altruism varies by sex-linked chromosomes. In terms of the sex-chromosomes, paternal grandmothers are on average 50% related to their granddaughters, but not related to their grandsons at all. (Since a male is  XY and a female XX, a boy must get his Y chromosome from his father and his X chromosome from his mother). Maternal grandmothers, on the other hand, will on average share 25% of their sex-chromosomes with both grandsons and granddaughters.    
• In other words, if you are a paternal grandmother it makes sense to dote on granddaughters (again, at least when it comes to sex-chromosomes) and if you are a maternal grandmother, it makes sense to dote equally. And, apparently, controlling for these different genetic interests makes sense of the previously-inconsistent data.
  

"Who's the Scientist?"

• Seventh graders describe scientists before and after a visit to Fermilab. Not surprisingly, meeting an actual scientist changes children's perceptions dramatically, and for the better.
  

"Clever fools: Why a high IQ doesn't mean you're smart"

• Excellent New Scientist piece on how IQ does a pretty bad job of measuring intellectual competence. The problem with people like George Bush, I have long thought (and the article basically agrees), isn't that they are stupid, it's that they subscribe to an unjustified epistemology in which they elevate intuition, ideology, and "gut feelings" over critical thinking and science. As I have said time and again, the human mind is prone to innumerable biases and rigorous thinking, humility, open mindedness and a reliance on reason are the only antidotes.
  

"Creationism Taught as Science in South African State Schools"

• The title says it all. Depressing, annoying, unacceptable.  

"A Language of Smiles"

• It has been known for a long time that the simple act of smiling can lift your mood and frowning can sour it. The most excellent Olivia Judson puts these findings together with the fact that different languages require different frequencies of mouth movements, some of which resemble smiling and others frowning. So if language A has a lot of sounds requiring speakers to pull a smile-like face, and language B lots of sounds requiring a frown-like face, we might have an interesting (but subtle and partial) explanation for different national cultures. German, for example, contains a lot of vowels that make you frown... 
  

 "Reforming libel law: A city named sue" (registration required).

• The Economist argues, entirely convincingly, that England's libel laws are archaic and damaging to free speech. Some American media organizations are now actually threatening to stop publishing in England and blocking access to their websites there. 
• Good ideas for reform include shifting the burden of proof to the claimant and capping damages. Dear House of Commons: do something, dammit. 

"Probably guilty: Bad mathematics means rough justice"

• Innumeracy - the inability to deal competently with basic mathematics and statistics - is a Bad Thing. (As John Allen Paulos has argued). As this article explains, innumeracy in the legal system leads to miscarriages of justice.

"Next-gen PhDs fail to find Web 2.0's 'on-switch'"

• The Times Higher Education Supplement reports on a survey that suggests 'Generation Y' graduate students have not embraced Web 2.0. C'mon guys... RSS and blogs are particularly valuable tools: use them. (I have my doubts about social bookmarking).
• A weakness: the study (at least as reported here) did not compare patterns of use among the Ph.Ds to the wider population of Generation Y.
  

"Face the Facts - and End the War on Drugs" - Johann Hari

• It so obvious I find it embarrassing to have to point it out: governance ought to be evidence-based. Alas, policymakers are notoriously immune to the facts, especially so on issues people are prone to go into moral panic about. The evidence with regards to drugs is overwhelming and clear: prohibition causes far more harm than good. Deal with it like alcoholism: decriminalize and treat it like a public health issue.
• See also: a piece in this week's Economist on how drugs are becoming 'virtually legal' due to laws not being enforced.

"How did I get Here?"

• Wonderful post over at Science, Reason and Critical Thinking tracing various contingent links between events, books and so on that led him to where he is now. Cue a cliche about the butterfly effect.
  

"Cell Size and Scale"

• Awesome little interactive on the Learn.Genetics site showing the size of various biological parts and organisma, ranging in scale from a rice grain to a carbon atom. It reminds me of that awesome video I posted a while back on the size of the planets compared to the Sun, and the Sun compared to other stars.
  

Ida: Damp squib...

So remember Ida? The fossil that was going to "change everything"? That was a "missing link"? That was supposed to be a human ancestor? Well it seems all that media hype was for nothing because, according to a new paper in Nature, Ida was the ancestor of... nothing. (Or at least nothing extant).

I don't have the necessary expertise to have an opinion about the controversy itself, but lots of people who do were skeptical right from the start and the naysayers now hove more ammunition that ever. Note to all: doing science by media is a really, really Bad Idea.

Further reading:

• "When It Comes To Being The "Missing Link", Ida -- You Are NOT The Candidate" at Prancing Papio.
• "Breaking the Link - Darwinius revealed as ancestor of nothing" at Not Exactly Rocket Science. 
• "Bone Crunching Debunks ‘First Monkey’ Ida Fossil Hype" at Wired Science.
  
• "Ida Redux" at NeuroLogica.
  

Lazy Linking

Your (sorta) weekly dose of lazy linking...

"Churches involved in torture, murder of thousands of African children denounced as witches"

• A genuinely sickening report on Africa's growing witch craze. It's positively Medieval. And who's at the forefront? Yep, the churches. Religion and evil, who would have thought...

"Facial Profiling: Can you tell if a man is dangerous by the shape of his mug?"

• A Slate piece on recent research by Aaron Sell and colleagues on adaptations for the visual assessment of formidability. I have in fact written a lengthy piece on Sell's research and once it's done and dusted, I'll post it here. Physiognomy is making a comeback. (Via Mind Hacks)

"The Pilgrim's Progressiveness: Does going to Mecca make Muslims more moderate?"

• A report on very clever research (pdf) that seems to demonstrate that going on the hajj may in fact make Muslims more moderate. Fascinating and surprising. Note: as far as I know, the research has not yet been published, so it's not been peer-reviewed. Buyer beware.
  

Obituary of Margo Wilson

• I was genuinely saddened to hear of Margo Wilson's death. If you haven't heard of her before, go find out. In collaboration with her husband Martin Daly, she produced groundbreaking work on the Cinderella effect and homicide.
  

"Experimenting on Mechanical Turk"

• Using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (in which people get small payments to do simple tasks) to do psychological experiments. Pretty cool, but rather fraught. (Via John Hawks).
  

"England’s libel laws don’t just gag me, they blindfold you"

• An op-ed in The Times by Simon Singh urging reform of libel law. He argues convincingly that England's preposterous libel laws not only limit freedom of expression, it limits people's right to know. A healthy democracy allows open debate and putting the onus on the defendant and not having a public-interest clause stifles such debate. It boggles the mind that these laws survived into the 21st century. 
  

"Refuting this post helps confirm it"

• A short but sweet post on Marginal Revolution about why blogging is good for you. Some of the critical comments are worth reading too: it's certainly possible to blog in a echoing chamber.
  

"Goodbye HuffPost, Hello ScienceBlogs: Science as a Religion that Worships Truth as its God"

• David Sloan Wilson's inaugural post at his new home over at ScienceBlogs. Wilson, if you don't know him, is an eminent biologist and one of the leading proponents of neo-group selection. Note: some other dude seems to have posts on the same blog (despite not being listed as an author). Those posts are dumb.
  

Lazy Linking

"The Durban Boredom Festival"

• So a friend, my fiancée and I went to a local psychic fair recently. I was planning to write about it... but it was a horrid experience, so I never got round it it. Luckily, Angela (the aforementioned fiancée) has written a great account of what went down at the fair and trust me, short as it is, her post contains everything you'll possibly want to know about it. Overall conclusion: way too much incense, rampant woo, boring as hell, complete ripoff.

"The latest verdict on using brain imaging for lie detection"

• BPS Research Digest reports on using fMRI et. al. to spot lying. Short version: it doesn't work. (At least not yet).

"Offensive Play: How different are dogfighting and football?"

• Malcolm Gladwell's latest New Yorker piece in which he compares the morality of dogfighting - almost universally reviled - with that of American football. It turns out that, like with boxing, a football career often results in an Alzheimers-like condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Amazingly, new resarch using accelerometers has revealed players regularly suffer hits to the head of up to 90gs. Not surprisingly this is a Bad Thing that does severe damage to the brain over the long run. Gladwell suggests this may make football morally comparable to dogfighting: the injuries and suffering of the players are an inherent and ineradicable feature of the game.
• As a big rugby fan I couldn't help wondering what the situation is like for my favorite Saturday diversion. Do rugby players also suffer as much damage? Obviously, only research could settle the issue (and some may already exist, I don't know). From the armchair, it's difficult to tell: on the one hand, there are many fewer hits to the head in rugby but, on the other, the players don't wear helmets or much protective gear. My (rather bland) guess, for the little that's worth, is that brain trauma is not as common in rugby as it is in football or boxing, but significantly more prevalent than in the general populace. I'm not going to stop watching though, that's for sure.

"Psychology: A Reality Check" (paywall, I think)

• A great Nature editorial calling for evidence-based clinical psychology in the United States. I'd say it's also much needed elsewhere, the training of psychologists is often criminally devoid of science or even critical thinking. 
• "Clinical psychology at least has its roots in experimentation, but it is drifting away from science. Concerns about cost–benefit issues are growing, especially in the United States. According to a damning report [pdf] published last week an alarmingly high proportion of practitioners consider scientific evidence to be less important than their personal — that is, subjective — clinical experience."
  
• "The irony is that, during the past 20 years, science has made great strides in directions that could support clinical psychology — in neuroimaging, for example, as well as molecular and behavioural genetics, and cognitive neuroscience. Numerous psychological interventions have been proved to be both effective and relatively cheap. Yet many psychologists continue to use unproven therapies that have no clear outcome measures — including, in extreme cases, such highly suspect regimens as 'dolphin-assisted therapy'."

"How We Lost Our Diversity"

• Interesting piece by the excellent Ann Gibbons about new research on the causes of human genetic homogeneity (relative to other primates).
• "Modern humans are a lot alike - at least at the genetic level - compared with other primates. If you compare any two people from far-flung corners of the globe, their genomes will be much more similar than those of any pair of chimpanzees, gorillas, or other apes from different populations. Now, evolutionary geneticists have shown that our ancestors lost much of their genetic diversity in two dramatic bottlenecks that sharply squeezed down the population of modern humans as they moved out of Africa between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago."
• See also: John Hawks' fairly critical analysis of the same study.

"Analogies to apes lead us on the wrong track"

• Razib Khan over at Gene Expression on how Ardi drives home the message that drawing analogies between humans and the other extant apes can be misleading. Six million years is a long time, and there's no reason to think our common ancestor with the chimps and bonobos was particularly chimp-like. Somewhat counterintuitively, the opposite might even be true.

"Dear Penn and Teller: Bullshit!"

• I've only recently remembered that I have Season 6 of Penn & Teller's Bullshit so I'm only watching it now. And like Massimo Pigliucci in the above post, I just hated their episode (6-06) on environmentalism. Libertarians so obviously have blinkers on when it comes to global warming that it positively amazes me that they're not more self-critical. It also reminds us all, of course, that being vigilant about our own biases is important.  

"Islam: A Shifting Focus"

• One of the most widespread misconceptions about Islam is that most of its faithful are Arabs. In actual fact, Asian Muslims vastly outnumber Muslims from other parts of the world, making up 61.9% of the global number of 1.57 billion believers.
• "A new survey of the world’s Muslim population, by the Pew Research Center based in Washington, DC, will help those who are keen to break that link [i.e. the perception that most Muslims are Arabs]. It estimates the total number of Muslims in the world at 1.57 billion, or about 23% of a global population of 6.8 billion. Almost two-thirds of Muslims live in Asia, with Indonesia providing the biggest contingent (203m), followed by Pakistan (174m) and India (160m)."
• "Perhaps more surprising will be the finding that the European country with the highest Muslim population is not France or Germany, but Russia, where 16.5m adherents of Islam make up nearly 12% of the total national population. Compared with other surveys, the report gives a lowish estimate for the number of Muslims in France (3.6m), as it does for the United States (2.5m); in both those countries, secular principles make it impossible to ask religious questions on a census."

Carnival of Evolution 16

• A superb edition of the Carnival of Evolution - there are many worthwhile posts to check out. My pieces on foxes and on chameleons were featured. 

Lazy Linking

I've not linked lazily in a while (nasty flu...). So...

"Twilight of the Efficient Markets"

• A superb, must-read review by Cosma Shalizi (Three-Toed Sloth) of the book The Myth of the Rational Market by Justin Fox. If you read any of the articles in this edition of Lazy Linking, this should be it.

"My Little Zebra: The Secrets of Domestication"

• Very interesting New Scientist article, related to my recent post on the farm fox experiment, that focuses on work done by Max Planck Institute evolutionary geneticist Svante Pääbo (of Neanderthal genome-fame) on the genetics of domestication. (They worked on rats bred for tameness and aggression though, not the foxes). My hypothesis that the original fox domestication results could have been due to experimental biases gets some indirect support from the fact that Pääbo's team thought it necessary to introduce more rigorous protocols for determining tameness.   
• Also noteworthy is a supplemental text-box that quotes Richard Wrangham as saying human beings may be a "self-domesticated species". Intriguing thought. 

"How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet"

• A fantastic Douglas Adams essay from the late 90s. Among other things, he predicted the end of the broadcasting (one-to-many) pattern of communications (c.f. Shirky).
• "Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’."
• Via Michael Nielsen. 

"The Waking Nightmare of Sleep Paralysis"

• Anomalistic psychologist Chris French on sleep paralysis (hypnopompia and hypnogogia). I have experienced this myself, which I described in a post early in the history of this blog...

12th Edition of Science Pro Publica

• The twelfth edition of the blog carnival Science Pro Publica hosted by Lab Rat. My pieces on chameleons and fox domestication were featured. 

"How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?"

• A lengthy piece by Paul Krugman in The New York Magazine on the causes of the failure of academic economics. 
• Random anecdote: I still remember the day I decided I wouldn't pursue economics beyond undergrad. (It was the last straw...). It was a third year ecos course at UCT and we were covering a 2-buyer, 2-commodity and 2-seller model when, reflecting on possible problems with the model, the lecturer said "the assumptions may not reflect reality". MAY!?!

"A History of the Past: 'Life Reeked With Joy'"

• A bunch of hilarious verbatim howlers from the essays of undergrads collected over several decades by a history professor.
• My favorite: "In the 1400 hundreds most Englishmen were perpendicular. A class of yeowls arose. Finally, Europe caught the Black Death. The bubonic plague is a social disease in the sense that it can be transmitted by intercourse and other etceteras. It was spread from port to port by inflected rats. Victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks. The plague also helped the emergance of the English language as the national language of England, France and Italy."

"What conclusions can be drawn from Neanderthal DNA": Parts One and Two.

• An excellent essay on... well, the title says it all. It's by one James Winters, a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh. There are a bunch of grammatical and stylistic solecisms and rather... creative use of adjectives, but the content is very interesting. 

Entheogens - Wikipedia

• "An entheogen ("creates god within")... in the strict sense, is a psychoactive substance used in a religious, shamanic or spiritual context. Historically, entheogens were mostly derived from plant sources and have been used in a variety of traditional religious contexts. Most entheogens do not produce drug dependency. With the advent of organic chemistry, there now exist many synthetic substances with similar psychoactive properties. Entheogens are tools to supplement various practices for healing and transcendence, including in meditation, psychonautics, art projects, and psychedelic therapy."

Big new find at Sterkfontein

The Times reports on a big new find at Sterkfontein, ‘The Cradle of Mankind’. Alas, we don’t know what’s been found, as the scientists are keeping it secret until they’re ready to publish. An excerpt:

This much can be revealed: new fossil discoveries have been made by Berger in the Cradle of Humankind. The discovery was disclosed to Parliament a few months ago. President Jacob Zuma recently took a break from his busy schedule to visit Wits to view these new items. So, we know we’re talking about something big. So big, the paleontological world is buzzing with excitement and there is widespread speculation that they will provide new clues to the evolutionary puzzle.

But none of this brings us any closer to answering the question: what precisely has been found? A possible pointer lies in the involvement of Thackeray. The professor has increasingly focused his interest on the field of variability, in size and shape, examining the areas of human evolution where the boundaries start to break down. Modern humans share 98% of their genes with chimpanzees. Studies involving the rate of mutation of DNA have produced a virtual molecular clock, indicating that the chimpanzee/human split occurred somewhere between 5million and 7million years ago. Subsequently, the hominins also split into branches. Several different hominin species have been found at Sterkfontein alone and three major tool cultures have been identified.

Via: John Hawks.

Lazy Linking

"The Dark Matter of the Human Brain"

• Carl Zimmer on how the neuron doctrine -- basically, that neurons do the computational heavy lifting in the brain -- might be wrong, or at least radically incomplete. Glial cells, it turns out, may be far more important than previously thought.
• "If astrocytes [a type of glial cell] really do process information, that would be a major addition to the brain’s computing power. After all, there are many more astrocytes in the brain than there are neurons. Perhaps, some scientists have speculated, astrocytes carry out their own computing. Instead of the digital code of voltage spikes that neurons use, astrocytes may act more like an analog network, encoding information in slowly rising and falling waves of calcium. In his new book, The Root of Thought, neuroscientist Andrew Koob suggests that conversations among astrocytes may be responsible for 'our creative and imaginative existence as human beings.'"

"Cracking the Spine of Libel"

• Olivia Judson over at the NY Times on the horrendous way in which Simon Singh has been treated. Good news: the US senate is putting pressure on the English parliament to change their libel laws. Hopefully freedom of speech will prevail. 

"The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution"

• PZ's review of Dawkins' latest book.
• "The enemy of ignorance is education, and the creationists know that; it's why there is so much effort by the religious conservatives to destroy public education. These are books that provide an end-run around the current deficiencies in science education in this one area, and what they ought to do is help people question the wanna-be theocrats. If they lie about evolution, if they are so transparently wrong about this one subject, maybe more people will wake up to the anti-science agenda so many are peddling in this country."

"Can I Take Your Son to Church?"

• Religious people try to get children young... even if their parents are atheists. C.f. Dawkins' "Good and Bad Reasons for Believing": religious people were "told to believe [crazy claims] when they were young enough to believe anything."

"Publish Less, Perish More"

• "What if we did a little more thinking and a little less sharing? What if a publication was thoroughly peer reviewed? But there’s no time for this, right? Everyone is too busy, right? There’s the rub. We’d have the time to check our research if we stop shotgunning our whims at every conference with two legs and a skimpy dress. Suddenly, we’d see the ridiculous page limit requirements relax. We’d no longer have to fit complex talks into 12.225 minutes. Most importantly, we might start to understand what the hell other people are talking about. Fancy that, a presentation outside your narrow niche that you can follow?"

"The Courthouse Ring: Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism"

• Malcolm Gladwell's most recent piece. I can't say I like it very much, but here it is anyway.