In this episode of The Pseudo Scientists, the official podcast of the Young Australian Skeptics, Belinda, Richard, new panel member Tom Lang and I dive into the disparate worlds of the Curiosity Mars Rover landing and the 2012 London Olympics. Plus, Ted interviews Jay Novella, one of the hosts of the influential and renowned Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast, on the link between skepticism and atheism, how the SGU got started, and how to live life as a skeptic.
You can follow new panel member Tom Lang on Twitter at @Langemhigh!
Jay Novella’s podcast, The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, is available on iTunes and on its website – but you knew that already, right?
The video of the gymnast’s parents that Richard referred to in this episode can be seen here.
This week’s “Houston, We Have A Problem” clip is the Turbo Encabulator. Sadly, it’s a parody. But it’s an hilarious parody.
If you have feedback for the show, get in touch via our Contact page or send us an email: youngausskeptics(at)gmail(dot)com.
To support the show (and get a great book, but that’s secondary, right?) you can purchase the Young Australian Skeptics’s Skeptical Blog Anthology – available in paperback or ebook!
What are you waiting for? Listen in the audio player above, subscribe via iTunes or Libsyn RSS, become a fan on Facebook, and follow the Young Australian Skeptics on Twitter.
The following was written by a friend of mine, Brady Clarke, on Tumblr. It struck such a chord with me that I’ve reposted it here (with permission). Make sure you follow Brady on the Twitters – @pressdarling - especially if you have the same taste in music that I do.
—
Humans did this. Humanity did this. We put a car-sized robot called Curiosity onto Mars. We control this robot from Earth. It took this picture. You’re looking at a picture that it took, made available on the internet hours after it was taken.
That’s right.
A photo taken on a different planet, available for you to see mere hours later.
If you’re fortunate enough to own a smart phone, you might be using it to look at this picture. How marvellous is that? You have a piece of technology that you carry around in your pocket every day that lets you see photos that were taken on Mars hours after they were taken.
Look at this.
Take for granted, if you will, that this technology all exists; it didn’t 100 years ago (we barely had heavier-than-air flight, radio and photography, let alone effective computers or space travel). Take that for granted if you want. But please don’t scoff at the fact that there is now a robot on Mars that is taking photos, that you can view on the little computer in your pocket.
You’re looking at a place far further away from home than any human has ever been.
It’s no secret that I’m a massive fan of Annie Clark, aka. St. Vincent, premiere indie songwriting darling, monstrous guitarist and general badass. So any news that she’s releasing new music is… er, something to my ears. Not going to say music. Was not going to say music.
Anyway, she’s collaborated with New Wave legend David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) on an album due out in September called Love This Giant, and if the first two tracks – the impossibly catchy “Who” and the impossibly funky “Weekend in the Dust” – are anything to go by, it’s going to be incredible. All the tracks have a friggin’ brass section in them, for goodness’ sake!
I’ve preorderedLove This Giant (naturally) and highly suggest that you do that same right now.
In other news: I’ve changed the blog’s header image – do you like it? I’m just glad I don’t have to cringe anymore when I look at my own blog…
In this episode of The Pseudo Scientists, the official podcast of the Young Australian Skeptics, Richard, Belinda and Rachael chat about the possible evolutionary roots of depression, the passing of Sally Ride, and research on how women’s brains age. Also, Ted interviews Carrie Poppy, Communications Director for the James Randi Educational Foundation, about her path to skepticism. Finally, Belinda has a sore throat (but it’s subtle, so you might not notice it).
You can find Carrie Poppy’s podcast, Oh No, Ross and Carrie! at its website and on iTunes.
If you have feedback for the show, get in touch via our Contact page or send us an email: youngausskeptics(at)gmail(dot)com.
To support the show (and get a great book, but that’s secondary, right?) you can purchase the Young Australian Skeptics’s Skeptical Blog Anthology – available in paperback or ebook!
What are you waiting for? Listen in the audio player above, subscribe via iTunes or Libsyn RSS, become a fan on Facebook, and follow the Young Australian Skeptics on Twitter.
You know, this has been happening for a while, but I just didn’t notice it. It took another post by intelligent design proponent David Klinghoffer for me to make the connections – was I oblivious before because I’m a lowly undergraduate? Hah.
The Discovery Institute has a strange relationship with online criticism. On one hand they hate it, because – naturally – it shows how wrong they are about most things. On the other, they love it, because they can derive thousands and thousands of blogged words enthusing their support base by showing that some scientists are actually taking their criticisms of “Darwinism” seriously, even if the other 99.95% of biologists have better things to do, like actual science and advancing our understanding of life and its place in the world. If a scientist critiques your position, that must mean she’s threatened by it, right?
But note that this doesn’t hold for criticism coming from students. I mean, who cares if some snotty-nosed kid, fresh out of high school (or even still in high school) thinks you’re wrong? They’re no scientist! Beat it, kid.
This can be seen quite obviously in the recent back-and-forth between Discovery Institute fellows Ann Gauger, Casey Luskin, Douglas Axe and, most obviously, the aforementioned Klinghoffer, and New Zealand PhD student Paul McBride, who criticised the DI’s new book Science and Human Origins in 6-part review on his blog. Klinghoffer refers to McBride as “a previously unknown New Zealand grad student”, “obscure”, having a “blog that no one before ever heard of”, his criticism as “one guy’s review on his personal website”, and – his words dripping with sarcasm – as a “hero and defender” of Darwinian thought. The phrase “grad student” is continuously mentioned, as if it’s something to be ashamed of. Yeah.
Turns out yours truly gets the same treatment, albeit in passing: apparently I’ve been “falling into ecstasies” over Carl Zimmer’s recent demolition act on Science and Human Origins‘s chromosome 2 fusion denial. Students need big, strong heroes to save them from the scary ID proponents who are trying get them to think for themselves! Luckily, Klinghoffer doesn’t out me as an “undergrad student” – but I feel he looks down on my continuing education with little more than a sneer.
(At this point, David Klinghoffer is most likely imagining me getting more and more upset that no one is paying attention to me.)
Nearly everyothertimeI’ve been mentioned on Evolution News and Views, it’s been through posting on The Panda’s Thumb, where my status as a student is not mentioned and my age is never brought up. However, whenever they randomly stumble upon one of my numerous posts about them on Homologous Legs, suddenly I’m talked down to. This one’s a classic, from earlier this year:
Credit where credit is due. Probably, unlike some of his more senior colleagues in the world of academic Darwin defenders, gents like Francisco Ayala, Scalan [sic] won’t pretend to have read the book when he hasn’t, or pretend there’s nothing there to review. Yet we also expect that when he’s mature and full of years, if not wisdom like ENV, he’ll still be threatening to read Signature in the Cell.
Eh. Maybe I’m reading subtext that doesn’t exist.
(I paw at a tear welling in my eye.)
It’s curious though, that the Discovery Institute is fine with deep thoughts from students – just only when they already agree with them. Regular ENV blogger Jonathan McLatchie has only just finished a Masters degree, and began blogging for the DI back in June 2010, when he was still an undergraduate student. No mentions were made of his age or his ability to critique the mainstream consensus of evolutionary biologists.
(My face is a hot, quivering mask of jealousy.)
I only rate a mention on ENV when I say something adorable or anything that can be spun into a rhetorical weapon. Never has a single, serious critique of ID that I’ve posted – both here and on The Panda’s Thumb - ever attracted any attention. My direct challenge to the DI last week was published before the post in which my seizure-inducing lust for Carl Zimmer was stated, so no doubt it was seen and subsequently ignored.
(I start eating ice cream directly from the tub.)
Moving on, the annual DI Summer Seminars are designed for students (in fact, McLatchie attended one in the last few years), but they only accept those who already believe the party line:
Admission Requirements: You must be currently enrolled in a college or university as a junior, senior, or graduate student. Required application materials include (1) a resume/cv, (2) a copy of your academic transcript, (3) a short statement of your interest in intelligent design and its perceived relationship to your career plans and field of study, and (4) either a letter of recommendation from a professor who knows your work and is friendly toward ID, or a phone interview with the seminar director.
Students are free to critically examine science and philosophy of science, but only when the Discovery Institute says it’s alright. No doubt if one of the students from this year’s Summer Seminars program started a pro-ID blog, ENV would be linking to it night and day, showing that even fledgling scientists know that “Darwinism” is flawed.
(“Bastards,” I whimper around my spoon. A mixture of chocolate sauce and melted ice cream leaks slowly down my chin. I don’t notice.)
But when a student of a similar age and education level writes hundreds of posts over years finding things wrong with your arguments? He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
(I finish the ice cream, and with a sob, flop into my bed and start watching reruns of Friends while crying into my pillow. No one understands me!)
If anyone from the Discovery Institute is reading this – and I know you at the very least check posts that link to you – engage with something I’ve written. I suggest my posts onthe “Bad Design Paradox” – simply because you’ve never acknowledged this contradiction in your pro-ID argumentation.
Last week, I was lucky enough to attend the Genetics Society of AustralAsia 2012 conference as an undergraduate volunteer. One of the fascinating presentations I had the pleasure of sitting in on was given by mammalian geneticist Jenny Graves, on the evolution of genetic sex determination in vertebrates – and, like many a talk at GSA2012, I livetweeted it. Somehow, that got back to the fine folk at COSMOS, a well-respected Australian science magazine, and I was asked if I would like to write a news piece on Graves’ talk.
I said “Yes!”, but I really wanted to say “Absosplendifferolutely!”, because I’m a dork.
After a few rounds of editing, the piece grew into a feature article for the online component of the magazine, and so… here it is! I present to you: “The elaborate evolutionary history of sex” for COSMOS Online – my first professional1 piece of science writing!
Here’s a short taste:
“I think everybody thought ‘Okay, problem solved, we’ve got the gene, everything else is going to be obvious,’” says Jenny Graves, a mammalian geneticist at the La Trobe Institute of Molecular Science in Melbourne, Australia, who gave a plenary speech at the annual Genetics Society of AustralAsia conference, held 15-18 July 2012.
“But the minute you get out from placental mammals, you strike all sorts of other ways of doing sex determination. Each one is a really interesting evolutionary story,” she says.
In 2008, Graves and her colleagues showed that the SRY gene and the X and Y chromosome system of determining sex had evolved less than 166 million years ago, from an ancient bird-like system for determining sex. This was much more recent than previously thought: earlier hypotheses placed the evolution of the X and Y system at least as far back as 310 million years ago, at the divergence point of mammals, reptiles and birds.
Excuse me, I’ll just be subtly dancing with pride and happiness in the corner over there. Look away.
As my patience for the Discovery Institute is at an all-time low, it’s heartening to see someone completely eviscerate their arguments. I mean, it happens all the time, but it’s particularly satisfying right now.
Carl Zimmer, well-known science writer, has been battling with DI fellow David Klinghoffer over the past few days over the evidence for a chromosome fusion event sometime in the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens that resulted in our chromosome 2, internal telomeres, double centromeric sequences and all. I say battling, but it’s been more of an interrogation, with the interrogated party attaching “persuasion devices” to their own private parts themselves. Klinghoffer has been refusing to tell Zimmer the source of his claim that:
…telomeric DNA parked in the middle of chromosome 2 is not a unique phenomenon. Other mammals have it too, across their own genomes. Even if it were unique, there’s much less of it than you would expect from the amalgamation of two telomeres. Finally, it appears in a “degenerate,” “highly diverged” form that should not be the case if the joining happened in the recent past, circa 6 million years ago, as the Darwinian interpretation holds.
To cut a long-ish story short, he eventually revealed his hand, and it turns out he was, of course, quoting – not any number of papers on the topic (which is quite well-represented in the literature) – but Science and Human Origins, the in-house Discovery Institute book about primate evolution written by two non-evolutionary biologists and one non-scientist, which is apparently terrible.
Carl Zimmer has wasted no time tearing the argument in the book apart. It’s glorious. I highly recommend reading it all, but here’s the rhetorical meat:
After five days of stonewalling and name-calling, Klinghoffer points us to a passage from a book published by his employer, the Discovery Institute, written by someone else at the Discovery Institute. The passage he points us to cherry-picks another book and a 2002 paper. Reading the original sources quickly reveals that Luskin’s interpretation of those quotes is wrong. Luskin also nods to another Discovery Institute fellow, who makes a comment that is clearly contradicted by peer-reviewed research. Luskin has nothing to say about any of the research that has come out in the past ten years. Klinghoffer has nothing to say, either.
For Klinghoffer to say that you have to read the entire book to appreciate the weight of the evidence about human chromosome two is absurd. Klinghoffer himself made a specific claim, and the evidence he offers actually shows that he’s wrong. Unless the rest of the book provides better evidence concerning human chromosome two, it’s irrelevant to my question.
And if the rest of the book is as wrong as this passage, then I hardly see why it’s worth reading.
And that is why I ask for evidence.
It’s rather sunny and wonderful outside today, isn’t it? Or maybe that’s just me.
Why have I been staying away from writing about the Discovery Institute? Stuff like this keeps happening:
Yesterday our friends at Biologic Institute were being pestered on their Facebook page by science writer and Discover magazine blogger Carl Zimmer on the subject of Science and Human Origins. Facebook is really no place for a substantive debate — the format is such that it doesn’t repay the time you put in.
So I wrote to Zimmer to invite him to participate in a genuine and informative online debate here at ENV, pairing him against one of the authors of SHO and allowing him 2000 words total in which he could tear our arguments and evidence to shreds if he liked.
Carl wrote back promptly to say “No thanks,” having also written a blog post reproducing my (private) email to him – which pained me to no end, since my note contained a typo as Carl was meticulous to make clear to his readers. (I wrote “interesting” instead of “interested.”)
So you see what we’re up against. Carl hasn’t read the book and now, having ducked out of a proper debate, he can go on denouncing it without ever having read it. He’s perfectly willing to waste our time on Facebook, where the phrase “pecked to death by ducks” comes to mind. But how about gathering his thoughts after reading the book and then telling us what’s wrong with Science and Human Origins? No, that he will not do.
My head’s not in a great place right now, so I’ll keep it short: the intelligent design movement needs to put its supposedly substantial money where its over-talkative mouth is. Stop churning out books and publish some goddamn papers, guys. And not in your little circle-of-friends journal – in the big ones. Science. Nature. If you have what you think is some revolutionary information, put it out there. Overturn the status quo. Pull no punches. Upset the mainstream. Stop preaching to the choir and yelling at the popular kids from across the road. It’s not working.
Science is not afraid of change. It’s not afraid of being mistaken. But it doesn’t just roll over for anything – it needs evidence, hypotheses and a well-thought out position. So far, it seems to me, you’re lacking all three – but I’m happy to be proven wrong. All scientists are. Write a paper outlining the best evidence for intelligent design, and submit it to every major biology journal in the world. If you survive the critiques, well… congratulations, you’ll have changed the world of biology forever.
In this episode of The Pseudo Scientists, the official podcast of the Young Australian Skeptics, Belinda, Rachael, Richard and I discuss the chemical ghost of a 120 million year-old bird, a vaccine against obesity (and why it might not be such a good idea) and a fascinating exploding star. Plus, Belinda interviews astronomer Dr. Lisa Harvey-Smith about the Square Kilometre Array telescope.
For the picture of the exploding carbon star, visit the New Scientist article referenced in the episode.
For a range of references on the effectiveness of Kinesio tape, see the Wikipedia page for elastic therapeutic tape.
If you have feedback for the show, get in touch via our Contact page or send us an email: youngausskeptics(at)gmail(dot)com.
To support the show (and get a great book, but that’s secondary, right?) you can purchase the Young Australian Skeptics’s Skeptical Blog Anthology – available in paperback or ebook!
What are you waiting for? Listen in the audio player above, subscribe via iTunes or Libsyn RSS, become a fan on Facebook, and follow the Young Australian Skeptics on Twitter.
Just for a bit of fun/semi-productive time usage, I thought I’d set down a somewhat definitive, unranked list of my favourite ever albums. Defining it was a lot harder than I thought, although I did make it slightly easier by forcing myself to only choose one album per artist – otherwise this list would be 50% Björk, and no-one wants that (except perhaps me, deep down). I’ve included a link to my favourite song off each album too, so you can get a taste of what I mean when I describe what I like about each one.
Bitte Orca – Dirty Projectors
In many ways, this album completely redefined what I thought good music could be. Complex rhythmic patterns, Dave Longstreth’s wholly unique lead vocal style blending in with the tight, female vocal harmonies, the crazy guitar work – it hit me for six (even though I hate cricket), and my musical tastes changed forever. While I love other Dirty Projectors albums too (their latest, Swing Lo Magellan is a killer), Bitte Orca will most likely always be my favourite. There’s just nothing else out there like it.
Homologous Legs is the personal blog of Jack Scanlan, an Australian science communicator and biology student.
Topics of interest here include the intelligent design/evolution "war", biology, philosophy, religion, music, and mostly coherent thoughts from a scattered brain.
Recent Comments