Over at the Intersection, Chris Mooney is concerned that we haven’t had a science/religion tiff in what, days? So he wants to offer a defense of organizations like the National Center for Science Education, who choose to promote science by downplaying any conflicts between science and religion. For example, the NCSE sponsors a Faith Project, where you can be reassured that scientists aren’t nearly as godless as the newspapers would have you believe.

In the real world, scientists have different stances toward religion. Some of us think that science and religion are (for conventional definitions of science and religion) incompatible. Others find them perfectly consistent with each other. (It’s worth pointing out that “X is true” and “People exist who believe X is true” are not actually the same statement, despite what Chad and Chris and others would have you believe. I’ve tried to emphasize that distinction over and over, to little avail.)

In response to this situation, we uncompromising atheists have a typically strident and trouble-making idea: organizations that bill themselves as “centers for science education” and “associations for science” and “academies of science” should not take stances on matters of religion. Outlandish, I know. But we think that organizations dedicated to science should not wander off into theology, even with the best of intentions. Stick with talking about science, and everyone should be happy.

But they’re not happy; Chris and others (Josh Rosenau at Thoughts from Kansas is a thoughtful example) think that the NCSE can be more effective if it proactively tries to convince people that science and religion need not be incompatible. As an argument toward this conclusion, Chris attempts to horrify us by offering the following hypothetical conversation between a religious believer and an NCSE representative:

Religious believer: I know you say that evolution is good science, but I’m afraid of what my pastor says–that accepting it is the road to damnation.

NCSE: As a policy, we only talk about science and to not take any stance on religion. So we couldn’t comment on that.

Religious believer: I do have one friend who accepts evolution, but he stopped going to church too and that worries me.

NCSE: All we can really tell you is that evolution is the bedrock of modern biology, and universally accepted within the scientific community.

Religious believer: And I’m worried about my children. If I let them learn about evolution in school, will they come home one day and tell me that we’re all nothing but matter in motion?

NCSE: ….

To which I can only reply … um, yeah? That doesn’t seem very bad at all to me. Do we seriously want representatives of the NCSE saying “No, the claim that accepting evolution is the road to damnation is based on a misreading of Scripture and is pretty bad theology. If we go back to Saint Augustine, we see that the Church has a long tradition of…” Gag me with a spoon, as I understand the kids say these days.

Of course, we could also imagine something like this:

Religious believer: I know you say that evolution is good science, but I’m afraid of what my pastor says–that accepting it is the road to damnation.

NCSE: Oh, don’t worry. There’s no such thing as “damnation,” your pastor has just been misleading you.

Religious believer: I do have one friend who accepts evolution, but he stopped going to church too and that worries me.

NCSE: Well, that will happen. Prolonged exposure to scientific ways of thinking can lead people to abandon their religious beliefs. But don’t worry, you’ll be happier and have a more accurate view of how the universe works if that’s what happens.

Religious believer: And I’m worried about my children. If I let them learn about evolution in school, will they come home one day and tell me that we’re all nothing but matter in motion?

NCSE: That would be great! Because that’s what we are. But it’s not as depressing as you make it out to be; correctly understanding how the world works is the first step toward making the most out of life.

How awesome would that be? I don’t actually advocate this kind of dialogue in this particular context — as I just said, I think science organizations should simply steer clear. But these answers have a considerable benefit, in that I think they’re “true.”

That’s the major point. Advocacy and educational organizations have the goal of supporting science and education the best way they can, but there are limits. For example, they should stick to the truth. I tried to make this point in my post about politicians and critics — some people have as their primary goal advocating for some sort of cause, whereas others are simply devoted to the truth. But an organization advocating for science needs to take both into consideration.

And there are some scientists — quite a few of us, actually — who straightforwardly believe that science and religion are incompatible. There are absolutely those who disagree, no doubt about that. But establishing the truth is a prior question to performing honest and effective advocacy, not one we can simply brush under the rug when it’s inconvenient or doesn’t make for the best sales pitch. Which is why it’s worth going over these tiresome science/religion debates over and over, even in the face of repeated blatant misrepresentation of one’s views. If science and religion are truly incompatible, then it would be dishonest and irresponsible to pretend otherwise, even if doing so would soothe a few worried souls. And if you want to argue that science and religion are actually compatible (not just that there exist people who think so), by all means make that argument — it’s a worthy discussion to have. But it’s simply wrong to take the stance that it doesn’t matter whether science and religion are compatible, we still need to pretend they are so as not to hurt people’s feelings. That’s not being honest.

I have no problem with the NCSE or any other organization pointing out that there exist scientists who are religious. That’s an uncontroversial statement of fact. But I have a big problem with them making statements about whether religious belief puts you into conflict with science (or vice-versa), or setting up “Faith Projects,” or generally taking politically advantageous sides on issues that aren’t strictly scientific. And explaining to people where their pastors went wrong when talking about damnation? No way.

Right now there is not a strong consensus within the scientific community about what the truth actually is vis-a-vis science and religion; I have my views, but sadly they’re not universally shared. So the strategy for the NCSE and other organizations should be obvious: just stay away. Stick to talking about science. Yes, that’s a strategy that may lose some potential converts (as it were). So be it! The reason why this battle is worth fighting in the first place is that we’re dedicated to promulgating the truth, not just to winning a few political skirmishes for their own sakes. For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? (Mt. 16:26.)

[Update: In this post I originally said that Biblical passages are inscribed in the sights, however, what is actually inscribed are references to these passages, such as "JN8:12" referring to John 8:12. I corrected the text below. I don't think changes anything but I want to be accurate.]

There has been a minor uproar over an ABC news report that some rifle sights made by a Michigan company and bought by the US military have Biblical inscriptions in them.

According to the article, the military Powers That Be apparently didn’t know about the inscriptions (though apparently some soldiers knew; see below). The military does have rules forbidding proselytizing any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan (where the rifles are used), and this could be seen as such. Certainly it’s fodder for the people there to claim the US is waging a holy war, so the inscriptions are a pretty bad idea.

What to do about this?

First, on the military side, they need to sever the contract with the company, called Trijicon. I would hope that there is some other company that can make scopes for the rifles — if not, then the military needs to tell Trijicon to stop inscribing the ones they buy. The existing scopes are a problem to be sure, but that’s already done. Maybe they can be swapped out, or the inscriptions scraped off, though of course the expense in time and money would be huge. As far as the military goes, I think it’s almost certainly not worth it; they may simply have to (haha) bite the bullet, continue to use the rifle scopes, and hope for the best.

Trijicon, on the other hand, really screwed this up. They put the U. S. government in a bind here, both financially and perceptually. Whether they did this knowing it would violate U.S. laws or not, they need to be fined at the very least, and publicly humiliated as well.

Why humiliated? One of the Bible passages referenced on the scopes reads, "Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life."

Remember, that’s referenced in the scope of a rifle designed to kill people. Unless I have grossly misinterpreted the Sermon on the Mount, I don’t think that’s exactly what Jesus had in mind.

So Trijicon is icky and weird and allegedly did something illegal. However, Michael Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation goes farther. He said: "It’s wrong, it violates the Constitution, it violates a number of federal laws…" I agree it’s wrong and that it violates laws. I suspect a First Amendment case can be made here, but I’m not sure it’s a good one, or that it’s worth making. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to me that an indirect violation of the Establishment Clause has probably occurred, and since it was done unknowingly by the military, the violation of the federal law is a better avenue of pursuit if action is taken to stop the inscriptions. I’m glad the issue has come to light, but I certainly don’t think we need to rake the Marines and Air Force as a whole over the coals because of it.

Now, having said that, there’s the matter of some soldiers knowing about the inscriptions. Weinstein says that "…commanders have referred to weapons with the sights as ’spiritually transformed firearm[s] of Jesus Christ.’" If that is true, then we have a far clearer problem. Those soldiers have indeed violated the First Amendment, and again, if this is true those military personnel need to be chastised — at the very least. I am of the opinion they shouldn’t be in charge of troops in religious tinderbox areas like Iraq and Afghanistan as well. The idea of religious zealots fighting on our behalf in an area that has been torn apart by religious zealotry for millennia strikes me as a really, really bad idea.

But then, again in my opinion, Weinstein goes too far in his rhetoric:

"This is probably the best example of violation of the separation of church and state in this country," said Weinstein. "It’s literally pushing fundamentalist Christianity at the point of a gun against the people that we’re fighting. We’re emboldening an enemy."

This statement makes me uncomfortable. I suspect Al Qaeda will use this as propaganda against us, but then they do that for everything; they hardly need more fodder for that. But this being the best example of Establishment violation… I think Weinstein needs to take a look at Kansas, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, and most recently Mississippi. Creationists make bigger violations than this over breakfast every day.

Perhaps he means Iraq when he says "this country", though the context in the article is unclear. Either way, though, I think caution is called for in our rhetoric over things like this. There’s a clear path here, and no need to exaggerate the situation.

The image of Jesus with a rifle is everywhere on the web, but I couldn’t find the original. If anyone knows who did this, please leave a comment!

The personal brander job doesn’t sound like such a stretch, and the space pilot gig is definitely something for young rocket enthusiasts to aspire to… but grower-of-body-parts is definitely not something you expect to see advertised at a job fair this year. But a new study done by the British government has indeed included this unique profession as one of the important jobs in the future.

The report commissioned by Britain’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills was carried out by market research group Fast Future, and tried to determine a list of both jobs that do not currently exist and current jobs that could become more prominent by 2030.

The BBC writes:

Potential jobs of the future will include more farmers of genetically engineered crops and livestock, specialists in climate change reversal, and personal branders who will help individuals to establish their own brand across social networking sites.

Not just that, the report predicts police officers will be needed to monitor weather manipulation, and electronic waste data managers will be employed by people who do not want to be tracked online.

Oh, and if you’re feeling a little slow, the report predicts that surgeons may be around to “boost your RAM” as it were, giving people the ability to get extra memory capacity.

Yay! The future is coming. Strap on your jet-packs.

Related Content:
Galleries: Is Vermin the Meat of the Future?
Future Tech: Doctor on-Call? Cell-Phone Cameras Can Diagnose Disease
Future Tech: The 3-D Simulation that Lets Your Surgeon Practice …on You

Image Credit: Flickr / Thorne Enterprises

Attention lovers of old-timey science: the good stuff keeps on coming. Last month, when Britain’s Royal Society released digital versions of some of its greatest scientific papers to celebrate its 350th anniversary, we brought you delightfully odd and gruesome samples from the library. Now the society has uploaded another batch of classic manuscripts, including a book containing an early account of Isaac Newton’s apple story, one of science’s most famous anecdotes.

A biography written by William Stukeley, one of Newton’s contemporaries, relates the apple story as Newton himself told it to Stukeley. The text of Stukeley’s Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life has long been available online, but the Royal Society opened up digital access to the handwritten manuscript itself Sunday [Scientific American]. In his 1752 book on Newton, Stukeley writes:

After dinner, the weather being warm, we went out into the garden and drank tea under the shade of some apple trees, only he and myself.

Amidst other discourse, he told me he was just in the same situation as when formerly the notion of gravitation came into his mind.

Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself, occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood.

Why should it not go sideways or upwards, but constantly to the earth’s centre? Assuredly, the reason is that the earth draws it.

While Newton personally told this story to Stukeley, the latter’s book wasn’t published until a quarter-century after Newton’s death. And the great scientist himself may have embellished the anecdote. Keith Moore, the Royal Society’s head of library and archives, said: “Scholars know where the apple story comes from, and clearly it’s an anecdote Newton polished. What we want is for the public to see the manuscript itself. It wasn’t just Newton that polished it, succeeding generations put a gloss on it as well – that story just humanises him just a little bit” [The Guardian]. Indeed, some popular retellings have embellished the tale to add that the apple didn’t just plop to the ground near Newton, but actually clonked him on the head.

However padded or polished, the apple story still inspires the imagination. Thomas Levenson, MIT professor, DISCOVER contributor, and author of Newton and the Counterfeiter, tells DISCOVER that scholars have gone to great length to investigate its details, including some who took cuttings of what they believed to be Newton’s original apple tree. MIT has an apple tree grown from the supposed Newton cuttings that saw first fruits in 2006.

Stukeley’s Newton book isn’t the only newly released manuscript, though. The Royal Society also digitized Henry James’ fossil sketches, Richard Waller’s watercolors, and more.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Gimmie That Old-Time Science: DIY, Gruesome, and Spelled Funny
Cosmic Variance: Celebrity Throwdown? Einstein vs. Newton
Cosmic Variance: Guest Post: Tom Levenson on Isaac Newton as the First Cosmologist

Image: The Royal Society

Well, I finally succumbed. I had to. I made a Facebook fan page for myself.

Sigh.

When you sit in your office at home without pants on, writing about whatever you feel like, you can sometimes forget that what you do has an impact on the greater world. People from all over the planet read this blog (I’ll need to contact someone at NASA sometime to get it put in the ISS RSS feed reader), which is something I try to keep in mind when I write it.

I also love using social media, which is a great way to keep such a community together. I follow a lot of folks on Twitter, for example, and I use Facebook, too, though my list of complaints about it would reach from here to, well, the ISS.

One of those complaints is that there is a limit to the number of friends you can have. A FB page was never really intended for use by people to promote social media, but for some of us that’s what’s happened; for me it morphed from its original use as a personal page for IRL friends to something bigger. But I’ve run up against that limit, and cannot add any more friends.

So, to get around this, I had to bite the bullet and make that fan page (which has no limit). If you’re already a friend on my original page, then consider adding that as well. I’ll note that a while back someone started a fan page for me, which was very cool, and much appreciated. But I don’t control that one, and wanted one where I do, something more official.

I’ll start using the fan page more and more as time goes on. I have my Twitter feed going to my original page, and I’ve added it to the fan page too. I’ll eventually post more pictures there, and so on. If you join the page you can add stuff there as well. I can also add events to the calendar, more info about what I’m doing, and eventually, who knows? It may have some actual use!

Welcome to the first installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. We’re starting at the beginning, with Chapter One, “The Past is Present Memory.”

Excerpt:

The world does not present us with abstract concepts wrapped up with pretty bows, which we then must work to understand and reconcile with other concepts. Rather, the world presents us with phenomena, things that we observe and make note of, from which we must then work to derive concepts that help us understand how those phenomena relate to the rest of our experience. For subtle concepts such as entropy, this is pretty clear. You don’t walk down the street and bump into some entropy; you have to observe a variety of phenomena in nature and discern a pattern that is best thought of in terms of a new concept you label “entropy.” Armed with this helpful new concept, you observe even more phenomena, and you are inspired to refine and improve upon your original notion of what entropy really is.

For an idea as primitive and indispensable as “time,” the fact that we invent the concept rather than having it handed to us by the universe is less obvious—time is something we literally don’t know how to live without. Nevertheless, part of the task of science (and philosophy) is to take our intuitive notion of a basic concept such as “time” and turn it into something rigorous. What we find along the way is that we haven’t been using this word in a single unambiguous fashion; it has a few different meanings, each of which merits its own careful elucidation.

The book is divided into four major parts — Part One gives an overview of the issues, Part Two discusses relativity and time travel, Part Three (the longest and best part of the book) is about reversibility, entropy, and the arrow of time proper, and Part Four puts it all into a cosmological context. So Part One is somewhat out of logical order — it’s an attempt to survey the terrain and raise some ideas that will come to fruition later in the book.

The basic point of Chapter One is to examine the ways in which we use the concept of “time.” I’ll readily admit that this doesn’t sound like the sexiest idea for an opening chapter. (In my next book, an important character will be murdered within the first few pages, after which his beautiful daughter will be compelled to search for his killer in various exotic locales.) The first chapter has to serve multiple purposes — it obviously needs to provide some background for the rest of the book, but this is not a classroom where you can assume the audience will necessarily follow you to the end. So the first chapter also has to be fun and engaging, hinting at some of the mysteries to come.

In fact, I juggled the first three chapters back and forth. Chapter Two explains the basics of entropy and the arrow of time, while Chapter Three explains the basics of cosmology. At one point I had the current Chapter One placed after these two chapters, on the theory that we could be precise about definitions after we had been exposed to some of the big and exciting ideas. This was a well-intentioned theory, but not an especially good one. Test readers balked, so the current Chapter One was put back in the beginning.

Despite being about definitions and so forth, I think Chapter One turned out to be pretty interesting — indeed, I wonder now whether it shouldn’t have been longer. When you talk to people on the street about “time,” the first questions they ask tend to be along the lines of “what is time, really?” or “is time real, or just an illusion?” This chapter tries to answer those questions, or at least spell out the perspective I’ll be taking for the rest of the book. And they’re important questions, interesting in their own right, even if I breeze through them — lots of philosophical work, not to mention physics, has been addressed to these issues.

We distinguish between three ideas of time — time is a coordinate, time is what clocks measure, and time is the agent of change. These aren’t really “definitions” in any careful sense, so much as “ways we use the notion of time.” And my readers were right — it’s important to set out these different senses right from the start, as I’ve discovered that even physicists tend to blur them together in their minds.

The most important non-obvious stance I take in this chapter is to come down firmly on the side of an “eternalist” or “block universe” conception of time. The past, present, and future are equally real. Philosophers and other deep thinkers have been arguing about this for years, and I kind of dismiss the whole discussion in a couple of paragraphs. Sorry, philosophers! It’s an important issue, but we have other conceptual fish to fry.

So let me know what you thought, and what questions still remain — either about the substance of the chapter, or the stylistic choices made along the way. I’ll try to respond, although I reserve to right to say “hold that thought until we get to Chapter X.” And of course everyone else is encouraged to chime in, too.

Last week, I wrote at Science Progress about how a group of scientists had dealt a devastating blow to the practice of MTR (mountaintop removal mining) with a good paper, some luck, and a good communications plan.

Now, the point is driven home further, as the chief scientist involved, Dr. Margaret Palmer of the University of Maryland, was actually invited on The Colbert Report to discuss her work. Of course, the blowing up of mountains is a perfect Colbert topic, but I felt that Dr. Palmer did a good job, er, sticking to the science. Watch the whole thing:

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Coal Comfort – Margaret Palmer
http://www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

Last week ended with the encouraging cosmological news that the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared (HiFi), on the Herschel Space Observatory, is once again working. How stars are born, and the influence of the environments in which this takes place is, as you might imagine, an important astrophysical question. Part of Herschel’s mission is to address this issue by using HiFi, which is a high-resolution spectrometer, to provide detailed measurements of the composition of stellar nurseries. This question is also important for cosmology, where we are increasingly interested in the details of how galaxies formed and evolved over cosmic time, in order to be able to separate out the astrophysics from the features of large scale structure that are sensitively dependent on the background cosmology.

Herschel, which was launched along with the Planck satellite, but a few months into operation, HiFi developed an electronics problem and was switched off. This week, after a careful study of the incident, HiFi’s reserve electronics were switched on, and appear to be working correctly. While HiFi was down, Herschel’s other two instruments – Pacs and Spire were able to hog the observing time and do some lovely far-infrared and sub-millimeter science. To make up for this, the plan is now to give HiFi a larger slice of the observing pie for a while, in order to make sure it can accomplish its mission.

All in all this is wonderful news for cosmology and I’m delighted that another of our suite of outstanding experiments is once again up and running. One thing did make me giggle a little though. Speaking to the BBC, Frank Helmich, who leads HiFi, pulls one of my favorite academic tricks, saying

“I don’t watch much television but I know Crime Scene Investigation and this was just such an investigation – but in space! We found out what happened and then we designed all the mitigating measures,”

The CSI angle is a mild attempt to connect with popular culture for the benefit of the large and diverse readership of a BBC story, and I think that isn’t a bad idea at all. But what I find hilarious is the initial qualification. Although irrelevant to the point, it has to be said anyway, to satisfy what I’ve referred to before as the unspoken academic code, which I’ve paraphrased as

“Do not engage in any activity that is part of popular culture. Such activities include, but are not limited to; playing video games, playing card games (bridge excepted), watching movies without a serious social message and watching television (PBS, in particular NOVA, occasionally excepted). Any violation of the above may lead to a stubborn stain on your intellectual reputation, which may only be removed by repeatedly attending highly experimental theater.”

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to some interpretive dance.

More than two decades have passed since the Exxon Valdez spilled 38,000 tons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound, but despite cleanup efforts and time, thousands of gallons of oil remain stuck in the region’s beaches. A new Nature Geoscience study offers an explanation for why the oil has been so slow to disperse: it’s the composition of the beaches themselves.

According to study leader Michel C. Boufadel, natural forces have created beaches in Prince William Sound with two distinct layers, and water moves 1,000 times slower through the bottom layer than the top. Once the oil entered the lower level, conditions were right to keep it there, he said. Tidal forces worked to compact the finer-grained gravel even more, creating a nearly oxygen-free environment with low nutrient levels that slowed the ability of the oil to biodegrade [AP].

Boufadel began his study to explain why the oil from Valdez spill, which happened in March 1989, was lingering longer than most scientists expected. Most clean-up operations in the area ended in 1992 because the remaining oil was expected to disperse within a few years. A later study discovered that the oil was disappearing at a rate of just 4% each year, and that an estimated 20,000 gallons remained in the beaches [BBC News]. The researchers dug pits several feet deep all around Eleanor Island to investigate, and found that the two-tiered beaches has allowed plenty of crude to sink down and get stuck. In their field studies, Dr. Boufadel said, when they would dig into deeper sediments, “the whole place would smell of oil” [The New York Times]. If environmental agencies want to finish the cleanup, Boufadel suggests that chemicals could be injected into the lower sediment layer to speed up the oil’s biodegradation.

This study of a 21-year-old oil shipping disaster coincides with a current scare in the same locale; an Exxon ship briefly lost power in Alaskan waters Sunday, but two tugs towed it to safety. This tanker has quickly become a poster child for pending federal legislation to beef up protection for Prince William Sound oil shipments [Anchorage Daily News].

Related Content:
80beats: 20 Years After Valdez Spill, Eagles Are Healthy; 7 Other Species Still Hurting
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DISCOVER: Whatever Happened To… The Exxon Valdez?

Image: NOAA

“Individuals’ faces communicate a great deal of information about them. Although some of this information tends to be perceptually obvious (such as race and sex), much of it is perceptually ambiguous, without clear or obvious visual cues… …Here we found that individuals’ political affiliations could be accurately discerned from their faces. In Study 1, perceivers were able to accurately distinguish whether U.S. Senate candidates were either Democrats or Republicans based on photos of their faces. Study 2 showed that these effects extended to Democrat and Republican college students, based on their senior yearbook photos. Study 3 then showed that these judgments were related to differences in perceived traits among the Democrat and Republican faces. Republicans were perceived as more powerful than Democrats. Moreover, as individual targets were perceived to be more powerful, they were more likely to be perceived as Republicans by others. Similarly, as individual targets were perceived to be warmer, they were more likely to be perceived as Democrats… …These data suggest that perceivers’ beliefs about who is a Democrat and Republican may be based on perceptions of traits stereotypically associated with the two political parties and that, indeed, the guidance of these stereotypes may lead to categorizations of others’ political affiliations at rates significantly more accurate than chance guessing.”

But the real question is, who’s more good-looking?

Thanks to Mary for today’s ROFL!

[Update: some commenters are saying this bill is dead in the water. That's music to my ears! Let's hope that info is correct. We'll see soon enough.]

Mississippi state representative Gary Chism has decided that science is stupid. After all, he submitted House Bill 586 to the legislature, which is in part,

AN ACT TO REQUIRE LOCAL SCHOOL BOARDS TO INCLUDE AN INSTRUCTIONAL LESSON ON THE EVOLUTION OF HUMANITY IN ITS HIGH SCHOOL BIOLOGY CURRICULUM, WHICH SHALL BE TAUGHT AT THE BEGINNING OF THE BIOLOGY COURSE; TO REQUIRE THAT THE CURRICULUM BE BASED ON CERTAIN EVIDENTIARY FACTS AND SCIENTIFIC DATA; TO REQUIRE THAT THE LESSON NOT BE BIASED THROUGH SELECTIVE INSTRUCTION; TO REQUIRE THAT THE LESSON HAVE EQUAL INSTRUCTION FROM EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS THAT PRESENT ARGUMENTS FROM BOTH PROTAGONISTS AND ANTAGONISTS OF THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION

[ALL THAT SHOUTING is in the original bill.]

This is obviously another attempt by antireality anti-Constitution creationists to ram their religion down the throats of students. Chism, by the way, tried to get a disclaimer put into biology textbooks last year because he has mistaken the Bible for a science textbook. Anyway, if this bill passes, Mississippi will join the lofty ranks of such places as Texas, Kansas, and Dover, Pennsylvania as the laughing stocks of the nation and the world at large.

But there’s a funny thing in the bill. About teaching evolution, it says:

The lesson provided to students shall not evidence bias through selective instruction on the theory of evolution, but rather, shall have proportionately equal instruction from educational materials that present scientifically sound arguments by protagonists and antagonists of the theory of evolution.

Well, hey, I agree with that! Let them pass this bill! Because, of course, there is no scientifically sound argument by antagonists of evolution.

Creationists. Is there no dumbosity they can’t surpass?

The NCSE has more info. And if you live in Mississippi, especially District 37 where Chism supposedly represents the people, you may want to make your voice heard.

But if this bill does pass, then, of course:

Related posts:
Oklahoma: Doomed
Louisiana: Well, that’s it then
Texas: Careening toward doom
Sorry Texas, you’re still doomed

Tip o’ the Old Man River to Chad Gardner.

After the last post concerning Chad Orzel’s position on science and religion, I want to explore the central policy question here that seems to get everyone exercised, namely: What should the science/religion stance be for top science organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Center for Science Education, etc?

Many “New Atheists” would argue that such organizations should stay silent on the question, and not lend credence to the view that science and religion can be compatible (even though they certainly can be for individual people, even if not in some grand philosophical way, as Orzel explains). Let me explain why I find the NA position to be exceedingly bad advice.

If you’re working in America today to promote the teaching or the public understanding of evolution, you are constantly going to be dealing with religious people–in various localities across the country; in regular queries through your website and by phone, and so on. Much of America is, after all, religious.

And that’s not all. Much of religious America has also been told, from various pulpits, by various friends, and by sundry New Atheists, that evolutionary science is incompatible with religion. This prevailing notion creates an incredible blockade preventing the acceptance of evolutionary science. For as we know from reams of polling data, in the United States, when you pit science against religion, science often loses.

Aware of this context, groups like the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) take a stance likely to help some religious believers reject what they’ve been told from the pulpit, and move toward a more moderate stance on science and religion–in essence, from anti-science fundamentalism to middle-ground reconciliationism. To this end, NCSE states something factually true and indeed, undeniable: that not every religious person thinks science and religion are incompatible.

The veracity of this statement is not really open to debate. The issue here is simply whether such people exist, and of that there’s no doubt whatsoever. In this blunt factual sense, at least, science and religion are compatible–they are reconciled all the time by actual living, breathing human beings. You might take issue with the logical basis for such reconciliation in a particular mind, but you can’t deny that it happens regularly.

Moreover, if religion is the mental block that prevents a wider understanding and acceptance of evolution, then by seeking to remove that mental block, a group like NCSE is simply striving to be effective. Why should its hands be tied in this regard?

They shouldn’t. I mean, just picture the kind of conversations a representative of NCSE would have to have with a concerned religious believer if New Atheists were setting its policy:

Religious believer: I know you say that evolution is good science, but I’m afraid of what my pastor says–that accepting it is the road to damnation.

NCSE: As a policy, we only talk about science and to not take any stance on religion. So we couldn’t comment on that.

Religious believer: I do have one friend who accepts evolution, but he stopped going to church too and that worries me.

NCSE: All we can really tell you is that evolution is the bedrock of modern biology, and universally accepted within the scientific community.

Religious believer: And I’m worried about my children. If I let them learn about evolution in school, will they come home one day and tell me that we’re all nothing but matter in motion?

NCSE: ….

You get the point, I think. To me, it is obvious that, far from enforcing an unnecessary purism, a group like NCSE should be encouraged to speak with religious believers in terms they can understand, and in a way that will help them accept evolutionary science. The same goes for other science organizations.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I don’t know and I’m hoping for the best, but this could be it for the little rover.  There is a good team working on it so who knows – good luck!!

I’m a fan of the Colorado Children’s Immunization Coalition, whose purpose is to make sure my home state’s kids are healthy and not susceptible to preventable diseases (they’re on Twitter, too!). Last Thanksgiving, they had a "Thanks-a-thon", letting Coloradans post their messages and stories about their kids. It’s a great read, with lots of heart-warming — and some harrowing — stories.

And while I’m at it, here is a great immunization FAQ posted by the American Academy of Pediatrics. In it you’ll see something very hard to find on the web: actual science-based facts about vaccinations, without the scare tactics employed constantly by the antivax (what some people call the pro-disease) crowd. If you’re wondering about getting yourself or your kids vaccinated, please check out that site and read it carefully. You may be saving not only your child’s life, but the lives of other children as well.

It doesn’t matter how much you say about them, there’s still more to say.  It doesn’t matter how much you know about them, you barely know anything at all.  We’ve talked at length about what black holes are, what they do, how they do it, and what may happen after they’ve done it.  We all know about Hawking Radiation, microscopic black holes, and event horizons.

Doesn’t the term “event horizon” sound like it fell right out of The Twilight Zone?

Since most people know I’m very interested in black holes, I get a lot of questions and comments on the subject.  Here are a few of the topics most discussed in my email:

Image created by ESA/NASA/JPL – a Black Hole Concept drawing

A good “rule of thumb” in the empirical sciences goes like this:  For every action there is an equal, and opposite, reaction.  How does that work with black holes?

The “flip-side” to the black hole coin could very well be the hypothetical “white hole”.  Matter is drawn inexorably into the black hole, compressed by enormous energy into a singularity, and released (explosively) by the white hole.  The puzzler in this theory is if it happens at all (and it seems as if it must), why don’t we see it happen around us all the time?  After all, there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of black holes.  Some scientists are saying that the ejection of matter at the white hole is happening all around us, all the time.  It simply creates another “universe” when it happens.  The next step along this line of thought is the speculation that we have indeed experienced a white hole in this universe.  We called it “The Big Bang”.

Remember, the existence of a white hole it purely hypothetical.  By its very definition, we couldn’t produce one in this universe since its existence could only be manifest by the formation of another universe.  Tricky little problem in logic, that.

NASA/ESA STScl   X-Rays from heated material falling into a black hole

Let me give you a quick aside here;  if you fall into a black hole, you are not going to encounter a “worm hole” and travel through time, space, or dimension.  If you fall into a black hole, the only thing you’re going to encounter is a singularity, and that’s not a pleasant prospect.  Worm holes are an even iffier proposition than white holes.  Even if they did exist, and there was a way to travel through them (and control where you were going), you would not want to go through one.  Trust me, you do not want to go there.

Illustration of space-time “fabric” being warped by a black hole

Black holes are now thought to be at the center of most, if not all galaxies.  The gravitational pull of the black hole may very well be instrumental in holding the galaxy together.  When galaxies collide, or “merge”, it appears that their respective black holes orbit each other, creating a binary system, until they also collide.  The largest black hole located so far, OJ287 (a BL Lac object), is believed to be one center of such a collision of galaxies. OJ287 is thought to contain 18 billion (that’s “b” as in “boy”) solar masses, and is one member of a binary system.  Its smaller companion (“only” 100 million solar masses), will eventually be absorbed.   OJ287 is in the constellation of Cancer.

There is indeed a black hole at the center of The Milky Way.  It’s about 27,000 ly away, and is believed to be 4 million solar masses.  Here is an image of the center of our galaxy, combining images from Chandra, Hubble, and Spitzer.

Brought to you by NASA/ESA, SSC, CXC, and STScI

And finally, to look at our galactic center, churning around our own black hole:

Journey to the Galactic Center

The Science Tattoo Emporium continues to thrive, long after I first wondered aloud in August 2007 whether scientists had any cool tattoos of their research hidden under their lab coats. I continue to get photos at a regular rate, and as I post new ones, they continue to get noticed anew by places like Digg and Boing Boing.

Initially, I was so stunned by the influx of photos that I posted just about anything that came my way. But as the emporium has grown, I’ve become choosier about which ones I post. So if you are considering sending in your own scientific ink, please read these guidelines:

1. I’m most interested in tatoos that tell a story. The most interesting stories are the ones about how people became scientists. I love this one, for example.

2. When you send in pictures, please include a paragraph in which you tell me who you are and explain the significance of the tattoo. I prefer people to tell the story of their tattoo in their own words.

3. If you’ve been so inspired by the emporium that you’ve dashed out and gotten a tattoo of your own, do NOT immediately take a picture and send it to me. I don’t enjoy staring at raw, bruised flesh. Neither do readers of the Loom. Let yourself heal before grabbing the camera.

4. Make sure the photograph is well lit and at high resolution.

My pal Amanda Bauer — aka Astropixie — has been posting a great series of short videos called Sixty Symbols, where scientists discuss the meanings of a given symbol in science, and the story behind them. In the latest, she tackles the pronunciation of the planet name Uranus — the name is Greek, so I think the title of this post is correct — but the video she made has lots of info on the planet, and I thoroughly enjoyed watching it.

Related post (and to pre-empt any Futurama jokes):
Yes, yes, rings around Uranus, haha

I’m just back from ScienceOnline 2010, a conference unlike anything I’ve been to before. I usually go to conferences where my role is the journalistic fly on the wall, gathering story leads from presentations and hallway chats. Sometimes I go to meetings of fellow science writers, where it’s mostly hard-core job talk (with sporadic wailing and gnashing of teeth). ScienceOnline was a strange merging, where scientists talk about how to blog from a research vessel in the middle of the Pacific and journalists talked about how to teach Hollywood producers about quantum physics.

It is futile for me to distill all the stuff I learned into a blog post. There’s just too much, from the inspiring to the mundane. For example, for good podcasting sound quality, why not sit in a closet with a towel draped over your head? I’m also spending much of today surfing around to new web sites I heard about. Allow me to give a shout-out to fellow Discover-ite Darlene Cavalier’s newly launched Science For Citizens. It’s like Amazon.com for all sorts of possibilities for doing cool citizen science (such as studying fireflies).

Fortunately, later this week you can watch just about all the sessions on this YouTube channel. In the meantime, some audience members have already started uploading their own recordings. Embedded below is my seven-minute spiel. I was part of a panel on “rebooting science journalism.” Moments before I stood up to dispense my wisdom, I decided that nothing summed up the situation today with science journalism better than duck sex. And, as I discovered, ScienceOnline is just the sort of place where the audience gets it.

[More on Uff da here]

There might just be some truth to the notion that excessive indulgence in the “interweb” makes people a tad–just a wee bit–cuckoo.

Research being conducted by the Clalit Health Maintenance Organization, Israel’s largest HMO, points to a possible connection between unrestricted Internet use and the occurrence of psychotic episodes.

According to the Israeli paper Haaretz, researchers presented three cases of individuals who experienced psychotic episodes in the wake of intensive, prolonged Web surfing that included the development of a close online relationship with another person. All the three subjects were women between the ages of 30 and 50 with no significant psychiatric history. Two of them had no previous history of mental problems, although one had been treated for anxiety in the past.

Each of the three ladies had experienced an unsatisfactory intimate relationship in the past, and developed a dependent relationship with a man over the Internet without ever meeting him face-to-face.

As Haaretz explains:

The subjects’ psychoses included a total disconnection from reality, and in the case of one of the women also involved tactile hallucinations; she imagined that she could feel the man with whom she was having a “virtual relationship” touching her.

Creepy. But here comes the scary part: The researchers said all three required psychiatric care in the past year after undergoing uncontrollable psychotic episodes accompanied by delusions and hallucinations. One of the women was referred to emergency psychiatric care, while two checked into clinics. All three needed anti-psychotic drugs to stop the episodes.

Happily, all three women recovered and are reportedly fine now.

Researcher Uzi Nitzan said that while a casual relationship cannot be established between internet use and psychotic episodes, the women in the study told researchers that their conditions intensified as they got increasingly involved with their cyber-amours.

Internet-related psychosis hasn’t yet appeared very much in scientific literature, but there have been some instances of internet delusions in individuals with a history of mental disorders.

Haaretz quotes Nitzan as saying:

“There are descriptions of patients who have developed delusions inspired by computer software or hardware, such as one man who believes that someone is trying to poison his fingers through his computer keyboard or to implant certain thoughts in his mind.”

OK, logging off now.

Related Content:
80beats: China Bans Electroshock Therapy For “Internet Addiction”
80beats: Have You Consumed Your 34-Gigabytes of Information Today
80beats: Cheescake is like Heroin to Rats on a Junk Food Diet

Image: Flickr/Mandiberg

The James Randi Educational Foundation has teamed up with the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science and a dozen other secular groups to set up a way to donate money to help out the people of Haiti after the huge earthquake last week.

As Randi says,

We at the JREF are very proud to be part of the concerted effort to aid Haiti to recover from this catastrophic event. To my mind, there is nothing more disturbing than hearing the distressed cries of children who are subjected to grief and/or injury, and my personal contribution has already been added to the encouraging total that mounts hour by hour. Please be generous and help us to reach out to Haitians of all ages, of any and all philosophical orientations.

Richard Dawkins will cover $10,000 of PayPal fees, so if you use that method 100% of your donation will go to help.

You can donate here. Please help.