It turns out that Dolphin Safe Tuna is bad for sharks. And visa versa. More or less….
Let’s as BlogFish about it…
Who’s right depends on what you value more, dolphins or broader ocean ecosystem health. At least that’s the way I see it. We could protect dolphins totally during tuna fishing only if we’re willing to allow other animals like fish and sea turtles to suffer harm and become depleted (or further depleted).
In this illuminating talk, Richard Pyle shows us thriving life on the cliffs of coral reefs and groundbreaking diving technologies he has pioneered to explore it. He and his team risk everything to reveal the secrets of undiscovered species.
Bonus video:
Continue reading Rachel Maddow on The View
NASA’s planet-hunting space telescope Kepler is slated to launch the night of March 6 from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to find Earth-sized planets that could have liquid water at the surface and potentially harbor life.
“It’s not just another science mission. This one has historical significance built into it,” said Ed Weiler of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters. “It very possibly could tell us that earths are very, very common, that we’ve got lots of neighbors out there. Or it could tell us that Earths are really, really, really rare.”
Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, will reportedly not leave his television career to become Surgeon General.
Ed Ulbrich, the digital-effects guru from Digital Domain, explains the Oscar-winning technology that allowed his team to digitally create the older versions of Brad Pitt’s face for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”
It is a long way from Kazakhstan to Kentucky, but the journey to the Derby may have started among a pastoral people on the Kazakh steppes who appear to have been the first to domesticate, bridle and perhaps ride horses — around 3500 B.C., a millennium earlier than previously thought.
Archaeologists say the discovery may revise thinking about the development of some preagricultural Eurasian societies and put an earlier date to their dispersal into Europe and elsewhere. These migrations are believed to have been associated with horse domestication and the spread of Indo-European languages….
Dawkins gave a talk that could be criticized as not particularly new, in that his main idea is that human brains are too powerful and adaptable to continue to function primarily within an adaptive program serving as a proper adaptive organ. Instead, human brains think up all sorts of other, rather non-Darwinian things to do. This idea has been explored and talked about in many ways by many people. Kurt Vonegut Jr.’s character in Galapagos repeatedly, in a state of lament, quips “Thanks, Big Brain…” as evidence accumulates that our inevitable march towards extinction is primarily a function of that particular organ’s activities. People have talked about the brain as the outcome of runaway sexual selection. Evolutionary psychologists have talked about the evolution of strong preferences and desires, which in turn play out i a rather Frankensteinian fashion in a world where those desires can be met with ease instead of hard work and much time. Thus, we have evolved a yearning for rare nutrients such as salt and fat, and then we invented the ability to have unlimited access to salt and fat. So now, in a ‘civilized world’, it is the salt and fat that kills us incited of the predator or the con-specific competitor over access to some food or some sexual opportunity. (Thanks, Big Brain….)
Continue reading Dawkins…. On Purpose
A unique ecosystem of plants, birds and monkeys thrives in the treetops of the rainforest. Nalini Nadkarni explores these canopy worlds — and shares her findings with the world below, through dance, art and bold partnerships.
… again … This just in from the NCSE:
It’s not a hurricane or even a tropical storm. But a small knot of ignorance is twisting through the Florida state senate.
Late last week, Stephen R. Wise (R-District 5) filed Senate Bill 2396, which if passed, would require “[a] thorough presentation and critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution.” Like other “academic freedom” bills that aim to smuggle creationism back into the classroom, this bill would let educators teach the supposed scientific controversy swirling around evolution.
“There is no controversy among scientists”, says Dr. Genie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). “Evolution is a proven science, backed by a mountain of evidence. Naturally, scientists continue to test and expand the theory, to debate the patterns and processes of evolution. But telling students that evolution is scientifically shaky is just flat wrong.” Senator Wise hasn’t been shy about his intentions–before he introduced the bill, he admitted his goal was to promote the teaching of “intelligent design” in Florida public schools. “If you’re going to teach evolution, then you have to teach the other side so you can have critical thinking,” said Wise in an interview with the Jacksonville Times-Union. But when the bill was finally filed, all mention of intelligent design was excised.
Florida has recently endured a bout of anti-evolution legislation. House Bill 1483 (filed in early 2008) supposedly protected the right of teachers to “objectively present scientific information relevant to the full range of scientific views regarding biological and chemical evolution”. But Florida newspapers (not to mention the state department of education) could not substantiate any claims of persecution. The House bill–and its Senate counterpart, SB 2692–did not become law because the two chambers couldn’t agree on compromise wording before the end of the legislative session.
Said the Tampa Tribune at the time, “The session will be remembered for what wasn’t done to compromise the quality of education in Florida.”
Will Senator Wise’s bill suffer a similar fate in the land of Disney? The grassroots pro-science group Florida Citizens for Science (www.flascience.org) hopes so. “Florida’s schools and the state as a whole are floundering in financial turmoil, and citizens are demanding our lawmakers focus their attention on this crisis. There is no appetite for embarrassing our state yet again.”
“Florida has bigger fish to fry,” says NCSE Project Director Josh Rosenau. “Florida already has science standards in place; they’ve got a board of education; and they have teachers that know what they’re doing. It’s crazy for legislators to micromanage the classroom.”
CONTACT: Robert Luhn of the NCSE, 510-601-7203, luhn@ncseweb.org
Web site: www.ncseweb.org
To see more on Florida, see: http://ncseweb.org/news/florida
Richard Dawkins came to Minneapolis and gave a talk, sponsored by CASH, the primary atheist/humanist group on the UMN campus, on “The Purpose of Purpose.”
Before the talk, several of us got together at Annie’s Parlour. It was harmonic convergence, in a sense, of numerous independent groups all planning to go to Annie’s and ending up at the same table, including but not limited to Amanda and myself, PZ and his wife and daughter, Stephanie, Mike, Mr. and Mrs. Linux in Exile, Lynn, and a few others who don’t have links. After the talk, we spent close to an hour hanging around with Amanda and a teacher colleague of hers and his wife, Kristine and Mr. Kristine (Oh, and Kristine regaled us with her famous Jerry Falwell/Richard Dawkins/Galapagos story), and Lynn, conversing about the talk. Also attending in our group was my friend Lizzie and a couple of her buddies. All in all, it was a great social event that I wouldn’t have missed for the world!
Oh, and somewhere in there Richard Dawkins gave this talk, and I enjoyed it a great deal.
I have three bad reviews, one by this guy and two that came in to me after the talk via cell phone from academics who were in attendance. All those people are showing their own lack of grounding with these negative reviews, really. Dawkins came to give a talk to the public about certain ways to look at the complexity of evolutionary process and society. As an academic who actually studies this stuff, I could easily say that Dawkins talk was trite, same-old-stuff we’ve all been saying all along slightly re-wrapped, self evident, and so on and so forth. But I guarantee that Dawkins did not come all the way across the Great Pond to give talks in Michigan and Minnesota and elsewhere for the benefit of Ed Brayton, me, or any other PhD toting scholars. This talk was for the interested public, they’re the ones that packed about four thousand people into Northrup Auditorium, and they are the ones for whom this talk was crafted, and I think Dawkins did an excellent job.
PZ Myers gave a very well crafted and entertaining introduction, by the way. And here is his blog post on the event.
I’ll probably write up a bit more about Dawkins talk and a few further thoughts I have about it. But right now I’m off to bed. It’s a school night!!!!
Oh, and here’s Dawkins on our local public radio show this AM.