I’m so disappointed!
I was in Bookman’s used books yesterday and they had Michael Behe’s work classified in the science section. I can expect this sort of stuff from the big chain bookstores, but I thought Bookman’s was different.
Category: Science
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Book Selection: Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before… as I was approaching college age as the 80’s were dawning on us, I had three areas of interest that I explored for my future life’s work. Each would set the course of my adult life in three very different ways and each would have been a different University.
I was interested in forestry, which would have taken me to Northern Arizona University, paleontology, which would have started at my home town university, the University of Arizona, or computer science at Arizona State University.
Forestry was the long shot and got eliminated early, and plays no further part in this story.
My deep and abiding interest was paleontology – I wanted to be a fossil hunter, but my aptitude was more computer science.
Computers won because as I learned more about the coursework required for paleontology, I realized that there were large parts (like biology and zoology) of it that would really be painfully dull for me.
Looking back, I didn’t make the wrong choice. Paleontology has developed significantly since the days of Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. Parallel developments in other fields, such as genetics and evolutionary biology have dovetailed with the old bone diggers and brought us to a quantum leap in our understanding of past life. (Yuck, I apologize for that sentence. Must be too much sugar in my iced tea.)
That’s my long way of saying, I love a good book on the evolution of life, especially when there’s a paleontological adventure involved.
Neil Shubin’s book Your Inner Fish (and Shubin himself, for that matter) first came to my attention when he plugged the book on the Colbert Report. Colbert, in his role as a conservative fundamentalist host, always throws his guests a few curve balls (or googlies, if you prefer a cricket analogy over baseball) and I was really impressed at how well Shubin comported himself on the show.
That alone made me want to give him money by reading his book, but Shubin has another important claim to fame: He was an instrumental part of the team of paleontologists who discovered Tiktaalik, the important fish to amphibian transitional fossil.
The book’s subtitle is “A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body” and, as such, isn’t strictly about Tiktaalik, or even fossil-hunting. It is an excellent, and easily accessible book that gives a good primer into how genetics and fossils tell us why life is the way it is.
As such, I’d recommend the book to anyone with even a passing interest in understanding “how it all comes together.”
Your Inner FishA Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body
by Neil Shubin
Pantheon BooksISBN 978-0-375-42447-2 -
It’s all quantum physics, I tells ya!
One of those fascinating little tidbits that always amuses me concerning quantum physics is that whole time/speed. Oh, you know what I’m talking about, it’s what happened to Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes. Their spaceship travels at speeds upwards towards the speed of light, and they age less than the space around them. It’s an Einstein thing, look it up.
So, the faster an object travels, the slower it’s relative time versus the time of the non-moving space around it, and, since the speed of light is the universal maximum, then at the speed of light, time stops. If that’s the case, light which travels as both particles and waves is really weird. Light particles would then be essentially “timeless”. From their relative perspective, they are passing through all points along their trajectory simultaneously. Then how can it have amplitude, which is a function of time? Quantum physicists apparently don’t like it when people say quantum physics is weird, but, come on! It is weird. It’s weird because, no matter how well documented and proven it is, it’s counter-intuitive. It behaves in ways that our senses tell us would be nonsense. That doesn’t make it nonsense, that’s just a natural bias we have.
Then you get into causality, which, at the quantum level can happen mathematically in reverse. (OK, this is way out of my depth, but I got it out of a fairly well-regarded book on the subject, which I can’t call to mind right now.) That’s not saying it actually does happen with the cause coming after the effect, just that mathematically, it could work that way.
Honestly, Doctor Who wouldn’t be any fun without this sort of science.
Why do I bring up all this stuff? Because I was reading quite a funny article on intercessory prayer, and the incredibly flawed studies that have been published on the subject and popularized in the media indicating that they have values, despite being thoroughly invalid studies. You can read about it here.
The article briefly looks at several prayer-related studies and points out some of the warning signs of a poor-constructed clinical trial. My favorite though, has to be an Israeli study which is summed up like this:
In 2000, Leibovici looked at patients admitted to the hospital for brief stays in 1990-96. He randomly assigned them to one of two groups, and had prayers said for the members of one group. The control group got no treatment. Mortality rates showed no difference, but subjects in the prayed-for group had less fever and shorter hospital stays, significant at the p=4% level. Note that the praying was all done 4 to 10 years after the patients had either recovered or died. So Leibovici is making the extraordinary claim that prayers are altering the past.
So my question is: If that’s true, does the act of looking at the records “freeze them”? That is, now that the doctors have looked at the records of the non-prayed for group, if another group of people prayed for them, would their records change or would it be too late? That vaguely sounds like another one of those quantum physics things where you can’t know where the particle behaves differently when you observe it.
Anyway, that study would appear to have been a tongue in cheek, but the others aren’t.
The article is good information if you’re not familiar with some of the potential mistakes in clinical trials that can render them invalid (or at least deeply flawed.)
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The Anomalies come to America!
When we were in Taiwan last time, do you know what I saw on TV?
Primeval.
That’s right, Taiwan gets Primeval! The United States doesn’t. Now, the second series of Primeval has been an enormous letdown for me, but it’s still better than most of the crap on US TV (and that’s before the writer’s strike!, and that’s why I’m pleased as punch to report that BBC America has finally snatched up the first two series of Primeval for airing later this year.
BBC Worldwide America president Garth Ancier said in a release Friday: “Primeval is a perfect addition to our successful Saturday night menu of sci-fi and adventure. Torchwood and Robin Hoodhave done a tremendous job at the core of our schedule, building ratings and attracting younger viewers to BBC America. We think our audience will be excited by the addition of this prehistoric thriller — one of the latest big hits from the U.K.â€
Link: Multichannel.com
Looks like it will start airing in August. Hopefully it will follow on DVD and I can add it to my collection without having to pick up the Region 2s.
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Reptiles make tracks
Just cool paleontological news…
BBC NEWS => Ancient reptile tracks unearthed
The earliest evidence for the existence of reptiles has been found in Canada.
The 315 million-year-old fossilised tracks give an insight into a key milestone in the history of life, when animals left water to live on dry land.The footprints suggest reptiles evolved between one and three million years earlier than previously thought.
See the BBC for the full story…
Technorati Tags: Blog, Paleontology, Science
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What I like most about waterspouts…
…is that we don’t have them in Phoenix.
These were in Singapore this week. Even though it is six hours by plane to Taiwan, that’s too close for comfort since I’ll be in Taiwan next week.
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Dinosaur footprints found in Mexico
Reuters => Mexican man finds forty dinosaur prints in desert
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – A Mexican man has discovered dozens of dinosaur footprints dating back up to 110 million years along the banks of a dried river, scientists said on Tuesday.
The article goes on to explain the prints are from an early cretaceous dinosaur, as yet unidentified, and that each is 24 inches long.
Afterwards, the article begins to fall apart, particularly when it concludes with this gemstone:
Mexican researchers say those prints may have been made by a brontosaurus.
Seriously? Brontosaurus?!?
Technorati Tags: Blog, Dinosaur, Dinosaurs, Paleontology, Science
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Shermer at TED
I don’t really know who TED is, but Michael Shermer is always interesting to listen too.
I always loved it when he was the lone, token skeptic on those drubbed up UFO and paranormal shows on TV.
Not only is he smart guy, but he also apparently uses a Mac.
Technorati Tags: Blog, Science, Skepticism
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Freakin’ Big Bird
NPR => Huge ‘Terror Bird’ Fossil Discovered in Patagonia
Scientists have discovered a skull belonging to a hook-beaked bird that ruled the grasslands of South America. Scientists are calling the bird a “terror bird.â€
The bird didn’t fly because it didn’t have to. Instead, it put its biological resources into growing bigger and faster than anything else on the continent. It was the largest bird ever and the top predator in South America millions of years ago.
South America must have been a fun place back in the Pleistocene.
Technorati Tags: Blog, Natural Sciences, Paleontology, Science
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A Whale of a Tale
ABC.Net (Australia) => Ancient whale broke all the rules – 16/08/2006
Recently published: The discovery of a new (extinct) species of fish hunting, dolphin-sized whales in Australia.
Fitzgerald found that the fossil had specific features in the facial region and the base of the skull that marked it as a member of the baleen whale group, which today includes the enormous blue whale.
But unlike modern baleen whales, which eat by filtering tiny krill and plankton from water, the fossil whale had teeth. It also had enormous eyes.
“This animal was capturing big, single prey, which is unusual for a baleen whale,” Fitzgerald says. “It used the front of its mouth to grip its prey and rip it apart.”
Technorati Tags: Blog, Natural Sciences, Paleontology, Science