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Melville on Science vs. Creation Myth

From Melville's under-appreciated Mardi: On a quest for his missing love Yillah, an AWOL sailor...

Non-coding DNA Function... Surprising?

The existence of functional, non-protein-coding DNA is all too frequently portrayed as a great...

Yep, This Should Get You Fired

An Ohio 8th-grade creationist science teacher with a habit of branding crosses on his students'...

No, There Are No Alien Bar Codes In Our Genomes

Even for a physicist, this is bad: Larry Moran, in preparation for the appropriate dose of ridicule...

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Michael WhiteRSS Feed of this column.

Welcome to Adaptive Complexity, where I write about genomics, systems biology, evolution, and the connection between science and literature, government, and society.

I'm a biochemist

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Networks Are Killing Science

Networks Are Killing Science

Aug 22 2009 | comment(s)


Here's a little exercise in scientific thinking. What's wrong the approach to science described in the following passage? (This passage, about applying network analysis to counterterrorism, is taken from the complex systems special feature in the July 24th issue of Science.)
Do computational biologists care about being right?

Do computational biologists care about being right?

Aug 21 2009 | comment(s)

I'm not the only one who hates computational biologists:

Zhang et al. (11), Braunewell and Bornholdt (12), Ge et al. (13), and Okabe and Sasai (14) have presented stochastic models of the yeast cell cycle based on a deterministic Boolean model from Li et al. (15). The main concern of all of these authors was the robustness of cell cycle progression in the presence of intrinsic and extrinsic sources of noise. None of them compared their models to observed statistics of cell cycle properties in wild-type or mutant cells.

Morning Science Quote

Morning Science Quote

Aug 21 2009 | comment(s)

In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.

- Richard Feynman, Letter to the Editor of the California Tech, Feb. 27 1976












Notes From The Underground At The AAAS

Notes From The Underground At The AAAS

Aug 21 2009 | comment(s)

The Pacific Region of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, "the world's largest general scientific society") includes some of the best universities in the world, located on the Pacific coast of the US. So it was with great excitement that I flew out to San Francisco to attend the 90th Pacific Regional Meeting of the AAAS at San Francisco State University (SFSU), where I was slated to give a talk on science blogging.
Physicist Snobbery Alert

Physicist Snobbery Alert

Aug 20 2009 | comment(s)

I'm not sure what Freeman Dyson has been smoking when he argues that cutting-edge genome science is ripe for hobbyists:
Evolution Doing Better in State Curricula

Evolution Doing Better in State Curricula

Aug 20 2009 | comment(s)

The National Center for Science Education has a report out on how evolution fares in the states (published in Evolution, Education, and Outreach.) Read the report to see how state science standards teach evolution. The authors, in addition to looking at the standards, make an argument for why standards are important: