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...

Michael White

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

Anti-evolution 'Academic Freedom' Bills: What Is Academic Freedom Anyway?

Jul 12 2008 | comment(s)

You may have heard the news that Louisiana's governor recently signed an "Academic Freedom" bill, the first such bill to pass in a recent string of efforts to allow public school teachers to push non-scientific alternatives to evolution. (I previously wrote about Missouri's failed version.) All of these bills claim to promote academic freedom for public school teachers to teach the Intelligent Design movement's so-called evidence against evolution. But the concept of academic freedom in a high school curriculum makes no sense.

In the New Scientist story linked to above, Josh Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education points out that "if you look at the American Association of University Professors' definition of academic freedom, it refers to the ability to do research and publish." The whole point of academic freedom is, like tenure, to protect independent scholars and scientists from having their work suppressed, manipulated, or managed by administrators or other people outside the research community who might want to pressure scholars to alter their conclusions or not research unfavorable topics.

George Will: Why Are We kicking Talent Out of the US?

Jul 11 2008 | comment(s)

Continuing my science policy blogging streak (we'll get back to real science here soon, I promise!), it's worth noting Washington Post columnist George Will's recent piece about our "perverse national policy of expelling talented people."

If you've spent any time recently around America's science PhD programs, you'll have heard about the problem: we bring talented people in from all over the world, train them to do great science, and then make it impossible for them to get a job here, even when US companies and universities want to hire them. As George Will writes, this creates yet one more incentive for US companies to send their operations outside of the US:

But one reason Microsoft opened a software development center in Vancouver [Canada] is that Canadian immigration laws allow Microsoft to recruit skilled people it could not retain under U.S. immigration restrictions.

Updating how the US Government Gets Its Advice

Jul 10 2008 | comment(s)

Over the last few years, we've seen some bitter political arguments over the role of US Government scientists, political appointees, and the manipulation of technical reports. I'm not going to wade into that fight here, except for one point: occasionally we hear the argument that government scientists are employees of the executive branch, and that they are therefore legitimately subject to the efforts of the President and his appointees to get everybody on board with the President's agenda. For many positions in the federal government, that argument is correct. If you work for the executive branch, ultimately the President is your boss. But in many cases, especially ones that concern some government scientists, there is a limit to what the President and his political appointees can do, because the role of those scientists has been established by law. Congress has sensibly written several laws to ensure that the government can get sound, unbiased technical advice, free from political manipulation.

Do we know nothing about the origins of the first living systems?

Jul 10 2008 | comment(s)

Over at the Panda's Thumb, Nick Matzke weighs in on how scientists should respond to Creationist criticisms that we know nothing about abiogenesis - the origins of the first living systems from non-living systems. Matzke correctly says that the typical response is two-fold: scientists will say that a) sure, we don't know much about it, but we're working on it, and b) it has nothing to do with the main field of evolutionary biology. Matzke says that

It is high time all of these statements be discarded or highly modified. They are basically lazy, all-too-easy responses relying on hair-splitting technicalities or nearly philosophical assertions of the “even if the creationists were empirically correct on this point, which they aren’t but I’m too busy to back it up right now, it wouldn’t matter” variety. And the worst part is that these sorts of statements mis-describe the actual state of the science among the people who work in the field. It is simply not true that we, the scientific community, know almost nothing about the OOL (what an individual who spent a career working on fossils or fruit flies or speciation might know personally is a different question).

I agree with much of what Matzke has to say, but disagree with him that it's wrong for scientists to say that origins of life/abiogenesis research is a substantially different field from mainstream evolutionary biology.

Harvard Prof on Virtue vs. Money in Science

Jul 09 2008 | comment(s)

I've been traveling, often with three whining kids in the back seat of a cramped car - not the best environment for blogging. On part of this trip, we toured this not so well known, but spectacular site:

I'll be impressed if any readers recognize the place - give it your best shot in the comments, if you think you know where it is. The real subject for today is virtue and scientists: is the ideal scientist a disinterested, virtuous seeker of knowledge? Do academic scientists embody this ideal, and are corporate scientists sell-outs? Harvard historian Steven Shapin shares his ideas in an interview with the Boston Globe. The interview is a brief plug for Shapin's upcoming book. Shapin says the wrong way to think about science in academia is with

the presumption is that this is about the unequal distribution of virtue, about threats to the autonomy, integrity, value, and authenticity of science, represented by commercializing interests.

ScienceDebate2008 And 14 Questions On Science Policy For US Presidential Candidates

Jul 04 2008 | comment(s)

ScienceDebate2008 has come up with 14 questions they would like to see answered by the US presidential candidates. This group has been pushing for a science policy-focused debate among presidential candidates. That debate is looking more and more unlikely, but in an effort to keep some of the election focus on science, this group is now urging the candidates to answer a set of questions on science policy (abbreviated below - go read the questions in full at the ScienceDebate2008 site):

1. What policies will you support to ensure that America remains the world leader in innovation?

2. What is your position on the following measures that have been proposed to address global climate change—a cap-and-trade system, a carbon tax, increased fuel-economy standards, or research?

3. What policies would you support to meet demand for energy while ensuring an economically and environmentally sustainable future?

4. What role do you think the federal government should play in preparing K-12 students for the science and technology driven 21st Century?

5. What is your view of how science and technology can best be used to ensure national security and where should we put our focus?

6. In an era of constant and rapid international travel, what steps should the United States take to protect our population from global pandemics or deliberate biological attacks?