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Scientific American Gives Up
IvyMike writes "The April issue Scientific American opens with a Perspectives column titled Okay, We Give Up. It opens, 'For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.'"
But they're still trying to make a buck charging for the article.
How American.
We don't even get a full joke!
THEY need to hire Paris Hilton
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This one actually made me giggle like a little schoolgirl. Giggle with joy that they finally admit that creationism is a valid theory.*
*Parts of this statement may be false.
Post-rock/Ambient/Drone and other noise.
They're changing their name to "Christian Scientific American."
Ya think? Our oldest daughter was just yesterday telling me about intelligent design, which she learned about from her SCIENCE teacher. It's insidious, this faith-based truth, and is popping up in far too many places where it doesn't belong.
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
If you critisise them for `not sticking to science' then you deserve to be called an idiot, as they rightly say it's impossible to isolate science from the social context in which it happens. Eg. if you don't know what is being funded, you can't know whether it's significant that there are a lot of results in some area recently; if you don't see reports of scientists being pressured by the state top change their results, how will you know what weight to put on those results?
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
"Worst of all was the behavior of the Scientific American, which seemed intent on proving the post-modernist point that it was all about power, not facts. The Scientific American attacked Lomborg for eleven pages, yet only came up with nine factual errors despite their assertion that the book was "rife with careless mistakes." It was a poor display featuring vicious ad hominem attacks, including comparing him to a Holocust denier. The issue was captioned: "Science defends itself against the Skeptical Environmentalist." Really. Science has to defend itself? Is this what we have come to?"
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
For the length Of time I have been reading them, they have always been what they are, namely laymen accessible science. It is the best _affordable_ science magazine out there. If you are looking for in depth peer-reviewed science, you have nature at $320 a year subscription.
In the other direction you have Discover (which continues to move south). It is even cheaper a year then SciAm. I think it is only a matter of time before G4 buys them and merges game content into the already fluffy content.
I'd encourage you to look at Science News. It's about $54 a year for a weekly magazine, which is twice as much as Scientific American. It's weekly, and I think around 16 pages, so you're getting only 64 pages a month, but there's a lot less advertising than SciAm.
But more importantly, the science reporting is a lot better. They usually report from the original journal articles in peer-reviewed journals, or from scientific conferences. When a science story comes out in the news I scan it but I don't believe it until it comes out in Science News. They don't just rewrite press releases (like most newspapers) and they certainly don't take the Wired approach of presenting scientific advances as being available at Target any day now.
Each issue contains two long-format articles that do run closer to the Scientific American model, which I think of as being more forward-looking than actual news. Sometimes they'll use them to examine one reasonably-current topic (like DNA testing) in depth, presenting an overview of the field and where the next likely advances are coming. Not blue-sky stuff, but reporting on the state of scientific research.
But the most important thing about Science News for me is that it's a weekly look at real science conducted by scientists, written for technically-minded laymen. The articles are usually around a half-page, containing a summary of the research. It's where the real work in science gets done. Waiting for it to come out in Scientific American is often months, which is dull for the kind of everyday advances made by scientists who do work (as opposed to the people who wonder if it means we're going to have time travel).
I read both SciAm and Science News, but the latter I read almost immediately whereas the former I scan and maybe get back to later.
Because all the theory of "Intelligent Design" says, is, "since I don't understand how this could have evolved, it must have be designed, not evolved." For at least two hundred years, the "perfection" of the eye was given as evidence of design, until computer models should how easy it is for eyes to evolve, and molecular biology showed us eyes have separately evolved at least forty times.
Now the "Intelligent Design" proponents having had the eye explained, talk about freely rotating flagella in certain bacteria. They hang their "theory" in the contention that since "half a rotation" isn't useful, organisms with "half a rotation" could not have ben favored by evolution, and so a freely rotating flagellum could not evolve. But it turns out several of the components of that wheel are the same as components of a "needle" used by parasitic bacteria to inject chemicals into host cells, a so-called Type Three Secretory Apparatus.
All "Intelligent Design" is not a useful theory, in the sense that science uses the word "theory", because all it is able to do is say "I can't figure this out". It has no explanatory or predictive power.
Compare the "theory" of Intelligent Design to Boyle's law: a physicist on being told about changing temperature in a room full of some gas, knows there's a relation between temperature and pressure because Boyle's law predicts it. The physicist doesn't have to go to the room himself, or ask what mechanism is responsible for the temperature change, or in what direction the temperature is changing, or really even what kind of gas in the room -- the physicist can with confidence predict that pressure and temperature are dependent on one another.
It's not just that evolution is consistent with what we know, it's also consistent with what we don't know.
It has predictive and explanatory power: using evolution, we are able to say, "assuming evolution is correct, we ought to see this", and then when we do look, we see what evolution predicts.
We say, evolution tells us that meiosis helps to keep each paired chromosome like its opposite pair, because genes are exchanged in meiosis. Because meiosis only takes place in sexual reproduction, this allows us to predict that in asexual reproduction, paired chromosomes will diverge. when we look at bdelloid rotifers, we see what was predicted: their chromosomes do diverge, and we can even compare the chromosome divergence between pairs against the to the total mutational change in the entire bdelloid rotifer genome, to come up with a good idea of how long bdelloid rotifers have been reproducing asexually: abut 80 million years.
We say, evolution predicts that, since workers bees born to a queen with only one mate share more genes, on average, with their haploid nephews -- that is, males born to other workers -- than with their diploid brothers born to the queen, the workers will favor their nephews. And the prediction turns out to be true. We can also predict, using Trivers' work, that if the queen mated with more than one male, a nephew isn't necessarily more related, so the workers in that case won't favor nephews. And that also turns out to be true. (Bee examples from here).
Note that in the bee example, we don't know what mechanism allows a worker to "know" how many mates her mother the queen has had, or the mechanism that, given that "knowledge" allows the worker to modify her behavior. We just know that the worker behaves "as if" she understood the genetic math involved, and knew the mating history. Of course, bees don't do genetics or math and probably don't even remember matings -- but we don't need to see the mechanism to predict that it and the behavior must be there: evolutionary theory predicted that bees would act like "as if" geneticis
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