Science

From an article of the same title BBCNews.com:

Scientists have condemned a leading Catholic cardinal's calls for those who carry out embryonic stem cell research to be excommunicated. Vatican-based Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo told a Catholic magazine such research was "the same as abortion". He said excommunication should apply to "all women, doctors and researchers who eliminate embryos"... But Dr Stephen Minger, leading stem cell expert at Kings College London, said: "Having been raised a Catholic, I found this stance really outrageous. "Are they going to excommunicate IVF doctors, nurses and embryologists who routinely put millions of embryos down the sink every year throughout the world? "It is more ethical to use embryos that are going to be destroyed anyway for the general benefit of mankind than simply putting them down the sink."

Below are some excerpts from an article of the same title by Robert Lee Hotz of the LA Times. Note the last two paragraphs...20 sudden large climate changes in the last 110,000 years. Though I'd rather be safe than sorry, I think this illustrates why some folks aren't so sure that the climate changes that we are experiencing are man-made:

The Greenland ice sheet - two miles thick and broad enough to blanket an area the size of Mexico - shapes the world's weather, matched in influence by only Antarctica in the Southern Hemisphere. It glows like milky mother-of-pearl. The sheen of ice blends with drifts of cloud as if snowbanks are taking flight. In its heartland, snow that fell a quarter of a million years ago is still preserved. Temperatures dip as low as 86 degrees below zero. Ground winds can top 200 mph. Along the ice edge, meltwater rivers thread into fraying brown ropes of glacial outwash, where migrating herds of caribou and musk ox graze. The ice is so massive that its weight presses the bedrock of Greenland below sea level, so all-concealing that not until recently did scientists discover that Greenland actually might be three islands. Should all of the ice sheet ever thaw, the meltwater could raise sea level 21 feet and swamp the world's coastal cities, home to a billion people. It would cause higher tides, generate more powerful storm surges and, by altering ocean currents, drastically disrupt the global climate. Climate experts have started to worry that the ice cap is disappearing in ways that computer models had not predicted. By all accounts, the glaciers of Greenland are melting twice as fast as they were five years ago, even as the ice sheets of Antarctica - the world's largest reservoir of fresh water - also are shrinking, researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Kansas reported in February… From cores of ancient Greenland ice extracted by the National Science Foundation, researchers have identified at least 20 sudden climate changes in the last 110,000 years, in which average temperatures fluctuated as much as 15 degrees in a single decade. The increasingly erratic behavior of the Greenland ice has scientists wondering whether the climate, after thousands of years of relative stability, may again start oscillating.

Via the Kyivmission blog: here's an interesting article from The Washington Post about a case of fact-check neglect. It had been widely reported in may different sources that 600,000, 350,000 and 70,000 were the numbers of new engineers produced in 2004 in China, India, and the US, respectively...evidence that the US is falling behind in the technology race. It turns out that the realistic numbers are more like 352,000, 112,000, and 137,000. That means, per million residents, the rate of engineer production is higher in the US.

From an article of the same title by Alison Motluk on NewScientist.com:

The range of birth control choices may have become narrower for couples that believe the sanctity of life begins when sperm meets egg. The rhythm method, a philosopher claims, may compromise millions of embryos. "Even a policy of practising condom usage and having an abortion in case of failure would cause less embryonic deaths than the rhythm method," writes Luc Bovens, of the London School of Economics, in the Journal of Medical Ethics. With other methods of contraception banned by the Catholic church, the rhythm method has been one of the few options available to millions. In using the rhythm method, couples avoid pregnancy by refraining from sex during a woman's fertile period. Perfect adherents claim it is over 90% effective - i.e. one couple in 10 will conceive in an average year. But, typically speaking, effectiveness is estimated at closer to 75%. Now Bovens suggests that for those concerned about embryo loss, the rhythm method may be a bad idea. He argues that, because couples are having sex on the fringes of the fertile period, they are more likely to conceive embryos that are incapable of surviving... Bovens calculates that, if the rhythm method is 90% effective, and if conceptions outside the fertile period are about twice as likely to fail as to survive, then "millions of rhythm method cycles per year globally depend for their success on massive embryonic death"... "If you're concerned about embryonic death," Bovens says, "you've got to be consistent here and give up the rhythm method."

I've been getting the feeling lately that us Ph.D.s have a tendency toward smugness and condescension when addresses the public about our area of expertise. I got that feeling from Garry Wills recent NY Times op-ed piece with which I mostly agreed. Another example is the recent one titled "Evolution's Bottom Line" by Holden Thorp. It has the same smug feel. I can agree with some of the particulars, like:

THE usefulness of scientific theories, like those on gravity, relativity and evolution, is to make predictions. When theories make practicable foresight possible, they are widely accepted and used to make all of the new things that we enjoy - like global positioning systems, which rely on the theories of relativity, and the satellites that make them possible, which are placed in their orbits thanks to the good old theory of gravity. Creationists who oppose the teaching of evolution as the predominant theory of biology contend that alternatives should be part of the curriculum because evolution is "just a theory," but they never attack mere theories of gravity and relativity in the same way. The creationists took it on their intelligently designed chins recently from a judge in Pennsylvania who found that teaching alternatives to evolution amounted to the teaching of religion. They prevailed, however, in Kansas, where the school board changed the definition of science to accommodate the teaching of intelligent design. Both sides say they are fighting for lofty goals and defending the truth. But lost in all this truth-defending are more pragmatic issues that have to do with the young people whose educations are at stake here and this pesky fact: creationism has no commercial application. Evolution does.

In a gross oversimplification of his argument, let me say that he goes on to claim that the theory of evolution has been the enabler of all the recent advancements of modern science and technology. Students growing up in a place that sees the much more philosophical theory of intelligent design as an alternative to the hard science of evolution are doomed to be runners up in the race of human progress. The main problem I have with his piece is that he's set up a straw man and then smugly knocked it down. The straw man is the assumption that anyone who might believe in a creator - anyone who doesn't find the current content of our scientific knowledge to be a sufficient explanation for how all this began and came to be what we observe around us - must also discount the process of evolution as the driver for any change in the natural world. Of course, that isn't the case. Any student of science can understand the principle of evolution and would see that it must happen. That same person can reasonably come to conclusion that, as an explanation of origins, neither a creator nor 13 billion years of random mutations is something that be understood or proved based on our extremely limited ability to scientifically observe either of those processes. Chances are, that person is in no danger of being the odd man out in the quest of "...finding the innovations to improve society and compete globally." Some more from the op-ed piece:

So evolution has some pretty exciting applications (like food), and I'm guessing most people would prefer antibiotics developed by someone who knows the evolutionary relationship of humans and bacteria. What does this mean for the young people who go to school in Kansas? Are we going to close them out from working in the life sciences? And what about companies in Kansas that want to attract scientists to work there? Will Mom or Dad Scientist want to live somewhere where their children are less likely to learn evolution... In his most recent State of the Union address, President Bush mentioned our problems in science education and promised to focus on "keeping America competitive" by increasing the budget for research and spending money to get more science teachers. I hope he delivers, but we can't keep America competitive if some states teach science that has no commercial utility. Those smart youngsters in India and China whom you keep hearing about are learning secular science, not biblical literalism. The battle is about more than which truth is truthier, it's about who will be allowed to innovate and where they will do it. Sequestering our scientists in California and Massachusetts makes no sense. We need to allow everyone to participate and increase the chance of finding the innovations to improve society and compete globally. Where science gets done is where wealth gets created, so places that decide to put stickers on their textbooks or change the definition of science have decided, perhaps unknowingly, not to go to the innovation party of the future. Maybe that's fine for the grownups who'd rather stay home, but it seems like a raw deal for the 14-year-old girl in Topeka who might have gone on to find a cure for resistant infections if only she had been taught evolution in high school.