This is not much of a surprise:

In six out of ten countries including Argentina (57%), China (72%), Great Britain (62%), India (77%), Mexico (65%) and Spain (61%), the majority of people who had heard of Charles Darwin and know something about his theory of evolution agreed with the opinion that ‘enough scientific evidence exists to support Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution’, compared to an overall average across all the countries surveyed of 56 percent.

It's late, but still morning in my time zone:

Agnosticism is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the vigorous application of a single principle. Positively the principle may be expressed as, in matter of intellect, follow your reason as far as it can carry you without other considerations. And negatively, in matters of the intellect, do not pretend the conclusions are certain that are not demonstrated or demonstrable. It is wrong for a man to say he's certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty.

- Thomas Huxley, Collected Essays, vol. 5 p. 237

The biomedical community has become too risk-averse, according to a recent NY Times piece. I agree, although I don't agree with the dramatic presentation (it's not some dirty scientific secret - it's not hard to find scientists, and the leaders of the funding agencies themselves talking about it).

Here are the basic issue:

Yet the fight against cancer is going slower than most had hoped, with only small changes in the death rate in the almost 40 years since it began.

Improvement makes strait roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.

- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Proverbs of Hell #66

Someone's got issues with Web 2.0 - hell, with Web 1.0:

Of all the misguided schemes put forth lately to save newspapers (micropayments! blame Google!), the one put forth by Judge Richard Posner has to be the most jaw-dropping. He suggests that linking to copyrighted material should be outlawed.

That basically guaranteed to finish killing off newspapers - having them drop out of online discussion. It's also an outright rejection of one of the major advantages of online publication - citations that take you straight to the original document.
And why does everything have to be all about newspapers anyway?

How proteins recognize specific stretches of DNA is one of the key questions of gene regulation. One would like to be able to look at the regulatory DNA sequence adjacent to a gene, and predict which regulatory proteins bind there, and control the adjacent gene. In other words, we want to, just by running a few computer programs over a genome, know how the genes in that genome are regulated.

Jeffery Dach, MD claims that this argument is persuasive:

An interesting phenomenon in growing random networks:

The number of 3-node, 3-edge connected subgraphs in a random, scale-free network of N nodes scales as N⁰ (=1). No matter how big your network grows, you're going to have a roughly constant number of 3-node, 3-edge  subgraphs that depends only on the ratio of edges to nodes.

Let's back up a minute before we see why this counterintuitive result is so and what it means.  Imagine that we have a network made up of N nodes connected by E edges. You can start out with two nodes connected by one edge:

David Brooks takes on evolutionary psychology and gets it sort of right:

The first problem is that far from being preprogrammed with a series of hardwired mental modules, as the E.P. types assert, our brains are fluid and plastic. We’re learning that evolution can be a more rapid process than we thought. It doesn’t take hundreds of thousands of years to produce genetic alterations.

By honest I don't mean that you only tell what's true. But you make clear the entire situation. You make clear all the information that is required for somebody else who is intelligent to make up their mind. 


    - Richard Feynman "Cargo Cult Science", Caltech Commencement 1974

Some of this is just too much: (from The Guardian):

State "laboratories of democracy" at work:

The Database of Useful Biological Numbers - great stuff, although before using any hard-to-measure number, be sure to know how the measurement was done before you trust the result.

Check these out:

Number of hairs in human eyebrows: 600

Respiratory cost for slow growing gradd: 2.4 mmole ATP/g dry weight * day

ATP requirement for the creation of an E. coli cell: 12-20 billion ATP molecules.

Average diameter of a protein in E. coli: 5 nm

Fraction of total body energy that is used to drive sodium/potassium pumps in the human brain: 10%

Serotonin content in pineapple: 17ug/g

Total nasal epithelial cell surface area in a mouse: 300 mm^2

When you turn the resources of modern science to the problem of killing people, you realize how vulnerable they really are.

- Physicist I.I. Rabi, quoted in Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, p. 779

Ken Miller vs. Jerry Coyne: Can you believe in God and evolution? Many creationists say no. But so does Jerry Coyne, as well as a fair number of other non-believing scientists active in the blogosphere. If you follow the science blogging community, you've probably tuned in to, or at least overhead snippets of, the debate between the believing Ken Miller, and the non-believer Jerry Coyne. Both are well-regarded scientists, with impressive research track records, and both are very outspoken opponents of creationism and intelligent design, as well as defenders of evolution.

A new journal is out - Genome Biology and Evolution. To my surprise, it actually looks quite good, with high-quality pieces. I generally don't see many new journals I like, but this one fills a needed niche. A lot of genome papers bear on evolution, but the authors aren't really evolutionary biologists; many evolutionary biologists don't have a lot of contact with hard-core genomics. But there is a growing community of researchers who function well in both worlds, and this journal fits that community.

As the editors say:

All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it.

- Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding Book IV, Ch. 20, sec. 17

Most conspiracy theories wouldn't gain much traction without unhinged academics:

"The most destructive people linked to conspiracy theories and denialism are those with academic appointments - and those who can manipulate their backgrounds to appear as if they have had academic appointments."

Why? Probably because they write are fluently and prolifically than the guy you meet at 2pm in the bar who can't stop going on about all of those people on Hillary Clinton's hit list. (Hey, if you're in the bar at 2pm, you're asking for it.)

DNA is like your phone line. As Northwestern University biophysicist Johnathan Widom put it in a talk recently, DNA simultaneously encodes multiple overlapping signals, just like your phone line that allows you to call home while you're surfing the net via DSL. Written into your DNA is the code for the amino acid sequences of the proteins produced by your genes, as well as the so-called 'non-coding' regulatory sequences which essentially encode when, where, and how much your genes are expressed.

No one disturbs his fellow men with a new view unpunished.

- Ernest Mach, "A New Sense", quoted in Edmund Bolles, Galileo's Commandment, p. 27