What to do?

So we all know that this time of year, aka the holidays, bring families together. It has been nice being home and getting to see my family. Over the last few days I have my parent's have had one of my aunts and her son over to visit. And it is nice to see them since I haven't seen them in at least 2 years. My aunt is for the most part conservative but then again so is most of my family but at the same time we are far from religious, although apparently my grandfather is very liberal which made for an interesting situation yesterday when we went to go visit him but that is another story all together. I love my aunt I think she is funny but tonight she said something that disappointed me.

We were watching the TV show The Big Bang Theory, Monday's at 9:30 on CBS, and the intro song mentions human evolution. My aunt said, "I don't believe in human evolution." There was the silence where no one knew what to say or do. One thing is for certain as much as my parent's might not completely understand science they have at least tried and they tend to accept most of the theories, sometimes a little too much against my advising but it has never hurt them. That maybe why both my sister and I have always been interested in science. Anyway this silence lasted for what seems like a couple of minutes but was probably only a few seconds until the next cheesy commercial came on. I will admit I didn't say anything and I probably should have but I tried to make my annoyance known.

So now my question is this: If you were put in the same situation what would you have done? Would you have sat their quietly like my whole family did or would you have said something challenged her or heck maybe you have some sort of middle ground. I just didn't know what to do at the time and just let it slide, since for most things we have very similar thought processes and I don't get to see her very often. I don't know how many people follow this blog but I figured I would ask that question to see if anyone who does read has any suggestions for next time.

Book Review #3

I finally have had some time to read. And while this is a good thing it turns out that I did not bring near enough books home to read. It is kind of sad that a book that I started months ago I read in 3 days, although I only actually read 2 of those days, and the main reason I got done so fast was that I had to wait for 3 and 1/2 hours for my car to get inspected.

But enough about me lets get to talking about the book. This book is a book I promised would be in my second book review when I wrote my first one (1st one here, 2nd one here) and that I failed miserably at. Yes I finally finished Your Inner Fish by Dr. Neil Shubin. In this book Dr. Shubin uses his discovery of Tiktaalik to describe in very simple terms the evolution of humans from simple single celled organisms to what we are now. In the process he talks about the major skull systems like sight, hearing, and smell and describes how they evolved from our more simple relatives to now. The description on the book reads:

WHY DO WE LOOK THE WAY WE DO? Neil Shubin, the paleontologist and professor of anatomy who co-discovered Tiktaalik, the "fish with hands," tells the story of our bodies as you've never heard it before. By examining fossils and DNA, he shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our heads are organized like long-extinct jawless fish, and the major parts of our genome look, and function, like those of worms and bacteria. Your Inner Fish makes us look at ourselves and our world in an illuminating new light. This is science writing at its finest--enlightening, accessible, and told with irresistible enthusiasm.

I really did love this book. It is a very simple read, at least for someone who just took a class in vertebrate paleontology in which a lot of the same topics where discussed, so it doesn't like some one is lecturing too you but at the same time it is not so simple that you feel that someone should be cleaning drool off of your chin. It is clearly written for someone with at least some education that somewhere along the line included some basic biology. He also includes within a couple of quick one-liners that actually had me laughing as I read them. I like the way he treats the subject as well he takes you through his life at the start of each chapter and you can feel him "evolving" as a human and each of his stories in someway tie into the topic of that chapter.

If there was one thing he could have done better is to disguise the book. What do I mean by that? Well the full title of the book is Your Inner Fish, A Journey into the 3.5 Billion-year History of the Human Body. Right away any creationist is not going to pick this book up to read it. And the sad thing is that those are the people who need to read this book the most. He is very clear in how evolution works and would clear up a lot of misconceptions that creationists have about the science involved. So what should he have done? I don't really know the answer to that maybe come up with a name like "How Tiktaalik disproves evolution" and then have "not" written somewhere really small on the cover.

So what do I suggest? I recommend that you read this book it is a very good intro to evolution and if you are a high school or college student interested in evolution at all you should definitely read it. But after you read it you should make sure that your creationist friends read it, I would say go make them buy another copy but then I doubt they would do that since well I have a hard time buying creationist books, they are the ones after all who really do need it.

The author has a website (here) which has a lot of supplementary material for the book, and in fact as I found out from Dr. PZ Myers' blog (Pharyngula found here) today Dr. Shubin and company put out all of the images from the book on PowerPoint slides for teachers to use during their lectures (here). Dr. Shubin they have been downloaded and will be greatly appreciated during my lab teaching in the spring semester but will obviously be referenced to you I thank you.

Book citation
Neil Shubin . Your Inner Fish, a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body. 2008. Pantheon Books. New York.

Book review page

Venomous Dinosaur?

Apparently at least according to the authors of a paper that is about to come out. Based upon this blog post (here) it is hard to tell exactly they have some evidence but nothing certain. I obviously haven't read the paper yet so I can't really say for sure till I do that.

It could always be worse:

The difference between going to Grad school and going to work right out of school

So this may seem really random but where I am currently in both life and in location I really got to thinking about this today. At 23 years old I am in a unique position in life most of my really good friends from both high school and college have a job now but there is a good number, myself included, who decided to continue going to school and are now in grad school. I also am not quite in the position where I know a lot of people who are working and in grad school at the same time so I won't really be discussing that here. But tonight I was hanging out with a bunch of friends from high school we are all really close and it was good to finally see them all again. As I was leaving my one friend's house (yes he owns a house) he jokingly said to me something along the lines of it must me nice to have 3 weeks off but I guess you do kind of work for it. He has next week off and I told him well I can only imagine what it is like in your position.

So what is the point? Well once you get through your undergrad education your life very quickly evolves out of the large amounts of fun it was as an undergrad. I'm not saying life isn't fun but no matter what path you take you will be in working to be where you are. So for example there is no question my friends who have jobs work harder than me when you average it out. They will work 48-50 (5 day) weeks a year I however will get a month off from winter break and 3 months off for the summer. But what do you get for that? One of my friends is working but owns a house and has a kid, my fiance and I couldn't afford to do that if we pooled all of what we make a year, we would still make less than all of my friends except the ones who are teachers (which says something about our society). They tend to get up and are at work by 7-9 in the morning where as I tend not to get up that early but I will be up working on homework or something till 2.

So what should you do? Sometimes you don't have a choice. There are certain fields, and all of academia is included in that, in which you need at least some post-graduate education so you are stuck. But is it worth going to grad school right away or to enter the work force. That I cannot answer for you, and to be honest it took me time to answer it for myself. And that is just it if you can make enough to afford to own a house and have a kid at 23 then I say go for it but if you don't want to leave school right away and are willing to work hard in the academic world go for that too. In the end it comes down to the individual and nothing else!

Climate Change - "Those" e-mails and science censorship

Potholer54 continues refuting those people who cling to the recent e-mail hacking incident as evidence against global warming in his newest video and since I posted his last video (here) and greenman3610's last video (here) and after my post yesterday/earlier today (here) I figured I should pass it along as well:

Why we must tread carefully with climate refrom

So I just finished up my work for the semester and made it home yesterday so I might have some free time over the next few weeks to put some posts together, assuming I can come up with some topics.

This week wrapped up the Copenhagen climate conference in which only very little was accomplished. But I don't really want to discuss what happened there to be honest you will never get most of the developing countries to support something like that until you make it cheaper than just dumping the trash in the ocean, so to speak, and for this reason I think the US needs to take the lead in this attempt to clean up our actions. We have done this before when polluting of water was a major problem and now most countries realize it is wrong it just isn't something they can easily change. We need to set the example!

But, you might be saying that is not what you have as your title to this post. You would be correct and that is because of the economic problems we will face with a sudden drastic change in the way we produce power/drive/etc. The US transport and power industry is currently based on oil/gas and coal if we all of a sudden said no you can't use those any more because it is destroying the world well we will destroy our economy in the process it is currently too expensive to buy the alternative energy sources. I often think that many scientist forget about this cost and that is really too bad but I think most humans tend not to care as much about those who aren't us, so I don't think it is just a scientist thing but I know we do it and think that it should be easy to change things.

So what do I suggest we do, since it is one thing to say something is wrong but we should always be able to provide solutions to the problems we point out? Well we should start by funding alternative energy solutions. The current government subsidies go almost exclusively to oil/gas and coal. Why not scale back a little on that funding, thereby increasing cost and making it less desirable to the average person, and send that change towards alternative options. The strides that have been made in solar and tidal etc have been slowed by lack of money but yet they have occurred.

But the government shouldn't be the only one we as consumer's should demand cleaner resources etc. Vote with your wallet, drive less and walk more, turn off lights when you leave a room, (in honor of the massive snow storm on the east coast) shovel your own snow you don't need a snow blower, all of those things that we have been preached at to do we should. Yes it won't always be easy but it can be done but I do realize that you can never please everyone:

Comfort you are in trouble now

So I know that Michael Shermer tweeted this but I figured I would throw together a quick post on it. The story can be found here. But to summarize it real quickly it seems the evidence is pointing toward Ray Comfort stole a summary of Darwin's life from a professor at the University of Tennessee who is now thinking about legal action for obvious reasons. My favorite part of the article is this:

“I would like to engage him in intellectual combat, but it wouldn’t be fair,” Guffey says. “If he were to play by the rules of reason and logic, I would whoop his ass, but he’s not constrained by those rules, so it wouldn’t be fair to me.”

Yes, he is right that most creationists don't play by the same rules as us scientists but the part I am talking about is the "I would whoop his ass" part. I can see a lot of my professors saying things like that but not to a newspaper article for publication but to each his own.

Anyway this is an interesting development we will have to keep tabs on it to see what happens.

Smacking the Hack Attack

Write a paper of watch youtube videos and post a quick blog article? We will go with the second one.

Ok so yesterday I posted the video posted by potholer54 so today I was glad to see that greenman3610 decided to comment on the hacked e-mails as well. So I will let him take it from here:



So at least these two should help clear things up.

Those hacked e-mails

Ok still busy working on the end of the semester hopefully after the next two weeks I might be able to blog a little bit more.

Anyway I am sure you have all heard about those hacked e-mails from the climate change experts. Well the right here in the US has been holding up a couple as proof that it is just a conspiracy. So Potholer54 did some research and shows that well maybe they don't say what we have all been told they say.



Interesting eh?