An interesting discussion branching off from questions about the benefits of resveratrol. It seems pretty clear to me that there’s no evolutionary pressure to live much past the time that your offspring (or perhaps grand-offspring) are off on their own. And that it violates no laws of physics to figure out how to cheat mother nature in that regard.
Category Archives: Science And Society
Still Giving Them Hell
Freeman Dyson continues to refuse to be part of the “consensus”:
Wearing an effusively-colored tie that set off his gray suit, Mr. Dyson began his talk at the Nassau Club by encouraging the audience to interrupt him as he spoke, since, he declared, “it’s much more fun to have an argument than do a monologue.”
In the absence of audience interruptions, Mr. Dyson had an argument anyway with the scores of people (like Al Gore) who weren’t present to defend their belief in the dire consequences of global warming. (“There’s no accounting for human folly,” Mr. Dyson said when asked about Mr. Gore’s Nobel Prize.) Saying that on a recent trip he and his wife found Greenlanders to be delighted with their warmer climate and increased tourism, Mr. Dyson suggested that representing “local warming by a global average is misleading.” In his comments at both the Nassau Club and Labyrinth, he decried the use of computer modeling to make “tremendously dogmatic” predictions about worldwide trends, without acknowledging the “messy, muddy real world” and the non-climatic effects of increased carbon dioxide. “There is no substitute for widely-conducted field operations over a long time,” he told the Nassau Club audience, citing the “enormous gaps in knowledge and sparseness of observation” that characterize the work of global warming experts.
Why can’t some people get with the program? Thankfully, though, mz will be along any minute to call Professor Dyson “stupid.”
What Really Happened?
Alan Boyle has a piece on what looks to be an interesting PBS series on biblical archaeology. I agree that it is not the archaeologist’s job to either prove, or disprove creation myths. His job is to, as best as can be done, utilize the scientific method to figure out what the past really was.
A Corrective
…to the charlatans like Jim Hansen. Here are two useful books. First, Cool It
Yup. As many reviewers note, “climate change” isn’t really about science–it’s just the latest ideology to come along for the collectivists to use in their latest attempt to bend us to their will.
In The Deep End Of The Gene Pool
Kay Hymowitz writes about the chaos of Darwinist dating.
The Latest Scientific Fraud
…from the global warm-mongers.
I have nothing to say, other than that James Hansen gets entirely too much respect. And by “too much,” I mean more than none.
Libertarianism and SF
Katherine Mangu-Ward, in an essay on Tor Books, says that the link remains strong.
The Big Chill?
So, are we heading for rising sea levels, or a return of the glaciers? A roundup of the debate.
Better (And Longer) Living
In monkeys, a single injection of a drug to induce RNA interference against PCSK9 lowered levels of bad cholesterol by about 60 percent, an effect that lasted up to three weeks. Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, the biotechnology company that developed the drug, hopes to begin testing it in people next year.
The drug is a practical application of scientific discoveries that are showing that RNA, once considered a mere messenger boy for DNA, actually helps to run the show. The classic, protein-making genes are still there on the double helix, but RNA seems to play a powerful role in how genes function.
“This is potentially the biggest change in our understanding of biology since the discovery of the double helix,” said John S. Mattick, a professor of molecular biology at the University of Queensland in Australia.
Of course, as the article points out, there’s still a lot we don’t know, and there are likely to be unforeseen side effects until we understand how this all works much better. But this is a breakthrough in itself.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s an interesting article on how far genetics has come in the ninety-nine years since the word “gene” was coined.
[via Derbyshire, who has other thoughts]
Science And Technology Policy
…in an Obama administration. Alan Boyle has a sneak preview. (I actually linked to this yesterday, but only in the context of the suborbital regulation issue.)