And now for something completely similar

Well, I'm now about a month into my ZOO 498 project, and things are going as slowly as ever. Well, not really. I got through Funk and Wagner (1998) and I've finished converting the all of the phylogenies into taxon-area cladograms. I still want to include some of the other phylogenies I've dredged up on Web of Science. Am I really that insane for actually, purposefully, making *more* work for myself?

So now I have to get on the ball and start combining these suckers. Ouch. Some of the venn diagram conversions look like the worst nightmate of a ZOO 362 student on acid. Professor Brooks says that Maggie should be finished the all-mighty program...er...soon(tm). I don't mind doing it all by hand really -- just that I still feel somewhat clueless as to how I'm going to fit this mess all together. And then I have to interpret it.

And speaking of Web of Science, I have to say THANK YOU to the people who decided to upgrade WoS. I hate, just hate, just HATE how for three years I had to put up with searching for stuff on WoS only to find that ~90% of the hits I got were to journals that either weren't carried by U of T or were linked to articles that weren't available to U of T and therefore would make me have to pay some exorbitant fee to get to them. $45 for an article?! are you Nuts!? I had to suffer through Cambridge Scientific's Biological Sciences index, which still doesn't work on Safari and still has downright awful JavaScript coding. I tell you, the people who coded that site deserve to be condemned to running Windows ME on Pentium 166 boxes for the rest of their lives. If it weren't for JSTOR, I would have gone totally insane.

Happy (Belated) Birthday, Planet Earth!

First, an explanation to Jennie; yes, I'm up, and no I'm not sleeping. Insomnia once again rears its ugly head.

According to the Archbishop Ussher, the geneaologies given in the Old and New Testament leads one to an approximate date of creation for the earth as being October 23, 4004 BC, at midday. Which means that now the Earth can relax and retire, having achieved the ripe old age of 6000 years (well, 6000 and change, given that I am about a week late).

Stephen Jay Gould, in his essay "Fall in the House of Ussher" (a rather clever pun on the Edgar Allen Poe work), in the book Bully for Brontosaurus, admirably defends our Irish friend Ussher by showing that his date was more than a mere show of piety, a symbol of a myopic religious establishment that was against scientific principles. Quite the opposite, in fact -- his estimate was the product of incredible, dilligent scholarship and focused, intensive scientific research. Scientific in that he worked through a deductive process, at a time when the use of the Bible in dating the earth was fraught with immense debate and controversy.

I can't do Gould's essay justice; I really recommend you pick up a good cheap used copy of Bully for Brontosaurus and read it. But what I can say is that it's almost ironic that such a clear, stark contrast can be made between Creationists such as Ussher and the great Louis Agassiz, and the Creationists of today in their scholarship, methodology, and motivation.

Would that the Creationists of today learn from the Creationists of old.

[EDIT: Added the link to "Bully for Brontosaurus", in which "Fall in the House of Ussher" was published. I added it because I really liked it, and I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in evolutionary biology, or in the history of science.]

Funding as the limiting reagent in the reaction of scientific inquiry

I had an intriguing conversation with Anna yesterday evening, about a problem than always has and arguably always will plague scientific research: funding. What Anna basically proposed was to change public perceptions of science to make scientific research more appealing and more interesting to the unwashed masses. In doing so, pressure would then be placed on the government to allocate more funding to research.

This then leads to the question, "But how do you actually get the public more interested in research?" Her answer amounts to a general campaign of exposing people to the wonders of scientific research. Get the public so interested, so conditioned to be interested in scientific research, that attitudes will appropriately change.

My arguement disagrees with this (naturally). I completely agree with Anna's motives and to see a world where people think of science as something to be accepted and respected, instead of the caricature which is so often ridiculed, feared, and marginalized. The ceaseless rhetoric of Creationists notwithstanding, many people just don't understand science, and who could really blame them? Not everyone has the luxury of devoting four years or more to studying population genetics, the mechanics of natural selection, or the application of phylogenetic systematics to historical biogeography. Biologists have for years (if not decades) tried to deduce a model tantamount to the "Universe on a T-Shirt" (to borrow the title from a fascinating popular physics book I saw at a store once) -- a clean, simple, easy phrase which can be easily ingrained into the public consciousness. Would that all of biology could be easily distilled, condensed, and packaged up the way Einstein's immortal E=MC^2 is now (and with that I really have to wonder just how much of a percentage of those who can actually spout off that formula could with equal nonchalance state its meaning and importance -- let alone how one could use such a creature).

And of course, there's the selfish factor -- the plague of Conservation Biology. Why do you want to save Species X? What's in it for me?

Perhaps it is my personal bias, having been raised as a child steeped in critical thought (and that of the most devastating, yet excellent sort -- parental). I have always thought of science in the way that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayor stated their famous slogan, even beneath their roaring lion: "Ars gratia artis". Is it really such a foreign concept that scientific inquiry should be a pleasurable experience, in and of itself?