Two robots walk into a bar...

James Randi on Carl Sagan

Rebecca Skloot on science journalism

During a 2010 visit to her alma mater - Colorado State University - Rebecca Skloot gave a series of seminars on communicating science to the public. I asked her what she thought about the role of science journalism in a world where more and more scientists are communicated directly to the public. Here is her answer.

Before Sagan came Bronowski

During my second year of graduate school I became obsessed with Carl Sagan. I read many of his books - Dragons of Eden being my favorite. I incessantly watched episodes of the Cosmos series. The more episodes I watched the more I fell in love with the history of science. It became clear to me that, contrary to popular belief, science is an extremely HUMAN endeavor. The series clearly demonstrated how concepts build on each other over time. Understanding how this process of accumulating concepts works is essential to understanding any one branch of science, no matter how tiny and frail that branch may be.

When I found out that Sagan had based his Cosmos on the earlier work of another I was immediately primed to go deeper into this rabbit hole. His name was Jacob Bronowski and he produced a 13 part series called the Ascent of Man. This series made its debut on the BBC in 1973. Tragically, Bronowski died a year later. Though the title might be a bit misogynistic for this age the messages within are timeless. 

Recently in the middle of dinner at a sushi restaurant here in southern Oregon I had an encounter with a creationist in his early 30s. I saw this as an opportunity to try and teach him the evidence for evolution and the geologic age of the earth in the most direct way possible. One question that many creationists ask is how could a person just come into existence randomly? How could all the atoms of a human being just pop into existence? 

Back at Umi-Sushi this very question was asked. I tried my best to explain that this is not what evolution suggests and that physical beings are the product of millions of years of accumulated chance. I tried my best to explain this and I hope my partner in conversation stayed with me. The fact that he continued to ask questions told me he was indeed open-minded. I caught him at a good time in his life as he was not totally entrenched in his beliefs as I suspect some people can be. Questions were sparked in his head and that was the first step. I wish I had memorized the unscripted monologue Jacob Brosowski launches into in the video below. Beginning at 30:30 in he explains a concept echoed by Carl Sagan - in essence we are made of star-stuff. As I have talked to people over the years who have had their own scientific epiphanies, the epiphany, in many cases begins with this beautiful notion that every human being began to exist in the center of a star somewhere out there. 

War of the Worldviews

Leonard Mlodinow and Deepak Chopra discuss the nature of the scientific method and the study of consciousness.

Jesus Emerges from an Alternate Universe

In an act of guerrilla reporting from the World Science Festival in New York City last week Inflaton - the newest TPG affiliate captured this entertaining bit of logic vs. faith. This iPhone gem was shot just moments after Steven Weinberg delivered the inaugural On The Shoulders of Giants address titled - The Future of Big Science. I wonder the probability of the Webb space telescope seeing Jesus seared on the side of a piece of cosmic toast?

World Science Festival 2011

Hello from New York City. For all you faithful Tom Paine's Ghost readers out there you may have noticed a marked decline in my actual written-word of late.  Apologies as I was composing my dissertation and being distracted with flowering aloe plants good music and LOVE all at the same time.  Having defended my dissertation and driven a few thousand miles I am here in New York City to live-blog the 2011 World Science Festival.

I am a big fan of the overall mission of this festival which is...

"The Mission of the World Science Festival is to cultivate and sustain a general public informed by the content of science, inspired by its wonder, convinced of its value, and prepared to engage with its implications for the future."

Keep your eyes here at Tom Paine's Ghost and catch me blogging for the official WSF blog over the next few days!

PS - please excuse grammatical and spelling mistakes for the time being. I am of the philosophy that content is more important than the frame it is presented in. I promise I will  go back and tidy it up after I come up for air sometime next week but for now you get my thoughts raw!

An Ode to Saccharomyces Cerevisiae!

A day late but worth the time! Biochemical muse for St. Patty's Day.

Sperm from Space?

The interwebs are exploding right now with buzz about a paper published in the Journal of Cosmology authored by a NASA scientist - Richard B. Hoover. The title of the controversial paper published online late last Friday is Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites.

Hoover claims to have found evidence of extra terrestrial life.  

This isn't a new claim.  This evidence comes by microscopic observation of a freshly fractured meteorite that landed on earth in 1864.  If it is life it's been dead for awhile. 

A torrent of criticism has quickly spewed from the scientific community.   When a journal drops names like NASA, Harvard, and Smithsonian it is not something to brush aside without consideration.  But I have spent some time looking into this "Journal of Cosmology" and come up disappointed.

The fact that my University does not have any record of this journal's existence and I can not get researchblogging.org to recognize any of the digital object identifiers (DOIs) attached to Dr. Hoover's paper are both red flags that this is a bunch of bollocks.  

I'm all for online open access journals but when peer review means you get a bunch of astrophysicists to weigh in on matters of microbial biology, Huston, we have a problem. 

The one figure from the paper that looks  interesting to me is figure 5. Seems as though someone got a bit over-excited to crack open that rock.  
 

I tend to agree with PZ Meyers after looking at this paper myself.

"I think many confuse their wish to see evidence of extraterrestrial life with the evidence for extraterrestrial life. Personally, I'd love to see the discovery of life that originated elsewhere other than our world — that would provide a radically different insight into evolution. I know there has been evidence of organic molecules in space, and I suspect that life does exist on other planets (possibly even other planets in our solar system), but I'm not going to accept a claim of discovery without adequate evidence.

And I'm sorry, but Hoover's paper is poorly written, sloppy work that uses a non-biologist's impressions of complex textures in a mineral to imply morphological evidence for fossilized bacteria. You'd think NASA would know better: we had a similar phenomenon a few years ago, in which people claimed to see a "face on Mars," a claim that NASA effectively debunked. This is the same thing. It's a shame that NASA isn't being as quick to dismiss bad science this time around.

It is disheartening to see this kind of article be presented as "peer-reviewed" because it chips away the integrity of what peer-review actually means.  On the other hand the journal in question is willing to publish negative critiques of these claims in parallel to the paper.   So let's see what the scientists that actually study microorganisms have to say about these complex textures. 

 

Hoover, Richard B (2011). fossils of cyanobacteria in C11 carbonaceous meteorites Journal of Cosmology, 13

Second in the Sagan Series

The Frontier is Everywhere

Watch at 720p!

Happy Birthday Carl