Missing Shades of Grue

So get in line, intelligent designers. Get in line behind the hypothesis that life started on Mars and was blown here by a cosmic impact. Get in line behind the aquatic ape hypothesis, the gestural origin of language hypothesis and the theory that singing came before language, to mention just a few of the enticing hypotheses that are actively defended but still insufficiently supported by hard facts.

The Discovery Institute, the conservative organization that has helped to put intelligent design on the map, complains that its members face hostility from the established scientific journals. But establishment hostility is not the real hurdle to intelligent design. If intelligent design were a scientific idea whose time had come, young scientists would be dashing around their labs, vying to win the Nobel Prizes that surely are in store for anybody who can overturn any significant proposition of contemporary evolutionary biology.

Remember cold fusion? The establishment was incredibly hostile to that hypothesis, but scientists around the world rushed to their labs in the effort to explore the idea, in hopes of sharing in the glory if it turned out to be true.

Instead of spending more than $1 million a year on publishing books and articles for non-scientists and on other public relations efforts, the Discovery Institute should finance its own peer-reviewed electronic journal. This way, the organization could live up to its self-professed image: the doughty defenders of brave iconoclasts bucking the establishment.

For now, though, the theory they are promoting is exactly what George Gilder, a long-time affiliate of the Discovery Institute, has said it is: "Intelligent design itself does not have any content."

Since there is no content, there is no "controversy" to teach about in biology class. But here is a good topic for a high school course on current events and politics: Is intelligent design a hoax? And if so, how was it perpetrated?

Lately companies have been paying more attention to open source.

Ten years ago there seemed a real danger Microsoft would extend its monopoly to servers. It seems safe to say now that open source has prevented that. A recent survey found 52% of companies are replacing Windows servers with Linux servers.

More significant, I think, is which 52% they are. At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don't.

But the biggest thing business has to learn from open source is not about Linux or Firefox, but about the forces that produced them. Ultimately these will affect a lot more than what software you use.

We may be able to get a fix on these underlying forces by triangulating from open source and blogging. As you've probably noticed, they have a lot in common.

(1) that people work harder on stuff they like,
(2) that the standard office environment is very unproductive, and
(3) that bottom-up often works better than top-down.

Many employees would like to build great things for the companies they work for, but more often than not management won't let them. How many of us have heard stories of employees going to management and saying, please let us build this thing to make money for you-- and the company saying no? The most famous example is probably Steve Wozniak, who originally wanted to build microcomputers for his then-employer, HP. And they turned him down. On the blunderometer, this episode ranks with IBM accepting a non-exclusive license for DOS. But I think this happens all the time.

The 21st century has been coined the Century of the Brain. But as the exciting tools of neuroscience probe deeper -- compelling ethical and philosophical questions over the privacy of our thoughts, identity and selfhood are coming to the fore. What if a brain scan revealed more about you than you really want to know? How might neuroscience be used in the courts? What can we confidently read from the bright lights of a brain image? How should this information be used beyond the research lab? Two of the world's leading thinkers in the emerging field of 'neuroethics' explore these and other timely questions.

Focusing on interdisciplinary teams instead of interdisciplinary people reinforces standard disciplinary boundaries rather than breaking them down. An interdisciplinary team is a committee in which members identify themselves as an expert in something else besides the actual scientific problem at hand, and abdicate responsibility for the majority of the work because it's not their field. Expecting a team of disciplinary scientists to develop a new field is like sending a team of monolingual diplomats to the United Nations.

Dear Senator Clinton:

I'm writing to commend you for calling for a $90-million study on the effects of video games on children, and in particular the courageous stand you have taken in recent weeks against the notorious "Grand Theft Auto" series.

I'd like to draw your attention to another game whose nonstop violence and hostility has captured the attention of millions of kids -- a game that instills aggressive thoughts in the minds of its players, some of whom have gone on to commit real-world acts of violence and sexual assault after playing.

I'm talking, of course, about high school football.

Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader, aligned himself with President Bush on Friday when he said that the theory of intelligent design as well as evolution should be taught in public schools.

Such an approach "doesn't force any particular theory on anyone," Mr. Frist said in Nashville, according to The Associated Press. "I think in a pluralistic society that is the fairest way to go about education and training people for the future." A Washington spokesman for the senator, Nick Smith, said later that the report was accurate.

Evolutionary psychologists have long taken heat from critics for overplaying innate characteristics--nature at the expense of nurture--and for reinforcing gender stereotypes. But they've dismissed many detractors, fairly or no, as softheaded feminists and sociologists who refuse to acknowledge the true power of natural selection. Increasingly, however, attacks on EP come from academics well-versed in the hard-nosed details of evolutionary biology.

As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

"Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.

The term "theory of mind" refers to the fundamental ability of a person to understand that other people can have intentions or desires that are different. But does the concept hold for other species? Can a chimpanzee, say, know what another chimpanzee is intending?

The issue is a subject of much debate, and a new study by Thomas Bugnyar and Bernd Heinrich of the University of Vermont is sure to add to the discussion. In a study in Proceedings B of the Royal Society, the two show that ravens know what other ravens have or have not seen.

Ravens store caches of food, which are often pilfered by other ravens who watch while the food is being hidden. In one set of experiments, the researchers allowed a raven that was storing food to see whether another was watching (in this case the second bird was visible to the first but was shielded from the cache by a curtain).

Later, the two ravens were set loose to retrieve the cache. The bird that stored the food behaved differently based on whether the other bird had watched earlier.

A second set of experiments involved two pilfering birds. The researchers found that when retrieving food, a bird that watched the food being cached acted differently if the other bird had watched, too.

Taken together, the researchers say, the results show that ravens are capable of identifying other birds and of knowing what the others had or had not seen. They add that the findings are in line with other work on ravens and crows that shows they have great cognitive potential when it comes to social behavior.

Just the good ol' boys
Filled with guilt and ennui
They're bored, racked with discord
Just hangin' by the fjord
Scarred emotionally

In this special issue, PopSci explores the breakthroughs that will make it possible to manipulate the body in novel (and sometimes disturbing) ways. What will it be like when athletes can augment themselves with artificial muscles and ordinary people can opt for implants that let them see new colors or never forget a thing? What will it be like when medications can make a person more monogamous?or religious?and babies can be brought to term in artificial wombs? Read on to learn scientists? plans for altering everything from your bathroom medicine cabinet to your own brain.

Anne's Anti-Quackery & Science Blog: Should intelligent design be teached at school?