john hawks weblog

paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

science in society

  • AAA: "President Obama Supports Scientific Integrity of Anthropology"

    Tue, 2013-05-14 19:38 -- John Hawks

    The American Anthropological Association blog (on the Huffington Post) included a post last week by AAA President Leith Mullings, commenting on President Obama's address to the National Academy of Sciences: "President Obama Supports Scientific Integrity of Anthropology".

    Mullings quotes from President Obama's remarks:

    And it's not just resources. I mean, one of the things that I've tried to do over these last four years and will continue to do over the next four years is to make sure that we are promoting the integrity of our scientific process; that not just in the physical and life sciences, but also in fields like psychology and anthropology and economics and political science -- all of which are sciences because scholars develop and test hypotheses and subject them to peer review -- but in all the sciences, we've got to make sure that we are supporting the idea that they're not subject to politics, that they're not skewed by an agenda, that, as I said before, we make sure that we go where the evidence leads us. And that's why we've got to keep investing in these sciences.

    The President's comments are important, considering the last few weeks' news of Congressional antipathy toward NSF funding of work in the social sciences. Although many cultural anthropologists consider themselves to be pure humanists and non-scientists, the National Science Foundation does not fund work that is non-scientific in approach. Emphasizing the importance of hypothesis-testing and peer review in anthropology is something I think most anthropologists can rally around.

    That sounds like science has to be a part of any viable long-term plan...

    Tags: 
    American Anthropological Association
    metascience
    science in society

  • Synthetic science

    Sat, 2012-05-19 14:02 -- John Hawks

    Wired reporter Thomas Goetz interviews Craig Venter on his synthetic biology projects and the public perception of science "Craig Venter wants to solve the world's energy crisis".

    Goetz: Just to touch on the ethics of this, why do you think it strikes a nerve in people that you’re doing this with life, with organisms, compared to the tinkering and manipulation that’s being done with, say, silicon? What is it about biology that is different?

    Venter: I think because we’re a part of biology and we relate to that. But the amount of fear this arouses depends on our education, it depends on people’s religion. You see it in literature, the idea that “if you alter life forms it’s going to lead to no good end.” That goes back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and you see it in movies—it’s part of our culture. Perhaps it’s an innate fear because we’re a part of biology, so we’re afraid of making things better or making them worse. But I think it’s the most powerful technology we have at our disposal to change the outcome of humanity.

    Tags: 
    J. Craig Venter
    synthetic biology
    science in society

  • Mailbag: Jury regression

    Tue, 2011-12-13 09:41 -- John Hawks

    Re: Jury science

    I have followed your blog with inerest for a while now, and I was looking through your
    twitter stream and saw this, attributed to Kahneman:

    "if a court case hinges on regression to the mean, the side that has to explain this to the jury
    will lose."

    I was immediately intrigued by the idea of coming up with a good explantion for a
    jury, and here is what I came up with:

    Its like poker hands - even if daddy has 4 kings and mommy has 4 queens, the kids
    aren't going to average much better than two pair, kings over queens.

    This simplifies and glosses over a lot, but its memorable and avoids the dreaded
    'eyes glaze over' effect so common with math explanations for laymen. Perhaps it might be
    useful in teaching.

    Thanks! That does seem appealing. I do regression to the mean over the course of a whole lecture, using data that my students measure on themselves to replicate Galton's work on stature. I wouldn't envy anyone who had to do it under a time constraint!

    Tags: 
    mailbag
    science in society
    teaching
    statistics
Subscribe to science in society

Neandertals

For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.

Denisova

From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.

Acceleration

The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.

Malapa

Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.