“…no life schedule, even under the most benign ecology possible, could escape my spectrum of forces of senescence..in the farthest reaches of almost any bizarre universe.”
– Hamilton (1966)
Do all species age?
Category: Science
Dragonfly intestines: nature’s Swiss Army knife
“We should be extremely cautious in concluding that an organ could not have been formed by transitional gradations of some kind. Numerous cases could be given amongst the lower animals of the same organ performing at the same time wholly distinct functions; thus in the larva of the dragonfly… the alimentary canal respires, digests and excretes.”
– Charles Darwin, Origin of the Species, Chapter 6Read More »
Does the contraceptive pill affect female mate choice in humans?
In the final Reality Check episode (#208) with which I was involved, I presented a segment on whether or not the contraceptive pill influences women’s perceptions of potential partners. I’ve been interested in this question for a few years, ever since sharing an office with evolutionary psychologists at the University of Liverpool. Craig Roberts, whose work I cited a couple of times, was a lecturer there when I was doing my doctoral research. Anyway, on with the show!Read More »
I have an Erdos number of 5!
People may have heard of the “six degrees of Kevin Bacon“, related to the idea of six degrees of separation, where it was posited that any Hollywood actor could be linked to Kevin Bacon by six or fewer relationships (e.g. by virtue of having shared co-stars, etc). This theory of networks is fascinating in its own right, due to the uneven connectedness of nodes (people) within a given network. Not to be outdone, scientists have their own “centre of the universe” and that person is Paul Erdös (1913-1996). Read More »
Why I love Creative Commons and the Open Source movement (and my attempt to give something back)
It struck me recently that I have been making use of a lot of practically-free services provided by a variety of communities, but that I have not necessarily been giving anything back in return.Read More »
Is Correactology just chiropractic in a funny hat?
I’ve blogged about Correactology before, and that post has been pretty popular (for one of my posts, anyway…) so I thought I would revisit the topic. Supply and demand and all that jazz… Also, I was moved by a comment on the earlier post (reproduced in full below the fold), where a woman described a terrible experience with a Correactologist because she (a) had not been familiar with the nonsense treatment before, and (b) had nowhere to go to complain (the particular practitioner she was treated by is actually a Director of the “Canadian Association of Correactology Practitioners”). Helping people like this is one of the reasons that I set up this blog:Read More »
A new paper
I recently had a scientific paper accepted on the topic of parasites in damselflies. The lead author, a graduate student at Carleton University, has put up a blog post about it. Go read! http://buddingbiologist.wordpress.com/2012/10/12/the-currency-of-science/
A skeptical take on allergy testing
This is the second of three segments that I presented on The Reality Check, Canada’s weekly skeptical podcast. On episode #205, I talked about allergy testing. Advances in medicine have completely eradicated diseases such as smallpox, and we are well on our way to doing the same for polio. Yet more diseases are firmly under control through most of the developed world through the use of vaccines. However, as we remove some causes of ill health, we notice that others have grown in prominence over the past few decades. Allergies are a good example of one of these increasingly diagnosed conditions, but the general public tends to have a fairly poor understanding of what allergies are, how they come about and how they can be diagnosed.Read More »
Journal dedicates entire issue to replicating previous studies
The journal Social Psychology has issued a call for proposals for a special issue of their journal to be published in 2014. The name of the issue will be “Replications of Important Results in Social Psychology” and the call is available here. Read More »
Is water fluoridation safe and/or effective?
I was lucky enough to be invited on as a guest presenter on The Reality Check, one of Canada’s largest skeptical podcasts. I recorded a couple of shows before I left Ottawa and it was immensely fun and interesting. I had made fairly extensive notes for the segments, and it seemed a shame not to post them here.Read More »
Katatrepsis 