A few colleagues and I recently had a paper published in Nature on “A comparative analysis of the evolutionary of imperfect mimicry”. Those of you fortunate to have a Nature subscription can read the paper here. Alternatively, you can email me and I’ll send you a copy. Unfortunately, I can’t make the paper available due to issues with copyright from Nature (see elsewhere for details of scientists’ love-hate relationship with publishers…) but I can summarise the paper here.
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Tag: science
Scientific publishing – what a con…
I have a confession to make… I have an addiction. I just can’t live without it, no matter how much it hurts me… My drug is scientific publishing.
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I get email
So, I have been following PZ Myers’ blog at Pharyngula for some time and it always makes me smile when he comments on some of his email correspondance. Well, I had a bit of a mention in a news story last weekend which looked at the control of feral cat populations (see the Ottawa Citizen article). As a result, I received the following email:
The difference between men and women
I had the pleasure this evening of introducing Prof Root Gorelick to give a lecture to the local Centre for Inquiry group here in Ottawa. I have seen him give a number of relatively provocative talks at conferences and I knew his engaging style and fascinating subject matter would make for an interesting evening. Some people have asked me to summarise the talk as they couldn’t make it, so here is my best attempt while it is still fresh in my mind…
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Clever little Keas…
Intelligence can be defined as the ability to solve novel problems. In other words, many examples of “animal intelligence” wouldn’t count because of the limited range of situations within which they are able to act. Examples might include squirrels caching nuts and finding them again or the ability of drongos to mimic the alarm calls of meerkats to scare them off and steal their food. A true demonstration of intelligence requires that an animal be able to solve a problem with which it has no familiarity. The kea is an example of an animal that has a remarkable capacity to do just this (h/t Jerry Coyne):
International variation in IQ – the role of parasites
I co-authored a paper with Tom Sherratt at Carleton University a few months ago and we have received a bit of attention in the press (Washington Post blog, Scientific American, the Ottawa Sun, the heady heights of the Carleton University newspaper…). As pretty much everyone has offered their views on the paper based on the press coverage (which has been pretty good but not perfect…), I had better set the record straight!
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The limitations of clinical trials
[I really should have discussed this before having launched into reviews of evidence from clinical trials as it is fundamental to the issue of what constitutes “evidence”. You will notice, if you read back, that I have peppered my previous posts with links to this article where appropriate.]
I have mentioned in a number of previous posts that there is some evidence for efficacy for some fairly outlandish alternative medicine treatments. This evidence comes in the form of significant statistical tests in clinical trials. Now, clinical trials (double-blind, placebo-controlled and properly randomised) are the gold standard for evidence-based medicine but (as with all statistics) you have to know how to interpret them for them to be of any use. There are three places where care needs to be exercised in the interpretation of clinical trials:Read More »
The value of scientific hoaxes
It came to my attention recently that some of my friends were not aware of the Sokal Hoax. I recommend that you check out the Wikipedia article on it as this provides not only an extensive discussion of the event itself, but also a look at the subsequent discussion that the hoax generated, but I’ll quickly summarise what happened here.
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Negative ions and health (a review)
So I mentioned a few new expensive rubber band scams in a previous post and have been promising a review of negative ions for a week or two. Well, here it is (and it’s a bit of a monster…)!
How cryptozoology could actually do some good
I have posted a few times about “cryptids” and mentioned that the study of cryptids is called “cryptozoology”. This has been very much a fringe science ever since its inception in the 1940s. The disparagement has resulted from an over-reliance on anecdotal evidence and what some would call an “overabundance of credulity”. What I am going to discuss here is not so much pure cryptozoology as the concepts that underpin it.
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Katatrepsis 