Via Chris Mooney, here’s a quick introduction to the latest controversial addition to the science curriculum.

Update A bit more on the history of Intelligent falling and following

The SMH reports a Mini Y2K on the way. I wrote quite a few articles in 1999 poking fun at the whole Y2K scare, and finally managed to get a proper publication out of an ex post analysis (it’s coming out in the Australian Journal of Public Administration but you can read the PDF article here.
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Reading John and Belle’s blog, not the place I would usually look for unfamiliar maths results, I discovered that the circle can be squared in Gauss-Bolyai-Lobachevsky space . Checking a bit further, I found this was not a new result but was shown by Bolyai back in C19.

I haven’t found a link that shows how the construction was achieved, though. Can someone point me in the right direction, please?

A question that’s often raised in relation to public policy issues involving science is whether conflicts of interest matter. For example, does it matter if scientists who publish reports suggesting that the dangers of smoking are overstated turn out to be funded by tobacco companies? Common sense suggests that it matters, but a lot of commentators, often with a vague recollection of classes in elementary logic, suggest that this is an ad hominem criticism and that the only thing that is relevant is the argument, not who makes it. You can see a defence of this position from Elizabeth Whelan at Spiked here[1] (hat tip, Jennifer Marohasy in the comments to this interesitng Catallaxy post on values and science.

I’ll argue that common sense is right here.
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This piece by Nicholas Kristof encapsulates everything I don’t like about ‘evolutionary psychology’, particularly in its pop mode. Kristof makes the argument that the success of the religious right is due to a predisposition to religious belief grounded in supposed evolutionary advantages, supposedly reflected in a particular gene, referred to by its putative discoverer as ‘The God Gene’. This is pretty much a standard example of EP in action. Take a local, but vigorously contested, social norm, invent a ‘just so’ story and assert that you have discovered a genetically determined universal. Kristof doesn’t quite get to the point of asserting that there exists a gene for voting Republican, but it follows logically from his argument (Dawkins defends the idea of a gene for tying shoelaces, for example).

Where to begin on the problems of all this?
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The discussion of Windschuttle has, not surprisingly, got us into the general nature-nurture debate. Here’s a link to my review of Pinker’s Blank Slate. I suggest that general comments on this topic, as well as responses to my review, be posted here.

I was thinking idly about Erdos numbers, and it suddenly struck me that I could easily prove the necessity of a couple of ‘stylised facts'[1] about the associated networks. It’s well-known that the collaboration network for mathematicians contains one big component, traditionally derived by starting with Pal Erdos. The same is true of the network generated by sexual relationships. Although there is no generally agreed starting point here, it is a sobering thought that a relatively short chain would almost certainly connect most of us with both George Bush and Saddam Hussein.
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I’m a worrier. I worry about the economy, global warming, cancer, even about whether life has any meaning. But now, thanks to the guys over at Troppo Armadillo*, most of my worries are over. Reading the ‘always excellent‘ Junk Science site run by Steven Milloy, I’ve learned that

• cigarette smoke is good for you
• guns don’t kill people, gun laws kill people
• Global warming is a myth
• Darwinism is an atheistic fraud

How did I come to get the wrong idea on all these questions? Well, it turns out that the National Academy of Sciences, Environmental Protection Authority, Intergovenmental Panel on Climate Change, NASA and a host of individual scientists are engaged in a vast leftwing conspiracy to alarm and deceive us.

Only a handful of scientists have had the courage to resist this conspiracy. They can be recognised by the fact that they are typically affiliated with right-thinking think tanks like the Cato Institute (where Milloy works) and prefer to publish their work with Fox News (‘we report, you decide’), rather than in corrupt journals like Science and Nature, where ‘referees’ from the scientific establishment censor the truth. Fortunately, their work is now being recognised with generous grants from the tobacco, coal and oil industries.

The good news doesn’t stop there. According to this morning’s email, I am about to receive a substantial commission on a transaction involving Nigerian gold (as long as I can beat ASIC to the punch). And beautiful girls from all over the world are just waiting to meet me.

I’m glad I’ve stopped worrying. Now if I could only cure my addiction to irony …

* More exactly, to Geoff Honnor who provided the link to Milloy’s Junk Science site, and to Ken Parish who linked to the similarly-styled Bizarre Science site.

Boring disclaimer A link to a site doesn’t imply endorsement of everything that appears on that site.

The frontpage of Monday’s SMH has a link to a multimedia piece, entitled “Journey to the Centre of the Universe”. I couldn’t make the link work, but the teaser text says everything I needed to know anyway. I reproduce it without comment

Take a spectacular 3D tour to the centre of our solar system. Normally it would take you 50 million light years, but we can get you there in three minutes.Ê