Wired has this article about the former Texas science curriculum director, Chris Comer, who was forced to resign after she forwarded a mail announcing a lecture promoting evolution. Her bosses felt that by sending an FYI about the lecture she was showing “insubordination” and therefore needed to go.

It boggles my mind that the people running the science curriculum are not allowed to promote a solid scientific theory/law like evolution. There is a good quote in the article:

• “Each approach should be fair game for critical analysis, so terminating someone for just mentioning a critic of intelligent design smacks of the dogma and purges in the Soviet era.”

Intelligent design is hogwash and has no place anywhere near scientific education, except as an example of a bad theory. The Texas school board has a long way to go – Mrs Comer you are better off without them over your head.

Wired has this article about a study in which scientists were able to breed mice there are immune to cancer. The best part is that these mice passed their immunity on to their offspring!

This was all done by introducing a gene called Par-4 which causes cells to “self-destruct when they become cancerous.” The mice which had the gene implanted “resisted researchers’ attempts to give them breast, pancreatic, head and neck cancer.”

If there was such a simple gene (it sounds simple) to resist cancer I would have thought that this gene would already be enormously widespread (it was actually discovered in humans). I can think of a couple of reasons why it wouldn’t be so widespread:

• Because cancer is most often a late-onset disease it probably didn’t have a huge impact on reproductive success in our evolutionary past. Very few of our ancestors lived long enough to have benefited from cancer resistance!
• It is plausible that the gene has some other detrimental impacts which prevented it from becoming very widespread. Hopefully such impacts would be discovered during experiments on mice.

Be that as it may, all this is still very promising.

National Geographic has this article about an experiment showing that monkeys know when they are being ripped-off and get upset about it.

In the experiment the monkeys were paired up and given simple tasks to do for a reward. When monkeys saw their peers getting better rewards for the same task, they “went on strike” and refused to participate. In some cases a monkey would get plain old cucumber while its partner would receive a delicious grape for the same task. In those cases the monkey who got ripped off “often refused to conduct future exchanges, would not eat the cucumbers they received, and in some cases, threw their rewards at the researchers.”

Very interesting – we humans love it when animals exhibit human-like behavior. It’s also very interesting to me because it shows that some monkeys have evolved a view of what is “fair”. This is evolutionarily useful for a species whose survival depends a lot on complex social interactions.

This is an awesome page listing ways of “cheating” when debating. I have encountered many of these when discussing religion and evolution with friends, family and colleagues – to be fair I think they are just making logical mistakes and not actively cheating.

Here are some examples of the logical errors that have infuriated me in the past:

Argument from Personal Incredulity – arguing that because you personally cannot explain or understand something, it must therefore not be true. E.g. “I don’t believe we’re related to apes, therefore evolution can’t be true” or “quantum mechanics doesn’t make any sense to me, therefore it must be made up by scientists and can’t possibly reflect reality”

Shifting the Goalposts – moving the criteria for acceptance of an argument continually out of range of evidence, in order to ensure that regardless of the quality of evidence, the criteria for acceptance is never met. E.g. “Okay, I know i said that if you showed me proof of speciation i’d accept evolution, but what i really want is proof of…”

Currently unexplained does not imply unexplainable – Just because we don’t have an explanation for something now, does not imply that it is inherently unexplainable. E.g. “Scientists don’t currently know what caused the first instance of self-replicating life on earth, therefore no scientific explanation will ever be found, leaving only god as an explanation”

Argument from Popularity – arguing that because most people believe something to be true, it must be true. E.g. “every newspaper has a horoscope section, therefore astrology must work or it wouldn’t be so popular”

Straw Man – creating a charicature of an argument, because the charicature is more easy to destroy than the actual argument. E.g. “Evolution is a completely random process, and the likelihood of something as complex as humans arising from a completely random process is so small as to be impossible” – straw man, because evolution is not at all a totally random process, but is in fact dependent on non-random selection.

There are plenty more examples of fallacies on the page (which is incidentally an excellent South African blog).