A Fish Eye View » Science news

Sociology accepts genetics

Mason Posner — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:05:30 +0000

The long history of sociologists ignoring the role of genetics in human behavior is being challenged. The Chronicle asks:

If sociologists ignore genes, will other academics — and the wider world — ignore sociology?

Some in the discipline are telling their peers just that. With study after study finding that all sorts of personal characteristics are heritable — along with behaviors shaped by those characteristics — a see-no-gene perspective is obsolete.

A new supplement of the American Journal of Sociology is devoted to the integration of genetics into the field. With titles like:

this supplement should make some great reading (a few of the articles are open access if you do not have a subscription). Hopefully the integration of genetics and sociology will break through the academic barriers that have made nature/nurture debates unproductive.

Holiday debauchery ain’t so bad

Mason Posner — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 13:00:43 +0000

If the holidays and New Years has left you feeling that you took some years off your life, you’ll feel better reading this.

And if last night’s party got a bit out of hand and today you can’t smell the difference between lemons and vanilla, this may help you find out why.

Meteorologists vs. climatologists

Mason Posner — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 04:42:24 +0000

There is little doubt among climatologists that the world is getting warmer and that human activity is the primary cause. The World’s governments have accepted this concept, although at the just ended UN conference in Poland they have not reached much agreement on how to slow these climatic changes. But it seems word has not seeped into the TV studios of local weatherpeople.

The Plain Dealer has an interesting article on how our local meteorologists, and many around the country, do not think human activities contribute to global warming and that the extent of upcoming changes is overhyped.

Dick Goddard

Bernier and Dick Goddard — the patriarch of Cleveland weather forecasters — predict the weather at WJW Channel 8.Both cite natural fluctuations in the Earth’s climate and dismiss the industrialization of the 20th century and the subsequent spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide as the cause for warming.

Goddard compared the current anxiety over warming with the global cooling concerns of the 1970s, which have since dissipated. He and Bernier both point to solar cycles as the key ingredient in climate change.

Bernier also said he believes the climate is no longer warming — but, rather, cooling again.

“I have a hunch that in 10 years we’re all going to be longing for global warming because it will be so cold,” Bernier said. His Web site, andrebernier.com, links to a Canadian documentary that suggests the same.

It is not just the air in Cleveland. This is apparently a common view within the meteorological community across the country.

The most notable example of dissent among meteorologists has been the Weather Channel’s founder, John Coleman, now a TV forecaster in San Diego.

Coleman — whom Seitter quickly points out remained with the Weather Channel for only a year in the early 1980s — has said human-induced warming is “the greatest scam in history.”

There have been others, from the longtime director of the National Hurricane Center to Accu-Weather.com’s long-range forecaster, who told The Plain Dealer that “global warming is being forced down the throats of the public.”

So what gives? Where are these “hunches” coming from?

Jay Hobgood, head of the Atmospheric Sciences Department at Ohio State University, agreed. He said the university teaches the IPCC findings on global warming, but allows for debate.

“The day-to-day meteorologists are seeing anecdotal evidence, but not the research that goes back thousands of years,” he said. “The two disciplines are very related, but the time span being looked at is very different.

“Looking at the daily weather doesn’t necessarily tell you the climate is changing.”

Mongolian fossil poachers take Cleveland dinosaur

Mason Posner — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 19:09:24 +0000

The Cleveland Plain Dealer has an interesting article on a specimen of Tarbosaurus bataar that was to be exhumed in Mongolia last year by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s Michael Ryan, curator of vertebrate paleontology. Tarbosaurus may be the sister genus to Tyrannosaurus, and some argue that they belong in the same genus. When Ryan first found the specimen in 2005 poachers had already taken the skull, hands and feet. The remaining parts would still have been the largest Tarbosaurus specimen in North America but Ryan’s crew was not prepared to extract it that year, and he was not able to get back in 2006. When they returned in 2007 all of it had disappeared.

This story illustrates some of the modern political and cultural consequences of moving fossil specimens out of developing countries. This specimen would have been transported to Cleveland for study and then eventually returned to Mongolia, unlike earlier times when the specimen would not have been returned. Because Mongolia is tightening its export controls to limit poaching it will be harder to move research specimens out of the country in the future. Local paleontologists hope to develop research facilities in Mongolia itself so that these specimens can be studied there.

Cleveland knows this process well – perhaps the most famous fossil specimen ever, Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), was brought back to the Cleveland Museum by Donald Johanson in 1974 and all casts of this specimen around the world are made at the museum. The originals, however, were given to the Ethiopian National Museum nine years later. Her remains were recently on tour in the United States, which produced some controversy back in Ethiopia.