Science

From an article titled "Scientists Call Fish Fossil the 'Missing Link'" by John Noble Wilford in the NY Times:

Scientists have discovered fossils of a 375 million-year-old fish, a large scaly creature not seen before, that they say is a long-sought "missing link" in the evolution of some fishes from water to a life walking on four limbs on land. In addition to confirming elements of a major transition in evolution, the fossils are widely seen by scientists as a powerful rebuttal to religious creationists, who hold a literal biblical view on the origins and development of life. Several well-preserved skeletons of the fossil fish were uncovered in sediments of former stream beds in the Canadian Arctic, 600 miles from the North Pole, it is being reported on Thursday in the journal Nature. The skeletons have the fins and scales and other attributes of a giant fish, four to nine feet long. But on closer examination, scientists found telling anatomical traits of a transitional creature, a fish that is still a fish but exhibiting changes that anticipate the emergence of land animals - a predecessor thus of amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans. The discovering scientists called the fossils the most compelling examples yet of an animal that was at the cusp of the fish-tetrapod transition. While Dr. Shubin's team played down the fossil's significance in the raging debate over Darwinian theory, which is opposed mainly by some conservative Christians in the United States, other scientists were not so reticent. They said this should undercut the creationists' argument that there is no evidence in the fossil record of one kind of creature becoming another kind. Dr. Novacek responded in an interview: "We've got Archaeopteryx, an early whale that lived on land and now this animal showing the transition from fish to tetrapod. What more do we need from the fossil record to show that the creationists are flatly wrong?"

The other day I blogged the recent study that showed prayer didn't aid heart patients' recoveries. I later saw the following press release from the Ayn Rand Institute:

"The Harvard medical study showing that prayer has no effect on recovery from heart surgery is shocking," said Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute. "It is not shocking that prayer has no medical effects--what's shocking is that scientists at Harvard Medical School are wasting their time studying the medical effects of prayer." "Science is a method of gaining knowledge by systematically studying things that actually exist and have real effects. The notion that someone's health can be affected by the prayers or wishes of strangers is based on nothing but imagination and faith. Such blind belief represents the rejection of reason and science, and is not worthy of serious, rational consideration. What's next? A study of the medical effects of blowing out birthday candles?" "Every minute these doctors spend conducting this sort of faith-based study is one minute less spent on reality-based research--research that actually has hope of leading to real medical cures."

I kind of think they have a point though of course I don't share their perspective that imagination and faith are equivalent and both are associated with things that don't "actually exist." I can see why it would seem pretty silly to try to test the possible effectiveness of expressions of faith via the tools of science.

Encyclopaedia Britannica finally responded to Nature's claim that the encyclopedia and wikipedia had comparable levels of inaccuracy. From an AP story by David Carpenter on abcnews.com:

Encyclopaedia Britannica has completed an exhaustive research article on an unlikely new topic questions about its accuracy. The publisher's verdict: It was wronged. Firing back at an article in the science journal Nature that likened its accuracy to that of Wikipedia, the Internet site that lets anyone contribute, Britannica said in a 20-page statement this week that "almost everything about the journal's investigation … was wrong and misleading." It demanded a retraction. The venerable encyclopedia publisher, which has enjoyed an almost unassailed reputation for reliability since the 18th century, called Nature's research invalid, its study poorly carried out and its findings "so error-laden that it was completely without merit." "The entire undertaking from the study's methodology to the misleading way Nature 'spun' the story was misconceived," Britannica said.

The original Nature news story has been updated with links to Britannica's analysis and Nature's response. Regardless, I love wikipedia.

Job cuts at Dow seem to have tapered off for now, though the seemingly-endless re-org process is on-going. DuPont announced plans to slash 1500 more jobs. From an AP article by Randall Chase on abcnews.com:

Chemicals maker DuPont Co. said Wednesday it plans to cut 1,500 jobs and close four facilities in Europe in a restructuring of its performance coatings business and raised its overall earnings outlook. DuPont officials said the restructuring, which will take about 18 months to complete, will reduce annual costs by about $165 million. The Wilmington-based company anticipates taking a pretax charge up to $165 million in the first quarter, with additional costs of up to $55 million over the next year. In a separate announcement, the company raised its first-quarter profit guidance to 80 cents per share, up from a January estimate of 70 cents per share. For 2006, DuPont revised its earnings estimate to $2.70 a share, up 10 cents from its earlier projection.

From a story in the BBC News, the candidates for the Aventis Prize for popular science writing have been announced:

• Electric Universe - How Electricity Switched on the Modern World, by David Bodanis (Little Brown)
• Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, by Jared Diamond (Penguin Allen Lane)
• The Elements of Murder - A History of Poison, John Emsley (Oxford University Press)
• The Gecko's Foot - Bio-inspiration - Engineering New Materials from Nature, by Peter Forbes (Fourth Estate)
• The Silicon Eye - How a Silicon Valley Company Aims to Make All Current Computers, Cameras, and Cell Phones Obsolete, by George Gilder (WW Norton)
• Parallel Worlds - The Science of Alternative Universes and our Future in the Cosmos, by Michio Kaku (Penguin)
• Power, Sex, Suicide - Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life, by Nick Lane (Oxford University Press)
• Venomous Earth - How Arsenic Caused the World's Worst Mass Poisoning, by Andrew Meharg (Macmillan)
• Empire of the Stars - Friendship, Obsession and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes, by Arthur I. Miller (Little Brown)
• Seven Deadly Colours - The Genius of Nature's Palette and how it Eluded Darwin, by Andrew Parker (Simon & Schuster)
• The Truth About Hormones - What's Going on when we're Tetchy, Spotty, Fearful, Tearful or Just Plain Awful, by Vivienne Parry (Atlantic Books)
• Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis - The Quest to Find the Hidden Law of Prime Numbers, by Dan Rockmore (Jonathan Cape)
• The Fruits of War - How War and Conflict have Driven Science, by Michael White (Simon & Schuster)