Monthly Archive for September, 2010

From The Economist,

Last Sunday, it emerged that the UN was set to appoint a Malaysian astrophysicist called Mazlan Othman to lead international efforts to respond to visitors from outer space. As the article in the Sunday Times explained, Dr Othman is the head of the UN’s Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa). But then an article on the Guardian’s News Blog seemed to pour cold green slime over the whole story. The Guardian reports that Dr Othman said, “it sounds really cool but I have to deny it”. Dr Othman is quoted as saying she is attending a conference next week on how the world deals with “near-Earth objects”.

This cannot be correct unless Unoosa considers aliens to be near-earth objects (like comets and asteroids). The Guardian did not contact the author of the original piece. Yet it is a matter of record that Dr Othman is due to attend a meeting at the Royal Society next Monday about how science and society should respond to aliens. If she turns up to talk about near-Earth objects, she’ll be politely shown to the transporter chamber.

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From David Sloan Wilson, Evolution for Everyone

The evolutionary community is as active as an alarmed beehive over the critique of inclusive fitness theory recently published in the journal Nature by Martin Nowak, Corina E. Tarnita, and E.O. Wilson. I do not agree with them in every respect but I’m glad that they have aroused the evolutionary community from its stupor. The general public and majority of evolutionary biologists have a pre-1975 understanding that hasn’t even kept pace with modern inclusive fitness theory, not to speak of the debates that will be taking place among the cognoscenti. This is an opportunity for everyone to take stock of the core issues at stake.

It is important to realize that numerous issues are at stake that must be examined one by one. It doesn’t help that Richard Dawkins continues to issue boneheaded statements about group selection, as I recount in my previous post. Inclusive fitness theorists should be joining me in pointing out the errors of these statements, just as I intend to join them in pointing out some errors in the Nowak et al. critique.

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From The Economist,

When a prominent man (or woman) of faith asserts the existence of God, nobody takes notice. But whenever a prominent scientist raises the opposite prospect, all hell is sure to break loose. The latest furore was provoked by Stephen Hawking, one of Britain’s best known scientists and a likely future recipient of the Nobel prize in physics (if, as expected, his 1974 theory that black holes emit radiation despite their notorious all-engulfing gravitational pull is confirmed by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN). On September 2nd The Times, a British daily, published an extensive excerpt (this and other Times links behind a pay wall) from The Grand Design, Dr Hawking’s first major book in nearly a decade, which will hit the shelves on September 9th (reviewed in the Financial Times by Roger Penrose, another big name in British physics).

Never mind the niceties of string theory and its implications for physics. What really got everybody aflutter was his contention that the Big Bang is an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, so that “it is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper.” The jury is still out on whether current theories really are enough to explain the origins of the universe. And the scientific method, with its laborious procedures and peer review, ensures we won’t know for certain in the foreseeable future. But the proposition elicited an immediate if predictable response from another quarter.

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