The process of science journalism

I saw this on Pharyngula and just had to pass it along:

WTF?!?

Oh great. The stretch of Florida road 9-A that I frequently use to drive to campus has just been renamed the "Ronald Reagan Memorial Highway."

Here in Jacksonville we already had at least one bridge and one street named for Klan members, and a high school named after that genocidal maniac, Civil War criminal, and Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest. And now we have a highway named for a vicious, murderous ex-president who perpetrated a terrorist war against the people of Central America back in the 1980s. Is there a theme in all this? Well, maybe, but I'll explore that later after this bout of crankiness wears off.

Meanwhile I have to find another way to get to school...

Sign this petition

If you admired Senator Edward Kennedy's struggle for health care reform, sign this petition:

PETITION TO THE SENATE: "Ted Kennedy was a courageous champion for health care reform his entire life. In his honor, name the reform bill that passed Kennedy's health committee 'The Kennedy Bill' -- then pass it, and nothing less, through the Senate."

Senator Kennedy and the potato

Sometime last night we lost one of the very few true progressives in the US Senate, Edward M. Kennedy. This is a sad, though not totally unexpected, event, reported at length in other places.

I want to focus here on something else: the largely unreported and underappreciated back story of how Teddy Kennedy and his family, along with other Irish folk, came to be in and around Boston, and what shaped their tendency to be on the liberal side of politics.

It began with the Columbian Exchange, the great transfer of people, plants, animals, and ideas set in motion when an Italian named Cristoforo Colombo, a.k.a. Christopher Columbus, working for the Spanish royalty, ran into the Americas on his way to the Far East. Columbus himself brought with him among other things horses, pigs, cattle, sugar cane, and wheat, all of which helped transform the New World. And he carried back to Europe not only some of the Native Americans he encountered but also various animals and plants. But it was the Spanish conquistadores who followed him who set in motion events that would lead to Edward Kennedy.

In the early 1500s the Spanish reached and conquered the area of South America we now know as Perú and Bolivia. In the Andes, the Spanish found indigenous farmers growing an amazing number of food plants, one of which we now know as papas; potatoes. When potatoes were first taken back to Europe people were reluctant to eat them, using them instead as ornamentals. Eventually, though, potatoes became the preferred food of much of the European poor and working classes, because abundant crops could be grown on small plots of land, even in poor soils. Potatoes helped European populations rebound from years of plague, providing labor for the new factories of the Industrial Revolution.


The Potato Eaters, by Vincent van Gogh

The soils of Ireland were especially productive, and Irish farmers became hugely dependent on potatoes. But then something bad happened: in 1845 a blight appeared that decimated the potato crop, and between 1845 and 1852 around a million people died. About the same number left the island to escape the British government's generally less than robust response to the problem, many landing in the port of Boston and settling there.

The Irish who came to America fleeing the Famine brought with them strong memories of the lack of help offered them by the British, and along with this the idea that it should be government's role to assist in such crises. This idea, that government can do things for ordinary people rather than only for the elite, formed the core ideology of the political party that came to be associated with Irish names like Kennedy and Kerry: the Democratic Party.

What else can I say?

There seem to be a lot of people here in the US who think that: (a) Obama was born outside the US; (b) Obama is anything like Hitler; (c) socialism is the same thing as fascism;(d) health insurance reform will lead to government-mandated euthanasia of old people; (e) legislating access to health care for everyone is a bad thing; (f) private insurance companies don't already ration health care; (g) Medicare, Medicaid, and the programs that provide health care to current and former military personnel are not managed by the government; (h) countries that have national health care are all just like Nazi Germany; (i) countries that have national health care are all just like the Soviet Union; (j) a government-managed public health care plan can't possibly be any good, because the government can't do anything right, but we can't have it because it will be so good that private insurance will face unfair competition...

I could think of more, but as the old saying goes, one picture is worth a thousand words:

Barney Frank does it right

I say chimp, you say orang; let's call the whole thing off!

There is an ongoing debate among scholars of human evolution regarding which living primate is most closely related to humans: chimpanzee or orangutan. The question boils down to: Which of these primates do we share a more recent common ancestor with?

The molecular and geographical evidence suggests chimpanzees as our closest relatives; the orangutan argument is built primarily from shared morphological traits. In either case, what we have are competing hypotheses, neither of which has been definitively falsified as of now.

It's an important issue in human evolution, but that didn't stop The Daily Show with Jon Stewart from tackling it. Enjoy!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Human's Closest Relative
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Spinal Tap Performance