I just returned from Bali. A large island in Indonesia just below the equator. It seemed like the perfect place to talk about large flies that either, (a) lay their eggs in the wounds of animals or that (b) transfer diseases when the flies take a blood meal (like the tsetse fly that I work on!). Nothing like a tropical paradise to send your mind thinking about flesh eating flies, heh? The two just seem to go together naturally. Most of the researchers are on-the-ground field entomologists, geneticists or GIS specialists. They came from many parts of the world: Iraq, Brazil, Yemen, Indonesia, Kenya, France, Ethiopia, Austria, Australia, UK and me, USA. We all gave presentations and, no surprise, climate change (CC) was the topic of conversation in many of the presented field studies. The climate change deniers keep picking at supposed anomalies in climate temperature readings and ignore the great swaths of other supporting data. But temperature measurements themselves (which all show global warming) aren’t the only story, there is stunning data showing drastic changes on the ground in real ecological systems. Read the rest of this entry »

To claim that climate change is a conspiracy is to misunderstand science in fundamental ways. To even imagine a scientific conspiracy suggests a lack in science education that scares me. Read the rest of this entry »

OK, I can’t help myself. My book is reviewed by Bored in Vernal here.

I am actually required by law to write a post here at least every month. The judge who imposed my stint as a blogger was very clear that failure to do so would violate my parole and necessitate me being sent to the poky for many many years for crimes against nature (I violated the speed of light). Be that as it may, of late everything I write feels lame. I read it and I think, “There is no one the world that would like to read this.” It’s not that my ability has evaporated (I hope), but I my perception of ability at times slides away. Suddenly everything I do is viewed through a lens of lameness. A bout of failures usually precipitates this. In academic journals acceptance rates hover at around 20% on exceptionally bright and sunny days. That means that rejections are the norm and you are likely spend vast energies of labor and hope only to find yourself at the realization that, it’s oh no burned again. In creative publishing I know it drops below 1%. Rejection is a way of life.

Moreover, I wasn’t nominated for a Niblet, this year. Read the rest of this entry »

David H Bailey (who as written some of The Mormon Organon’s most popular posts) has just developed an amazing website devoted to faith/science issues called Science Meets Religion! I invite everyone to check it out. It is well worth some in-depth exploration. Especially read his opening post “What I have Learned.” Great work David!

Also, teaching a new class has slowed me down a bit in my blogging. I should be back to posting in full form shortly. In the meantime check out my post at By Common Consent.

Let’s start the New Year by ridding ourselves of dilapidated ideas. Clean house on cobwebby perspectives that clutter and constrain our best thinking. To do so, poetry is a good place to start. Mary Oliver begins her poem, Mysteries, Yes: Read the rest of this entry »

Note: This is cross posted at By Common Consent.

“Perhaps you desire to know the manner in which God’s light is ascribed to the heavens and the earth—or, rather, the manner in which God is the light of the heavens and the earth in His own essence. It is not appropriate to keep this knowledge hidden from you, since you already know that God is light, that there is no light other than He, and that He is the totality of lights and the Universal Light.” Al-Ghazali, The Niche of Lights

We live in light. Before me now, the satiny white curtains of my living room have been transformed into a patchwork of bright silver where the morning sun strikes certain places in the fabric’s undulations. Darker areas (still colored white), are created in places where some of the vertical furrows of the drapes shy away from the radiance enjoyed by the alternating sunlit folds. These create striations and dappling that catch my eye and which I experience directly. I notice it more so this morning because I’ve been thinking about light. I want to write about light and I can’t help notice that I am surrounded by it. It fuses within me and although it is scattered around me, I cannot see it until it strikes my eye here in the center of my universe—I am an observer, a participant with light that creates my visual field and informs my consciousness. I experience light as it combines with my mind, integrating my world at a quantum level and then bubbling up into something that can be acted upon at macro scales.

Light. What is it? Read the rest of this entry »

I can think of no higher tribute on this the 150th Anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species than quoting in full its final paragraph:

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Don’t miss this (HT:BCC):

Those of you who missed Ken Millers wonderful BYU address are in for a treat. A friend of mine just complied a list of things you may find useful:

The Nova Program about Intelligent Design – Judgment Day:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/beta/evolution/intelligent-design-trial.html

The link to Kenneth Miller on the Colbert Report:
http://www.millerandlevine.com/talks/colbert.html

And finally, here is his entire lecture given at Brown University (Almost identical to what was given at BYU):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBMgNOXperg

Here are some papers he referenced:

Krauthammer – Phony Theory False Conflict

and

the Dobzhansky paper “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense
Except in the Light of Evolution”

Please don’t make comments if your unwilling to look at these in detail. If you are determined to only read the Intelligent Design Creationism side, this isn’t the site for you. I’m assuming honest seekers here. Intrenched fundamentalist Mormon creationists can form their own Church and add it to that. Intelligent Design Creationism is not friendly to or a part of Mormonism despite its appealing name.