Stationary Bandit

From Homeless to Nobel Winner

Yesterday Mario Capecchi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine.  In 1940s, he was homeless and he had no family.  He did not take a bath for six years.  Yet this did not prevent him from reaching the pinnacle of scientific achievement.

He was only 3 when his mother, Lucy Ramberg, a member of a group of artists known as the Bohemians, was sent to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany as a political prisoner for pamphleteering against Nazism and fascism. Anticipating the arrest, Ramberg, who never married Capecchi's father, an officer in the Italian air force, sold her possessions, giving the money to a peasant family that she asked to care for her son. But the money ran out in a year.

"They didn't have the resources to keep me and maintain their own family," the scientist said in a telephone interview yesterday. "So I went on the streets."

Here is the whole story.  It is truly remarkable.

Truth in Science?

Tom Bethell reminds me that

Where science is involved, the problem of self-interested research by government agencies is acute, because people are inclined to assume science is apolitical by nature. In practice, however, it is not difficult for scientists to find what they look for and to persuade the public their findings are not just true but scary. Their white coats, microscopes and test tubes give them a measure of immunity from media scrutiny.

I agree.  I have tried to replicate plenty of published empirical economic development studies with little success.  Furthermore, I have dealt with plenty of people from various international donor agencies who stress satisfying the ideological  demands of the donors rather than understand the sources of the problem. 

Richard Dawkins on Evolution and Intelligent Design

I came across this interview of Richard Dawkins yesterday.  Overall, it did not offer anything new but I found this interesting.

Q:  You criticize intelligent design, saying that "the theistic answer"--pointing to God as designer--"is deeply unsatisfying"--presumably you mean on a logical, scientific level.

Dawkins: Yes, because it doesn’t explain where the designer comes from.

He goes on to mention the low probabilties of a designer existing.  If he believes his claim, then evolution must be "deeply unsatisfying" since it offers no theory of the origin of life.  It offers no explanation of how life began; it offers a theory how it changes over time.  Gregg Easterbrook makes a similar point here.

Prelude to the Planet of the Apes?

For the first time, biologists have documented gorillas in the wild using simple tools, such as poking a stick in a swampy pool of water to check its depth.

Until now, scientists had seen gorillas use tools only in captivity. Among the great apes, tool use in the wild was thought to be a survival skill reserved for smaller chimpanzees and orangutans.

Story here.

Do Lobsters Feel Pain?

Apparently not. 

A new study out of Norway concludes it's unlikely lobsters feel pain, stirring up a long-simmering debate over whether Maine's most valuable seafood suffers when it's being cooked.

Animal activists for years have claimed that lobsters are in agony when being cooked, and that dropping one in a pot of boiling water is tantamount to torture.

The study, funded by the Norwegian government and written by a scientist at the University of Oslo, suggests lobsters and other invertebrates such as crabs, snails and worms probably don't suffer even if lobsters do tend to thrash in boiling water.

Why do the lobsters not fell pain?

"It's a semantic thing: No brain, no pain," said Mike Loughlin, who studied the matter when he was a University of Maine graduate student and is now a biologist at the Maine Atlantic Salmon Commission.

Here is the whole story.

Thoughts on Intelligent Design

Michael Behe writes that

First, what it isn't: the theory of intelligent design is not a religiously based idea, even though devout people opposed to the teaching of evolution cite it in their arguments...Intelligent design proponents do question whether random mutation and natural selection completely explain the deep structure of life. But they do not doubt that evolution occurred. And intelligent design itself says nothing about the religious concept of a creator.

Rather, the contemporary argument for intelligent design is based on physical evidence and a straightforward application of logic. The argument for it consists of four linked claims. The first claim is uncontroversial: we can often recognize the effects of design in nature. For example, unintelligent physical forces like plate tectonics and erosion seem quite sufficient to account for the origin of the Rocky Mountains. Yet they are not enough to explain Mount Rushmore.

He goes on to note that

The strong appearance of design allows a disarmingly simple argument: if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude it's a duck. Design should not be overlooked simply because it's so obvious.

I have never really understood the debate between evolution and intelligent design.  I doubt that we can really scientifically prove either one.  We simply do not have access to the relevant information.  Both are interesting stories that help us to understand the world around us.