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miriam_eI finally got around to reading the latest Teaching Biology blog post almost a week afterwards. It was on "Gradients" and "Fields" in Developmental Biology: A history of the ideas. A wonderful, short intro to the topic.
What surprised me was that Alan Turing, that wonderful, luminous thinker, had published an article on the topic way back in 1951! What an amazing person he was! If not for other people's homophobia he would likely still be alive and driving our thinking forward. His agile mind accomplished so much! I so wish he was still here. It makes me want to cry when I think of people's revolting bigotry killing that wonderful mind.
On the opposite end of the spectrum of mental prowess is Rupert Sheldrake. When I did a Google search for morphogenetic fields, the 13 results were, all but one, pointing to Sheldrake's absurd notions. How could such damaged thinking gain such enormous traction today? It just depresses me that I still meet people who believe Sheldrake's lunacy. If you haven't heard of it, Sheldrake says that things simply happening makes it easier for those things to happen later elsewhere. For instance, if some people learn something then it is supposedly easier for others to learn it even if they have no connection with the earlier group. He even put this forward as an "explanation" for the growth of crystals! Unfortunately it isn't any kind of explanation, but is the opposite; it is obfuscation.
I, and many others often bemoan the numbers of people attracted to wonky thinking, like homeopathy, crystal healing, astrology, and such stuff. Unfortunately, I think some of the blame can be placed at the door of science journals that obstruct the path to ordinary citizens learning about their world. Many specialty journals originally grew out of researchers' need to circulate information to their fellows. Unfortunately, the amount of money charged for access to that knowledge put it well beyond the reach of interested citizens. This was almost excusable back in the day when paper was the only way to spread such information, but now, when the internet can make such information free (or nearly so) then the high prices serve only to keep publishing companies rich and the public ignorant. This is especially obnoxious in the case of papers that were originally published before the recent obscene copyright extensions, and which should really be freely available, as part of our shared cultural heritage.
Please boycott expensive, snobbish publishers that work to exclude people instead of spreading knowledge. Please consider publishing online via a blog or in journals that make free full-text available, such as those listed at DOAJ - The Directory of Open Access Journals and Highwire and The Strategian.
Books can also be published online for free and made available through Project Gutenberg, WikiBooks, Textbook Revolution, http://www.freescience.info, or just a stand-alone website, like Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, Online Textbook of Bacteriology, Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, Motion Mountain - Online Physics textbook, and Developmental Biology.
What surprised me was that Alan Turing, that wonderful, luminous thinker, had published an article on the topic way back in 1951! What an amazing person he was! If not for other people's homophobia he would likely still be alive and driving our thinking forward. His agile mind accomplished so much! I so wish he was still here. It makes me want to cry when I think of people's revolting bigotry killing that wonderful mind.
On the opposite end of the spectrum of mental prowess is Rupert Sheldrake. When I did a Google search for morphogenetic fields, the 13 results were, all but one, pointing to Sheldrake's absurd notions. How could such damaged thinking gain such enormous traction today? It just depresses me that I still meet people who believe Sheldrake's lunacy. If you haven't heard of it, Sheldrake says that things simply happening makes it easier for those things to happen later elsewhere. For instance, if some people learn something then it is supposedly easier for others to learn it even if they have no connection with the earlier group. He even put this forward as an "explanation" for the growth of crystals! Unfortunately it isn't any kind of explanation, but is the opposite; it is obfuscation.
I, and many others often bemoan the numbers of people attracted to wonky thinking, like homeopathy, crystal healing, astrology, and such stuff. Unfortunately, I think some of the blame can be placed at the door of science journals that obstruct the path to ordinary citizens learning about their world. Many specialty journals originally grew out of researchers' need to circulate information to their fellows. Unfortunately, the amount of money charged for access to that knowledge put it well beyond the reach of interested citizens. This was almost excusable back in the day when paper was the only way to spread such information, but now, when the internet can make such information free (or nearly so) then the high prices serve only to keep publishing companies rich and the public ignorant. This is especially obnoxious in the case of papers that were originally published before the recent obscene copyright extensions, and which should really be freely available, as part of our shared cultural heritage.
Please boycott expensive, snobbish publishers that work to exclude people instead of spreading knowledge. Please consider publishing online via a blog or in journals that make free full-text available, such as those listed at DOAJ - The Directory of Open Access Journals and Highwire and The Strategian.
Books can also be published online for free and made available through Project Gutenberg, WikiBooks, Textbook Revolution, http://www.freescience.info, or just a stand-alone website, like Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, Online Textbook of Bacteriology, Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, Motion Mountain - Online Physics textbook, and Developmental Biology.