Astronomers are embarrassing themselves in Prague in a knockdown brawl about the status of Pluto. John McKay covers the details at archy.
In other science news, Michael Bérubé looks at the Department of Education Smart Grants program that lost evolutionary biology. You have to wonder if they checked Dobson’s pockets after his last visit.
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Last night on PBS they showed a rerun of Charlie Rose back sometime in 2005. His guests were James Watson (yes, that James Watson) and E. O. Wilson (yes, that…). When the show originally aired, Watson and Wilson had each just published books about Darwin, not exactly biographies but rather evaluations of Darwin’s place in the history of science, Watson from a molecular biologist’s perspective and Wilson from a field biologist’s. The conversation was fascinating, despite Watson’s all-too-manifest quirks in delivery. The simple version: Darwin’s “Origin” and “Descent” made him among the two or three most significant figures in the history of biology, ever, along with Mendel (who first established the discrete nature of inheritance, though he knew nothing of the mechanism) and of course Watson himself (along with Crick and a third party whose name nobody remembers). And Darwin’s guesses about things he had no direct basis for turned out, with the exception of his guess about heredity, to be pretty much right on the money.
But here are the things the fundamentalist Right will take away from the conversation: Darwin started out a devout Christian and wound up… something else altogether, though it is hard to tell exactly what, and both Wilson and Watson are effectively atheists, for good and sufficient reason from their own perspectives. I wonder if PBS has heard from Dobson yet. And Falwell, and Robertson, and…
Technically there were two others: Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, with Rosalind Franklin being the more important as she took the “pictures” that showed the structure, and supplied the clue that Watson and Crick needed to publish.
She died of cancer prior to the Nobel being awarded, and there are no posthumous Nobels. Wilkins was awarded the Nobel, mostly for pinching one of Franklin’s picture and showing it to Watson and Crick.
Darwin was essentially pushed out of the church by the battle between Huxley and the church. I doubt he altered his personal views at all. Which is the basis for the current problem – many who claim to know what Christianity is refuse to allow the freedom to explore the world. Most scientists become atheists, because they won’t give up science for what some people believe Christianity now demands.