Biopolitical alerted me to a paper by Colin W. Clark summarising the current state of misunderstanding of fisheries economics.¹ This prompts two thoughts, one about Clark, the other a response to Marcelino Fuentes, proprietor of Biopolitical.

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Wheel, meet butterfly.

Pal Neddie has done a bang-up job on The Da Vinci Code, including introducing someone to the word cackhanded, testimony to Ned’s own time in foreign fields. I have not, myself, picked up the aforementioned book, and would sooner suck out my own eyeballs than read it, so I...

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I did not realize ‘mendacity’ was a 50-cent word. That’s what academic life has done to me.

A new film about evolution looks like fun, if the NYT report is anything to go by. Randy Olson -- that’s him quoted above -- is a biologist turned film maker, whose Flock of Dodos lets scientists ta...

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A very interesting paper in PLOS Biology makes a convincing case that a mutation in a gene called APOC3 is linked to long life in people. Nir Barzilai, of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and his team looked for this particular genetic needle in a haystack of 214 centenarians. This was sma...

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I’d like to recommend Prof. Rodney Stark's latest podcast. Alas, I cannot.

Not because of the ideas. The lecture continues his series on religion (blogged earlier) by looking at the rise of different religious groups in Rome, effectively making the case that the dead hand of state-subsidized re...

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