Our division chips in on a goat through Heifer International in lieu of cards and gifts to each other. And that was the last act of kindness I participated in, although as I've been doing it for the past four years its not really random.

Woot! Thanks.

I'm making brownie cookies later in a random act of kindness for my family. And, um, me.

I have a question about scientific reporting. IO9 is pretty resoundingly crap at it--often the articles are based on the abstract and I can find more information than that in a ten minute search. The primary writer who does this is also pretty crappy with numbers in general and stats in specific, and flippantly conflates groups in ways that are at best, damaging to the strength of his argument, and at worst pretty deeply offensive.

Now, when he writes an article like this, titled...ahah! The shithead just changed the title. It used to be "Scientists confirm that homosexuality is not genetic but it arises in the womb", but now they've stricken "confirm" and replaced it with "claim"--that was my entire question--I don't see how this can possibly be definitively proven by just what was written, but I guess he got properly called on it (he's responded to me with "don't cares" when I point out that his language is implying untruths, but he just has no shame) I imagine someone on staff called him on this, because he ignores commenters.

I skipped over that article because of the original title.

Is there a shortage of good science writers, or are they just not getting hired by places like IO9?

I believe there's a general shortage of good science writers.

Is there a shortage of good science writers, or are they just not getting hired by places like IO9?

Trained science journalists cost more than general interest journalists, so they're not really getting hired anywhere anymore outside of science-specific publications.

Moreover, epi-marks are usually produced from scratch with each generation

I haven't read the original paper, but I'm fairly sure this is simply false. I remember listening to a biology lecture series years ago which talked about how epigenetic information ripples down through generations (and how trying to distinguish between genetic and environmental causes to explain biological characteristics is in almost all cases a false dichotomy to begin with).

Woot! Thanks.

and now I have a new act of kindness in my ledger

Everybody wins!

Except for science writers.

The new research about epigenetic effects is seriously blowing my mind: it really does a job on the whole nurture/nature debate.

In other news, have a Hobbit Dwarf cheat-sheet: [link]