THE ROYAL WEDDING. KATE AND WILLIAM. OR NOT. I see that (some of) my fellow science bloggers are engaging in Search Engine Optimization by contortion, writing about Kate and William and today's Royal Wedding even though there is nothing science-y about it.
The cleverest example is Faye Flam, who recently started an engaging new blog at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Planet of the Apes is about evolution, a marvelous — and brave — topic for a general-audience blog. This post is about inbreeding in Europe's royal families (and Darwin's, and Florida panthers). She drags William and Kate into it by pointing out that their marriage is not an example of royal inbreeding. As does Luke Jostins at Genomes Unzipped, He concludes that Kate and William are less related to each other than the average Brit newlyweds.
You see what I mean about contortion.
Among my forebears are Irish rebels who would, I'm sure, have been American revolutionaries too except that they didn't get here until the 19th century. So I am in despair at all this royalist sentiment, especially about the Brit royals. What is the matter with you people? It's unAmerican!
Nothing contorted about that.
ON THE AUTISM SPECTRUM: ROBERT MACNEIL, ANDREW WAKEFIELD, AND MANY OTHERS. I was a bit shocked when Robert Macneil permitted his daughter generous time to blame her son's autism on vaccines during his News Hour autism series a couple of weeks ago. The well-known newsman, who returned for this brief series at the age of 80 after many years away from the long-lived television program he founded, offered conventional rote balance by saying public health authorities denied a connection between vaccines and the disorder. But it wasn't really enough. And later interviews with docs implied that a possible relationship between childhood vaccines and subtypes of autism was being studied. I expected much blogging in response but couldn't find it, so set the topic aside temporarily. (Find the series and much other material here.)
But it's Autism Awareness Month, after all, and so bloggers have now surfaced — in part, perhaps, because the New York Times magazine last Sunday ran a piece on Andrew Wakefield, the discredited doc who started it all with a Lancet study years ago that the Lancet has retracted and journalist Andrew Deer and the British Medical Journal have shown to be a fraud.
A complete account is the one by Curtis Brainard at the Columbia Journalism Review's Observatory, posted only yesterday. Brainard links to several blog posts and other commentaries, so I won't repeat them here. It's a swell roundup, particularly strong in disentangling the Macneil program's declaration that a government agency has just recommended new studies of vaccines' possible effects in autism subgroups. Turns out those recommendations date to at least 2008, and, furthermore, argue for studying potential environmental causes of all sorts, not just vaccines. Brainard's piece also summarizes the piece on Wakefield and commentaries on it.
Meanwhile, at the Intersection, Chris Mooney has been trying to nail down the claim that the anti-vaccine movement is a green hippie natural foods lefty thing. In his latest post on Wednesday, Mooney concludes that data bearing directly on this topic don't exist, but what polling there is suggests that suspicions about the evil effects of vaccines are tied to no particular political point of view.
And at Respectful Insolence, Orac sets out to show that anti-vaccine fervor and faith in Wakefield have much in common with religion.
Seems to me that analysis could be applied to a lot of policy disputes du jour. The birthers' responses to the Obama birth certificate, for instance. They know in their hearts that Obama is not really entitled to be President. He's African-born and a Muslim sleeper agent. He's Not One of Us. Amen.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC HAS BOUGHT SCIENCEBLOGS.COM. OR NOT. Ivan Oransky, who early this week broke the news that National Geographic has bought that often-contentious pioneering blog network Scienceblogs.com, now reports on a conference call among network bloggers, NatGeo executives. and executives from Seed, the magazine and media company that has owned the network.
And does still, according to a Seed executive during the conference call. All NatGeo will be doing is "leading the charge and managing the website on a day-to-day basis."
Make of that what you will. It sounds to me like what my philospher colleagues used to call a distinction without a difference. It also sounds to me like big changes will be coming to Scienceblogs.com — the biggest since last summer's Pepsi Challenge, which I summarized briefly here.
As the recent conference call made clear, blog posts will henceforth be vetted for conformation to NatGeo standards and practices. That has got to mean cleaning up language like this repetitive repetitive repetitive ERV example from last summer. Perhaps even more of a headache for NatGeo vetters will be comments on blog posts, which tend to be, uh, unfettered.
This problem of comment censorship worries PZ Myers, who writes one of the world's most popular blogs, Pharyngula. He is also worried about how NatGeo standards and practices will affect what he writes. As well he should be. He's a biologist, but his blogging is notable chiefly for fulminations against religion. Hard to imagine NatGeo will be able to live with that.
And yet. And yet. Scienceblogs.com is a top — perhaps the top — network precisely because it is so often over-the-top. The prospect for outrageousness is why those blogs get millions of hopeful clicks from folks looking for the juicy bits, magnetic juicy bits that are also the lure for NatGeo — not to mention its advertisers. What a dilemma. Tame the bloggers and the eyeballs will go elsewhere. Leave the bloggers free to rip — as some of them surely will, just to test the limits — and risk desertion by advertisers who can't stand the heat. Even Fox News has absorbed that lesson.
The NASW cybrarian Russell Clemings has handily collected some additional links here. If you are really really really interested in even more backstory, Christopher Mims, who started Scienceblogs.com for Seed, has been tweeting its early history at the hashtag #SBHistory. But if you haven't the eyes for dozens of 140-character chunklets, Curtis Brainard comes once more to the rescue, performing the public service of gathering them into sentences and paragraphs. Which gathering approximates the long blog post that Mims should have written in the first place.
