Seed magazine

Because the reborn Seed magazine has also sent me a copy of their October issue, because they mention this blog alongside with other blogs, it may be expected that I join Clifford Johnson and Peter Woit and write a couple of nice words about them, too.



The design is very attractive and the magazine only costs 5 USD for 100 pages. The cover page apparently shows an animal that has been constructed via Intelligent Design. Its face is composed entirely of the mouth and it's really disgusting. I assume that this picture belongs to an article of Chris Mooney - a blogosphere's well-known far left-wing political manipulator of science - about a very cheap topic: namely the assertion that creationism and George Bush are wrong. The article is not really about science but rather about various general arguments of authors of a textbook with the Christians and similar things.

While I agree with most Mooney's opinions about evolution, I strongly dislike his politicization of science. George Bush is not a leading biologist and no one pretends it. His opinions about the origin of species follow the same pattern as the opinion of hundreds of millions of his fellow Christians. His opinion is not threatening scientific research in any way. It's just scientifically insufficient - but it is equally scientifically irrelevant. And it is completely unfair to pretend that it is just the Christians whose religion affects their opinions about science. During the controversy about the "innate aptitudes" we have seen that the feminist religion has the very same effect on the far left-wing believers. Science becomes secondary once a belief is threatened.

Some other articles are about the cosmic relaxation to 3D - an attempt of Lisa Randall and Andreas Karch to explain the dimensionality of our spacetime using an inverse Brandenberger-Vafa mechanism applied to spacetime (or brane) dimensions embedded in the 10D spacetime instead of the worldsheet dimensions within the 4D spacetime. I kind of worked on it and the idea is appealing - and there will be a new paper by Andreas, Lisa, and Liam that may convince new people that their picture works and localizes gravity into the right number of brane dimensions.

Other articles are about buddhism and science, why we love Einstein, four new species, and many other things.