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Academic Freedom

Back to “Science sez”? (What makes or privileges “scientific knowledge”?)

It seems we cannot escape epistemological questions when we address ID issues. AK opens the squeaky-hinged door yet again in the US National Association of Scholars thread. My comment: KF, 9: >>[AK,] I see your: If they are published in reputable peer reviewed journals, they are scientific findings. We need to distinguish key terms and address underlying issues on logic and warrant. Truth (following Ari who got it right) says of what is that it is and of what is not that it is not — accurate description of reality. As potentially knowing, rational and responsible subjects, we face the challenge that we are finite, fallible, morally struggling (is is not ought) and too often ill-willed. To credibly know objective Read More ›

Why science needs free speech

Adam Perkins offers a revealing example at Quillette: But why do we specifically need free speech in science? Surely we just take measurements and publish our data? No chit chat required. We need free speech in science because science is not really about microscopes, or pipettes, or test tubes, or even Large Hadron Colliders. These are merely tools that help us to accomplish a far greater mission, which is to choose between rival narratives, in the vicious, no-holds-barred battle of ideas that we call “science”. For example, stomach problems such as gastritis and ulcers were historically viewed as the products of stress. This opinion was challenged in the late 1970s by the Australian doctors Robin Warren and Barry Marshall, who Read More ›

Science prof’s YouTube banned? Because science has become a government

From David Klinghoffer at ENST: Cardiff University philosopher Orestis Palermos was at the center of a stir last week for a claim he made, in an online lecture, that evolutionary biology is as much of a pseudoscience as creationism, because it relies very heavily on ad hoc explanations for data after they have been discovered, rather than making bold universal predictions beforehand that hold up. Critics have been saying this for decades, and it’s encouraging to know that others can see it too. When this happens it is always entertaining to watch the consternation of our fundamentalist Darwinist friends. In response they have, of course, flexed their muscles to shut him up, or at least hide the intro video. It Read More ›

“Burning” climate change dissenters

From Peter Rees at Quadrant: The Little Ice age was quite severe in Europe from 1550- 1700. After the prosperity and plenty of the medieval warm period, the LIA led to impoverishment, crop failure, starvation and a resurgence in witch burnings. Every misfortune was an excuse to accuse someone of being a witch working under the direction of Satan. Many of these accusations were the result of some calamity caused by an extreme weather event. For example, in 1626 a hailstorm struck Germany and dropped a metre of hail. Two days later an Arctic front descended on Europe. Rivers froze, grapes on the vine ‘exploded’ and rye and barley crops were destroyed. Then came a severe frost the likes of Read More ›

Polite request to stop cyberbullying scientists falls, of course, on deaf ears

From Alex Berezow at ACSH: Their first coordinated campaign against Mr. Neidenbach targeted his Facebook page. Facebook capitulated, temporarily blocking his page and banning Mr. Neidenbach – for the “crime” of promoting biotechnology. His page was soon reinstated, but their success only served to embolden the activists. Their most recent tactic is to try to get Mr. Neidenbach fired from his school, so they have accused him of stealing from his students and mocking people with intellectual disabilities. Of course, neither of these are true, but that hardly matters. As a “public figure” – a middle school teacher with a blog – people can say whatever they want about him with no consequence. That’s why Medium blogger Ena Valikov is Read More ›

Scientists who laboured in comparative obscurity who made a big difference

Science historian Michael Flannery kindly writes to offer a list (in case anyone was tempted to measure achievement by invites to yada yada talk shows): 1) Girolamo Fracastoro (aka Fracastorius) proposed a form of germ theory of disease in his On contagion and contagious disease in 1546 over 300 hears before Pasteur. 2) Josiah Clark Nott suggested that malaria and yellow fever were transmitted by an insect vector in 1848, mocked and derided in its day, Nott’s theory was vindicated by Albert F. A. King’s study in 1883. A word on Nott: At first Nott, a polygenist racist, opposed Darwin’s monogenist evolutionary theory but later came to fully accept it as equally supportive of his racist ideas. 3) When Carlos Read More ›

Evergreen PoMo: Stop trying to “get” science. It is white supremacy.

Of course we knew the PoMos would get round to this. From John Sexton at Hot Air, quoting a now hard-to-find memo from Evergreen College: Earlier this week, some graffiti was spotted on campus that sought to couterpose intersectionality and the sciences, equating the latter with white supremacy. Facilities staff have completed the chore of cleaning up the graffiti. The slur against the sciences, however interpreted, is offensive and disappointing to see given the values we espouse and our shared commitment to equity and interdisciplinarity. Using graffiti to condemn one discipline or summarilty dismiss one group in favor of others runs counter to these values. Evergreen strives to bring multiple lenses into our work, to afford respect to all who Read More ›

Yes, the Jordan Peterson riots are coming to science too

Ask Heather Heying. But first, get a load of this: From a quiet, historic U hamlet in Canada (one I have often enjoyed visiting), the SJWs emerge like an irruption of disease: Queens University in that hamlet (Kingston) puts the matter oh-so-politely: Of the roughly 150 people who attended the protest, most exercised peaceful demonstration. However, several individuals engaged in or incited the destruction of property. Several Kingston police officers arrived at the scene of the protest. Roughly 20 minutes into the lecture, protesters outside hit the stained glass windows and doors outside of Grant Hall. They also chanted “why are you hiding?” and “let us in.” One protester broke a stained glass window after they repeatedly hit it with their Read More ›

New internet venue: Free Science Today

Here: Every day scientific discovery is held back as inquiring minds are boxed in by a history of academic reprisal when teaching or research runs afoul of current orthodoxies. More. The site, sponsored by Discovery Institute, won’t lack for stories. Most of us don’t have time to tell them all. And could we get one thing straight?: Science boffins want it that way. The boffins are the same people who obsess about what Florida parents want their kids to learn in school but turn a blind eye to the death penalty elsewhere for witchcraft. Was there something else you needed to know about the boffins? See also: Historic journal Nature is freaked out over American public school science classrooms – again.

Toxic snow has claimed Stone Age artwork: Willendorf Venus banned from Facebook

Since reinstated. That’s what comes of hiring toxic snowflakes to make decisions. No, really: From Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason: A pudgy little figure with wide hips and ample breasts, the Venus of Willendorf was discovered in 1908 but originally dates to the Stone Age. One of the oldest surviving art works in the world, the limestone sculpture now resides in Vienna’s Natural History Museum, where a woman named Laura Ghianda snapped a pic last December and then posted the image to Facebook. It was promptly removed. A notice from Facebook explained that the naked figure was inappropriate for the social site. According to the company’s official policy, “photographs of paintings, sculptures, and other art that depicts nude figures” are Read More ›

The intellectual dark web: Increasingly, a refuge from approved stupid noise

From Douglas Murray at the UK Spectator: Of course the intellectual dark web partly thrives because it does not have the limitations of the traditional media. For any public intellectual or thinker the experience of a Newsnight or Channel 4 News studio is always the same. The evening is wrecked by having to travel to a studio where you will be given a maximum of three minutes’ airtime to correct a set of false presumptions which the presenter has already gathered against you. ‘So what you’re saying’ could be the epitaph for this form of journalism. There is no opportunity for nuance, not much opportunity for correction and very little to recommend it to anyone but the producers. Certainly not Read More ›

Biology is real, if not popular: Lone scientist squares off with social justice warriors

Remember Heather Heying, wife and co-belligerent of Bret Weinstein in the science vs. snowflakes wars? Guess what happened when she tried saying in public what everyone knows? Daily Wire: On February 17, Portland State University held an event to discuss viewpoint diversity moderated by PSU philosophy professor Peter Boghossian, with a panel including former Evergreen State biologist Heather E. Heying, writer Helen Pluckrose, and former Google engineer James DaMore, who was fired in 2017 after writing a memo about the biological differences between men and women. When Heying spoke of the simple biological differences between men and women, some leftist activists hilariously threw a fit, rising up in protest and sabotaging the sound system as they exited. … Heying answered, Read More ›

C. S. Lewis and J. R.R. Tolkien on science and authoritarianism

From Mike Kugler in Northwestern Review: Long before Tolkien began writing The Lord of the Rings and Lewis converted to “mere Christianity,” their suspicions of modern science, the heart of the modern worldview, and anxiety about Europe’s future were latent. The Great War illustrated terribly how well-grounded were their concerns. Later, in the 1930s, Europeans watched creeping authoritarian and fascist movements, further illustrating the danger from the Europe-wide threat of totalitarianism. Through the 1940s Lewis’ association of Darwinian evolution and science augmenting human power and arrogance deepened. His greatest concern was not evolution alone; I don’t know of evidence that Lewis dismissed Darwin’s argument or conclusions. Lewis’ concern, I think, was that the Darwinian account afforded rational permission to “Progressives” Read More ›

Nick Matzke’s research critiqued in Journal of BioGeography

Readers may remember Nick Matzke, especially for getting a publisher to abandon the Cornell University papers and for other contributions to Darwinism. A reader now writes to tell us that two Field Museum researchers have just published a critique of Nick Matzke’s (probable) most important contribution to research so far. “Conceptual and statistical problems with the DEC+J model of founder-event speciation and its comparison with DEC via model selection” by Richard H. Ree, Isabel Sanmartín, Journal of Biogeography. 2018 Abstract: Phylogenetic studies of geographic range evolution are increasingly using statistical model selection methods to choose among variants of the dispersal-extinction-cladogenesis (DEC) model, especially between DEC and DEC+J, a variant that emphasizes “jump dispersal,” or founder-event speciation, as a type of Read More ›