Culture

 That’s promising. Imagine: Margaret Hamburg at AAAS isn’t wondering what’s wrong with the taxpaying world for doubting. She is wondering why we doubt. No, really. She writes at AAAS: “I would like to better understand the increasing skepticism about science,” she said. “It concerns and surprises me on many levels. I think it is important that we as the science community, led by AAAS, are getting out and learning, talking to people, trying to make sure that we are not a closed community, but one that is truly engaging the wider public.” Four observation from UD News: – Peer review, is absolutely and totally bust. Retraction Watch might help you get back on track with that stuff. – Also listen to Read More ›

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 ›

Barry Arrington noted night that Richard Dawkins is beginning to overcome the cannibalism taboo. Sure, whatever, as long as we are spared the details … A question looms, in light of this kind of thing: This view extends even to those who have died, which is why we treat the deceased in a respectful manner and why desecrating the dead is considered to be immoral and is against the law — even in war. Dawkins, of course, rejects the concept, considering it “speciesist,” e.g., discrimination against animals. He thinks we are just a collection of carbon molecules and certainly of no intrinsic value simply and merely because we are human. (For example, he has yearned for the creation of a human/chimp Read More ›

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.

Whatever that means. From Kerry Grens at the Scientist: The administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scott Pruitt, said that evolution, at least as it concerns the origins of humans, is a philosophical and not scientific matter, according to audio from a 2005 radio show unearthed by Politico. “There aren’t sufficient scientific facts to establish the theory of evolution,” Pruitt said. More. What exactly is the “theory of evolution”? Efforts to establish it seem to end either in tautologies like “survival of the fittest” or advertisements for atheism/Christian atheism, none of which are part of Pruitt’s remit anyhow. Apparently, Pruitt’s boss Donald Trump gets evolution wrong too: Human evolution has a public relations problem. That isn’t just because Read More ›

Richard Weikart, UCal history prof, writes to note that he recently gave a talk at North Dakota State Univ. on “Darwinism and the Death of Humanity,” using material from his book, The Death of Humanity And the Case for Life: It’s still legal to offend people by talking about this stuff. See also: Weikart vs Darwin on the value of human life

From John Gray at New Statesman, reviewing Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Science, Reason, Humanism, and Progress: To think of this book as any kind of scholarly exercise is a category mistake. The purpose of Pinker’s laborious work is to reassure liberals that they are on “the right side of history”. He is an evangelist for science – or, to be more exact, an ideology of scientism. Along with reason, humanism and progress, science features as one of the core Enlightenment values that Pinker lists at the start of the book. But for him science is more than a bunch of methods that are useful in conjecturing how the world works: it provides the basis of ethics and Read More ›

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 ›

From Catherine Offord at the at The Scientist: In one recent project, for example, Schroeter and her advisor Mary Schweitzer extracted and analyzed collagen peptides from just 200 mg of an 80-million-year-old fossil of a Cretaceous-era herbivore, Brachylophosaurus canadensis, excavated in Montana. The amino acid sequences of those peptides, published last year, placed the dinosaur on a branch of the phylogenetic tree between crocodiles and basal birds such as ostriches.1 What’s more, the team’s collection of analyzable peptides from the ancient specimen suggests that there might be other fossils out there with similar molecular information hidden in them. Although the findings were controversial—some researchers still doubt that proteins can resist degradation for tens of millions of years—Schroeter is one of a Read More ›

  From Richard Weikart, author of The Death of Humanity, on Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Science, Reason, Humanism, and Progress, at ENST: In his zeal to defend science from the onslaught of those allegedly waging a “war on science” Steven Pinker (in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education taken from his recent book, Enlightenment Now) cries foul against anyone who dares suggest that science (including Darwinian science) has anything to do with racism. Racism, Pinker informs us — as if anyone needed to be informed — is much older than the dastardly scientific racism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Pinker admits that scientific racists deserve our opprobrium, but he rescues science from any Read More ›

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 ›

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 ›

We’ve heard plenty from the transhumanists and the pillpushers who think we can medicate our way to eternity. But now this, from Peter Hoffmann at Nautilus: Nanoscale thermal physics guarantees our decline, no matter how many diseases we cure. There is a vigorous discussion inside the aging research community about whether to classify aging as a disease. Many researchers studying specific diseases, cellular systems, or molecular components would like to see their favorite research subject take the mantle of “the cause” of aging. But the sheer number of possibilities being put forward refutes the very possibility. They can’t all be the cause of aging. Leonard Hayflick, the original discoverer of cellular aging, pointed out in his provocatively titled article “Biological Read More ›

Science journalists are actually fun— provided they are not just a flock of page boys for science boffins: This, for example, from Alex Berezow at ACSH: 314 Action’s stated mission is laudable. It includes, among other things, a desire to “elect more leaders… from STEM backgrounds” and to “strengthen communication among the STEM community, the public and our elected officials.” One would be left with the impression that the mission is bipartisan, which would be outstanding. Unfortunately, it is not. The leadership are all Democrats. All the candidates 314 Action has endorsed are Democrats. The site’s news page refers to Republicans as “anti-science denialists,” and one of the endorsed candidates refers to a GOP politician as “science’s public enemy number Read More ›

It’s not like the United States put a man on the moon and then brought him back or supervised mapping the human genome or anything useful like that. So it stands to reason that anyone at all, including people who live in countries where witchcraft is a capital offense, are free to fret about Florida classrooms. The beauty of pomo (post-modernism) is that it never needs to make sense, just make complaints. From Giorgia Guglielmi at Nature: Education bills would allow people who live in the state to review and recommend instructional materials to be used in schools. That’s shocking, especially when you consider that the people who live in the state are forced to pay for the schools and Read More ›