Culture

From coastal geologist Robert S. Youngjan at New York Times: Talk is growing about a March for Science on Washington, similar to the Women’s March the day after President Trump’s inauguration. It is a terrible idea. Among scientists, understandably, there is growing fear that fact-based decision making is losing its seat at the policy-making table. There’s also overwhelming frustration with the politicization of science by climate change skeptics and others who see it as threatening to their interests or beliefs. But trying to recreate the pointedly political Women’s March will serve only to reinforce the narrative from skeptical conservatives that scientists are an interest group and politicize their data, research and findings for their own ends. More. Good points but he Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views, on Tom Bethell’s new Darwin’s House of Cards: A Journalist’s Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates, he records his own investigation of the evidence, including interviews with lions of science and philosophy such as Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Colin Patterson, and Karl Popper. Lo and behold, it’s not beyond the intellectual reach of a reporter to get to the bottom of the controversy and to estimate the plausibility of Darwin’s theory. Not a religious apologist or a cheerleader for any competing view, but rather an old-fashioned skeptic, Bethell has been doubting Darwin since he was an undergraduate at Oxford University. … Evolutionary science is in a depressed condition, despite all that the Read More ›

Theistic evolution: Darwin was right and we defend Darwinism from critics from whatever quarter. But we feel that God did it somehow anyway (even though Darwin and most of his followers do not think that)… In a time of such ferment around evolution, theistic evolution attracts lazy people with theology credentials and a gift for easy sloganeering. In my line of work (O’Leary for News), one learns to spot these types, whether one wishes to use, abuse, confuse, or refuse them. Put simply: If I belonged to a church that wanted to “take a position” on evolution, I would ask, “Why? Even the Royal Society isn’t sure what its position should be. If we haven’t already gone and said something Read More ›

From Peter Dockrill at Science Alert: NASA just announced that any published research funded by the space agency will now be available at no cost, launching a new public web portal that anybody can access. The free online archive comes in response to a new NASA policy, which requires that any NASA-funded research articles in peer-reviewed journals be publicly accessible within one year of publication. More. Some of us think that all publicly funded science should be free, and friends say there is a move in that direction, for a variety of reasons, including transparency: It also follows a growing general trend towards more openness in science research and academia more broadly. With frustration stemming over the commercial control wielded Read More ›

Via BeauHD at Slashdot: Popular Science reports that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is now barred from communicating with the public. [And early this morning, BuzzFeed revealed that] The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has banned scientists and other employees from sharing the results of its taxpayer-funded research with the broader public. Here. However, UDPDATE 1/24/17: The USDA has disavowed the memo sent to employees at its Agricultural Research Service unit. USDA’s deputy administrator, Michael Young, clarified that the gag order specifically applies to policy-related statements in press releases and interviews, which need to be vetted with the secretary of agriculture. He told The Washington Post that peer-reviewed scientific papers from the unit should not be blocked, nor should food Read More ›

From Jernej Ule at RealClearScience, where he explains his team’s findings, then reflects, We’ve known for decades that evolution needs to tinker with genetic elements so they can accumulate mutations while minimising disruption to the fitness of a species. Our most recent research, published in the journal eLife, looked at over 6,000 Alu elements to show that our code does exactly this. The two forces are tightly coupled in evolution, so that as soon as any mutations make the ying stronger, the yang catches up and stops them. This allows the Alu elements to remain in a harmless state in our DNA over long evolutionary periods, during which they accumulate a lot of change via mutations. As a result, they Read More ›

From Hannah Devlin at Guardian: According to Bruno Lemaitre, an immunologist at the EPFL research institute in Switzerland, it is no longer enough to be right – or even to get there first. Reaching the top of the scientific hierarchy increasingly depends on a glittering media profile, publishing in “trophy journals” and cultivating a network of academic frenemies who are treated as close allies until they become obstacles in the path to academic glory. But performers don’t create that atmosphere; audiences do. Speaking last week at the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences, Lemaitre described the cut-throat atmosphere of world-class laboratories and international conferences as closer to House of Cards than The Big Bang Theory. Because scientists would rather party Read More ›

From Carl Straumsheim at Inside Higher Ed: Beall’s lists have been controversial among researchers and scholarly communications experts. Advocates of open-access publishing have criticized Beall for being overly negative toward the model. In a 2013 essay, for example, Beall wrote that the open-access movement is an “anti-corporatist, oppressive and negative movement, one that uses young researchers and researchers from developing countries as pawns.” Some publishers have objected to being featured on the lists. OMICS International, a publisher Beall has previously described as “the worst of the worst,” in 2013 threatened to sue Beall, seeking $1 billion in damages. But Beall has also received credit for highlighting a growing problem in the field of scholarly publishing. A 2015 study by researchers Read More ›

No, really. From the home of the Boltzmann brain wars and information as a physical quality, we now learn, Protesting the incoming Trump administration’s anti-science agenda may not be easy – but it’s vital not just for the US, but the world THE stamp of jackboots, raps on the door, marches and uniforms; these are what we associate with the emergence of an authoritarian state. The reality is less dramatic: life for most people may carry on much as usual – except they will no longer have any sway over the governing of their nation. This is fascinating because the political movements that seem to unhinge New Scientist so much (Trump’s win and Brexit) were the result of asking voters what Read More ›

Not just dumping on it. We get mail, only some of which we can quote*: At a recent alt-right meet up in Boston, a number of young alt-righters noted how they’ve given up on Christianity and have converted to neo-paganism (Asatru Folk Assembly). Their complaints about Christianity were as follows: … You have literal cuckolds adopting blacks and you have weak girly men crying about the need not to deport 3rd world invaders. This religion, they maintain, is a disgrace for any man with a healthy testosterone level.” … What happened? One professor of evolutionary psychology and religion, in a forthcoming book, argues that mainstream Christianity has been overtaken by girly men. It’s undergone a selection process where more manly Read More ›

Obviously, for all to see. A sentence appears in a paywalled article in a peer-reviewed publication (Journal of Molecular Evolution): Since the subject of cellular emergence of life is unusually complicated (we avoid the term ‘complex’ because of its association with ‘biocomplexity’ or ‘irreducible complexity’), it is unlikely that any overall theory of life’s nature, emergence, and evolution can be fully formulated, quantified, and experimentally investigated. But that is not a justified change in terminology and certainly not an improvement. “Complicated” is usually a pejorative term, that is, a term that means something negative. Compare: “The new system is more complicated” [= messy, time-wasting, not ergonomic, typical product of a committee, etc.… ] vs. “The new system is more complex” Read More ›

Here, on the thugs’ attack on Thomas Nagel for doubting Darwin: The intelligentsia was so furious that it formed a lynch mob. In May 2013, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece called “Where Thomas Nagel Went Wrong.” One paragraph was notable: Whatever the validity of [Nagel’s] stance, its timing was certainly bad. The war between New Atheists and believers has become savage, with Richard Dawkins writing sentences like, “I have described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious, sadomasochistic, and repellent. We should also dismiss it as barking mad….” In that climate, saying anything nice at all about religion is a tactical error. It’s the cowardice of the Chronicle’s statement that is alarming—as if the only conceivable Read More ›

From Evolution News & Views: the top five big problems for evolutionary theory: namely, the fossil record, the origin of biological information, the necessity of early mutations in development, the existence of epigenetic information, and Dr. Axe’s recent contribution in his new book Undeniable, the universal design intuition. More. Here. See also: Darwinism: Replacement or extension? Follow UD News at Twitter!

From BBC radio: One of Britain’s finest comedians, Rob Newman returns to Radio 4 with a witty, fact-packed series mixing stand-up and sketches, challenging notions of Survival of the Fittest and The Selfish Gene with a new theory that’s equal parts enlightening and hilarious. Rob is our guide on a journey through a unique audio A-Z of nature that takes in everything from altruistic amoebae and dancing squid to Richard Dawkins wrestling naked with a postal worker. Piecing these fragments together allows Rob to correct some major distortions of Darwinism, as well as rejig the theory of natural selection in the light of what we now know about epigenetics, mirror neurons and the Flintstones. Written by Rob Newman Starring Claire Read More ›

From U Buenos Aires molecular biologist Alberto Kornblihtt at Nature: To complete the landscape of nonsense, the chief of the cabinet of ministers, Marcos Peña, attacked one of the fundamentals of science by saying that “critical thinking has done too much damage to our country”. He continued: “Some people in Argentina think that being critical is being smart. Our government believes that being smart is being enthusiastic and optimistic.” This is gobbledygook, yet it neatly fits the New Age concept of the “revolution of happiness” proclaimed by Macri as a lubricant for social conflicts. Colleagues around the world should know that, in this new Argentina, science and technology could become dispensable. More demonstrations are sure to follow. We will not Read More ›