Reform is nearly impossible if the incentive structure remains as it is — rewarding publication in and of itself. On the other hand, nothing stays the same forever and growing public cynicism might provide a spur to reform.
Medicine
Jerry Coyne on Cancel Culture’s hit on medical science
The new terminology would make it hard for most family doctors to talk plainly about typical health issues around, say, obesity or substance abuse very clearly. One doesn’t get the impression from the Woke rhetoric that the patient can decide to make changes that lead to better health. Yet people in all social groups do that every day. Anyway, Coyne is way more useful fighting this than fighting design in nature.
Science writer asks: Why are medical journals full of fashionable nonsense?
Alex Berezow: The point is that hopping aboard a political bandwagon is good for grabbing attention — and subsequently, funding. We are witnessing a similar phenomenon with respect to climate change. No matter how extraneous a topic, researchers try to tie it to climate change.
Nobel Prize Medicine win exchanges evolution theorizing for solving a mystery
At Big Think: “In order to truly appreciate Dr. Julius’ discovery, a bit of context may be in order. Unless you build up tolerance, eating spicy foods is painful. Peppers and wasabi give off a strange sensation that your mouth is on fire, and for the longest time researchers simply couldn’t figure out why this was the case. Failing to pinpoint any immediate benefits of this response, they speculated it must be the remnant of some distant evolutionary adaptation.”
Francis Collins, well-known theistic evolutionist, resigns his position at NIH
If either of these political/ethics matters are factors, his sudden resignation would send the stories down the news hole promptly and conveniently.
At The Ness: Science is not Just Philosophy
Wait. If atheist neurologist blogger Steven Novella is right, the science presenters in media must be speaking a different language from the rest of us. The impression that he says they don’t convey (“insight into the ultimate nature of reality”), they in fact do — by a variety of means. That’s okay, of course, until the whipped cream hits the fan.
At Stat News: Science has got obesity all wrong
A science writer reflects on the way paradigms work. If he’s right, a popular paradigm it was dangerous to doubt will come under fire.
A new open access paper offers an approach to cancer that sees past Darwin
Researchers: Although neo-Darwinian (and less often Lamarckian) dynamics are regularly invoked to interpret cancer’s multifarious molecular profiles, they shine little light on how tumorigenesis unfolds and often fail to fully capture the frequency and breadth of resistance mechanisms.
Statistician Ioannidis on how COVID wrecked science
Readers may remember John Ioannidis. His point here is that getting more people involved with science doesn’t always work: “A lack of sharing and openness allowed a top medical journal to publish an article in which 671 hospitals allegedly contributed data that did not exist, and no one noticed this outright fabrication before publication.”
Medical science: “Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?”
Michael Cook: The gold standard for fraud is a Japanese researcher in anaesthetics, Yoshitaka Fujii, of Toho University. By the time he came unstuck about 10 years ago, he had published around 200 articles – and 183 of them have been retracted because he had falsified the data. “If someone can publish 183 fabricated trials,” said Roberts, “the problem is not with him, the problem is with the system.”
At Mind Matters News: Epilepsy: If you follow the science, materialism is dead
Egnor: on the issue of intellectual seizures, the fact that there has not been a single seizure in recorded medical history out of 250 million seizures, a quarter of a billion seizures, that has evoked abstract intellectual content, Maybe the next one will, but I’m not going to bet on it…
A panel on CV19 with a co-inventor of mRNA technology
See here: Okay, embed seems to work. If not please click the link. This is a FYI news item, no discussion. END
Dr Been and Dr Marik on Covid-19 after 15 months
Here: This is a news notice, not an invitation to debate, so no comments. END
When Woke invades science…
Sadly, cancer isn’t racist. Nor is Alzheimer syndrome. They can’t be fought by rallies or civil disobedience, which we could all just do. Not just anyone who cares can be a science researcher. A war on math, for example, as “white supremacy” will simply prevent progress.
At Mind Matters News: More on the COVID-19 lab leak theory
It’s off topic for ID as such. But it is important for helping people work through a general principle that concerns all issues that pertain to science: “Trust the science” is not a good approach when the science is so clearly not bound by any standards of grappling with the facts. (Darwinism anyone?)