Wootton on Spencer: “… he doesn’t seem to grasp that the pared down, purely ‘spiritual’ religion he defends has virtually nothing in common with that of Augustine, Calvin, Loyola and Newman.”
Science
Jerry Coyne defends the sex binary in animals
Gotta hand it to Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, he’s a brave one. He is taking on the Woke claim that sex isn’t really binary in animals.
Science journalists are paid not to be skeptical?
The science writers’ behavior around the origin of COVID raises the question: About what other, less immediate but more profound topics, are these professional non-skeptics obfuscating things?
A classic in scientism: ‘In Science Lives Hope.’
When science becomes scientism, people who call out the bad stuff become heretics, not just critics. We saw plenty of that during the COVID crazy.
In real science, dissent is a feature, not a bug
Tomasz Durakiewicz: The courage to say no to scientific authority, to contradict widely accepted knowledge, to question and disrupt the status quo is essential to science’s ability to move forward.
News about the lab leak leaking out – and why it matters to ID
The point isn’t just that the debunkers are proven wrong in principle (because there was good reason for concern) but that there was never any reason to give them much credibility in the first place – except that they claimed to represent “science.” A few more blows like this – and they would be just the ones to administer them – and trust in science among the smarter segments of the public will not easily recover.
The decay of science mags is not going unnoticed
Woke has its fans but it takes no prisoners. Perhaps we will get rigorous science in dribs and drabs now.
More on the Lab Leak theory vindicated… receipts pile in…
Matt Ridley: To summarise. A bat coronavirus pandemic began in the city with the biggest bat coronavirus lab in the world, a long way from where those viruses are found naturally. It was caused by the first and so-far only sarbecovirus with a furin cleavage site in it, a feature that had been inserted into other coronaviruses nearby, and that had been planned to be inserted into a sarbecovirus for the first time.
Lab leak theory vindicated in upper echelons
Turley has the receipts. The COVID crazies have singlehandedly done more damage to “the science” and “trust the science!” than anyone who actually hated science could possibly do.
Massive early galaxies defy “prior understanding of the universe”
Tip: If all you want is to have your prior beliefs about the universe confirmed, don’t whack a huge telescope into space and code it to send back real-life actual data. Pound lecterns on behalf of manipulated interpretations of prior data instead.
Theodore Dalrymple on enshrining untruth
Unworkable or unbelievable science might be expected to take refuge in totalitarianism. That rids it of the risk of falsification.
Paul Davies at Closer to Truth: Do ultimate questions evolve?
Note: If the questions are really ultimate questions, they can’t evolve. That’s what “ultimate” means: It’s the last one. But perhaps Davies and various readers have a different view.
Rob Sheldon responds to Sabine Hossenfelder’s loss of faith in science
Sabine says 40 years of lack of progress, with 40 years of wrong predictions is not normal, and we should not normalize it. (The field is losing graduate students, which means the end is nigh.)
Trust the Science! chronicles: The origin of COVID and Wuhan
Wade: Virologists like Daszak had much at stake in the assigning of blame for the pandemic. For 20 years, mostly beneath the public’s attention, they had been playing a dangerous game.
Will the war on objectivity in news media spread to science? Has it already?
Trust in science will deteriorate if, like many journalists today, scientists come to see objectivity as worth sacrificing in order to achieve other goals.