Science

On 3 Mar 2011, we learned from Britain’s Daily Telegraph that “Millions of NHS patients have been treated with controversial drugs on the basis of “fraudulent research” by one of the world’s leading anaesthetists,”:

He published dozens of papers “proving” their benefits and contradicting studies which suggested they could increase the risk of death in surgery and cause kidney failure, severe blood loss and heart failure.German medical authorities are scrutinising 92 of his key publications and a criminal investigation is under way into allegations that he forged documents, tested drugs on patients without their consent and fraudulently claimed payments for operations he had never performed.

[ … ]

Sources close to the investigation said that the editors would announce the formal retraction of 89 papers next month.Rhineland state prosecutors are investigating Mr Boldt over allegations that he forged the signatures of his alleged “co-authors” on his studies, conducted drugs trials without official approval and claimed money for operations that he never performed.

[ … ]

Dr Rupert Pearse, a senior lecturer in intensive care medicine at Barts and the London School of Medicine, and co-author of the British guidelines on fluid drugs, said last night: “…For me, it shakes the world I work in and makes me feel less confident in it, and if I were a member of the public I would feel the same.”

These cases are so common now, it might be worth taking a look at reasons that aren’t anyone’s direct fault: Read More ›

In a review of several recent science books, Dartmouth professor Alan Hirshfeld offers us a view of the Royal Society (former employer of sinner in the hands of an angry god, Michael Reiss), and similar societies, as engines of perpetual revolution (The Wall Street Journal) , opining “The Royal Society’s history of open-minded debate epitomizes science as a self-correcting process”: The group is more effective than the individual at sussing out weak hypotheses, flawed experiments or biased observations, and one of the vital contributions of Europe’s “natural philosophers” during the Enlightenment was the creation of societies to disseminate and evaluate their ideas. Such conclaves served as intellectual hubs before the rise of modern research universities and institutes, and remain important Read More ›

At ScienceDaily (Mar. 5, 2011), we are invited to contemplate, “Has Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Already Arrived?”, With the steep decline in populations of many animal species, from frogs and fish to tigers, some scientists have warned that Earth is on the brink of a mass extinction like those that occurred only five times before during the past 540 million years.Each of these ‘Big Five’ saw three-quarters or more of all animal species go extinct. Is a three-quarters disappeance – as hinted by the University of California, Berkeley, paleobiologists who published a study in Nature, March3, – at all likely to happen, short of a worldwide nuclear holocaust or giant asteroid hit? Tigers are featured in the article but – Read More ›

Re British science czar John “grossly intolerant” Beddington facing off against scholar and political correctness zapper Frank Furedi  – both angling off original science thinker Freeman Dyson: Set me thinking. When I was young (yes, forty years ago), two issues my paper explored were breastfeeding and palliative care.

Fashionable? Haw. Read More ›

Frank Furedi, author of On Tolerance: The Life Style Wars and foe of political correctness in academic life, replies powerfully to science czar “Intolerance” Beddington at Spiked (21 February 2011). Comparing Beddington’s protective views on homosexuality with the hostile ones shown by Ryszard Legutko, leader of Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice party, he writes,

No doubt Beddington also feels intolerant towards Legutko’s views on homosexuality. Yet what is truly fascinating about these two crusaders against tolerance is that although they have diametrically opposed viewpoints on gay rights, they are at one in their affirmation of the ethos of intolerance. The targets of their intolerance might be different, but they share the worldview of the bigot. Legutko is offended by the sight of gay and lesbian people dressed up as nuns and priests, while Beddington objects to people he disagrees with masquerading as scientists. The casual manner with which European public figures celebrate intolerance is testimony to the censorious and illiberal spirit that now dominates political life across the continent.

He also offers a three-minute focus on a key point of history:

The idea that we should not be tolerant of problematic ideas, or indeed of any beliefs other than our own, dominated the political culture of pre-Enlightenment Europe. It is important to note that until the seventeenth century, it was intolerance rather than tolerance that was upheld as a virtue. So when Beddington declares that ‘we should not tolerate what is potentially something that can seriously undermine our ability to address important problems’, he is adopting the dominant narrative of late medieval Europe. In that medieval outlook, heretical beliefs represented such a danger to society that the only virtuous response was to silence them. Intolerance was seen as a marker of moral virtue. As late as 1691, the French theologian Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet boasted that Catholicism was the least tolerant of all religions, stating: ‘I have the right to persecute you because I am right and you are wrong.’,

[adding] Read More ›

In “Beddington goes to war against bad science” (Research Fortnight , 14-02-2011), John Dwyer and Laura Hood advise us that

Selective use of science ‘as bad as racism or homophobia,’ and

Government Chief Scientific Adviser John Beddington is stepping up the war on pseudoscience with a call to his fellow government scientists to be “grossly intolerant” if science is being misused by religious or political groups.In closing remarks to an annual conference of around 300 scientific civil servants on 3 February, in London, Beddington said that selective use of science ought to be treated in the same way as racism and homophobia. “We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of racism. We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of people who [are] anti-homosexuality…We are not—and I genuinely think we should think about how we do this—grossly intolerant of pseudo-science, the building up of what purports to be science by the cherry-picking of the facts and the failure to use scientific evidence and the failure to use scientific method,” he said.

Beddington said he intends to take this agenda forward with his fellow chief scientists and also with the research councils. “I really believe that… we need to recognise that this is a pernicious influence, it is an increasingly pernicious influence and we need to be thinking about how we can actually deal with it.

Some thoughts:

😉 There is no shortage of gross intolerance in the world. I was surprised that Beddington cited the nearly defunct Ku Klux Klan, and not the very active Muslim brotherhoods, whose tolerance for gays is justly famous. Indeed, the extent to which Beddington is right could in part be gleaned from the fact that the Middle East, where gross intolerance is celebrated, leads the world in science. Oh wait, it doesn’t. A Muslim friend tells me that his culture’s progress in science stalled precisely when intolerance became a virtue and people were no longer permitted to think for themselves. Read More ›

Further to Templeton Foundation’s attempts to make nice with Darwinists and where it gets them, Jerry “the inimitable” Coyne comments further on his anti-Templeton, no-accommodation-between-science-and-religion opinions stated there – strongly endorsing same opinions. He asks a darn good question too, “[W]hat the bloody hell does “progress in spirituality” mean?” Ah, a question I can answer. The classical spiritual direction literature on this subject is formidable, but one might usefully start with John of the Cross. However, where Templeton is concerned, the phrase probably means more grant applicants offering increasingly scrooier projects. By the way, Coyne’s combox is quite the little hatefest, I see. If you ever wondered whether new atheists like each other, have a brief look. It’s harmful to Read More ›

The recently released Religion Versus Science: Where Both Sides Go Wrong in the Great Evolution Debate, by Buddhist University of Wyoming geology prof Ron Frost offers, In Religion Versus Science Frost posits that the big mistake creationists make is to attack the evolutionary facts rather than the materialistic way that these facts are used to describe evolution. His goal in this remarkable book is to present a view of evolution that will be compatible with both the scientific evidence for evolution and the core teachings of the world’s major religions.After studying and practicing Buddhism for over twenty-five years, Frost became very aware that aspects of his mind occurred from outside his ego. He realized that acceptance of a transcendent aspect Read More ›

NOVA scienceNOW: Where Did We Come From? Airing Wednesday, February 16 at 8pm on PBS In this episode of NOVA scienceNOW, journey back in time to the birth of our solar system to examine whether the key to our planet’s existence might have been the explosive shockwave of an ancient supernova. Meet a chemist who has yielded a new kind of “recipe” for natural processes to assemble and create the building blocks of life. And see how the head louse, a creepy critter that’s been sucking our blood for millions of years, is offering clues about our evolution. Finally, meet neuroscientist André Fenton, who is looking into erasing painful memories with an injection. Thoughts?

Read the last quoted line of a Nature editor’s recent story: The design Debate But external peer review hasn’t always kept the foundation out of trouble. In the 1990s, for example, Templeton-funded organizations gave book-writing grants to Guillermo Gonzalez, an astrophysicist now at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, and William Dembski, a philosopher now at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. After obtaining the grants, both later joined the Discovery Institute — a think-tank based in Seattle, Washington, that promotes intelligent design. Other Templeton grants supported a number of college courses in which intelligent design was discussed. Then, in 1999, the foundation funded a conference at Concordia University in Mequon, Wisconsin, in which intelligent-design proponents confronted critics. Those Read More ›

In “Science Cannot Fully Describe Reality, Says Templeton Prize Winner” (Science 16 March 2009), David Lindley profiles French physicist and Templeton winner Bernard d’Espagnat, 87: Quantum mechanics allows what d’Espagnat calls “weak objectivity,” in that it predicts probabilities of observable phenomena in an indisputable way. But the inherent uncertainty of quantum measurements means that it is impossible to infer an unambiguous description of “reality as it really is,” he says. He has proposed that behind measured phenomena exists what he calls a “veiled reality” that genuinely exists, independently of us, even though we lack the ability to fully describe it. Asked whether that entails a kind of mysticism, d’Espagnat responds that “science isn’t everything” and that we are already accustomed Read More ›

… it turns out that Jerry “whyevolutionistrue” Coyne doesn’t like Elaine Ecklund, a Templeton author on faith and science*: Elaine Ecklund is making more hay out of her Templeton-funded research than I would have thought possible. Author of the book Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think, she has spent her post-publication time distorting her findings as loudly and as often as possible, and spinning them to claim that they show the need for a consilience of science and faith. Templeton could not have gotten more bang for their bucks. Her latest piece, “Science on Faith“, is in The Chronicle of Higher Education. (It’s behind a paywall but I got it from the library.) Once again Ecklund emphasizes the many Read More ›

Ken Connor, commenting on Jonah Lehrer’s New Yorker piece (December 13, 2010) on the loss of replicability of science findings over time, writes, But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. . . . For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated Read More ›

From the Australian (Paul Monk, February 7, 2011), on the dangers of consensus in science: … we are justified in being wary of foreclosing major debates based on scientific consensus, since it can be in error. Second, it shows that the way to challenge and correct scientific consensus is not through polemic or denial, but through specifying crucial variables and deductions and testing them scrupulously, in the manner of Hubble. Third, it shows that there is, nonetheless, such a thing as scientific consensus and that when handled in the manner just described, it tends to prove self-correcting. Fourth, it shows that ideally such correction will occur, as it did between Hubble and Shapley, on the basis of lucid examination of Read More ›