Science

From professor of pharmacology David Colquhoun at Aeon: The aim of science is to establish facts, as accurately as possible. It is therefore crucially important to determine whether an observed phenomenon is real, or whether it’s the result of pure chance. If you declare that you’ve discovered something when in fact it’s just random, that’s called a false discovery or a false positive. And false positives are alarmingly common in some areas of medical science. … In 2005, the epidemiologist John Ioannidis at Stanford caused a storm when he wrote the paper ‘Why Most Published Research Findings Are False’, focusing on results in certain areas of biomedicine. He’s been vindicated by subsequent investigations. For example, a recent article found that Read More ›

From Shawn Otto at Scientific American: Four years ago in Scientific American, I warned readers of a growing problem in American democracy. The article, entitled “Antiscience Beliefs Jeopardize U.S. Democracy,” charted how it had not only become acceptable, but often required, for politicians to embrace antiscience positions, and how those positions flew in the face of the core principles that the U.S. was founded on: That if anyone could discover the truth of something for him or herself using the tools of science, then no king, no pope and no wealthy lord was more entitled to govern the people than they were themselves. It was self-evident. In the years since, the situation has gotten worse. We’ve seen the emergence of Read More ›

Yes, yes, you say, gentle reader. Tell that to Darwin’s followers. Well it is too bad about Darwin’s followers. The rethinking evolution meet at the Royal Society in the fall, however disappointing at first, is only the beginning of th end. Darwinism worked so well as a dogma, foisted on school systems at public expense and defended by educrat lobbies. Over the last decade ad a half, I have sifted through countless media releases announcing either that researchers had once again proven Darwinism or come up with a casuistical explanation for why it is true anyway. That sort of thing happens when a field is not really a history but a cult. But as this post at Creation-Evolution Headlines demonstrates, Read More ›

From Robert P. Crease at Nature, a review of Carlo Rovelli’s upcoming Reality Is Not What It Seems, A sceptic might react to this irksome scientism by objecting that, unlike in Plato’s image, the vistas seen through the window keep changing. One can imagine, too, a book by a string theorist offering another view out of the window — just how many exits does Plato’s cave have? Yet another problem is that Rovelli has a cavalier attitude towards philosophy. Plato’s cave is more nuanced than he makes out, and Rovelli misinterprets a passage to claim that Socrates was disappointed by scientists. He plucks a statement out of context from a lengthy autobiographical story in which Socrates is describing youthful views Read More ›

Further to a recent account of cyberbullying of GMO scientists, Brian McNicoll writes at Townhall: Hysterical predictions that haven’t panned out have taken a toll on the credibility of scientists, and one would think environmentalists would want to be more careful about how they state their case going forward. Just 39 percent have “a lot of trust” in information received from climate scientists, according to a Pew Research poll released this week. Only 28 percent say they believe climate scientists understand the causes of global warming, and 19 percent say climate scientists know what should be done to address it. One thought that comes to mind: If there really were a worldwide climate apocalypse, would not more people be experiencing Read More ›

From Alex Berezow at American Council for Science and Health: I first learned about GMOs as a sophomore microbiology major in college. (They weren’t called GMOs then; they were simply referred to as “transgenic crops.”) I remember feeling exhilarated — the sort of thrill that only accountants or geeky academics can usually understand — at how basic knowledge of DNA sequences was leading to a huge technological revolution. The opportunities were limitless. Years later I entered journalism. And I saw breathtaking ignorance and vitriol aimed at scientists like me coming from supposedly educated people. Never in a million years would I have anticipated that our passion for science would be used as a bludgeon or as a scarlet letter. That Read More ›

Genetics researcher Bruno Lemaitre introduces his book, An Essay on Science and Narcissism at The Scientist: Psychological studies show that narcissistic individuals tend to use human relationships to attain positions of authority or to improve their own visibility, as illustrated by Monod’s strategic mate choice. The Monod case suggests that it would be naive to see scientists as simply seekers of truth. It is likely that the Nobel laureate enjoyed the position of power that science afforded him, and that it suited his personality. After all, a scientist is someone with expert knowledge who can reveal complex secrets to the public. But how does narcissism, a personality trait associated with dominance and short-term mating strategies, influence the scientific process? As Read More ›

Closing our religion coverage for the week (a bit late), over at ReligionNews.com, Emily McFarlane Miller reports that Mike McHargue tells us: ‘Science Mike’ McHargue: ‘Christians aren’t stupid, and atheists aren’t evil’ … What are some of the most compelling things you’ve found in your scientific studies that point you back to God? Probably the first thing would be how ideally suited the human brain is as a host for beliefs about God, the way belief seems to be relatively inevitable a consequence of human consciousness, and the way our brains tend to develop in healthy ways when we indulge that belief, especially in a God who is loving. Beyond that, as you learn more about cosmology and physics, particle Read More ›

From Hugh Ross at Salvo: With access to gravitational waves emanating from both medium-sized and supermassive black hole binaries, astronomers will be able to explore new properties of gravity and general relativity. They will be able to determine in much more detail the formation histories of both stars and galaxies in the universe. These advances will lead to a more precise understanding of the cosmic creation event and the subsequent development of the universe. Inevitably, worldviews will come into play, but scientific testing can and should overcome preconceived ideas. How did our universe come to exist? Was it by chance? For a fair-minded person, the understanding to be gained by these advances promises to remove any remaining doubts about the Read More ›

One wouldn’t think anyone had to point that out, but physicist Christopher Graney does a good job at Aeon: … Yes, [an opponent] said, a moving Earth messes with certain Biblical passages, like Joshua telling the Sun to stand still. But it also messes with certain astronomical terms, such as sunrise and sunset. Copernicans had work-arounds for all that, Locher said, even though they might be convoluted. What Copernicans could not work around, though, were the scientific arguments against their theory. Indeed, Locher even proposed a mechanism to explain how Earth could orbit the Sun (a sort of perpetual falling – this decades before Isaac Newton would explain orbits by means of perpetual falling), but he said it would not Read More ›

From Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media: Real misogynists used to argue that women couldn’t understand things as well as men could. This patronizing view is both insulting and false, but now it has reemerged in a new way — so-called feminist professors arguing that science itself is misogynist because it deals in objective truth. That’s one of the daft arguments in “Are STEM Syllabi Gendered? A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis” by the University of North Dakota’s Laura Parson, published in The Qualitative Report at the beginning of this year. While Parson admits that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) syllabi do not have “overt references to gender,” their language “reflects institutionalized STEM teaching practices and views about knowledge that are Read More ›

From Charles Seife at Scientific American: The deal was this: NPR, along with a select group of media outlets, would get a briefing about an upcoming announcement by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration a day before anyone else. But in exchange for the scoop, NPR would have to abandon its reportorial independence. The FDA would dictate whom NPR’s reporter could and couldn’t interview. The government wouldn’t budge on that, and the situation only accidentally came to light. But practically the eintre Who’s Who of big U.S. media science journalism showed up to cover the “story.” This kind of deal offered by the FDA—known as a close-hold embargo—is an increasingly important tool used by scientific and government agencies to control Read More ›

You’d think so, to listen to Lebanese American essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb at Medium.com: What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for. But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — Read More ›

From Associated Press via Mashable: The sugar industry began funding research that cast doubt on sugar’s role in heart disease — in part by pointing the finger at fat — as early as the 1960s, according to an analysis of newly uncovered documents. The analysis published Monday is based on correspondence between a sugar trade group and researchers at Harvard University, and is the latest example showing how food and beverage makers attempt to shape public understanding of nutrition. This matters to us at UD because most people have had no idea how much of what is called “science” is shaped by various interests, with data addressed and questions framed, to support lobby and interest group views. We are only Read More ›

From Peter Ellerton at RealClearScience: Claims that the “the science isn’t settled” with regard to climate change are symptomatic of a large body of ignorance about how science works. So what is the scientific method, and why do so many people, sometimes including those trained in science, get it so wrong? The first thing to understand is that there is no one method in science, no one way of doing things. This is intimately connected with how we reason in general. More. Ellerton writes an average good article on the scientific method but it has almost no relationship to why people doubt the human-caused global warming a-crock-a-lypse. Most doubters suspect that marketing doomsday is a means of raising taxes and Read More ›