From Jazz Shaw at Hot Air: Remember when eggs were bad for you? All the doctors were telling us that eggs have cholesterol so they’re evil. Fortunately, breakfast is my favorite meal of the day and I pretty much ignored them. Later we learned that the facts doctors were so sure of turned out to be not quite so factual and that we evolved to process eggs fairly efficiently. Now we have yet another element of the conventional wisdom which may be crumbling under the light of additional study. We’ve been forcing kids to drink low fat or skim milk for years because that was supposed to be bad for you too. Frankly, I can’t stand that watery skim milk Read More ›

From Sharon Begley at Stat News (“reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine”): ore than a decade after leading geneticists argued that race is not a true biological category, many studies continue to use it, harming scientific understanding and possibly patients, researchers argued in a provocative essay in Science on Thursday. “We thought that after the Human Genome Project, with [its leaders] saying it’s time to move beyond race as a biological marker, we would have done that,” said Michael Yudell, a professor in the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University and coauthor of the Science paper calling on journals and researchers to stop using race as a category in genetics studies. “Yet here we are, and Read More ›

Apparently, the folks at Darwin Day are getting U.S. politicians to declare Darwin Day in their jurisdictions: “Humanists Around the World Celebrate Darwin Day to Promote Science and Evolution … Since 2011, the American Humanist Association has worked closely with members of Congress to introduce the Darwin Day resolution. Introduced on December 3, 2015, by Rep. Jim Himes (CT-04) with 20 co-sponsors and counting, U.S. House Resolution 548 would officially recognize February 12, 2016, as a national celebration of Charles Darwin, the theory of evolution and the advances of scientists around the globe. The Secular Coalition for America, of which the AHA is a member organization, worked with Senator Richard Blumenthal (CT) in the U.S. Senate to introduce a companion Read More ›

In Part Two of my series on methodological naturalism, I critiqued the claim that it was espoused by philosophers as far back as the Middle Ages. In Part Three, I rebut a different claim, that methodological naturalism was a product of the Scientific Revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries. According to this claim, methodological naturalism arose largely in reaction to the superstitious thinking of the Middle Ages, in which epilepsy was attributed to the Devil, and epidemics and lightning bolts were ascribed to the wrath of God. I show that on the contrary, doctors in the Middle Ages knew that epilepsy was a disease of the brain, and that epidemics were a contagious disease. The cause of epidemics was Read More ›

In Part One of my series on methodological naturalism, I addressed the question: Is methodological naturalism a defining feature of science?. In Part Two, I rebut the oft-heard claim that even as far back as the Middle Ages, natural philosophers espoused a form of methodological naturalism. Proponents of this claim commonly cite passages in the works of medieval natural philosophers, which sound as if they are supporting this principle. I show that in fact, they were supporting two other methodological principles, which when combined, lead to conclusions which could easily be mistaken for methodological naturalism by a careless reader. Because these philosophers followed Aristotle in (i) defining science as the systematic study of natural bodies in motion, and (ii) limiting Read More ›

How many lives did Dawkins save, you say?  Carson doesn’t believe in Dawkins’ religion, Darwinian evolution. All doctors should be as ignorant as Carson. As so often, we close our religion coverage for the week with a new atheist: Richard Dawkins on US prez contender Ben Carson: On Dr. Ben Carson specifically Richard Dawkins said, “You just told me all the Republican candidates except one doesn’t believe in evolution, I mean that’s a disgrace. For a senor a very eminent, distinguished doctor, as he is, to say that is even worse. Because of course evolution is the bedrock of biology and biology is the bedrock of medicine. For a distinguished doctor to not understand, I have to use the word Read More ›

Here’s a discussion between theologian Michael Chaberek, O.P. and Joseph E. Gorra at the Evangelical Philosophical Society site, on Chaberek’s new book  Catholicism and Evolution (2015): What do you find to be the leading historical and historiographical challenges regarding the ‘story of evolution’ among Catholic leadership and theology? Immediately after Darwin presented his theory, the vast majority of Catholic scholars opposed Darwinian ideas. Today, those scholars who accept “some form of macroevolution” and think that this is theology’s way to go try to diminish that initial opposition. Moreover the private documents of the Church from that period remained virtually unknown until 1997 when the Archives of the Holy Office where opened to researchers. What was learned? We have only recently learned how Read More ›

Okay, this is the last thing I (O’Leary for News) have to say on the subject of doctors and evolution, and fitness for public office: Once, about forty years ago, one of my kids was hit on the head by a car. She was taken immediately to the local ER. I flagged down a cruiser to follow. Even in those days, one could get immediate updates by cruiserphone (… so far okay … so far okay … um, check with medical resident … ) So the cops and I rushed through the ER doors. It wasn’t hard to find her; I could hear her screaming from four emergency rooms away. Later, a medical attendant told me to carry her upstairs Read More ›

Like many readers, I watched the Pope’s speech earlier today. It was in many ways a beautiful speech, which brought members of Congress to their feet (many with tears in their eyes) in a standing ovation. While the issues it addressed were all vital ones, I was a little disappointed at the issues it didn’t address, or barely mentioned. Perhaps there was a good reason for that. But then I decided that instead of whingeing, I would do something constructive: write an alternative speech that the Pope could have delivered, covering all the issues that I felt he needed to draw people’s attention to. I don’t write speeches for a living, so I apologize to readers if my poor effort Read More ›

He’s at it again. Physicist Lawrence Krauss has written an article for the New Yorker titled, All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists (September 8, 2015), in which he asserts that for scientists, “no idea is sacred,” while at the same time declaring: “Scientists have an obligation not to lie about the natural world.” Sorry, Professor Krauss, but if no idea is sacred, then neither is the idea of an obligation. Krauss also argues that scientists should “openly question beliefs,” even if that means offending others, and that they should not be ashamed of being called militant atheists. I am astonished that Krauss cannot perceive the contradiction between his universal skepticism and his absolutist endorsement of Enlightenment values, when he gushes, Read More ›

Along with anyone who buys into it. Someone brown-bagged me the Canadian Christians in Science publication, Perspectives’s review of William Dembski’s Being as Communion. That took me back a ways. To the days when I used to listen to those clever people, and their immense betrayal of basic principles: Like it matters whether human beings can think or not. This is what it seems like: They wanted jobs in a system run by materialist atheists. And meeting the system most of the way was the only way to get them. That was their right. Christians for Darwin are mostly decent people, but have no idea that they do not need to grovel anymore. Raise your heads. To say nothing of Read More ›

A friend kindly linked us to a Reason feature on the alternative medicine “racket:” Behind the dubious medical claims of Dr. Mehmet Oz and Deepak Chopra is a decades-long strategy to promote alternative medicine to the American public. Twenty-three years ago, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began to investigate a wide variety of unconventional medical practices from around the world. Five-and-a-half billion dollars later, the NIH has found no cures for disease. But it has succeeded in bringing every kind of quackery—from faith healing to homeopathy—out of the shadows and into the heart of the American medical establishment. … The OAM’s stated mission was to investigate the medical value of alternative therapies. Despite its minuscule budget, its mandate was Read More ›

Jeffrey Tayler, a contributing editor of The Atlantic and a writer for Salon magazine who has lived in Russia since 1993, knows quite a lot about foreign languages, a little about science, very little about history, and nothing at all about religion – a subject with which he appears to be obsessed, judging from the 40-odd articles he has written on the subject for Salon magazine, during the past two years. Strangely enough, Tayler wrote much more sympathetically about religion during the late 1990s, at a time when his articles for Salon were actually entertaining to read, and as late as 2006, he declared in his book, River of No Reprieve (Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2006, p. 121) that “the Read More ›

Over at Pharyngula, Professor P.Z. Myers has been ridiculing Senator Marco Rubio for declaring, “The science is settled, it’s not even a consensus, it is a unanimity, that human life beings at conception” – a claim he repeated at the GOP debate on August 6. Unfortunately for Myers, Senator Rubio is dead right: embryologists agree that an individual human life begins at conception. Here’s how Professor Myers attempted to dispose of Senator Rubio’s claim in a 2014 post: Let’s take that phrase “human life begins at conception” apart. What do you mean by “life begins”? Was there some step between your parents and you where there was a dead cell? Life is continuous — there hasn’t been a transition from Read More ›

From: Evolution: The Fossils Speak, but Hardly with One Voice 5. Far too much attention may be given to genes and DNA. So much current evolution thinking, including questionable fields like evolutionary psychology, depends on the alleged power of the gene. Does anyone remember that fellow who said in the early 90s that a CD of your genome is “you”? Not even close. From the New Statesman: “According to a growing number of researchers, the standard story of the influence of genes is overblown. So many other factors influence how we turn out as individuals and how we evolve as a species that the fundamentals of biology need a rewrite.” “This is no storm in an academic tearoom,” a group Read More ›