Philosophy of Science:
Category: Creationism
...Or "What I've been up to for the last week or so." Last week was a busy travel week. I was in West Virginia for the first half of the week, on a whirlwind tour of the Morgantown area, speaking in the geology department at West Virginia University, then twice at a symposium on science communication, and then at a local freethought group (meeting in a beautiful Unitarian church with a view of the valley). The video above is a slidecast from a talk NCSE's Steve Newton and I gave about the Process of Science and Scientific Controversy. Steve...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 1:05 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Biology
Virginia Hughes, once the benevolent overlord here at Scienceblogs, asks the Question of the Year: What is Life, Anyway? She notes that many of the major scientific discoveries or advances of the year hinged on that question, and this month's Astrobiology has a series of essays on the state of our understanding. She explains: Is life simply the ability to reproduce? Well, no. If that were true, as one scientist famously noted, then “Two rabbits—a male and female—are alive but either one alone is dead.” In 1994, a NASA committee deemed that life is “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 9:01 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia
T. Ryan Gregory asks this important question: Who is a scientist? It's a followup to a post titled: "Graduate students are not professional scientists. Discuss," which – briefly – argued that grad students are scientists in training, not yet scientists-full-stop. In the later post, he explains: Here are the criteria I threw out off-handedly for the purpose of discussing the NYT story about science blogs [this one -Josh]: - Does scientific research for a living, - Publishes research in peer-reviewed journals, - Is funded by granting agencies to do it, - Does not just write about it, or study it,...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 12:44 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Philosophy of Science
John Fleck, a superstar science journalist whose work on water in the southwest is consistently brilliant, has some sage thoughts on the Problem With Science Journalism: In the newspaper this week, I took a whack at what I think is one of the fundamental public misunderstandings about the nature of science. I like to call it “the textbook problem”, but one might also characterize it as “the science journalism problem.” Lay exposure to science comes in two fundamental ways. The first is academic learning, in which non-scientists are exposed to textbook explanation of things scientists have already figured out, knowledge...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 7:12 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
There are those who say "Not only does the NCSE not criticize religion, but it cuddles up to it, kisses it, and tells it that everything will be all right." There are others who say: The continuum [between creationism and evolution] as described on the NCSE site strongly implies that “atheist science is better science”. Even though the objective of the continuum is to counter the belief that “evolutionists must be atheists”, it indirectly implies that evolutionists should be atheists. For this fact alone, I think the model needs to be replaced.A simpler person than I would take this to...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 8:51 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture Wars
Denyse O'Leary uses Bill Dembski's blog (and a dozen other ID blogs) to report a comment from a friend about the mission statement for Nature. The mission statement reads: First, to serve scientists through prompt publication of significant advances in any branch of science, and to provide a forum for the reporting and discussion of news and issues concerning science. Second, to ensure that the results of science are rapidly disseminated to the public throughout the world, in a fashion that conveys their significance for knowledge, culture and daily life.Her friend replies: To report advances and serve scientists means not...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 1:28 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Philosophy of Science
"Truth," the late philosopher Richard Rorty explained, "is what your contemporaries let you get away with." It has been observed that his contemporaries did not, as a general proposition, let him get away with that understanding of truth. This comment came to mind not just because Rorty passed away last Friday, but because of the spat going on over agnosticism and atheism. John Wilkins quoted Bertrand Russell saying that "An agnostic thinks it impossible to know the truth in matters such as God and the future life with which Christianity and other religions are concerned. Or, if not impossible, at...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 1:38 PM • 27 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture Wars
In which I defend framing and argue it is as important a part of a good argument as accurate data.
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 11:54 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Philosophy of Science
In honor of MarkCC's latest effort to explain to the deeply egnorant Michael Egnor why the fact that any inferentially true set of statements – including scientific theories – can be reformulated as a tautology, I thought I'd crack open Elliot Sober's excellent Philosophy of Biology, in which he discusses the relevance of the "tautology" objection to evolution. But before doing that, I have to take exception to something Egnor said. I actually take exception to nearly everything he says, but I'd rather not bog down in the details. Egnor tries to summarize natural selection as "survivors survive," but that...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 3:31 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Philosophy of Science
Misogynistic authoritarian Vox Day requests a definition of science. His commenter suggests: Science - sci·ence (sī'əns) n. - The organized attempt to disprove the existence of God so we can do whatever we want without feeling bad about it.Anyone involved in the arguments over creationism will recognize this sentiment that science is about morality and theology, but it really and truly isn't. Dr. Myers offers a much better tripartite definition. He puts science-as-encyclopedia first, which I think is unfortunate. People tend to think of science as a collection of facts, which ignores the important role that uncertainty plays in science....
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 12:51 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at 
