cmooney | February 23, 2006A while back I appeared on the Tavis Smiley Show on PBS, and pretty much everyone who saw said it went very well. But little did I know, at least until now, that there's an official transcript of the show available. You can check it out here. Meanwhile, you can also listen here.
cmooney | February 23, 2006PZ and Jason Rosenhouse are blogging about this testy email exchange between two of evolution's top defenders, Michael Ruse and Daniel Dennett. I don't fully grasp how or why these emails got out--it doesn't seem like something that should have happened (although frankly, they're not actually all that salacious anyway). But I would like to wade through a few of the issues they raise.
PZ and Rosenhouse have an interesting reaction to one argument by Michael Ruse that I find fairly persuasive (although it's stated rather hyperbolically here): that Dennett and Richard Dawkins are "absolute…
cmooney | February 23, 2006A new documentary, Flock of Dodos, is now out. The auteur, Randy Olson, is an "evolutionary ecologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard University." But he's also from Kansas originally, and he has made a film that apparently heaps a fair amount of scorn on both sides of the evolution debate:
"Flock of Dodos" audiences laugh at the expense of Olson's own evolutionist friends. While the evolutionists are playing poker and calling intelligent design proponents "yahoos" and "idiots," he turns the evolutionists into animated dodos, the extinct, flightless birds that were known for their lack of grace.
Or…
cmooney | February 23, 2006If San Francisco really gets municipal wireless, I am moving there out of sheer principle....
cmooney | February 23, 2006I didn't mean to launch a name game yesterday with my remarks about Daniel Dennett and the "brights" label, but that's what seems to have happened. More than fifty comments came in, many of them suggesting various ways in which atheists ought to be relabled: "humanist," "freethinker," and many others, including some amusing ones like "Godless Smartboys" (which, it was quickly pointed out, excludes female atheists).
What was missing to all of this excitement, of course, was anything other than a gut feeling as to what would work, and what wouldn't work, from a public relations standpoint.…
cmooney | February 22, 2006Everyone has been buzzing lately about Leon Wieseltier's nasty review of Daniel Dennett's new book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. I haven't read Dennett's new book yet, but having read and been impressed by his previous book Darwin's Dangerous Idea--and, furthermore, finding Wieseltier's take to be extremely nasty--I must confess my suspicion that the current review is unfair.
But on at least one point, Dennett is getting what he deserves, I think. Wieseltier writes the following:
If you disagree with what Dennett says, it is because you fear what he says. Any…
cmooney | February 22, 2006Brian Montopoli, of CBS's "Public Eye," talked with Scott Pelley recently about his "60 Minutes" global warming special. Pelley explains that he deliberately did not talk to those voices who remain skeptical of the science: "It would be irresponsible of us to go find some scientist somewhere who is not thought of as being eminent in the field and put him on television with these other guys to cast doubt on what they're saying." My own belief is that Pelley is being a tad too dismissive--a better approach might be to include the existence of the skeptics but also to contextualize their…
cmooney | February 21, 2006State of Fear is back in the top 100 books on Amazon.com, presumably thanks to the news that Bush read it. Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh, who's probably driving plenty of those sales, has this to say about Crichton's book:
If you haven't read State of Fear you ought to get it and you ought to read it, because he puts it in novel form, but documents how many of these groups actually try to create accidents and disasters on the eve of big conventions where they're going to be trying to raise money, how it is all a fund-raising operation; it all has its own political agenda.
"...puts it in novel…
cmooney | February 21, 2006Why is it that all birdwatching trips seem to end up the same way: You trudge along lengthy forest trails and freeze your ass off, only to find at the very end that the bird you were searching for was sitting in the parking lot the whole time? Such was my experience this weekend.
On Sunday we went to Virginia, to Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge, to look for Bald Eagles and whatever else we could find. Except for some distant sightings of what may have been eagles, we didn't see squat. But then, while stuck in traffic on the way back to Washington, D.C., what did we see but a majestic…
cmooney | February 20, 2006A week ago, I quipped that some reporter should ask Scott McClellan about Bush's reported meeting with Michael Crichton during the press gaggle. Well, it happened today. Here's the relevant exchange, which took place aboard Air Force One:
MR. McCLELLAN: The United States is leading the way in investing in the kind of technologies to help us address greenhouse gas emissions. That's something we -- remember, we're on track to meet the President's goal of reducing greenhouse gas intensity that he outlined. And we also have joined in partnerships around the world to invest in research and…
cmooney | February 20, 2006As it's President's Day and I plan on seizing the opportunity to get some writing done, I won't be blogging much. But I will leave you with something very worth of contemplation on the subject of how scientists can sucessfully combat attacks on their expertise and various assorted misinformation campaigns.
As it turns out, my friend and sometime co-author Matthew Nisbet just presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science about this. Read here for his full message, but let me list the take-home points in bullet form:
1. SCIENCE EDUCATION REMAINS CENTRALLY IMPORTANT.
2.…
cmooney | February 19, 2006Finally, the major media pick up the story I've been flogging all week. The Times piece is relatively bare-bones, but it does contain something revealing. You see, the paper asked the White House to comment on the Bush-meets-Crichton story. And not only was the Crichton meeting confirmed; Bush was dug into a deeper hole by one of his spokespeople:
Not so, according to the White House, which said Mr. Barnes's book left a false impression of Mr. Bush's views on global warming.
Michele St. Martin, a spokeswoman for the Council on Environmental Quality, a White House advisory agency, pointed to…
cmooney | February 17, 2006As many bloggers have noticed, with the latest revelations about NASA and other agencies, the Republican war on science continues apace. But what's driving it? Clearly, the acts of scientific censorship that have made so much news lately have been coming from political appointees in press or public affairs offices. This fits the thesis of my book, according to which such political appointees are conditioned and trained to act in such a way as to appease the Republican base: corporate American on the one hand, and the religious right on the other. Allow GOP political appointees to appease the…
cmooney | February 17, 2006Over at Real Climate, Raypierre has an exceedingly enlightening post about the similarities and differences between attacks on evolution and attacks on global warming. As someone who has explored both areas extensively--and who has also found striking similarities, if also some differences--I think he gets almost everything right.
Almost. You see, there's one philosophical point that bugs me. Raypierre strains the entire discussion through an attempt to explain what constitutes science, and on this matter he takes guidance from Judge Jones' already famous opinion in the Dover evolution trial…
cmooney | February 17, 2006When I'm speaking about how to fix the politics-of-science problem, I often target the media for special criticism. I point out that if journalists weren't so addicted to the norm of fify-fifty "balance," they wouldn't be so vulnerable to the machinations of science abusers who attempt to create phony "debates" over topics like evolution or global warming.
But when asked what to do about this problem, I don't throw up my hands in despair. Quite the contrary: I think that, at least to a large extent, journalists are amenable to reason. Sure, we need better science education in journalism…
cmooney | February 16, 2006My copy of Rebel-in-Chief just arrived, and I can now quote you exactly what the book says about Bush's views on global warming, and his meeting with Michael Crichton. From p. 22-23:
The president later provoked worldwide protests when he formally withdrew the United States from the Kyoto global warming treaty. The environmental lobby in this country fumed, but Bush didn't flinch. The treaty had never been ratified and stood little chance of winning Senate approval. Though he didn't say so publicly, Bush is a dissenter on the theory of global warming. To the extent it's a problem, Bush…
cmooney | February 15, 2006There were some serious fireworks at the House Committee on Science today. John Marburger got nailed several times for his wholly unsatisfactory response to repeated charges of science abuse and suppression by this administration. Meanwhile, Dana Rohrabacher proved that he's just as out of it now as he was back during the Gingrich years, when he declared global warming to be "liberal claptrap."
I encourage you to watch the webcast here. Some highlights, with minutes provided:
56:55-57:25: Committee chairman Sherwood Boehlert emphasizes that global warming is a serious issue, and states his…
cmooney | February 15, 2006I've written at length in the past about why Zogby polls, conducted on behalf of the Discovery Institute and invariably showing that a large percentage of the public supports "teaching the controversy," shouldn't be relied upon. I was about to blog about this topic yet again, but Matt Nisbet beats me to it, and does a far better and more exhaustive job debunking the latest pro-ID poll than I myself would have done. Suffice it to say that by touting these surveys, Discovery is undermining the science of polling in pretty much the same way that it is undermining the science of evolution.
cmooney | February 15, 2006While in Boulder, I appeared on the "How on Earth" Show--I think it went pretty well. You can listen here. My segment begins around minute 7:00.
cmooney | February 15, 2006Dr. Mark Siegel has a new book out, entitled Bird Flu, in which he apparently asserts that our fears are in overdrive when they probably shouldn't be. In a Washington Post interview, Siegel elaborates:
Bird flu is one in a long line of things we've been warned about, and for which we supposedly need some kind of "safe room" with an ample supply of food and water just in case. First it was anthrax, then West Nile virus, then smallpox, then SARS. In each case we were warned that we had no immunity and could be at great risk.
The national psyche has been damaged by all these false alarms. On…