cmooney | January 24, 2006I'm pleased to announce that along with PZ Myers and Wendy Northcutt (genius of the Darwin Awards), I'll be heading up the science panel at Yearly Kos, Friday, June 9 in Las Vegas. This is the progressive blogosphere's mega-convention; its theme is "Uniting the Netroots." The keynote speaker will be none other than Harry Reid. The event itself will run for four days (June 8-11) and will be located at the Riviera Hotel in Vegas. Thousands are expected; you should be one of them.
I'm honored and excited to have been invited to speak and to be part of this massive and important event. As I said…
cmooney | January 24, 2006PZ caught Kurt Vonnegut mouthing pro-ID nonsense recently. This is deeply depressing. Myers attributes it to Vonnegut getting pretty old and addled, but I'm not so sure.
Back in 1998, Vonnegut showed up at Yale University for a master's tea at my college, Silliman. I didn't think much of it at the time, but I remember him making a remark about rattlesnakes that suggested that he thought in a "design" sort of way. I don't recall precisely what Vonnegut said, or what question he was responding to. But I distinctly remember him likening rattlesnake fangs to syringes, in that they are ideally "…
cmooney | January 24, 2006How naive I am. I thought it was settled that the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker was back among us. I guess I was wrong. As an amateur birdwatcher, I also thought that the videotape provided of the bird was extremely convincing. But I guess I can't be too certain any more, as a real expert ornithologist doesn't buy it.
There's a lot of hope involved here, and hope can easily cloud our judgment. But once again--though I'm not an expert--I don't see how hope alone can explain the striking white outer wings of the bird in the video. My hunch, and it's only a hunch, is still that this is the real thing…
cmooney | January 24, 2006I'm Google dependent, just like all the rest of you. But I heard about a new search function that's going live today, and I've been checking it out. (Full Disclosure: I heard from a friend here in D.C. who's involved in promoting this search.) The name is catchy--Dumbfind. It doesn't replace Google, and it takes some getting used to, but it seems to allow for better sifting of results for those who know exactly what they're looking for through the use of tags that organize the content, as explained here and here. As a bunch of science geeks, I figured that some of you folks might want to give…
cmooney | January 23, 2006The latest attempt to create sparks over science and religion came on Sunday in the New York Times book review. There, Judith Shulevitz wrote a subtle but ultimately very troubling piece that largely points the finger at scientists themselves for spurring on the evolution conflict. John Rennie goes to town on the article here, and he does a more extensive job than I plan on doing. Still, I was bothered by certain aspects of Shulevitz's article, and I'd like to explain further why.
If I had to guess, I'd say that Shulevitz is writing in what I like to call "counterintuitive mode." This is…
cmooney | January 23, 2006My book was reviewed in the Sunday Times of London yesterday. The reviewer was generally positive. Nevertheless, presumably out of the standard critic impulse to say something, anything negative, he created one of the most staggering strawmen I've ever witnessed:
But the central plank of [Mooney's] argument is the embryonic stem-cell issue. There is no doubt that Bush's solution to his dilemma was based on atrocious science. Exposing that fact is one thing. But to question the right of anybody to oppose experiments on human embryos, as Mooney does, is quite another. [Italics added]
Actually…
cmooney | January 23, 2006Some of you may have seen that there is a vampire-werewolf movie in theaters starring Kate Beckinsale. The title is seriously disturbing: Underworld Evolution. I haven't seen the movie yet, although it sounds like my kind of trash. But how much do you want to bet that it misuses or distorts the scientific concept of evolution? If I know anything about these schlocky films (and I do, having seen far too many of them), I'd say the chances are quite high......
cmooney | January 22, 2006Although it isn't out yet, people already seem to be pre-ordering Bobby Henderson's The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I'm one of them; heck, I already have the FSM T-shirt. I predict that Henderson's book will be a huge success, and in the process will further serve to prove a key axiom: Intelligent design may not count as science, but it's hard to think of anything more ripe for parody.
Advance reviews of the book look pretty promising:
"If Intelligent Design is taught in schools, equal time should be given to the FSM theory and the non-FSM theory."
--Professor Douglas Shaw, Ph.D…
cmooney | January 22, 2006If you'd like to see an impressive example of how politically relevant, non-"balanced" science reporting can be carried out, read this article in the Reno News and Review. It's a takedown of Congressman Jim Gibbons--now running for Nevada's governorship--for releasing (along with Rep. Richard Pombo) a report that distorts and twists the science of mercury pollution.
I believe that politicians should be held accountable for lying to or misleading the public, whether it's about science or about anything else. So I'm glad the Reno News and Review is bringing charges about the misuse of science…
cmooney | January 22, 2006Looks like a lot of the folks here at ScienceBlogs.com keep on going straight through the weekend. My habit is the opposite: For sanity, for relaxation, for a change of pace, I'm not a weekend blogger, unless there's something that I really think needs to be noted and can't wait. But when it comes to weekdays, I can always be expected to be posting--unless I'm traveling or hungover or something. And at least in the first case, you can expect a fair warning!
The readers of my old blog were familiar with this routine, I think, but there are a lot of new visitors here on the new site, so I…
cmooney | January 20, 2006Bill Ruckelshaus. Russell Train. Lee Thomas. Bill Reilly. Christie Todd Whitman. What do these names all have in common?
Answer: All are former administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency. All take human-caused global warming seriously. And all are Republicans--moderate Republicans, of a very different breed from the ones who are (generally) running our government today.
The GOP has a proud environmental tradition, of that there can be no doubt. Just think of Teddy Roosevelt. The tradition lives on, albeit in a kind of exile, in these five Republican former EPA heads--none of whom,…
cmooney | January 20, 2006I'm heading off to Boston for an event tonight. I may get to blog again from Beantown, or I may not. A couple of things to leave you with: First, check out the latest Bush administration science scandal. A government report was apparently doctored to take out references to the possibility that Navy sonar may have caused the beaching of a group of whales. Typical, I know, but do try to sustain the outrage, if you possibly can--at least until the weekend.
Meanwhile, just a reminder that I'm on Tavis Smiley tonight on PBS. Check your local listings; Tivo here.
cmooney | January 20, 2006I went and saw a movie the other night, and in the process also wound up seeing an ad that I'm sure many of you are familiar with. It's for Coca Cola, and it involves cute penguins and surprisingly benign polar bears getting together to enjoy fizzy beverages at the North Pole.
Now, the conceit of polar bears and penguins being buddies--rather than the former devouring the latter--is ridiculous enough. But let that pass; this is, after all, a cartoonish ad campaign obviously aimed at kids.
What troubles me more, though, is the blatant ignorance the ad both embodies, and spreads, about…
cmooney | January 20, 2006DarkSyde over at Daily Kos has been doing yeoman's work to bring information about science and politics to the blogging masses. Today, he's got the latest contribution: A long interview with three of the principals of RealClimate (Mike Mann, Gavin Schmidt, Stefan Rahmstorf). They talk about the basic science of climate, misguided attacks on the "hockey stick," and recent discoveries linking global warming to hurricane intensity. Make sure to check it out.
cmooney | January 20, 2006There's a very interesting, lengthy editorial about politics and science in the journal Cell by Paul Nurse, the president of Rockefeller University. Nurse articulates the scientific community's standard complaint about levels of research funding, but also goes much farther, dealing with the "intelligent design" issue as well as other political attacks on science. I particularly appreciated Nurse's stand on ID and the National Institutes of Health:
When the NIH Director, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, was asked by Science magazine whether he was personally concerned about the Intelligent Design movement…
cmooney | January 19, 2006Lots of folks have been posting stuff from their prior blogs. I'm not going to do too much of that, but I would like to breathe some more life into one discovery from my old blog--a rather scandalous quote from Energy and Commerce committee chair Joe Barton on climate science.
Nowadays everybody knows Barton for his outrageous attack on Michael Mann and his colleagues over the "hockey stick." But do they know what he said in 2001 in denouncing the Kyoto Protocol? To wit:
Second thing that the citizens of the United States need to understand about Kyoto is that the science is not settled. In…
cmooney | January 19, 2006The anti-research types get a lot of mileage out of arguing that embryonic stem cell research has been hyped. In general, I think they greatly overstate the case, but we must admit--and I certainly do--that some pro-research statements have been made that are really beyond the pale. Perhaps the most outrageous example, of course, is Jonathan Edwards' statement during the 2004 campaign that
If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.
Note to John: You…
cmooney | January 19, 2006Folks, I'll be appearing tomorrow night on The Tavis Smiley Show, on PBS, for a pretty thorough interview about the themes of my book. I had to do the interview by satellite, which is always a bit challenging, but I'm told it came off pretty well. For my local network, WETA, the show is on at midnight eastern (i.e., technically it airs on the 21st). You'll have to check your local listings if you're located somewhere else than Washington, D.C., but I do hope you can tune in. I'll provide another update tomorrow.
cmooney | January 19, 2006The Times is reporting today that the Vatican is not so anti-evolution after all--thank goodness--but that's not what's intriguing about the article from my perspective. I couldn't help noticing this sentence from the middle of the piece:
There is no credible scientific challenge to the idea that evolution explains the diversity of life on earth, but advocates for intelligent design posit that biological life is so complex that it must have been designed by an intelligent source.
There it is--a clear admission that ID is not a scientific theory. This is not merely a matter of opinion, and…
cmooney | January 19, 2006It's good to have friends. In this case, specifically, Jason Rosenhouse, who has taken on a few of my critics for me.
The gist is this: Some conservatives, in response to my arguments in The Republican War on Science, have been trying to make it look as though "intelligent design" is not so heavily backed by the GOP. For instance, Rosenhouse cites Adam Keiper in National Review, who has argued that "Conservatives are not politically unified in, not especially motivated by, and in a great many cases simply annoyed at, the intelligent-design debate." He also cites Kevin Shapiro in Commentary,…