cmooney | January 18, 2006I've never been impressed with New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, but I did not know he was this batty. From the Washington Post:
[Nagin] said "God is mad at America" and "is sending hurricane after hurricane" because He disapproves of the United States invading Iraq "under false pretenses."
I agree with basically all of this, excluding all the parts about God and hurricanes.
Seriously, though: It's not at all amusing to learn that Ray Nagin thinks in an alarmingly Robertsonian vein (albeit with a leftwing twist). Robertson has considerable influence but is not in a political leadership position.…
cmooney | January 18, 2006We hardly knew ya! In the long history of American monkey trials, your rather puny attempt to undermine evolution--the case was quickly settled in our favor once the inevitable legal threat came down--may be worthy of a footnote. Or maybe not. It really depends on whether or not other creationists try to adopt your strategy of packaging anti-evolutionism in the guise of a philosophy class, rather than a science class.
Still, let's count down your errors. You made the same mistake that creationists always make: Wearing your religion on your sleeve. The teacher of your now-infamous course even…
cmooney | January 17, 2006This post is basically a pile-on. We're already flogging National Review over its promotion of Tom Bethell. So why not rub it in?
In The Republican War on Science, I outline conservative attacks on science in a variety of areas. Not surprisingly, it turns out that many of the leading strategies are reflected in articles published by National Review Online. Three quick examples:
Global Warming: Most of the pundits that NR publishes on this topic seem attached to one of a small number of well-known contrarian think tanks. Examples: Iain Murray and Christopher Horner of the Competitive…
cmooney | January 17, 2006I feel kinda bad: Rasmus at RealClimate has gone and done a massive post in response to an idle question I asked on my old blog about whether an Amazonian drought could be definitively linked to climate change. (Answer: Not at this point, if ever...) The post, though, really shows the virtue of RealClimate as the web's leading source of climate science discussion and explanation, so I encourage you to check it out.
cmooney | January 17, 2006I've been going on and on lately about the adult stem cell partisans and what's wrong with their arguments. But underlying those arguments, I suspect, is something deeper. These advocates just don't seem to share the scientific mindset when it comes to embryonic stem cell research. Some of them, I speculate, may not even fully grasp why scientists want to see this research get done in the first place.
This reflection arose as I was reading Matt Nisbet's blog, which directed me to a Washington Post commentary by a Harvard stem cell scientist that I would otherwise have missed. The piece is…
cmooney | January 16, 2006Man, the Amazon.com reviewers just keep doing my work for me. Consider the latest takedown of Tom Bethell's The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science. It's lengthy, thorough, and written by a libertarian who says he's in similar territory to Bethell politicially. But instead, the reviewer says Bethell's book is "of no worth, even for a highschool audience." I particularly liked this bit:
In regards to science-critical journalism--we live in a country in which a fourth of the people believe that the sun rotates around the earth [I thought it was higher--ed]. Thus it is hard to believe we are…
cmooney | January 16, 2006Well, I've been here at ScienceBlogs.com for a few days now, and would like to reflect a bit on the experience. Overall, I must say, I'm overwhelmingly pleased. I'm a technical moron and my old blog was held together with spitballs and sealing wax. It had big technical difficulties. By contrast, writing here has been very smooth, and it has been much easier to engage back-and-forth with commenters. The discussions following my posts have generally been much better as a result. (The fact that more people are reading and commenting now than before certainly doesn't hurt either.)
I also dig the…
cmooney | January 16, 2006Go over to the Carpetbagger Report for the sad truth. USA Today itself has some good science writers; they must be aghast at this behavior by the weekend magazine. The most appalling thing is that the offending article ran under the banner of "science"....
cmooney | January 16, 2006I know I'm about a year late on this, but it was only recently that I finally watched the notorious Sci-Fi Channel version of Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea cycle. LeGuin has complained at length about how the adaptation destroyed her novels. I heartily agree. The Sci-Fi version simply invents, out of whole cloth, weird subplots and characters that don't exist at all in the books, for no apparent reason. Kargad warriors sacking the wizard stronghold of Roke? Come on.
The Sci-Fi adaptation also blends two different Earthsea books together so that their events happen simultaneously, instead of…
cmooney | January 16, 2006As I've noted previously, there have been attempts to question the scientific peer review process following the Hwang Woo Suk scandal. But a Rick Weiss article in the Washington Post over the weekend helpfully explains why it's naive to think that peer reviewers can catch this kind of chicanery:
Despite all the recent hand-wringing, there may be precious few new lessons to be learned from the Korean debacle, several experts said. Even the journal editors who promised to beef up their screening of submitted manuscripts say privately they doubt there is a practical way to intercept the small…
cmooney | January 16, 2006I was watching CNN the other day, and saw a segment they had on the latest "intelligent design" case out of California (no link available). My impression? Whew: We're going to win this one easily if it goes to trial, because once again, the creationists aren't smart enough to cover their tracks. It was like Bill Buckingham and Alan Bonsell all over again.
I went to Lexis-Nexis this morning to get the CNN segment transcript. In particular, CNN interviewed, on the air, a kid who had taken the notorious "philosophy" class that is at the center of the dispute. Wisely, CNN asked the twirp what he…
cmooney | January 15, 2006I must say, I'm kinda proud of myself. The very first book that I've ever blurbed is now out. It's by Cristina Page and it's entitled, How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Sex, Virtue, and the Way We Live Now. For me, Page's book was a revealing look at what's really driving the Christian right. Reading it made me realize, really for the first time, that religious conservatives aren't simply driven by their opposition to abortion; they're also driven by opposition to out-of-wedlock sex, and, in some cases, opposition to all sex that is not for the purpose of procreation.
Page starts out…
cmooney | January 13, 2006Yesterday, extending a public debate that I participated in earlier in the week, I criticized some arguments by Reason's Ron Bailey and started to criticize some writings by the Discovery Institute's Wesley Smith. I'm pretty much done with Bailey (see our exchange here), with whom I really don't disagree all that much. But I have more to say about Smith's arguments on the stem cell issue.
In my previous post, I left off by objecting to Smith's attempt to create what I view as a false opposition between adult and embryonic stem cell research. There's much more to say here. In particular, I'd…
cmooney | January 13, 2006The New York Sun covered my event last Tuesday, and it's a pretty interesting read. Check it out. It gives a pretty good sense of the tenor of the discussion that went on. Meanwhile, I'll have my second post about the substance of the issues discussed at the debate shortly (the first one was here).
cmooney | January 13, 2006Bush was in New Orleans yesterday, the day we learned that the federal budget deficit is going to be $ 60 billion more than expected, thanks to spending related to hurricane Katrina. Of course, that $ 60 billion hardly represents the only economic impact of the hurricane. For example, there are the insured and uninsured losses, which have been estimated at well over $ 100 billion. And then, of course, there's damage to the economy. Richard T. Carson, an economist at the University of California San Diego, has put the figure for that at around $ 1 trillion due to losses in shipping and tourism…
cmooney | January 12, 2006This Friday the 13th, I'll be sleeping in, then getting some work done, and hopefully taking it easy in the evening. It wasn't always so. Back in college I used to party on these days, making a point of floutting all kinds of hoary old superstitions, and (at least theoretically) buying myself an eternity of bad luck in the process.
I remember one "superstition bash" in my college dorm room where people were dancing, then we suddenly turned on the lights and I shattered a mirror. Gutsy, huh?
Another time, we set up a huge ladder in the middle of the Yale campus, and tried to see whether…
cmooney | January 12, 2006I have started to assemble a new blogroll for this new blog--the one on my last site was extremely outdated. My general policy is going to be that I will not list blogs that are right here at ScienceBlogs, simply because anyone reading the site is naturally going to see what the other participants are posting daily anyway. (Although, I'm quite open to arguments about why I shouldn't run the blogroll this way.) So far I've just added five blogs that I can vouch for, more will be coming. Check out one of them, SciAm Observations, for a recent post from John Rennie about my debate with Ron…
cmooney | January 12, 2006The three way debate/discussion on science and politics hosted by the Smith Family Foundation on Tuesday night was an interesting event, to say the least. It was in some ways a difficult discussion for me, because the other participants, Ronald Bailey and Wesley Smith, are much more inclined than I to mix it up about the ethics of different kinds of research, especially when it comes to future biomedical advances and whether they should go forward without restriction. I, on the other hand, simply take the stance that while ethical viewpoints may differ, that's no excuse for either side to…
cmooney | January 12, 2006It's by Matthew Nisbet, and it's about the changing politics of the stem cell issue in the wake of the Hwang scandal. The gist: The public had grown quite supportive of embryonic stem cell research, but the 2004 electoral campaign polarized the issue, and now the Korean fraud story has potential to turn opinion the other way. The data are troubling enough that Nisbet concludes with the suggestion that "perhaps the focus on funding stem cell research in science-friendly states remains a best strategy for stem cell proponents." Read the whole article.
P.S.: Potentially contrary data comes in…
cmooney | January 12, 2006If an alien from Mars arrived on Earth, visited the United States, and wanted to understand the issues that exist at the intersection of politics and science in this country, he, she, or it would have a problem. You see, there are two popular books out that have garnered significant public attention and that purport to address this topic. Unfortunately, they come from diametrically opposed perspectives, and reach irreconcilably different conclusions.
One book, as you may have guessed, is my own, The Republican War on Science. The other is Tom Bethell's Politically Incorrect Guide to Science.…