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Summertime thoughts on final exams.

While our exams were weeks ago, I know that some folks (especially high school students) are just finishing up. So these observations sent to me by a reader may be timely: I believe that if students are passing their classes with a B and above they should not have to take final exams. Most students drop letter grades when taking an exam that is an accumulation of material that they have to dig out of the crevices of their brain from 5 to 6 months ago. I cannot remember what I had for breakfast last week; how can we expect our students to try and remember what they learned in January by the…

Mother's Day appreciation (part II): Mom goes to grad school.

In part I of the interview, my mother described what it was like to be propelled by her dream of being an astronomer from being at home with four children to being in an undergraduate physics classroom and finding a serious mentor. Part II: Out of the comfort zone and into the graduate program: Were you encouraged by the folks at Rutgers-Newark with whom you were taking physics coursework to move on to graduate work? As I was nearing the point of exhausting the undergraduate physics curriculum, and with no graduate physics program offered on that campus, my professors all encouraged me to…

2007 Science Spring Showdown: Kuhn vs. Theory coverage!

PRESS CENTER | UPDATED BRACKET Janet: Welcome to team coverage of the much anticipated Chair Bracket match between Kuhn and Theory! Ben: Yes, I think we can agree on our assumptions that this will be quite a battle. Janet: I certainly hope so, Ben. Otherwise, we're going to spend the whole game talking past each other! Ben: Before the gladiators take the field, let's take a quick look at how they got here. In first round play, Kuhn surprised the crowd by trouncing Popper, while Theory squeaked by Experiment by a single point. Janet: The second round saw another trouncing at the hands of…

Making repairs, staying afloat.

Like sailors we are, who must rebuild their ship upon the open sea, never able to dismantle it in dry dock or to reconstruct it there from the best materials. Otto Neurath, "Protocol Sentences" * * * * * The Neurath quotation above was offered to explain something about scientific theories and scientific knowledge, but today it puts me in mind of scientific communities instead. For surely, if we could bring the ship of science to dry-dock, there are lots of rotten planks that we might replace with strong new lumber, but that's not an option. We have to fix the old tub while it's still at…

Impediments to dialogue about animal research (part 5).

Today we discuss an impediment to dialogue about animals in research that seems to have a special power to get people talking past each other rather than actually engaging with each other: Imprecision about the positions being staked out. Specifically, here, the issue is whether the people trying to have a dialogue are being precise in laying out the relevant philosophical positions about animals -- the position they hold, the position they're arguing against, the other positions that might be viable options. Why is imprecision about your philosophical position a dialogue blocker? It tends…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Heal your genome?

It's been a while since I've done a bit of Your Friday Dose of Woo, and I actually kind of miss it. It's not that there hasn't been anything that hasn't been worthy of this "honor" for a while. On the other hand, there hasn't been anything in a while that combines just the right proportions of pure woo, utter ridiculousness, and pure pseudoscience to provide the perfect "inspiration" to start me on a roll. Oh, it's out there, but for some reason I've let myself become bogged down by topics that are just too serious. It's time to lighten up, at least for a little while. So it was when I came…

Cthulhu Lives in The Blog Cave

Apropos Linux in Exile losing his Linux System to a Predatory Windows Install the other day (see Windows killed my laptop, again) I've been thinking about and beginning to do something about cleaning house. See below for my latest Windows mini-horror story (not as bad as LIE's). But first, a word about Cthulhu. Who lives in my blog cave. I have three computers sitting here in the blog cave, two of which I use on a regular basis. The Windows computer is used at this time only for scanning slides because the software that comes with the scanner for Windows is convenient and nice and the…

Go back to Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor

Garrison Keillor has done it again: he's written another insipid article loaded with casual bigotry, this time against gays. I'm pleased to see that Dan Savage has savaged him, so I don't need to go on at length. However, this really isn't the first time Keillor has done this—he has a history of unthinking stereotyping and rejection of gays and atheists. He's an excellent example of why, when I see the Religious Right and the Religious Left, I don't think the problem is the Right or Left…it's the Religious. My criticism of Keillor from 2005 is below the fold. Not only does he reject atheism…

Expelled! Induced Conversations and the Future of Science, Medicine and Hollywood

Despite the fact that the producers of Expelled! have the most nefarious of motives in mind, and that we can expect more from them (we are waiting for the other shoe to drop), it is interesting to note how many conversations this documentary about Intelligent Design Creationism has sparked. Ultimately, the intended purpose of Expelled! is to silence real scientists and set back scientific research that is on the verge of filling one of the most important "gaps" in which the Christian God of the theistic evolutionist currently lives. In the long run, conversations that arise from movies like…

Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe?

Several thousand intelligent beings have surrounded two funny looking blue trees. On some planet. Elsewhere. [Image source] Back in the old days, when Carl Sagan was alive and at Harvard, there was an annual (or at least frequent) debate between Sagan and my adviser, Irv DeVore. The debate was about the possibility of intelligent life having evolved on other planets. You already know Sagan's argument: There are billions and billions of Galaxies, each with billions and billions of stars, so there are billions and billions and billions and billions of stars. Even if the probability of…

Darwin and the Voyage: 06 ~ Bugs

When reading The Voyage it is impossible to miss the observation that much of the time Darwin was engaged in adolescent boy behavior: Pulling the heads off insects, noting how long they would wiggle after cut in half, closely examining the ooze and guts, occupied much of his time. Obviously, careful observation and a strong stomach were not all that was required to think up Natural Selection and his other theories, or the Origin of Species would have been written dozens of times by dozens of grown up kids. In the following passages, Darwin is still along the Atlantic Coast, in "The…

The wit and wisdom of G'Kar

Unfortunately, as we have been dreading for the last four months or so since her relapse was diagnosed, my mother-in-law passed away from breast cancer in hospice. She died peacefully, with my wife and the rest of her family at her side. As you might expect, I do not much feel like blogging. Because I foresaw this day coming, however, I did set up a series of reposts to autopost for you while I am in mourning. Some, I have even updated and spiffed up. If you've been reading less than a year or two, they're new to you. If not, I hope you enjoy them again. I don't know when I'll be back, other…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The physics of homeopathy and "nanocrystalloids"

I happen to be fortunate enough this year to have taken the Friday after Thanksgiving off, and it is a very good thing indeed. However, this morning, having indulged in the American tradition of stuffing myself full of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and various other most excellent and hearty foods, all accompanied by some hearty ale. What that means is that I'm still suffering some of the after effects of food coma. What that further means for the blog is that I don't feel up to tackling something that will require me to exercise my neurons too much. So, in my food-induced haze, I asked…

Creationism X Holocaust denial = stupidity2

Seventy years ago today, the massed armies of the Third Reich poured across the Polish border, marking the official start of World War II. It would require nearly six years, millions of deaths, and the combined might of the Soviet Union, United States, Great Britain, and numerous other nations to bring the war to an end, with Hitler utterly defeated. I mark this occasion because of my interest in World War II history, the Holocaust, Holocaust denial, and because my heritage is Polish through my father's side. Another thing that needs to be understood about September 1, 1939 is that it marked…

Surgery: Past performance is no guarantee of future results

In recent years, there has been a lot of interest in improving surgical outcomes. One strain of research tends to examine the "volume-outcome" relationship, which in essence asked the question if the volume of cases that a surgeon or hospital does has a relationship outcome. In other words, are mortality rates lower, survival rates better, or the correction of symptoms more reliable for a given surgical procedure in the hands of surgeons who do more of them per year or hospitals in which more of them per year are done? On the surface, it would seem self-evident that the answer must be yes,…

A physician's obligation

I've written about the corrosive effect that religion can have on medical care when it is allowed to become too pervasive. One example where the intersection of religion and medicine concerns me is when various religious doctors insist on very dubious evidence that religiosity is good for a patient's health and that physicians should therefore take a "spiritual history" of all of their patients, with one even going so far as to claim that "excluding God from a consultation should be grounds for malpractice." I've also critically discussed studies that purport to show various benefits of…

Why do intelligent people use alternative medicine?

While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) This post originally appeared on December 12, 2004 and could be considered the first "substantive" post that wasn't an introduction that I ever did for this blog. See what you think as far as the evolution of my writing style. And, of course, feel free to chime…

Alternative medicine and breast cancer

After the three posts that I recently did about vaccination have garnered well over 250 comments between the three of them (and still counting), I thought it might be time to switch topics. As important as they are, I don't want this blog to become all vaccines all the time. (After all, look what happened to the blog SupportVaccination.org. It's a long story that I'll have to tell you sometime; but suffice it to say that the blog no longer exists.) Quite frankly, seeing the same old fallacies being repeated over and over again by antivaxers does get tiresome after a while. After all, how many…

Rick Perry, Peter Wood and the blogosphere: Guest post from John Mashey

This is a guest post from John Mashey. An amusing coincidence surfaced a few days ago, relating the US Presidential campaign of Texas Governor Rick Perry to the Peter Wood kerfuffle at Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE), including the stir in some parts of the blogosphere. I explain that, followed by the weird background. 0) Rick Perry and Peter Wood 1) Chronology at CHE and NAS 2) Deltoid and elsewhere 3) Climate thuggery discovered by blogosphere 4) Chronology of the thuggery wave 5) Conclusion 0) Rick Perry and Peter Wood See Washington Post, 08/18/11 Fact-Checker: href="http://www.…

Skeptoid fact check part 2

In part 1 of this fact check I examined Brian Dunning's assertions that DDT did not thin eggshells. Responses from Orac: "Dunning should know better", Bug Girl: "Dunning clearly got his information second-hand. And it was bad information.", and Dunning: I think I've repeated that Milloy was not one of my sources enough times. I hadn't even heard of him. which is a rather odd thing to say, because in comments on his podcast Dunning responded to this comment: Yeah, the very fact that you would consider Junk Science a source worthy of citing frankly is enough to treat the entire article with…

An atheist Holocaust denier?

Here's an unfortunate story that shows that loonies come in all varieties: BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - Democratic Party leaders are wondering what to do about a candidate for attorney general who denies the Holocaust occurred and wants to "reawaken white racial awareness." Larry Darby, the founder of the Atheist Law Center, made an abortive bid for the AG job as a Libertarian in 2002, but only recently have his views on race and the Holocaust come to light. He has no money for campaign advertising and has made only a few campaign speeches, but garnered 12 percent support in the June 6 primary in a…

Friends of Earth, no Friends of Science

Friends of Earth put out a report on nanotechnology and sunscreens recently. They bungled it. Big time. A little background. Zinc (Zn) and Titanium (Ti) Oxides are the best sun protectants known. They don't break down in the sun and they have broad UVA UVB coverage. However, they are bright opaque white (you remember the thick white stuff lifeguards put on their noses and ears?). If you make it small enough, though, the solution will be clear, not white, and still do a good job. Most nanoparticles in sunscreen may be nano in terms of size, but nanotechnology (from a toxicology perspective)…

HIV/AIDS denialists digging themselves in deeper

When first I commented on the unfortunate death of HIV/AIDS denialist Christine Maggiore a few days ago, little did I expect to be descended upon by several of her fellow denialists, who promptly swelled the comment thread after the post to close to a couple of hundred comments. Perhaps I should not have been so surprised. It's an emotional story, and whenever, for example, Tara Smith wrote about HIV/AIDS pseudoscience it was not uncommon for her posts to provoke well over a thousand comments. It also doesn't help that HIV/AIDS denialists tend to be among the most persistent of cranks. In any…

Fabrication of DGUs

A large number of criminal shootings are "drive-bys" --- fired from long range and more likely to hit an extremity than a self-defence shooting at close range. These factors suggest that defensive shootings would be more lethal than criminal ones. John Briggs writes: Any data on the proportions of such long range shootings? I confess I have not seen a serious treatment of the topic. News acounts leave one with the impression that such shootings involve whole carloads of machinegun equipped gangbangers. Our streets aren't that wide here in the US. We aren't talking 100 yard firefights.…

String of Obama Victories Portends a Strong Performance in the General Election

Yesterday, Barack Obama won all three contests (Maryland, Virginia, and DC) in the "Potomac Primary", all by sizable margins. This means that he has won all eight contests that have occurred since Super Tuesday. He now leads the delegate race--even when superdelegates are included--and he maintains an incredible amount of momentum going into the February 19th contests of Hawaii and Wisconsin, where he is expected to do quite well again. However, his delegate lead is still slim, and if he wants to become the true frontrunner, he'll have to have a strong showing on March 4th, particularly in…

Sixth Annual CCPN Meeting in Ambleside, UK

On the weekend of July 28th-30th, about 150 NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) scientists from the UK and Europe (and a few from the US) gathered in Ambleside for the Sixth Annual Collaborative Computing Project for NMR (CCPN) Meeting. The topic of the meeting was "Efficient and Rapid Structure Determination by NMR", and it included presentations by twelve NMR scientists, a demonstration of the CCPN software, and about thirty research posters on various NMR talks. Note: for more background on NMR, check out my previous post on the topic. Biomolecular NMR is a rapidly growing field, one that…

Evolution an Alien Subject? Not to Bloort 183.

Photo source. I think that's what I'm trying to do," he says. "I think Darwin's life is a great story. So why not tell it as a great story? NPR Interview with Jay Hosler, Feb. 14, 2005 Amidst the media storms about teaching evolution in the classroom, I wonder whether anyone considered using comics? It is such a simple, elegant idea. Comics can draw students into the subject, using humor and whimsy, in a way that is simply not possible using a textbook. Plus there's nothing like humor to throw water on a fierce debate between a self-righteous religious zealot and a town's school board.…

To Hear A Mockingbird: The Plight of the Iguana

Predator-prey interactions are often viewed as evolutionary arms races; while predators improve their hunting behaviors and their ability to sneak up on their prey, the prey improve upon their abilities to detect and escape from their predators. The problem, of course, is that there is a trade-off between maintaining vigilance - the attention necessary to be consistently aware of others in the environment takes quite a bit of physical and mental energy - and doing all the other things that an animal must do, such as finding its own food. As a result of this trade-off, many social species,…

Alternative medicine: Changing the rules after the game has started

Damn Steve Novella. Well, not really, but I always get annoyed when someone comes up with an analogy or description of a phenomenon that I should have thought of first. I don't really get annoyed at the person who came up with such ideas, but rather at myself for not thinking of something so obvious or precious first. Whether this self-criticism is a symptom of the megalomania or massive ego that I have been accused of having by some of my less--shall we say?--enamored readers or simply a personality quirk, I'll leave to the reader to decide. Whatever the case, writing for Science-Based…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The secret life of plants

Last week's woo was pretty darned hard to top, don't you think? It had it all, after all: Boner potentiation, penis enlargement, magnets, near infrared, and more. The only thing it lacked that would have made it absolutely perfect woo were references to pseudoscientific "vibration" or, even better, quantum theory. That's the reason I could only give it a 9.5/10 rather than a perfect score of 10/10. All I can say is: Better luck next time. In looking for something that could at least live up to last week, if not surpass it, I was surprised that there actually was such a link in my ever-…

No justice for Abubakar Tariq Nadama after all?

Longtime readers of this blog probably remember the tragic case of Abubakar Tariq Nadama, the five-year-old autistic boy who died as a result of being treated with chelation therapy three years ago by Dr. Roy Kerry, an otolaryngologist who had apparently had given up doing head and neck surgery in favor of the more lucrative pastures of woo. This case was about as clear as a case could get. A known potential complication of chelation therapy is a lowering of calcium levels in the blood, to the point that cardiac arrhythmias and cardiac arrest can occur. Moreover, children are more sensitive…

Distributed Science, Part 2

I got a lot of feedback on my last post in which I argued that open source is the wrong metaphor fo science, because it ties us too closely to the artifact that is open source software. The core of my argument remains the same - science is not software, and we shouldn't treat it the way we treat software. But I got a few comments, here on the blog and in email, that are worth looking at. Here's comment #1. You cite openwetware and the biobricks registry, but if you look closer, openwetware is a wiki, not a website about open source wetware tech. To my knowledge, other than the people over at…

Statement on in response to Jim Lindgren's summary of my comments relating to John R. Lott's Work on Self-Defensive Uses of Guns

[Note: This was an attachement to a Nov 17 posting to firearmsregprof on Nov 17. My comments are in italics like this. TL] by David B. Mustard I take issue with two points of Jim Lindgren?s representation of my statements about John Lott?s 1997 survey, as posted on instapundit.com. Claim that I backed off my comments about what I knew about Lott's survey during a previous conversation with Frank Zimring I did not back off my comments that I made to Frank in our first conversation (which I believe was about July 1, 2002) when he called me to ask some very specific questions about my…

Get out the popcorn! This internecine war among antivaccinationists is getting interesting (part 6)

I don't know why I'm interested in this, to the point where I'm on my sixth post about it since February. I sometimes even ask myself that very question, because taking an admittedly somewhat perverse interest in the internecine feuds among antivaccinationists. Maybe it's a bit of schadenfreude. Maybe it's just me. Whatever the reason, the ongoing feud between Jake "Boy Wonder" Crosby and his former mentors and allies in the antivaccine movement keeps bringing me back for more, as it did last week after a couple of months away. Maybe it's because when the antivaccine movement is fighting…

The long, strange case of Abraham Cherrix continues

Discussing Stanislaw Burzynski's abuse of science while contemplating how even his success stories really aren't yesterday reminded me of a topic that I discussed rather extensively not long after I moved my blog over to ScienceBlogs and have covered sporadically since then. I'm referring to the case of Abraham Cherrix. Cherrix, for those who haven't been regular readers long enough to have encounter him before, was a 15 year old boy who was unfortunate enough to develop Hodgkin's lymphoma. Unfortunately for him, rather than undergoing curative therapy, he decided that he wanted "natural"…

Quoth antivaxers: "We demand transparency, except when it might embarrass us"

Before I delve into the next topic, I can't help but congratulate John Oliver yet again for his excellent deconstruction of the antivaccine movement on Sunday night. As I noted on Tuesday, it clearly hit the mark, given how angry one antivax blogger got over it. As of yesterday, over at that wretched hive of scum and quackery, that antivaccine crank blog known as Age of Autism, resident "Media Editor" Anne Dachel was still sputtering over Oliver's segment, labeling it Oliver's vulgar treatment of vaccine-injured and their families and posting a line about how allegedly "mocking and berating…

The death of a city and the death of science: No Man's Land a year later

When I visited the emptied hole that dominates America's leading city several years ago, a policeman seemed unable to keep himself from describing how people had cast themselves from the upper floors to avoid being trapped and then burning. Though no one needed to be told the consequences, the officer was driven to remind us how the bodies of those people simply vaporized on impact. The sheer horror of the event compelled him to tell the tale, and a desire to make sure that those lives didn't vanish into the ether as well. A year after Katrina struck New Orleans, it's necessary to remember…

Why it matters if liberals are much smarter

Update: Also see follow up post. My previous post where I point to Satoshi Kanazawa's finding that liberals & atheists are smarter than conservatives & the religious was a little drop in the bucket in the blogospheric debate. I made it rather obvious that I wasn't too interested in the evolutionary psychological model of why these patterns exist, rather, I was curious about the patterns themselves. The reason is the one Tom Rees elucidates: What's got people talking is the correlation between atheism and intelligence, although that isn't what the paper is actually about. It's already…

Here we go again...

[Note: Apparently Emma Marris didn't like Sizzle either, and you can read her review in Nature. I'm definitely interested in seeing more reviews of the film from various sources as we get closer to the release date.] After reading Chris Mooney's hyperbolic review of Sizzle this morning I have to admit I was a little pissed off. While I panned the film Chris went head-over-heels for it; it seems that we saw two different films. Maybe we did. Although the topic of science communication is an undercurrent through the film (breaking to the surface in a few places) I did not think that framing was…

Action paleontologists, to the rescue!

In nearly any film that involves dinosaurs, the main problem facing the people making the movie is determining how to get humans and dinosaurs together in the first place. Some films have opted for genetic experiments, others hidden refugia, and still others nuclear tests (although these films usually feature mutated dinosaurs rather than the animals themselves), but a solution is usually found through time travel, the existence of the lost world, or (more recently) fiddling around with DNA. Once the monsters have been securely brought into contact with humans, though, a hero needs to…

Things aren't as simple as they seem

According to tradition, Richard Owen is the great "villain" of Victorian biology; brilliant, arrogant, and jealous, the "British Cuvier" was the greatest threat to On the Origin of Species. In turn, his arch-nemesis was T.H. Huxley, a heroic young scientist who zealously defended Darwin and successfully made a fool of the creationist Owen. So goes the common treatment, anyway, and like most other quick-and-dirty historical synopses the popular caricatures of both Owen and Huxley present a rather jaundiced view of each figure and their importance to science. Much like Charles Lyell…

Un-bear-able

Throughout most of the world humans have exterminated carnivores in order to keep their places of habitation safe, and while large carnivores still exist in patches we have a sort of "You keep to your side, I'll keep to my side," sort of attitude towards them. The problem, however, is that we keep expanding our towns and villages out into areas where large carnivores live, some areas experiencing an increased level of conflict. Leopards eat stray dogs in the slums of Mumbai, wolves kill dogs left outside in Alaska, black bears raid trash cans in New Jersey suburbs, and even polar bears are…

The development of the atomic model

I love this story. It is a story of how ideas changed about the nature of the atom. These are the notes (and diagrams) I use when I teach the atomic nature of matter to non-science majors. The best thing about this story is that it is a great example of science. Science (or scientists) build a model. If new evidence comes along, the model gets changed. There are several other websites that describe all of this stuff, I will list a couple at the end of this post. Typical textbook model of an atom Look in an intro, non-science majors textbook and you will probably see a picture like this…

That hollow ring, that tired objection

Lots of people sent me a link to this essay in which David Hart declares "New" Atheism a passing fad, expecting me to take it apart. I didn't have the heart, and I'm busy right now, sorry. It's a horribly written and excessively long piece — I'd almost call it purple prose if the periphrastic verbosity and passionless vacuity of the author hadn't leeched all the color out of it. It hurt my brain to start reading it, and after scrolling down a couple of pages with no end in sight, I set it aside. TL;DR, as the glib technorati like to say. I did finally drag myself through it over a light lunch…

Plagiarism, copyright and theft

Billy Dembski, the Isaac Newton of Information, is in trouble. He took an animation that Harvard University commissioned from XVIVO, modified it in various ways (or used a copy someone else modified), put a new title on it, and used it without permission of either Harvard or XVIVO. It appears he requested permission, was denied, and used it anyway. Bad. Alas, the video of the event gets blurry at the precise moment when it might or might not show the copyright and credits for the video, but the video he used certainly is modified without permission and is used without permission. Both of…

Home Cooking

The closing of Gourmet magazine is a sad event. I won't just miss the lush pictures and Paris travel tips - what I'll really miss is the food journalism, from DFW on the suffering of lobsters to Daniel Zwerdling on the tragic life of an industrial chicken. I hope other magazines can fill the void, because our food supply is messed up. But this blog post isn't just another lament for the glossy. I had a short essay scheduled to run in the January issue of Gourmet on the pleasures of home cooking. Since that issue will no longer see the light of day, I thought I'd reproduce the essay below. (…

Liveblag II

You can listen along with me at: http://at1.tea.state.tx.us/sboeaudio As before, board comments are in blue. Rose Banzhas, speaking for herself but also an environmental educator: Environmental education matters. As an outdoor educator, I know this matters. McLeroy keeps asking people if they're here on their own dime or on business. Dunno why. Loresa Loftin, Science Teachers Association of Texas: More space science. "Man has walked on the sun"? Various chatter, nothing very exciting, mostly with Cargill. McLeroy is trying to keep things moving. Helen Holdsworth, Texas Wildlife…

The Creationist Running the EPA?

The Philadelphia Inquirer profiles EPA head Stephen Johnson: Johnson majored in biology. At Taylor [University, one of the oldest evangelical universities in the country], that includes discussion of creationism. Taylor biology professor Timothy Burkholder, who was Johnson's adviser, said, "We would adhere to the view that God is the creator of all things and in charge of our lives, and I think Steve recognizes that and did from the beginning." Asked about this, Johnson declined to express his views on the evolution-creation question. "It's not a clean-cut division," the career EPA…

Save the SREL

Reed Cartwright found out that a vital ecological research facility may be closed. The Savannah River Ecological Laboratory is operated by University of Georgia on land owned by the US Department of Energy. The DoE had a plutonium processing facility there, which is now closed. The unpopulated areas surrounding the facility has always been used for ecological research since the DoE started operations, and the site was designated as a National Environmental Research Park in the '70s. The ecological research was initiated because the DoE wanted a way to evaluate the risks and dangers of…

Breast-feeding and SUV-driving: what are the ethically relevant differences?

I'm not sure I realized it while I was writing it, but my last post (on whether scientific knowledge about the benefits of breast-feeding imposes any particular obligations) has me thinking about another kind of case where scientific knowledge might -- or might not -- bring ethical consequences. That case? Global warming. My big question, thinking about these two instances where scientific knowledge, individual decisions, and public policy all coalesce, is what the relevant differences are. First, the disclaimer: I am not an expert in the scientific literature on the health effects of breast…