Anti-Science
gregladen | August 24, 2017Posting this with no comment because it is expected and so obviously bone-headed Trump:
US President Donald Trump's administration has disbanded a government advisory committee that was intended to help the country prepare for a changing climate.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration established the committee in 2015 to help businesses and state and local governments make use of the next national climate assessment. The legally mandated report, due in 2018, will lay out the latest climate-change science and describe how global warming is likely to affect the United States,…
gregladen | July 3, 2017This is disturbing, but since civilization is ending as we speak, I suppose it is not surprising. From the Washington Post:
Any resident in Florida can now challenge what kids learn in public schools, thanks to a new law that science education advocates worry will make it harder to teach evolution and climate change.
The legislation, which was signed by Gov. Rick Scott (R) this week and goes into effect Saturday, requires school boards to hire an “unbiased hearing officer” who will handle complaints about instructional materials, such as movies, textbooks and novels, that are used in local…
gregladen | March 31, 2017A well known anti-science "think" tank has sent around, to teachers, a mailing including an antiscience book, a movie, and nice letter and, oddly, a pamphlet exposing the fact that the mailing is entirely politically motivated.
Most science teachers will ignore this. A few science teachers are science deniers, and they already had the material in the mailings. So, I think this was a huge waste of money and effort. But it happened and you should know about it, and you should warn anyone you know that is a teacher.
The real concern, in my opinion, is not this falling into the hands of science…
gregladen | March 29, 2017A few items that I think you should see:
Trump’s executive order puts the world on the road to climate catastrophe
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump issued a sweeping executive order that effectively guts national efforts to address climate change. If he isn’t stopped, the endpoint of this approach is the ruination of our livable climate and the needless suffering of billions of people for decades to come.
The order starts the process of undoing President Obama’s Clean Power Plan standards for power plants. It also spurs fossil fuel consumption and blocks federal efforts to even prepare for…
gregladen | June 13, 2016Thinker, writer, and independent scholar Shawn Otto has written an important book called “The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It” (Milkweed Editions, publisher)
Read this book now, and act on what you learn from it, for the sake of your own future and the future of our children and their children.
The rise of modern civilization, from the Enlightenment onward for hundreds of years, was the same thing as the rise of modern science. The rise of science was a cultural novelty with only vague foreshadowing. It was a revolution in the way humans think.…
denialism | February 7, 2015This week's Realtime with Bill Maher was just about the most perfect example I've seen yet that maybe reality doesn't have a liberal bias. Due to the measles outbreak becoming a hot-button issue, and the realization that his smoldering anti-vaccine denialism would not go over well, our weekly debate host decided to instead unleash all of his other incredibly stupid, unscientific beliefs about medicine.
This was astonishing. And because his panel, as usual, is composed largely of political writers and journalists, there was no one to provide a sound scientific counterpoint to the craziness…
gregladen | January 21, 2015What is the Serengeti Strategy?
"The Serengeti Strategy" is a term coined by climate scientist Michael Mann in which "special interests faced with adverse scientific evidence ... target individual scientists rather than take on an entire scientific field at once." His invention of the analogy must have been an interesting moment, given the context. In his book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Line, Mann talks about a trip to scientific meetings in Arusha as an IPCC co-author, during which he took the usual side trip to the Serengeti:
After the meeting, I…
gregladen | May 19, 2014I have nothing against Chobani Yoghurt. In fact, I like it. Even more importantly, Huxley likes it.
But the image above annoys me. It says "Nature got us to 100 calories, not scientists. #howmatters"
This is in accord with their latest ad, here:
OK, I have three challenges for Chobani Yoghurt.
First, demonstrate how science is not related to your yoghurt production AT ALL. Chances are you use methods of ensuring that your product does not contain harmful bacteria, or that the bacteria is killed off or removed during the processing cycle. Almost all food manufacturers use various methods…
oracknows | May 18, 2014I hadn't really planned on writing again about everyone's favorite conspiracy theorist and promoter of quackery, Mike Adams, at least not so soon after the last time I did it, which was only last week after Adams appeared on Dr. Oz's daytime television show to push his "laboratory." Adams, as you might recall, goes by the Internet moniker the "Health Ranger" (which would really more appropriately be "Health Danger") and is the man responsible for one of the quackiest sites on the Internet, NaturalNews.com, a repository for nearly every form of medical pseudoscience known to humans, mixed in…
stoat | January 30, 2011#4 in the series. Normally reserved for non-scientists, but WK wins a dishonourable mention. He is part of the stable of kooks that von S gathers round him at klimazwiebel, though as far as I can tell von S has carefully avoided becoming kooky himself.
You'd better go and read what Krauss has to say for himself before you come back to my rantings.
The strongest impression I get is that, as an anthropologist, he really has little interest in the science of climate change. Its all meat to the grinder as far as he is concerned, and reality is of no real importance. Hear him slavering:
For me as…
evolgen | July 17, 2008
The Creation Museum is located in northern Kentucky, just across the Ohio border from Cincinnati. Answers in Genesis, the folks behind the so-called "museum", claim that their "museum" is within a 6 hour drive of 2/3 of the US population. This is not true -- Kentucky is in the middle of bumfuck nowhere (I'm an expert on cities in the middle of bumfuck nowhere), and most people in the US can't get there in 6 hours.
But the museum is damn close to Cincinnati -- it's in what people would call the "greater Cincinnati area", and it's closer to the so-called Cincinnati airport (which is actually…
evolgen | April 21, 2008
The creationist movie that everyone* is talking about came out was released this weekend. Early reports have Expelled coming in 9th nationally in weekend gross, with about $3 million. That's a lot of money, and you can color Randy Olson freakin' impressed. However, put in the context of what the producers were expecting, it's not so good.
That doesn't stop Randy from pulling at Matt Nisbet and touting how awesome the creationists are and how shitty the "evolutionists" are. Fucking "evolutionists"! I'm gonna go off on a rant here, but, before I do, allow me to point out the beautiful irony…
evolgen | April 19, 2008It's funny because some people think both groups are wrong:
Originally from Tom the Dancing Bug.
evolgen | October 24, 2007Peer-to-Peer, one of Nature's many blogs, has a post on pseudoscience on preprint servers. The post is in response to a post from another blog (creationists using nature precedings to pre-publish junk science) that pointed out a potentially pseudoscientific article on Nature's preprint server, Nature Precedings (The saltational model for the dawn of H. sapiens, chin, adolescence phase, complex language and modern behavior). The article in question came off as creationist tripe to selena, who blogged about it at Tending the Garden.
This brings up a couple of questions. Taking a narrow focus,…
evolgen | April 20, 2007It seems like everything is coming in twos the past couple of days. Yesterday we mentioned two books on the evolution of genomes and two stories involving either Wolbachia or sex determination. Today, we have two stories involving criticisms of scientific papers. One deals with the evolution of the bacterial flagellum, and the other addresses natural selection on the brain expressed gene ASPM in humans.
The first story involves everyone's favorite irreducibly complex cellular apparatus: the bacterial flagellum. During the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, Nick Matzke worked with the plaintiffs (the…
evolgen | April 8, 2007Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney are arguing that science education is so fucked up and the press are so piss poor that scientists need to go swift boat vets in order win the public debates against anti-science types. According to Nisbet and Mooney, the general public are too stupid to understand the real science, so scientists need to dumb it down. And we can't rely on the press (which everyone calls "the media") to accurately communicate science, so we need to give them catch phrases and slogans. Scientists need ad wizards to convince the public that the earth is more than 10,000 years old,…
evolgen | January 25, 2007We've got Phil Skell, and we can't get rid of him. Both Michael Behe and William Harris have rolled through my parts in the past few years. Tonight we get disciples of Adnan Oktar (Harun Yahya), the muslim creationist described in this article on creationism in Turkey. He's also an alleged holocaust denier.
When I got my "Invitation to attend Evolution lecture tonight" (reproduced below the fold) from the president of the Muslim Student Association, I didn't know what to think. I'm not sure if I'll be attending the talk (I've got real work to do), and Oktar won't even be there; he's sending…
evolgen | December 28, 2006
Barbaro, the 2006 Kentucky Derby winner who broke his leg during the Preakness Stakes, is almost healthy enough to be released from his ICU stall at University of Pennsylvania's New Bolton Center. He has been the focus of hopes and prayers of many horse racing fans -- and little kids who are fans of horsies in general. The chief surgeon at the center has this to say about Barbaro's recovery:
"It's not a miracle. It's anything but that," he said, sitting next to a Christmas tree topped with a stuffed Barbaro.
"Some of the Barbaro fans aren't going to like that, perhaps. I'm a scientist, I'm a…
evolgen | December 22, 2006
Eugenie Scott and Glenn Branch are two of the leaders in the movement to keep the science in science classrooms in American public schools. Both Scott and Branch hold administrative position at the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), and they've displayed great commitment to maintaining the scientific integrity of American primary and secondary education. Of recent note is their new book Not in Our Classrooms, which offers an introduction to modern creationism and science education in the United States.
Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church…