Politics
razib | July 10, 2009Yesterday in my review of the recent Pew survey comparing attitudes of scientists and the general public I emphasized the fact that scientists are disproportionately godless liberals. But there are some issues where it seems that the Left is on the forefront of science-skepticism. There has been talk here on ScienceBlogs about the disproportionate Lefty orientation of anti-vaccination activists. From what I can tell this is true, but anti-vaccination sentiment is too shallow of a sentiment for it be starkly political, at least according to these data (there's little party difference). On the…
emjohnson | July 10, 2009
Science and religion bicker in the backseat. Collin Purrington / Creative Commons
With Francis Collins' nomination as head of the National Institutes of Health I felt it was appropriate to bring up Sam Harris' letter to the journal Nature objecting to what he called "high-minded squeamishness" on the part of the editors for their praise of his book The Language of God. In the book Collins states:
As believers, you are right to hold fast to the concept of God as Creator; you are right to hold fast to the truths of the Bible; you are right to hold fast to the conclusion that science offers no…
grrlscientist | July 10, 2009tags: funny, humor, satire, economy, television news, instapoll tracker, live poll, ONN, Onion News Network, streaming video
ONN is trying out a new feature to give viewers greater involvement in the news: a live popularity poll. Viewers can vote on specific comments as the pundits are uttering them, which gives the pundits the opportunity to kiss ass in real time and while the broadcast is in progress! (Important when talking about the economy) [3:10]
emjohnson | July 9, 2009On July 9, 1858 the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas was born. To honor the man widely held as the "father of American anthropology" the American Anthropological Association offered a tribute for Boas today on their blog. What conveniently went unmentioned was the fact that the AAA censured Boas in 1918 for revealing that American anthropologists were covertly working as spies for the US government.
As Boas wrote to the editor of The Nation:
The point against which I wish to enter a vigorous protest is that a number of men who follow science as their profession, men whom I refuse…
drorzel | July 9, 2009Just in time to feed into the discussion surrounding Unscientific America, there's a new Pew Research Poll about public attitudes toward science. As is usually the case with social-science data, there's something in here to bolster every opinion.
The most striking of the summary findings, to me, is the second table down, in which the fraction of people saying that "Science/ medicine/ technology" is the greatest achievement of the last 50 years has dropped from 47% to 27% since 1999. About half of that shifted to "Civil rights/ equal rights," which is hard to begrudge, but the other half seems…
oracknows | July 9, 2009I'm currently in Las Vegas anxiously waiting for The Amazing Meeting to start. Believe it or not, I'll even be on a panel! While I'm gone, I'll probably manage to do a new post or two, but, in the meantime, while I'm away communing with fellow skeptics at TAM7, I'll be reposting some Classic Insolence from the month of July in years past. (After all, if you haven't been following this blog at least a year, it'll be new to you. And if you have I hope you enjoy it again.) This particular post first appeared in July 2007.
"What do you think about second hand smoke?" he asked me. I sensed…
drorzel | July 9, 2009I got a weirdly hostile comment to my popularization post last night:
You have some chutzpah. You are being paid, probably quite well, to do research! Journalists are paid, not nearly so well, to popularize research. It takes some nerve to take an extra year's salary, and to take time away from your real job---and then to complain about not being well-enough rewarded. If you want something to complain about, become a science journalist and see how well you are rewarded then. I'm sure you think that is beneath you, and that you do so much better a job---but the general audience you aim to…
oracknows | July 8, 2009I'm currently in Las Vegas anxiously waiting for The Amazing Meeting to start. Believe it or not, I'll even be on a panel! While I'm gone, I'll probably manage to do a new post or two, but, in the meantime, while I'm away communing with fellow skeptics at TAM7, I'll be reposting some Classic Insolence from the month of July in years past. (After all, if you haven't been following this blog at least a year, it'll be new to you. And if you have I hope you enjoy it again.) This particular post first appeared in July 2008.
Last week, The New York Times started a rather unusual series in its…
pharyngula | July 8, 2009Oh, great. He's been appointed by Obama.
He'll do a fine job…he's a competent administrator. I think we can trust him to manage the institution smoothly.
We can also trust him to drape Jesus over every major announcement, use the office as a platform for promoting religiosity, and otherwise taint the whole business with embarrassingly inane nonsense…just as he did with the human genome press conference. Isn't it about time our government promoted secular values that work over these antique and ineffective superstitions that just make their proponents look goofy?
razib | July 8, 2009Over at Secular Right I break down attitudes toward a host of issues as a function of class and party identification. It is interesting to see the issues where class matters more than party, and those where party matters more than class, and where one segment is an outlier. Below the fold are a few questions of possible specific interest to ScienceBlogs readers.
Lower = No high school to some college
Higher = Bachelor's degree or higher
Repub or lean Repub
Dem or lean Dem
Lower
Higher
Lower
Higher
Humans evolved from animals
29.7
47.1
43.7
79.6
Will not eat genetically…
pharyngula | July 8, 2009Remember the Viet Nam war? I know, we've been suffering with the most recent military cock-up, but it's still worth looking back at what evil old Tricky Dick was up to. A new batch of tape transcripts from White House discussions about the war have been released, and wouldn't you know it — Nixon was engineering the defeat, putting pressure on the South Vietnamese government to accept a settlement that would lead to failure, but would at least postpone defeat until after the American elections.
Did I really need to be reminded that practically my entire lifelong exposure to American politics…
catdynamics | July 7, 2009``The King with half the East at heel is marched from land of morning;
Their fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air,
And he that stands will die for nought, and home there's no returning.
The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair.''
Full text of letter with signatures and footnotes (PDF)
July 6, 2009
Dear Governor Schwarzenegger:
The three hundred signers of this letter write to you as members of the US National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine, and as professors at the University…
drorzel | July 7, 2009One of the most interesting suggestions made by Chris and Sheril in Unscientific America is the idea that science needs to play political hardball (page 158, in the endnotes):
Why not form a nonpartisan science political action committee, or PAC, devoted to funding candidates who are either scientists themselves or who make science a strong priority and have good records on science issues? With adequate fundind, the PAC might select, say, five or ten members or candidates to support each election cycle. If there's a desire to be really aggressive (and we have mixed feelings about this…
drorzel | July 7, 2009Matt Leifer had a good comment to yesterday's post about how the editing function, in my opinion, adds considerable value to a book that you don't get with a blog. I got distracted and didn't reply to it, and since a day in blog-time is like a week in the real world, I'll promote it to a post so it doesn't get buried and forgotten:
Yes, but starting a wiki in order to put together a more coherent version of the ideas from the blog may have been equally effective. Blogging is not the only web publishing tool.
Of course, I realize that you still wouldn't get the benefits of the editorial…
oracknows | July 6, 2009It gives me no pleasure to do this, but sometimes even friends let loose with such jaw-droppingly bad arguments that it is impossible for me not to redirect a bit of the old Respectful Insolence in their direction. So it was earlier, when I saw an unreasonable article by an otherwise reasonable guy sneak into my newsfeed. If you want to see an example of a bad analogy, watch Dr. Kevin Pho have at it in a post entitled We've Tried Single Payer Health Care, and It Has Failed.
Quoth Kevin:
Based on an agreement in 1787, the government is responsible to provide free health care to Native Indians…
drorzel | July 6, 2009Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future is the new book by Chris and Sheril of The Intersection (formerly on ScienceBlogs, now at Discover), and they were kind enough to include me on the list of people getting review copies. It turned up on Friday (after I'd already started Newton and the Counterfeiter). I read it this afternoon, partly at lunch with SteelyKid (who, alas, was woken up by somebody else's ill-mannered child), but mostly in the back yard on a surprisingly pleasant afternoon. It's a quick read-- only 132 pages of text, plus 65 pages of (unmarked)…
drorzel | July 5, 2009This is a rare weekend in which I've completed two serious books-- the aforementioned Newton and the Couterfeiter and Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's Unscientific America (a review copy showed up Friday, thanks guys), about which more later. They're very different books, but both excellent in their own way.
While they have very different subjects, though, they have one unfortunate element in common, one of the most pernicious ideas in non-fiction publishing: the un-noted endnote. Both books are exhaustively researched and contain many pages of notes at the end of the text-- just under…
emjohnson | July 4, 2009Inspired by the nation's birthday, Larry Arnhart at Darwinian Conservatism has a few thoughts about the term "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" as it appears in the Declaration of Independence:
That phrase provokes questions. Do the "Laws of Nature" depend on some religious belief in "Nature's God"? Does "Nature's God" suggest some kind of natural theology--some conception of the divine that is manifest in nature without need for revelation? Could "Nature's God" suggest a deistic notion of God as the uncaused cause of Nature? Or do we need a more biblical conception of God as a divine…
emjohnson | July 4, 2009There has been much speculation as to why Sarah Palin announced her sudden decision to withdraw as Governor of Alaska Friday. Nate Silver at 538.com speculates:
There seem to be three* basic theories to explain why Sarah Palin decided to quit:
1. She's simply burned out;
2. There's some kind of "other shoe dropping";
3. She's so crazy she thinks this could actually help her for 2012, 2016, etc.
On FOXNews today Karl Rove stated:
Everybody's going to want to have her come campaign, or appear or make speeches and she no longer has the useful excuse of saying, 'Look, I would love to help you on…
grrlscientist | July 4, 2009tags: politics, the declaration of independence, fourth of july, independence day, streaming video
The United States was born with a single document -- the Declaration of Independence. Have you actually read it? Few people get beyond "... Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." But it really is fascinating. It lays out all the justifications for separation from Great Britain. And it clearly states the founding ideals. In this video, you'll get a chance to hear the entire document read by some of Hollywood's A-list celebrities. But the words are the real stars. It's not a perfect document…