Science and pseudo-science
jstemwedel | March 28, 2006By now you have seen the excellent Crooked Timber seminar on Chris Mooney's book, The Republican War on Science. In addition to the CT regulars, sociologist of science (and Kitzmiller vs. Dover expert witness) Steve Fuller contributed an essay to the seminar. While some in these parts have dismissed it rather quickly, I want to give it a slightly less hasty response.
At the outset, let me say that I'm not going to respond to all of Fuller's claims in the essay. For one thing, it's long; the printout (yes, I'm a Luddite), not counting comments, is seven pages of very small type. For…
jstemwedel | February 21, 2006A reader of this blog reports:
My children went to a [public charter] school in which pseudoscience was taught to them. However, it was something more insidious than "intelligent design." It was Qigong taught as science. One of my daughter's classmates fell unconscious while she was performing these exercises. Then the Qigong instructor ran to the victim and began moving his hands over her body, telling the students that he was healing her by moving his hands over her which was mainpulating body energy or "Chi."
I assume that the girl was OK in the end ... but, this gives one pause.
What…