War on Science

Dave Bacon watched "Judgement Day" last night, and has a question: It's not like, you know, there aren't people who think quantum theory is wrong or that quantum theory is somehow related to the Vedic teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. So why is it that quantum theory (which after all is "just a theory" wink, wink, nod, nod) doesn't illicit courtroom battles of such epic scope as the Dover trial? The answer: Because quantum physics involves math, and Math Is Hard. If you want to construct a cockamamie theory that can pretend to be an alternative to quantum mechanics, it needs to have…
So, in case you missed the splashy banner ads that have been running here for the last week, NOVA ran a show about the Dover, PA "Intelligent Design" trial last night. You can find all manner of commentary on ScienceBlogs, for example here, here, and here. I'm not as, shall we say, personally invested in the issue as many of my fellow bloggers, but this did look interesting to me, so I watched it last night (with occasional flipping over to the Syracuse basketball game). It was... pretty good. I doubt it would change anybody's mind, in the unlikely event that any "Intelligent Design"…
The Union of Concerned Scientists emails me fairly regularly with news items and calls to action-- one of the benefits of being a C-list blogger, I guess. This week's is a "Call your Senator" item opposing Executive Order 13422: Government agencies need to use the best available science to protect our health--setting standards that limit toxins in our drinking water and pollutants in the air we breathe. But a recent presidential directive would give the White House excessive control over the work of federal agencies, making science more vulnerable to political interference. Unless something…
(WASHINGTON, DC) On the heels of reports from Oslo that the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded jointly to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former US Vice President Al Gore, a White House spokesman issued a statement saying that "significant uncertainty" remained regarding the recipient of the prize. "The President feels that at this time, it's too early to say for sure whether Al Gore has won the Peace prize," said White House spokesman Scott Stencil. "The science is just not conclusive yet. The President feels that more study is needed before we agree that this honor…
An idle observation: One of the more ironic things about the whole framing argument (other than the sheer number of people talking past one another, as Mike notes in passing) is how quick a lot of the anti-framing people are to declare that Mooney and Nisbet are just completely and totally wrong. And the people who are most adamant about Nisbet and Mooney being way off base are the people who are most outraged whenever somebody with an engineering degree dares to say something stupid about biology. The irony here is that this framing business is exactly Nisbet's area of expertise. This is…
I haven't been following the discussion of the Mooney/ Nisbet "framing" article in Science all that closely, because most of the commentary has tended to be uninteresting in predictable ways. You can find a fairly comprehensive list of links from Bora (who else?), and Matt and Chris respond to most of it. There was one response that struck me as worth highlighting, though, from James Hrynyshyn of the Island of Doubt: Essentially, my response is that it is neither realistic nor fair to ask scientists to ditch their penchant for the facts and wander into territory more familiar to the…
As usual, Scott Aaronson says it better than I did: [M]ost of the commentary strikes me as missing a key point: that to give a degree to a bozo like this, provided he indeed did the work, can only reflect credit on the scientific enterprise. Will Ross now hit the creationist lecture circuit, trumpeting his infidel credentials to the skies? You better believe it. Will he use the legitimacy conferred by his degree to fight against everything the degree stands for? It can't be doubted. But here's the wonderful thing about science: unlike the other side, we don't need loyalty oaths in order to…
I'm having the sort of morning where I feel like lobbing a grenade at somebody, and the predictable outrage over yesterday's story about a creationist paleontologist is as good a target as any. The issue here is whether it's appropriate for Marcus Ross to receive a Ph.D. for work in paleontology, given that he's a young-earth creationist. His scientific papers are all perfectly consistent with modern understanding, speaking of events taking place millions of years in the past, but he himself believes the earth is less than 10,000 years old, and was created as described in the Bible. The usual…
Kate passes along a link to a New Scientist article noting this today has been proclaimed Evolution Sunday 2007 by the Clergy Letter Project: On 11 February 2007 hundreds of congregations from all portions of the country and a host of denominations will come together to discuss the compatibility of religion and science. For far too long, strident voices, in the name of Christianity, have been claiming that people must choose between religion and modern science. More than 10,000 Christian clergy have already signed The Clergy Letter demonstrating that this is a false dichotomy. Now, on…
Over at Bora's House of Round-the-Clock Blogging, we find the sensational headline Beaten by Biologists, Creationists Turn Their Sights On Physics. On seeing that, I headed over to the editorial in The American Prospect that it points to, expecting to be scandalized. When I got there, I found this: U.S. creationists have changed tactics. Though none have explicitly abandoned ID in public, the focus of their scientific cover arguments has shifted from organic change to the creation of the universe. They have picked up on the controversial claim that human life could only have evolved because…
The Union of Concerned Scientists has a statement on scientific integrity denouncing the various abuses of the scientific process perpetrated by the Bush Administration. If you're a scientist, and you're concerned about the politicization of the science used for policy-making, you might want to sign on to the statement by going to their site. This has already been linked a million other places, but it's still worth passing on.
Back in May, the DAMOP keynote address was delivered by a DoE program officer who basically chided scientists for being politically active, in a "you have only yourselves to blame if your funding gets cut" sort of way. Obviously, she hasn't read The Republican War on Science, or she'd understand why 48 Nobel laureates publically endorsed John Kerry in 2004. (Full comments below the fold.) I didn't read this book when it first came out because I'm a scientist and I follow the news, and I figured I already knew the story. Why buy a book to make myself depressed? I generally buy books to make…
Word has reached me[1] that, "me that the most notorious creationist on the Ohio State Board of Education, Deborah Owens Fink, has a challenger in the Novemeber 7th election." For the politically inclined out there, some information: The challenger is former Ohio congressman Tom Sawyer. She is asking for help from the other Citizens for Science groups in getting the word out and encouraging people to donate and get involved with the campaign...Collectively, we likely have several thousand readers in Ohio that we can encourage to get involved and support Sawyer's campaign. So I'm asking all my…
there's a fascinating article in the TimeS this morning about Chinese physicist Xu Liangying, a man who has led an interesting life, to say the least: The first time he was purged, Xu Liangying was 27, an up-and-coming physicist, philosopher and historian and a veteran of the Communist underground. He had to divorce his wife, leave his sons and go live on his mother's farm in the country. Three decades later, only a heart attack saved him from imprisonment or worse during the massacre that ended the democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989. During the Cultural…
Also in the Times today is an opinion piece by Lawrence Krauss on why the Kansas school board election isn't the end of the fight. He quotes some damning things from the chairman of the school board, and then observes: A key concern should not be whether Dr. Abrams's religious views have a place in the classroom, but rather how someone whose religious views require a denial of essentially all modern scientific knowledge can be chairman of a state school board. I have recently been criticized by some for strenuously objecting in print to what I believe are scientifically inappropriate…
This month's Physics Today has an article by Murray Peshkin on "Addressing the Public About Science and Religion", that is both a nice change of pace (as physicists don't do much of that sort of thing), and a reminder of why a lot of physicists don't do that sort of thing. It's not that he says anything stupid-- quite the contrary, his remarks are sensible and moderate. The problem is that, well, his remarks are sensible and moderate, and thus unlikely to please extremists at either end of the debate. The key paragraph is probably: Science and religion have different assumptions, different…
A very nice post from Rob Knop, exploring the the role of faith in science: You may then ask, am I not then taking many of the results of science as faith, since I didn't check all of the experimental results and subsequent analysis myself? Answer: yes and no. It is a lowercase-f "faith", in that I trust the scientists who did the work to have known what they were doing and to have honestly and reasonably done the work. I have also trusted the others in their sub-field to keep them honest, by reproducing the experiments independently and critically reading their work. This is very, very…
Orac beats me to commenting on today's depressing New York Times story about NCLB. It seems that, faced with strict "No Child Left Behind" requirements in reading and math, some schools are shifting things around so that their low-performing students take only reading and math: Rubén Jimenez, a seventh grader whose father is a construction laborer, has a schedule typical of many students at the school, with six class periods a day, not counting lunch. Rubén studies English for the first three periods, and pre-algebra and math during the fourth and fifth. His sixth period is gym. Because God…
So, how's my winning NCAA strategy going, you ask? Shut up, I reply. Well, OK. I'm currently in a four-way tie for tenth place in the ScienceBlogs pool (of 23) on Yahoo. Of course, unlike some gloating people, all four of my Final Four picks are still alive... I still don't have much chance of catching the other people ahead of me. So, for the record: Deliberate ignorance is a losing strategy. Hear that, Kansas and Ohio?
Dennis Overbye writes about popular NASA programs being delayed or cut in order to fund the Moon-and-Mars initiative and support the Space Shuttle/ ISS. Predictably, people who care about actual science are somewhat dismayed-- Gordon Watts serves as a nice example. Fellow ScienceBlogger Chris Mooney has carved himself out a nice little niche writing about the Republican War on Science, and it would be really nice to be able to lump the warping of NASA in with that. You could even make a decent case, without having to swing too far into tinfoil-hat territory-- some of the missions that are…