The War on Science
mikethemadbiologist | June 7, 2007I like much of Matt Yglesias' writing. But he still doesn't appreciate how science and evolution affect public policy issues. As many of you know, three out of ten Republican presidential candidates stated that they don't believe in evolution at one of the presidential debates. Yglesias comments on Huckabee's response:
I see that Jamie Kirchick didn't care for the reply at all: "Sorry, but if someone believes in fairy tales, I think that's pretty relevant to their qualifications as president." But why? The core of Huckabee's answer is here:
It's interesting that that question would even…
mikethemadbiologist | June 4, 2007I was watching this video of a presentation by ScienceBlogling Matt Nisbet, and he related this factoid about the NIH and scientific illiteracy:
Only nine percent of Americans could identify what the NIH was.
(on the video, it's at the 27:00 mark)
Given the public's staggering ignorance, it's a miracle any science gets done. How can people not know that the NIH stands for the National Institute of Holiness?
Kidding.
mikethemadbiologist | June 1, 2007And in other news, dog bites man. Would the NY Times have printed an op-ed allowing a flat-earther to explain why he believes the earth is flat? Because that's what they did when they ran Brownback's defense of intelligent design creationism. And there's nothing original in Brownback's op-ed either.
First, Brownback makes this declarative statement:
The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason. I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature…
mikethemadbiologist | May 31, 2007MarkH notes that Luskin is upset about what they perceive as academic discrimination against the proponents of intelligent design creationism. So he asks Luskin a question:
Mr. Luskin, is it the considered opinion of the DI, UD etc., that it is never acceptable to discriminate against a professor in a tenure decision based on their ideas?
Actually, I would rephrase the question:
Mr. Luskin, is it the considered opinion of the DI, UD etc., that intellectual affirmative action is acceptable?
Given the strong conservative affiliations of the ID movement, it would be great fun to watch them…
mikethemadbiologist | May 30, 2007Would you pay $728 more a year to keep schools and libraries fully funded? I would, but the voters of Northbridge, MA wouldn't. According to the Boston Globe:
And yesterday, budget cuts and voter indifference in Northbridge finally caught up with the institution officially known as the Whitinsville Social Library. Its doors closed at 2 p.m. And though they will reopen again this week, people in Northbridge, population 13,100, will notice a difference.
The town cannot afford the $200,000 needed to keep the library fully running for another year. Once open 40 hours a week, it will be open…
mikethemadbiologist | May 19, 2007In all the recounting of Jerry Falwell's life, almost all of the focus has been on Falwell's 'religiously' motivated positions. But this ignores Falwell's first political activity: to defend the system of American apartheid known as segregation. Racism, not abortion or other 'religious' issues, was what gave rise to the 'religious' right. Max Blumenthal reminds us of this:
Indeed, it was race-not abortion or the attendant suite of so-called "values" issues-that propelled Falwell and his evangelical allies into political activism....
Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights…
tlambert | May 17, 2007John Quiggin:
Phillip Adams and Peter Dixon have prepared a reply (over the fold) to the opinion piece by Robson and Davidson in the Australian which offered a range of incoherent criticisms of proposals to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Disgracefully, but not at all surprisingly, the Oz has declined to print it, marking yet another step in its decline.
Admittedly, the debate is so one-sided that printing the reply would have made it obvious how ill-advised it was to publish the Davidson-Robson piece in the first place. Dixon is Australia's pre-eminent economic modeller, and Adams is…
mikethemadbiologist | May 16, 2007Let's leave aside decency and morality and try to forget that Romney eliminated funding for a gay teen suicide hotline to curry favor with the theopolitical Right. Let's not plumb the dark, foul abyss that is Mitt Romney's soul. Let's not ask how morally decrepit one would have to be to attempt to gain political office through the suicide of a child. Let's talk about evolution: Romney's not half bad.
Here's what Romney said:
"I believe that God designed the universe and created the universe," Mr. Romney said in an interview this week. "And I believe evolution is most likely the process he…
tlambert | May 13, 2007Rupert Murdoch might be concerned about the harm that threatens from global warming, but the Australian is still in denial, printing an opinion piece by Alex Robson and Sinclair Davidson, who continue to deny the existence of scientific evidence for man-made warming:
The petition also states "the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has determined that warming of the world's climate is 'unequivocal' and that it is almost certainly due to human activity".
We are invited to think that such a statement would be backed up by IPCC research that used easily accessible data, replicable…
mikethemadbiologist | May 10, 2007Remember the old joke that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged? By way of Ed Brayton, I came across this post by Kent Hovind about his time in jail. Both the post and some of the responses are fascinating (in a 'car wreck' sort of way) because they illuminate the authoritarian mind so well. Hovind has reached an epiphany of sorts about the criminal justice system:
At lunch last week, one of the inmates said, "If I could, I would bomb the Christian Coalition. They are the reason we are here." I was shocked by his statement! I love the Christian Coalition, but I understand the…
mikethemadbiologist | May 9, 2007Tristero makes an excellent point about Republican rhetoric, and I think it partially explains why so many scientists are opposed to the Bush Administration. Tristero compares the Niger 'evidence' for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq with the rhetoric opposing the HPV vaccination (italics mine):
Why were we positive Bush was lying? Because no one who is telling the truth talks like this about such a serious subject. Notice the first five words. It's not that Saddam recently sought significant quantities yadda yadda, but only that "the Briitish government has learned." If there was any…
mikethemadbiologist | May 7, 2007By way of ScienceBlogling John Lynch, I read that George Gilder calls biologists "Darwinian stormtroopers." In the same NY Times article, John West claims (italics mine):
The [Darwinian] technocrats, he charged, wanted to grab control from "ordinary citizens and their elected representatives" so that they alone could make decisions over "controversial issues such as sex education, partial-birth abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research and global warming."
While Gilder and West don't realize it, they have stumbled across our Evil Darwinist Plot:
That's why we want the embryonic…
mikethemadbiologist | May 5, 2007Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but something Huntington Willard said in that science blogging article published in Cell about how senior scientists have been trained to communicate science got me thinking.
Modern biology (the article was in the biology journal Cell) has made tremendous breakthroughs in the last half century. Yet we have not been that successful in communicating those results to the public. After all, Thursday night, three out of ten Republican candidates for president were not embarrassed to admit that they did not 'believe' in evolution. In fact, it might have…
mikethemadbiologist | April 29, 2007Friday, Deputy Secretary of State Randall L. Tobias resigned because he had received 'massages' from an escort service. One of Tobias' major effects on U.S. foreign policy was to promote abstinence-only sex education:
Tobias, who was in Berlin for the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS' 2004 Awards for Business Excellence, said that promoting abstinence and monogamy are "far more effective" than distributing condoms for preventing the spread of HIV, according to Agence France-Presse. "Statistics show that condoms really have not been very effective," Tobias said, adding, "It's been the…
mikethemadbiologist | April 25, 2007Hopefully, by now, the anti-Wiley blogswarm is getting geared up. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, ScienceBlogling Shelley over at Retrospectacle was threatened with a lawsuit by Wiley Interscience for reproducing part of a figure and a table (and why would they want to do that? She has such groovy taste in cars). Shelley has the best argument why it's wrong for Wiley to do this:
But it leads me to ask the question: What really constitutes fair use? This is taxpayer-supported research, which should be available for all. If a blog properly gives credit, isn't…
mikethemadbiologist | April 13, 2007While I'm not as bothered by the Pope's statement about evolution as PZ is, what's troubling is the scientific misunderstanding shown by his statements.
I agree with one sentiment, which is that biology doesn't tell us much about meaning, since I think meaning is something we ascribe to physical reality (and events). Many biologists have made much philosophical and ethical hay of the common ancestry of humankind, so it's certainly reasonable for the Pope (or anyone else) to do so. What is really disturbing is how ignorant he is of modern biology and science. According to the Pope:
"The…
mikethemadbiologist | April 7, 2007I've just finished reading Chris Mooney's and Matt Nisbet's Science article about communicating science to the general public. It's right on target.
When it comes to defending evolutionary biology, the success one will have is far less dependent on marshalling the appropriate facts than many scientists would like. Since the Scopes trial 80 years ago, the evidence in favor of evolution has only increased--one discpline that supports it, genetics, was in its infancy, and another, molecular evolution/population genetics, didn't even exist. Yet we don't really seem to have made a dent, if…
mikethemadbiologist | March 30, 2007...or something like that. By way of skippy, comes this, erm, fascinating creationist exposition on the inertness of peanut butter:
People can't really be this stupid, can they?
mikethemadbiologist | March 29, 2007In response to us foul-mouthed evolutionists, Casey Luskin asks, "Yet for all their numbers and name-calling, not a single one has answered Egnor's question: How does [sic] Darwinian mechanisms produce new biological information?" I've never liked the whole "biological information" concept.
As far as I can tell, the creationists started bandying the term about after this George Gilder article in Wired was published:
Just as physicists discovered that the atom was not a massy particle, as Newton believed, but a baffling quantum arena accessible only through mathematics, so too are biologists…
mikethemadbiologist | March 22, 2007In a recent post that's made it's way around blogtopia (and yes, skippy invented that phrase), I referred to willful ignorance. I've used that phrase before, and one troll decided to get hung up on that phrase (even though I then explained it). In one of those internet tubes, I found an excellent parody of the anti-gay spew vomited forth by various rightwing faithtanks called "The Heterosexual Agenda: Exposing the Myths." The whole thing is worth a read, but in the part where the author explains how to write a similar parody is an excellent description of willful ignorance (bold original;…