The War on Science
tlambert | April 21, 2008The latest editorial from the Australian on the science of global warming cites a cardinal and a historian and no climate scientists:
We can trust that Catholic cardinal George Pell has not had to resort to inside knowledge to play the devil's advocate on global warming. Like historian and political scientist Don Aitkin, Dr Pell has studied the data and rejected the claim that scientific consensus exists.
It's like they are not even trying any more. Nexus 6 goes through the editorial and corrects the numerous errors it makes.
But that was this week. There was another war-on-science piece in…
tlambert | April 18, 2008Daniel Engber's Slate article The Paranoid Style in American Science is well worth a read. He explains how the Creationists, AGW and HIV/AIDS skeptics go well past skepticism into conspiracy theries about science.
Hat tip: Mark Hoofnagle.
tlambert | April 9, 2008The Australian front pages an article on "eminent historian" Don Aitkin who attacks the "quasi-religious" scientists of the IPCC for advocating that some action to combat global arming should be taken. Aitkin deploys the argument from incredulity
He says an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide over the past century is agreed, some of it due to fossil fuels, cement-making and agriculture. However, normal production of CO2 is not known, and it makes up only a tiny part of the atmosphere. "How does a small increase in a very small component have such a large apparent effect? The…
mikethemadbiologist | April 7, 2008A survey of Florida teens' sexual health knowledge yielded some very disturbing results:
A recent survey that found some Florida teens believe drinking a cap of bleach will prevent HIV and a shot of Mountain Dew will stop pregnancy has prompted lawmakers to push for an overhaul of sex education in the state.
There's been a lot said in favor of real sex ed and against abstinence-only 'education' (and rightly so), but, if the consequences of unwanted pregnancy and HIV weren't so serious, this other finding would be funny:
The survey showed that Florida teens also believe that smoking marijuana…
mikethemadbiologist | March 27, 2008Because of bureaucratic infighting, a valuable repository of microbiological specimens spanning over twenty years of collection was destroyed. Researchers, including the Mad Biologist, want to know why (italics mine); you can sign the petition here:
Scientists Call for Inquiry into Destruction of Microbes in VA Special Pathogens Laboratory
233 scientists and physician researchers from 27 countries have collectively expressed outrage over the destruction of an irreplaceable collection of microbes numbering in the thousands. The collection included Legionella bacteria (the cause of…
mikethemadbiologist | March 27, 2008
To avoid permanent brain damage, the Surgeon General recommends that Vox Popoli be read only through the StupidVu9000
So Vox Day stumbled across my post about the utility of evolutionary biology (among other things) and he went berserk.
Maybe he came across the link by way of ScienceBlogling PZ, and since there's no love lost between those two, he went nuts by association.
Maybe he read the word "emotional" in the post and became absolutely terrified that his tiny little penis would fall off.
Or maybe he's just a complete fucking moron.
I'll lay out what I meant by "moral":
Creationists…
mikethemadbiologist | March 20, 2008OK, last post about this bozo, and then I'm done (famous last words...). In the previous post, I dealt with Egnor's claim that the evolution of antibiotic resistance by selection of resistant genotypes is obvious, and not germane (namely, that it wasn't obvious at one point in time). What bothered me with not just Egnor's claim (which I'll get to a minute) and ScienceBlogling Mike's response is that evolutionary biology does have a significant role to play in combating the evolution and spread of antibiotic resistance.
First, what Egnor said:
The important medical research on antibiotic…
mikethemadbiologist | March 19, 2008In the previous post, I described how Egnor, like many creationists, refuses to answer serious rebuttals of his foolishness. But what's truly odd is how Egnor argues about natural selection.
Egnor repeatedly claims that 'Darwinism' is nothing except self-obvious: bacteria that are more likely to survive and reproduce because they are resistant to an antibiotic are more likely to survive and reproduce in the presence of that antibiotic.
It is obvious--today. If I were to give a talk which had as its central thesis the concept that natural selection has given rise to antibiotic resistant…
mikethemadbiologist | March 18, 2008While criticizing someone who does not understand the difference between artificial and natural selection--something I've successfully communicated to high school students and undergraduates--is like picking on the slow kid, his repeated nitpicking of ScienceBlogling Mike Dunford's post about the topic is illustrative of how creationists, whether they be young earth or intelligent design, operate.
Instead of dealing with Orac's or my response, Egnor quibbles with Mike over exactly what he meant. It's trolling, masquerading as intellectual discussion (and I had the same style of idiocy show…
mikethemadbiologist | March 10, 2008
ScienceBlogling Mike Dunford reminds us that Michael Egnor's creationist stupidity, like Camus' plague, never disappears, but only wanes. Egnor has unleashed his formidable stupidity on the concepts of artificial and natural selection.
So many fucking morons, so little Mad Biologist. Fortunately, I've written about this before:
The difference between artificial selection and natural selection isn't that the selective agent (e.g., pesticides) is a result of human activity. The difference is in what determines what is the 'fittest': a person's decision as to what traits are preferable, or…
mikethemadbiologist | March 9, 2008And in a Republican stronghold no less:
Twenty minutes after unofficially becoming the Fox Valley's newest congressman-elect, Democrat Bill Foster surprised the raucous crowd at Long Island Sound Banquets in Aurora when he entered from a rear door. Seconds later, chants of "Foster, Foster" clearly announced the former Fermilab scientist was now a congressman.
Foster's party entrance befitted the stunning win over perennial GOP bridesmaid Jim Oberweis. He topped Oberweis by just more than 5,000 votes, unofficially, across the 14th Congressional District to fill the remainder of retired Rep.…
mikethemadbiologist | March 8, 2008...it ultimately leads the Mad Biologist to a very irreverent, but accurate, description of the scientific method. Someone I know recently had said someone's car rear-ended. For reasons not worth going into*, said someone used The Google, and discovered that the person who ran into said someone is an intelligent design creationist (Intelligent Driving?).
This information comes by way of a post responding to a letter that the creationist wrote to the Boston Globe. The post contains this superb description of the scientific method as applied to intelligent design creationism (italics mine…
mikethemadbiologist | March 7, 2008
There's not much to add in terms of rebutting intelligent design creationist Jonathan Wells' latest misappropriation of science that Larry Moran, Orac, and Ian Musgrave didn't already write. But Wells' latest screed demonstrates just how pathetically low intelligent design creationism has sunk. An argument that stupid is a tacit admission of defeat.
Essentially, Wells' argument can be summarized as "if evolutionary biology isn't cited in every single biology paper EVAH!, then evolutionary biology isn't relevant to biology." Never mind that every step in genomic biology involves…
mikethemadbiologist | February 23, 2008...let's elect more scientists to office. A good place to start would be physicist and congressional candidate Bill Foster, one of the developers of the Irving-Michigan-Brookhaven proton decay detector. Darksyde has a good description of Foster's research. Go here to find out more about Foster.
mikethemadbiologist | February 19, 2008A lot of my fellow ScienceBloglings have written about the attempts in many Floridian municipalities to weaken biology education, so I won't waste bandwidth revisiting that here. But what amazed when I read this article about Floridian voters' views of evolution was the response to the question "Which of the following comes closest to what you think evolution is?":
How in the Intelligent Designer's green earth do the same number of people define evolution as creationism as do correctly define evolution? Remember, this was not a question about what was the 'correct' version of how life came…
mikethemadbiologist | February 14, 2008Slate has the goods on the style manual for Answers Research Journal, which is "a professional, peer-reviewed technical journal for the publication of interdisciplinary scientific and other relevant research from the perspective of the recent Creation and the global Flood within a biblical framework." One problem with the Slate commentary: many peer-reviewed journals allow authors to suggest reviewers, provided there are no conflicts of interest. It's still pretty funny though:
As an extra incentive to participate, those with "a reason for not wanting their biographical details publicized…
mikethemadbiologist | February 11, 2008I really wasn't going to bash Kristof over his recent apologia for evangelicals. I've done so before, and I didn't really see the point in doing so again. But, by way of ScienceBlogling James Hrynyshyn, I came across Kristof's response to some of the criticism he has received (in bold is his synopsis of a particular criticism; italics mine):
It's okay to deride evangelicals because they're Neanderthals on science and other issues. If people don't believe in evolution, they invite mockery. If we call them nuts, it's because we have good evidence that they are nuts.
I agree that the…
mikethemadbiologist | February 11, 2008Actually, the Mad Biologist's Rule of Base Ten Numbers is a pithier way of describing how certain numerical estimates or quantities are chosen based on little or no evidence. For example, when asked what an appropriate sample size is, someone will often respond, "ten." Of course, it might very well be that either nine or eleven are, in fact, the appropriate sample sizes, but we have a tendency when making shit up to focus on numbers divisible by five or ten, or, if we're dealing with really large quantities, increasing the quantities ten-fold (i.e., moving from 100 to 1000).
To give a…
mikethemadbiologist | February 3, 2008Prometheus describes the phenomenon of the arrogance of ignorance:
...the real issue is that everybody thinks that they are "above average";and have difficulty comparing their abilities to those of others. In the absence of actual face-to-face comparison, they assume that their abilities are equal to or better than most people.
Finally - a glimmer of illumination!
You see, it had always puzzled me that a person with, say, an MBA and a "Google PhD" (or, at least, a "Google MS") would have the temerity to accuse me of arrogance when I disagreed with them on a matter that is within my "sphere of…
mikethemadbiologist | January 23, 2008I'm posting about this because I want Orac's head to explode. Apparently, the first episode of the ABC legal drama, "Eli Stone", involves the protagonist taking up the mercury militia, anti-vax cause:
While police and legal dramas often use ripped-from-the-headlines topics as the basis of episodes, rarely do broadcast networks allow themselves to stray into the middle of heated debates that contain such emotional touchstones for large segments of their audience, if only because another big segment of a network's audience is likely to be on the other side of the debate.
With "Eli Stone,"…