Links

Catching up on readings I had saved up.

Edge essay. WHY DO SOME PEOPLE RESIST SCIENCE? By Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg

Pankaj Mishra's review of The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future by Martha C. Nussbaum.

Battle of the book reviews. Book review on a blog? Nah! You can't be serious!. There's middle ground. There's got to be. Blogs are here to stay.

A plug for TheScian Science Fiction Story Contest. The stories have started trickling in. Don't hurry, though. There's time. Only your very best submission please.

More like this

There's been lots of commentary online about Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg's article about why children (and adults) often resist learning scientific information. Deric Bownds gives the money quote from the article: Resistance to science will arise in children when scientific claims clash…
A while back, I wrote a series of posts (listed at the end) on whether or not creationists were in fact being rational in their choices of who to believe about science, based on what information they had available to them as they were growing up. Now, a paper has been published in The Edge by…
In the May 18th issue of Science, there's a nice review by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg [1] of the literature from developmental psychology that bears on the question of why adults in the U.S. are stubbornly resistant to certain scientific ideas. Regular readers will guess that part of my…
A little over a year ago, I wrote a post describing some research showing that there are cognitive barriers to understanding evolution. There I listed three specific factors: Intuitive theism, in which our intuitions lead us to make design inferences about complex kinds or under conditions of…