With its Jack Kirby stylings, I thought this video was worth highlighting.
I've been seeing some of these aforementioned attributes a lot lately, when I've been to a number of public events on evolution and genetic manipulation in particular. Still, it's good to see something that tries to lay it out rationally - just in case, I may be guilty myself of being close minded.
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Over at Greg's place, Brian Switek notes:
Thanks for the link Greg (and thanks for the compliment, Steve). I've generally been unimpressed with Coyne's popular articles, especially given that he seems to go out of his way to attack Gould and evo-devo whenever it seems fit to do so (which is just…
Hi, I'm Alice. It's been 11 days since I last blogged.
Things have been busy over the last couple of weeks - even more than usual. I started listing out the stuff I've been doing, but rather than making me feel like I had gotten a lot done, it was just making me tired, so I deleted it.
Instead, I…
After yesterdays post about the sloppy probability from ann coulter's chat site, I thought it would be good to bring back one of the earliest posts on Good Math/Bad Math back when it was on blogger. As usual with reposts, I've revised it somewhat, but the basic meat of it is still the same…
The always interesting Timothy Burke has a post that's basically a long links dump pointing to two articles about the state of humanities in academia, which includes a sort of aside that is more interesting to me than either of the linked articles:
This leads me to the second piece I really liked…
openmindedness: good
unwillingness to put your hypotheses to a hard test: bad
inability to understand valid evidence: super annoying
That is great - perfect for the students in one of my courses! The problem is, now I don't have anything left to teach.
The pseudoscience named Alchemy gets a bad rap. Isaac Newton himself, while brilliant in physics, was not only a lousy chemist, but also no match to the rigorously scientific demands of what later became the science of chemistry.
Mendeleev first proposed (from observation alone) that chemical elements seemed to have periodic chemical properties. His idea was met with the same skepticism that most had for Alchemy.
It wasn't until the particle physicists, including Pauli, came up with a solid electron configuration based on his exclusion principle, could it be seen that Mendeleev was correct, and why elements naturally organized into periods, groups, etc.
In this way, induction solves the demarcation problem of Hume and Popper's philosophies of the scientific method. Alchemy hit a dead end, but through observation and induction, what was previously a pseudoscience actually became a science.
Hume and Popper's ideas about removing induction from the scientific method be damned.
What's that you were saying about open-mindedness and pseudoscience again?