Social Sciences
illconsidered | April 25, 2006This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.
Objection:
Global temperatures have been trending down since 1998. Global Warming is over.
Answer:
At the time, 1998 was a record high year in both the CRU and the NASA GISS analysis. In fact, it was not just a record year, it blew away the previous record by .2oC. (That previous record went all the way back to 1997, by the way!) According to NASA, it was elevated far above the trend line because 1998 was the year of the strongest El Nino of the…
stcynic | April 24, 2006Pat Hayes of Red State Rabble has written a nice post about Barbara Forrest that is partly a biographical sketch and partly an analysis of the sometimes ridiculously over the top reaction to her from the ID crowd. I've had the pleasure of working with Barbara for many years now and Hayes is certainly correct to say that this tiny little southern belle is about the last person you would expect, based solely on appearance, to become public enemy #1 to the ID movement. Pat writes:
Despite her tiny physical stature, personal warmth, and old-fashioned Southern manners, Forrest seems to bring out…
stcynic | April 21, 2006The whole Samuel Chen thing reminded me of this brilliant satire of ID arguments that was compiled by Steve Reuland. The project was a collaborative effort of a bunch of folks, most of them associated with the Panda's Thumb now. I'm not going to include all of the footnotes, which show actual quotes from ID advocates to support each of these satirical takes on their arguments. To see those, follow the link above. This is reprinted with permission.
IDists...
On Intelligent Design...
ID is whatever we say it is, and we don't agree.
Greater and greater numbers of scientists are joining the ID…
razib | April 19, 2006The late 4th century witnessed the death of the pagan world and the rise of the early medieval era. Today, our culture focuses on the here & now and we neglect the past. But the past is important because we can learn from the rivers explored by our ancestors. In our modern age of religious pluralism, poised between the past and the future, I am often struck by how apropos the dispute between the pagan Prefect of Rome, Symmachus, and the great Christian cleric Ambrose, seems.
Here is Symmachus:
The divine Mind has distributed different guardians and different cults to different cities…
stcynic | April 14, 2006Is this ad illegal?
According to the trial court in Saskatchewan, it was. When Hugh Owens paid to take out the ad in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix in 1997, both he and the newspaper were brought up on charges of violating the province's Human Rights Code. Owens was ordered to pay $1500 to each of 3 gay men who filed complaints. Now the Court of Appeals in that province has overturned that decision and upheld free speech, at least temporarily (there are more such cases still going on, such as the Stephen Boissoin case).
The Saskatchewan Human Rights Code is a typically ridiculous set of…
pharyngula | April 13, 2006Palazzo has put me in a pissy mood, now. He's mentioned those pompous god-botherers at the Templeton Foundation, who awarded 1.4 million dollars to that credulous gasbag, John Barrow.
When Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins challenged physicist John Barrow on his formulation of the constants of nature at last summer's Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship lectures, Barrow laughed and said, "You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you're not really a scientist. You're a biologist."
For Barrow, biology is little more than a branch of natural history. "Biologists have a…
razib | April 12, 2006According to The New York Times Seeking Ancestry in DNA Ties Uncovered by Tests is the most emailed article today. As I've stated before, I believe this area of science & technology is driven by psychology. The same drive which has led men and women to enter into the time consuming hobby of genealogy for hundreds of years. Below, NuSapiens offers the opinion that the new technology will undermine the current orthodoxies and mentalities in regards to race. Unfortunately, I don't believe that anymore...I just think people are too driven by their intuitive pattern matching &…
razib | April 11, 2006There's a terrifying article in The New York Times titled Seeking Ancestry in DNA Ties Uncovered by Tests. Here is a sample:
Alan Moldawer's adopted twins, Matt and Andrew, had always thought of themselves as white. But when it came time for them to apply to college last year, Mr. Moldawer thought it might be worth investigating the origins of their slightly tan-tinted skin, with a new DNA kit that he had heard could determine an individual's genetic ancestry.
The results, designating the boys 9 percent Native American and 11 percent northern African, arrived too late for the admissions…
razib | April 10, 2006Gary Marcus, author of The Birth of the Mind, has a pithy piece in The New York Times, From Squeak to Syntax: Language's Incremental Evolution, which sketches out the refinements that the new science of genomics is adding to our understanding of the origins of language. In fact, one could argue that it isn't adding, it is actually building the initial foundations. Many of you probably also know that the Linguistic Society of Paris banned the discussion of the origin of language in 1866 because it seemed to be simultaneous attractive and intractable. Though Noam Chomsky was one of the major…
tlambert | April 9, 2006Bob Carter has a piece in the Telegraph where he claims:
For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).
Yes, you…
tsmith | April 7, 2006[This is one from this past December]
My favorite essay arguing against intelligent design isn't one of Gould's, or Dawkins', or Sagan's. Rather, it's one from an essay that has portions I disagree with, but the eloquent prose simply can't be beat:
"The analogy which you attempt to establish between the contrivances of human art, and the various existences of the Universe, is inadmissible. We attribute these effects to human intelligence, because we know beforehand that human intelligence is capable of producing them. Take away this knowledge, and the grounds of our reasoning will be…
stcynic | April 7, 2006Mark Olson has an interesting post, responded to in part by Jason Kuznicki here, at least partly as a reply to things I and others have written lately about atheism and morality. It's worth a serious response, but first there are a couple of misconceptions to clear up. He writes:
Atheism is defended often (see Mr Brayton) by the idea that atheism has the means to come up with reasonable ethical frameworks to live by and that God is not necessary for that.
I just want to make my own position clear on the subject. First, I am not an atheist, I am a deist. On the issue of morality, there's no…
stcynic | April 6, 2006Our old pal Hans Zeiger, aka Hannity-in-Training, is back with yet another column at the Worldnutdaily that completely distorts the reality of the court cases going on and, predictably, distorts the position of the ACLU. The issue involves the question of whether the government can continue to spend money and resources to support the Boy Scouts (by hosting jamborees and the like) on military bases and similar government facilities. A Federal judge ruled that they cannot and the case is now being appealed. Let's take a look at Zeiger's amazing ability to shift the premise of the other side's…
drorzel | April 6, 2006As anybody who has read my comments on basketball knows, I have an intense dislike of the Duke men's basketball team, mostly due to their fans, who combine the arrogance typical of fans of a dominant program with a sort of snobbery regarding their own class and cleverness. This is particularly aggravating given the institutional contrast between Duke's status as an elite private university and their main competitors' status as larger, more diverse public institutions-- it pushes my class consciousness buttons, and makes their antics all the more annoying.
In a weird way, this has prevented me…
pharyngula | April 3, 2006The Pianka situation is getting very, very ugly. I've been chatting with a member of the Texas Academy of Science, and people there are getting death threats over it. Here's one example of the kind of email they're getting:
While Heinrich Himmler's "final solution" was limited to exterminating the Jews,
Dr. Eric R. Pianka promotes a FINAL SOLUTION for 90% of earth's population. In
accepting the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist award, Heir Pianka was
interrupted with applause and received a standing ovation.
"Soylent Green is people." And the way cinema's futurist society dealt
with over…
drorzel | April 3, 2006While I managed to correctly re-set the clock yesterday, in the process, I turned my alarm off, so I'm running late. Which means no lengthy science blogging this morning. Even running late, though, I can't pass over Fred Clark's message to the evangelicals who organized an anti-pop-culture rally in San Francisco:
Stop it. Just stop. Stop pissing on trees. Stop "reclaiming America for Christ." Christ already has a kingdom, an upside-down, mustard-seed kingdom without a flag. And while you people are so busy trying to create an alternative kingdom called "Christian America," the prostitutes and…
tlambert | April 2, 2006
In 1972 the US banned the agricultural use of DDT, but did not ban its use against malaria. Other countries followed suit. The ban on the agricultural use of DDT has probably saved many lives by slowing the development of resistance. However, Michael Crichton blames the ban for 50 million deaths:
"Since the ban, two million people a year have died unnecessarily from malaria, mostly children. The ban has caused more than fifty million needless deaths. Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler."
Junkscience has a death clock that blames the ban for an impossible 90 million deaths.…
oracknows | April 1, 2006Sadly, unlike my post a couple of hours ago, this is not an April Fools jest.
Evolgen previously reported on the success of the Specter-Harkin Amendment in the Senate to change a completely flat National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget containing actual real cuts to the budget of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to one with a modest increase in fiscal year 2007. Both the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) and Genetics Society of America both weighed in when the budget was sent to the House in order to garner support in committee for adding an amendment similar to the Specter…
jstemwedel | March 24, 2006The last two meetings of my ethics in science class have focused on some of the history of research with human subjects and on the changing statements of ethical principles or rules governing such experimentation. Looking at these statements (the Nuremberg Code and the Belmont Report especially) against the backdrop of some very serious missteps (Nazi medical experiments and the Public Health Service's Tuskegee syphilis experiment), it's painfully clear how much regulation is scandal-driven -- a reaction to a screw-up, rather than something that researchers took the time to think about…
jstemwedel | March 22, 2006In comments to a pair of posts about research with animals, some issues that are germane to the subject of research with human subjects have come up. In particular, they raise the question of whether scientists ought to use results from ethically flawed experiments. And, this question pushes the question of the extent to which ethically flawed research can still be scientifically sound.
Here, I want to dig into the first question, but I'll only make a first pass at the second.
First, here are the comments that precipitated this post.
On my first post on the lab group lock-out from the…