The War on Science
mikethemadbiologist | March 19, 2007Yum. Theological conservative tastes GOOOODDD!
Full disclosure: I have never bought into the belief of the Compulsive Centrists that John McCain is a moderate. A detailed look at his voting record shows that he is often very conservative, with the occasional moment of lucidity (e.g., recognizing that global warming is actually happening). But it is truly pathetic to watch a man who clearly doesn't agree with the theological conservatives twist himself into a pretzel in an effort to placate them. He's done it with evolution. Now, he is 'confused' about condoms:
The unthinkable has…
tlambert | March 16, 2007The Australian's War on Science has continued. Fortunately, I am able to outsource the refuting.
First, Nexus 6 takes apart a Tuesday editorial where the Australian foolishly allows itself to be swindled by a British TV show. (Mind you the Australian came back on Thursday with another editorial the next day where they repeated the same bogus arguments again.)
And on Friday there was another anti-global warming rant in the Australian, with Frank Devine coming out against peer review. Ian Musgrave demolishes Devine here.
Seems like the Australian is trying to make up in quantity what their…
mikethemadbiologist | March 15, 2007To prevent brain damage, the Surgeon General recommends that statements by Michael Egnor be read using approved devices such as the StupidView9000
Orac bravely dives deeper into the Discovery Institute's creationist drivel, and reports on the continuing ignorant idiocy of Michael Egnor. I don't know what's worse: Egnor's willful ignorance, or his pseudo-victimization complex. Let's deal with the ignorance first.
In an interview with Casey Luskin, Egnor states (italics mine):
EGNOR: Well, it's a pretty funny claim on the part of Darwinists. It's sort of like Al Gore claiming that he…
mikethemadbiologist | March 13, 2007Last night, I was reading some of the comments you leave here, and, in response to a post about a surgeon who thinks evolution is irrelevant to medical practice (Got Antibiotic Resistance?), fellow ScienceBlogling Mark left a comment. I'll get to the comment in a minute, but tragically, I hear stories like his far too often. Mark writes (italics original):
Mike, you've nailed exactly what pisses me off so much about Egnor. Right now, we're talking about something that's become deeply personal to me.
Since January, my father has been paralyzed from the waist down. The cause of it is MRSA. He…
mikethemadbiologist | March 12, 2007I haven't been able to respond to Michael Egnor's idiocy about evolution because I've been recovering from a meeting, but fortunately my fellow ScienceBloglings have. But I'll add my two cents anyway. Here's the really stupid part from Egnor (italics mine):
Doctors don't study evolution. Doctors never study it in medical school, and they never use evolutionary biology in their practice. There are no courses in medical school on evolution. There are no 'professors of evolution' in medical schools. There are no departments of evolutionary biology in medical schools.
The evolution--not the…
tlambert | March 7, 2007The Australian doesn't just make war on climate science, they don't like epidemiology either, printing Anjana Ahuja's hatchet job on the Lancet study.
Greta at Radio Open Source has posted a response from Les Roberts:
The two main criticisms which were in both the Nature article and The Times article are completely without merit. They said there wasn't enough time to have done the interviews. We had eight interviewers working ten hour days for 49 days, they had two hours in the field to ask each household five questions. They had time.
The other criticism was that our people stayed close to…
mikethemadbiologist | March 5, 2007...high levels of resistance to cephalosporins and beta-lactam antibiotics are sure to follow. Sunday, the Washington Post covered the FDA approval of the use of cefquinome in cattle to treat respiratory pneumonia. The article provides a pretty good synopsis of what happened, so I won't summarize the whole thing, but this decision represents a complete corruption of the regulatory process by industry. It's that simple.
Here's why cefquinome use in agriculture is really stupid: bacteria that evolve resistance to cefquinome, also become resistant to cefepime, a vital drug in the treatment…
tlambert | March 3, 2007I only wrote my last post on the Australian's War on Science a couple of days ago and already there's more attacks on science from them.
First we have this news article:
Professor Henderson said yesterday the report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, handed down on February 2, was "alarmist".
He said it had mislead Western governments over rising temperatures, and warned the cost of mitigation measures would be felt severely in Australia, unless it adopted a "balanced" view. ...
Professor Henderson said IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri was "alarmist" and his report "a heavily…
mikethemadbiologist | February 27, 2007Beta test version of Conservapedia graphical interface. Isn't he reassuring?
What happens when you take Science Blogs "basic concepts" and add it to Conservapedia, the information website for fucking morons? You get more fun than a barrel of monkeys (which, of course, are not related to humans...). Here's what the Stupid People have to say about genes (this is the entire definition):
A section of DNA that codes for the production of a protein or a portion of a protein. The gene is the fundamental unit of heredity. Although the gene is the fundamental unit of heredity, changes in genes (so-…
mikethemadbiologist | February 26, 2007When I heard that Republican Senator and presidential candidate John McCain spoke at the Discovery Institute, I was disappointed but not surprised. In March, there's going to be a report released about antibiotic resistance in bacteria. A major finding of the report: roughly 40,000 people die every year from hospital-acquired antibiotic resistant bacterial infections.
The problem of antibiotic resistance is, fundamentally, a problem of evolutionary biology. Species of bacteria which had very few resistant strains (or none at all) now contain high frequencies of resistance strains (e.g…
tlambert | February 26, 2007Last year I wrote about the Australian's War on Science. It's continued this year, leading Ian Musgrave to write:
The Australian is Anti-Science, it's a conclusion I'm reluctant to draw, but the accumulated evidence drives me to it.
Read his post to find out why. He then has a post on the next anti-science piece published in the Australian (just two days later).
Nexus 6 piles on to the same dreadful Australian editorial here, while John S Wilkins concludes:
the paper is becoming firmly anti-science (as all good conservatives must be these days, it seems), especially with respect to climate…
mikethemadbiologist | February 24, 2007And it's free! Bob Altemeyer, whose work on the authoritarian mind significantly influenced John Dean'sConservatives Without Conscience, has released a free online book, The Authoritarians, which is about, well, authoritarians. Here's an interesting bit from the book about evolution from Ch. 4:
For the record, Darwin never said humans evolved from monkeys, even though many other people besides fundamentalists think he did. Even with the limited knowledge available to him 150 years ago, Darwin realized that humanity's ancestors had long separated from the evolutionary path that led to…
mikethemadbiologist | February 22, 2007Some of my fellow ScienceBloglings have written about Conservapedia's treatment of evolution. What has always puzzled me about creationists is the rather frequent denial of mutation. For example, in the section on macroevolution, titled "Is the theory of macroevolution true?"*--which should tell you what's to come right away, the entry reads:
2. Differences between organisms can be explained by known mechanisms of genetic mutation.
* Counter: There has not been enough time for mutation to generate existing biological diversity.
* Counter: There has been enough time enough…
tlambert | February 4, 2007In my review of Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science, I contrasted Mooney's book with Gross and Levitt's book about the the postmodern left's war on science, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. Now Mooney has got together with Alan Sokal (who punctured the postmodernist view of science) to write an article on the Republican war on science.
Norman Levitt seems to agree with Sokal. Here's an email he sent commenting on my review. (Posted with his permission.)
I think some of your remarks about HS are a bit unfair. The book was
written in 1992-93, at…
mikethemadbiologist | February 3, 2007It should tell you just how loony the Christopath right is when a conservative Texas governor gains admission to the Coalition of the Sane (for the time being, anyway). How did Texas governor Rick Perry do it? By mandating that schoolgirls receive the HPV vaccine, and that the state subsidize the vaccinations. From the AP:
Some conservatives and parents' rights groups worry that requiring girls to get vaccinated against the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer would condone premarital sex and interfere with the way they raise their children.
By using an executive order…
mikethemadbiologist | January 20, 2007...but I saw Al Gore speak last night, and he's not going to run for president. He did, however, have a lot of interesting things to say.
-role of television
-need to incorporate internet differently into schools
-overemphasis on liberal arts education (tension)
-slammed Bush and global warming critics
-decried scientific censorship
Gore was a keynote speaker at the "Science and Society: Closing the Gap" meeting held here in Boston. In his talk and the Q&A, Gore made some interesting observations:
1) The last forty years we have moved from a society built around the written and spoken…
mikethemadbiologist | January 10, 2007Over at DailyKos, Darksyde comments on the motivations of the Kansas creationists (italics mine):
It's easy to get lost in the scientific or religious discussion, but this isn't about evolution or science or even religion. It's just another right-wing funded attack on behalf of the mega-rich, cleverly packaged to appeal to the very working families whose future it will devastate. The real goal is to undermine confidence in public education, maybe ultimately replacing those institutions with privatized versions (No doubt run by a recently acquired subsidiary of Neoconia Inc., suckling at the…
mikethemadbiologist | January 2, 2007So Michael Fumento has issued a challenge to put 'odds' on avian influenza, thinking that somehow I've stated that an avian influenza pandemic is likely (he's also accused me, a scientist, of being "anti-scientist" and "alarmist"). Well, I'm not putting odds down because I've never said that a pandemic is likely. Then again, one should hardly be surprised when a professional conservative completely distorts what one says.
In fact, in the post, I wrote:
We can argue about public health priorities (avian flu isn't my top priority personally).
One would think that was clear, but I made the…
mikethemadbiologist | December 30, 2006You might not know this, but, due to pressure from Republicans beholden to batshit lunatic creationists theological conservatives, park rangers at the Grand Canyon are not allowed to discuss how old the Grand Canyon is. Really. I'm not making this up. From PEER:
Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood rather than by geologic forces, more than…
mikethemadbiologist | December 29, 2006A recent report by the National Arbor Day Foundation vividly describes the dramatic increase in average annual winter temperature throughout the U.S. They compared average annual winter temperatures in 1990 over a fifteen year period with those in 2006.
Here's what they found:
That's right: it is getting warmer everywhere in the U.S. The annual average low in Boston increased between 115-29 degrees Fahrenheit (unfortunately, the map is only in gradations of ten degrees). But I guess global warming is just a 'theory'...