Science politics
purepedantry | January 23, 2009In President Obama's inaugural speech, he announced his intention to "restore science to its rightful place." In response to Seed Magazine has initiated to The Rightful Place Project whose goal is to recruit scientists and engineers to answer the question: What is science's rightful place? Available on their website is a form where you can enter your responses to this important question.
Here is mine:
Science is a process by which fact is distinguished from non-fact. I emphasize the word process for just as we live in a nation of laws, not men, science is more than scientists: it is…
purepedantry | January 16, 2009Orac and PZ are popularizing a post at Change.gov to defund the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM):
Biomedical research funding is falling because of the nation's budget problems, but biomedical research itself has never been more promising, with rapid progress being made on a host of diseases. Here's a way to increase the available funding to NIH without increasing the NIH budget: halt funding to NCCAM, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. This Center was created not by scientists, who never thought it was a good idea, but by…
purepedantry | October 14, 2008Many scientifically-inclined voters were a bit shocked by McCain's comment criticizing Obama for supporting a "3 million dollar earmark for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago." The "overhead projector" in question was actually a top of the line piece of equipment for the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and many did not consider this an earmark.
University of Chicago professor, Andrey Kravstov, responded in a comment on the NYTimes website (Hat-tip: Cosmic Variance):
The way Sen. McCain has phrased it suggests that Sen. Obama approved spending $3 million on an old-fashioned…
purepedantry | September 16, 2008Both candidates have answered the questions about scientific issues posed by the ScienceDebate2008. You can read their answers side by side here.
Several comments in no particular order:
McCain mentions ending earmarks in reference to supporting scientific funding. How are those two even related?
Obama is much more specific than McCain with respect to innovation policy -- he promises to double basic research funding whereas McCain promises increases. Obama seems to understand the specific issue of scientific funding in relation to inflation better. They both seem to get the association…
purepedantry | September 12, 2008Philosopher Thomas Nagel, writing in the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs, criticizes the exclusion of Intelligent Design from science classes on the grounds that evolutionary science too rests on an assumption: the naturalistic assumption. He argues that both evolution based on natural selection and ID have untestable assumptions.
Frankly, I think that Nagel is wrong partly because he doesn't understand the people pushing ID and partly because he doesn't understand science. With respect to the first, he seems to give the IDers like Michael Behe credit as honest brokers pushing a…
purepedantry | March 27, 2008Last night, I saw Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) speak.
(I joined this speakers club called the Oxonian Society -- which despite its name is not restricted to Oxford alumni. Why? What can I say. I was bored, and it is cheaper than internet dating. Hopefully, the people I meet will be more reliably intelligent and less reliably absurd.)
Anyway, Sen. Specter has been touring around touting his new book, Never Give In: Battling Cancer in the Senate which discusses his battle with Hodgkin's lymphoma while dealing with a variety of controversial political issues such as judicial confirmations and…
purepedantry | March 24, 2008(How do I know that it is a bad idea to say anything about this. Oh well. Here goes.)
ScienceBlogs regulars will know that last week there was a tiny incident involving a prescreening of the movie Expelled! -- a documentary starring Ben Stein purporting to expose the exclusion of pro-Intelligent Design advocates from academia. The pre-screening occurred in Minneapolis at a time coinciding with a large meeting of atheists including PZ Myers of the ScienceBlog Pharyngula and Richard Dawkins. Both of them having been interviewed -- and having been lied to about the nature of the film --…
purepedantry | March 5, 2008Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin has launched a broadside at NYTimes Science Blogger John Tierney (also here) over what he (Quiggin) considers politicization of science:
One of the big problems with talking about what Chris Mooney has called The Republican War on Science is that, on the Republican side, the case against science is rarely laid out explicitly. On a whole range of issues (evolution, passive smoking, climate change, the breast-cancer abortion link, CFCs and the ozone layer and so on) Republicans attack scientists, reject the conclusions of mainstream science and promote…
purepedantry | February 12, 2008Important Announcement #1:
ScienceDebate2008 is actually going to happen. Here is the press release:
ScienceDebate2008.com, the citizens initiative calling for a presidential debate on science and technology policy, today announced that it has formally invited the presidential candidates to a debate on April 18 at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, four days before the Pennsylvania Primary. The invitation to the candidates can be found here.
"The future economic success of the United States depends on out-performing the competition with smart people and smart ideas," said Craig Barrett…
purepedantry | January 30, 2008I was distressed to read this at Wired because usually I feel like they are more on top of things. This is by Thomas Hayden:
Even worse, those same cortexes that invented science can't really embrace it. Science describes the world with numbers (ratio of circumference to diameter: pi) and abstractions (particles! waves! particles!). But our intractable brains evolved on a diet of campfire tales. Fantastical explanations (angry gods hurling lightning bolts) and rare events with dramatic outcomes (saber-toothed tiger attacks) make more of an impact on us than statistical norms. Evolution gave…
purepedantry | December 10, 2007Scientific issues are becoming more and more a staple of American life, which means that they should be becoming more and more included in the questions we ask our Presidential candidates. We want to know what they think about health care and the war in Iraq; we should want to know what they think about stem cell research, global warming, and implementing the Endangered Species Act.
This is why bloggers Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum are trying to organize a debate for the 2008 Presidential candidates about scientific issues:
Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges…
purepedantry | September 17, 2007Last week, I posted a long argument for why I believe pairing science and atheism is a poor strategic choice for scientists. The response to that article has I think been largely positive, but I do want to address the criticisms of it now that I have had a chance to read all the comments and posts about it.
Let me state clearly, though, that I think all of the counter-arguments are legitimate. The world is a complicated place, and I have no special insight into its workings.
Further, if any people find my arguments pejorative, I apologize. It was my intent that this discussion be conducted…
purepedantry | September 12, 2007
In 1922, John Dewey, pragmatist philosopher and champion of Progressive education, wrote an article in The New Republic entitled "The American Intellectual Frontier." The subject was William Jennings Bryan's attack on evolution that would later culminate in the Scopes trial. The argument that Dewey made was not what you would think, however. Though he was most definitely part of the the Northeastern liberal establishment at the time, he did not dismiss Bryan's attacks as indicative of rural ignorance.
Instead, he made the argument that while he disagreed with Bryan, liberals had to take…
purepedantry | August 27, 2007Fellow ScienceBlogger Tara Smith has a required reading article in PLoS Medicine on HIV denialists:
Since the ideas proposed by deniers do not meet rigorous scientific standards, they cannot hope to compete against the mainstream theories. They cannot raise the level of their beliefs up to the standards of mainstream science; therefore they attempt to lower the status of the denied science down to the level of religious faith, characterizing scientific consensus as scientific dogma [21]. As one HIV denier quoted in Maggiore's book [10] remarked, "There is classical science, the way it's…
purepedantry | January 3, 2007A UK charity called Sense About Science is taking on celebrities who misrepresent scientific reality:
MELINDA MESSENGER, TV PRESENTER
"Why should I allow my body or my children to be filled with man-made chemicals, when I don't know what the health effects of these substances will be."
Dr John Hoskins, toxicologist: "Away from the high doses of occupational exposure a whole host of unwanted chemicals finds its way into our bodies all the time.
"Most leave quickly but some stay: asbestos and silica in our lungs, dioxins in our blood. The most important thing is dose: one aspirin cures a…
purepedantry | November 16, 2006I have tried to show that the gender gap in the sciences is not the result of cognitive differences, but that begs the question about what else to which it can be attributed. It could be that it is the result of conscious or unconscious discriminatory behavior. However, it could also be the result of the personal and economic decisions of the women involved -- particularly with respect to having babies. If some women decide to leave their careers early or for long periods to have children, then this will affect their average representation among tenured faculty.
A recent NBER paper by…
purepedantry | November 9, 2006Shelley Batts has this to say about the poor funding situation of late:
At the Society for Neuroscience meeting last month, there was a special symposium regarding the current NIH funding situation that was supposed to be given by the current director of the NIH, Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni. Due to his plane being delayed, he was a no-show, although the talk was instead given by a few of the directors of NIH divisions. The gist of the talk was this: despite the NIH's budget being doubled a few years back, demand for grants has risen much faster and hence the paylines have decline dramatically. And…
purepedantry | November 1, 2006There is an election coming up. Hopefully this is not a shocking revelation for most people. Frankly, it seems like everyone not in a medically-induced coma for the past three months has spent every waking moment bloviating about it.
The scientists too have come out in force. If you don't believe me, read the Policy and Politics section of this site. We certainly have opinions and have no hesitation in expressing them in the most forceful terms. (I do not exclude myself from that list either, and I plan on forcefully expressing a good bit in the run up to election day.)
However, every…
purepedantry | October 30, 2006The famous skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis nicknamed Lucy is going on a field trip:
After 4 years of an on-again, off-again courtship, Ethiopian officials have promised the hand--and partial skeleton--of the famous fossil Lucy to museum officials in Houston, Texas. The 3.1 million-year-old early human ancestor has been engaged to make her first public appearance ever, in Houston next September, as part of an exhibit that will travel to as many as 10 other museums in the next 6 years. But many archaeologists are trying to stop the tour before it starts.
Ethiopian officials have high…
purepedantry | October 24, 2006New Scientist is reporting on a movement among some scientists to replace the word "cloning" with "somatic cell nuclear transfer":
Don't say cloning, say somatic cell nuclear transfer. That at least is the view of biologists who want the term to be used instead of "therapeutic cloning" to describe the technique that produces cloned embryos from which stem cells can then be isolated. This, they argue, will help to distinguish it from attempts to clone a human being.
But will it? Kathy Hudson and her colleagues at the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC asked more than 2000…