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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I've been using the phrase "textbook cardboard" a lot lately. I first picked it up after reading Gould's Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle, but the concept had been made clear to me even before Gould provided me with something to call it. All too often scientific legends are passed down as fact (i.e.…
One of the guilty pleasures of my sabbatical from the dark halls of Pharma-dur is the freedom to take in a movie on a weekday afternoon. There's just something special about sitting in a theater of the local googolplex with maybe three to ten other people and watching a new release on the big…
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…
[Note: Apparently Emma Marris didn't like Sizzle either, and you can read her review in Nature. I'm definitely interested in seeing more reviews of the film from various sources as we get closer to the release date.]
After reading Chris Mooney's hyperbolic review of Sizzle this morning I have to…
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?