Science & Society

One of the things I emphasize to my students in composition classes is that claims require evidence. All claims in a paper should be backed by evidence. Not simply stated and assumed true. Not propped up by fallacies. Backed by evidence. Writings relating to autism (like many topics) are often evidence-free. One of the ways we can back claims up is to offer examples. To back up my claim that writings related to autism are often evidence-free, I'm going to dissect a recent post at io9 about how autism is changing the world for everyone, not because of my opinion on the major claim…

The Agriculture Department is supposed to promote agriculture, including meat, but it seems someone in there once read a flawed metric that claims it takes a gallon of gas to produce a pound of beef and recommended USDA employees go meatless to save the world. Is there any truth to it?  No, but maybe they are counting on another four years of anti-science, advocacy-based leadership and getting a head start. In their agency newsletter, they provided tips on how to reduce environmental impact while eating in the department cafeteria - they suggested not eating meat.  They derived…

Null results are important in science, but that doesn't mean scientists want other people to see theirs. The reason is obvious: competition.  If one group has a null result and another group is working on something similar, they potentially give the competitor a shortcut by publishing a negative result. So it goes in just about every field. The food industry has its own null results, but they can be a lot more expensive.  The failure rate of new product launches is a shocking (to outsiders) 50%. It seems shocking because these are experts, armed with expensive demographic analyses…

Do you care about children?   If so, says Arianna Huffington, you'd better ask for more regulations that augment helicopter parenting with nanny government - and you'd better be part of the 1% that will be able to afford food when all pesticides are banned. What is her evidence?  Rachel Carson started telling us 50 years ago that scientists were out to kill us all. It's no secret that progressives are anti-science today, and Carson is a Saint in the Church of Nature, but at least their being anti-science has been a lot less harmful than when they tried to be on the science side; the…

In the last 2 years, ever since my daughter was diagnosed with a milk protein allergy, I have done a lot of personal research on diets and the effects of food on our bodies. I think that what you eat is a personal decision, and you can use whatever research you want (or none) to justify your diet.  What has worked for my family is that we are what has been dubbed "flexitarians"- largely vegetarian, sometimes vegan, with occasional or rare (haha) meat eating.  (If you're interested, our journey started with being dairy-free, then we saw Forks Over Knives, Food, Inc., and Earthlings-…

Today, scientists are extremely careful in making sure they cite others’ works, if not for ethical reasons because plagiarism destroys reputations and is potentially a career ender. However, in the past for some scientists including Charles Darwin and James Watson, the public has controversially given them credit for game changing discoveries and catapulted them into rock star status. In Darwin’s Ghosts (Random House 2012), Rebecca Stott, an English and creative writing professor at the University of East Anglia, explores Darwin’s story and his actual role in the concept of natural selection…

Have you noticed a huge increase in the price of pork chops or bacon or hot dogs? Neither have I, despite the fact that sow gestation stalls, or crates or whatever you may call them in your neighborhood, are disappearing.  The stalls are basically where pregnant sows are kept. Anti-science hippies who are always looking for ammunition in their war on human food contend big business uses these crates because they are, you know, eeeevil, but that isn't true.  Long before Big Pork even existed farmers kept sows apart because they fight.  And during pregnancy, if you screw with a…

The Los Angeles Times got a little Huffington Post-ish in an article July 17th about Oxitec's genetically modified mosquito to control dengue outbreaks in various poor countries - and perhaps even in the Florida Keys. Fortunately, the editors were happy to publish a science clarification, written by yours truly - it just isn't in the print edition.  That's twice in the last week the print op-ed has had anti-science cranks (they also had the Wilson 'scientists are picking on psychologists' whining that I wrote about) but only limit actual scientific responses to the website.  I…

Data visualization is gaining increased importance. Unlike arcane statistics (damned lies), visualizing data can provide context for a very big story - even enormous datasets like the heating and cooling effects of the sun. Nicholeen Viall, a solar scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., creates images of the sun with broad strokes of bright color splashed across a yellow background. But it's not simply art. The color of each pixel contains a wealth of information about the 12-hour history of cooling and heating at that particular spot on the sun. That heat history…

If you believe that disparity between male and female salaries is sexism or at least gender bias, well, you may have a point.   There's no doubt that, outside single women and men, there is a pay difference (lower for women) and an hours worked difference (more for men), so no matter which side you choose in the argument, you have a valid data point. But if you contend that income is the primary factor proving sexism, there are uncomfortable truths.  In environmentalism, for example, the income disparities are so large that it rivals the worst pay chasms of the 1950s.  Yet…