Science & Society

Progressives shriek "false equivalence!" every time the numerous anti-science positions of people on their side of the aisle are mentioned, but that is a reactionary defense mechanism - a large part of their world view and identities are tied up in the belief that they are on the side of science while people on the right are not so they can be forgiven for panicking a little as the mounting evidence and examples continue to pile up. But to people in the middle, the recent fetish with attaching special labels to genetically modified food seems a lot like clever abortion 'awareness' laws…

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005738http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124http://pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1302997110 Psychology in general, and evolutionary psychology in particular, were once casually considered part of the scientific circle. I am not sure why, maybe it is a 'well, they are on our side against creationists' thing for biologists or a 'well, they are on our side against Republicans' thing for the rest of science academia. Whatever the reason, when it came to protecting funding from the NSF or not…

http://www.cirm.ca.gov/StemCellBasics_Questionshttp://sdrmi.org/wordpress/?p=278http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=13523 The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) was established by California voters in 2004 to defy US President George W. Bush who, we were told, 'banned' human embryonic stem stem cell research.(1) Voters were willing to do it with $3 billion of borrowed money, that is how important science was to California, because stem cell research was going to both make us immortal and cure Alzheimer's, if only Republicans would get out of…

If San Diego has Republicans, anti-vaccine sentiment is bipartisan But even CDC data can be misused if someone sets out to do so. San Diego County had a measles outbreak in 2008, for example. San Diego itself voted for Democrats Clinton, Gore, Kerry, and Obama in the last few decades and its registration is 35.2% Democrat and 33.8% Republican so that is hardly a Republican stronghold, but since only 3 out of its 5 Congressional seats are held by Democrats, that is considered a conservative bastion to Californians. A measles outbreak there evens out all of the true Democratic anti-vaccine…

Attempts to craft articles with elaborate philosophical rationalizations are the kind of thing that conservatives of the Buckley era used to hate - so it is no surprise that their libertarian descendants are making the mistake of promoting progressive social Darwinism in the name of freedom. Social Darwinism became eugenics. Yet if you ignore the specifics of staunch progressives like John Maynard Keynes and Oliver Wendell Holmes and H.G. Wells and focus on the intent, you see the sentiment is the same as modern libertarians when it comes to picking winners and losers - the first group wanted…

"Astronomy is about as pure and as clean as you can get, so what’s the big deal?” That's the question an astronomer asked about why, after 13 astronomy experiments on Mauna Kea, 13,000 feet in the air and a pristine location due to lacking 40% of the earth's atmosphere, activists from the mainland have mobilized native Hawaiians into believing the air up there was some sacred space. It wasn't sacred. Commoners were not allowed to visit on penalty of death. And even elites didn't visit often. Yet Slate had a physicist beset by virtue signaling and liberal guilt over...something...draft an…

A study of risk communication as it relates to altruistic behavior has found that portraying an event as a distant risk, despite highlighting its importance and potential progression, fails to prompt altruistic behavior intention among the U.S. public. The Ebola outbreak in West Africa gained substantial media momentum during the final three months of 2014. In October, a Liberian man visiting family in Texas became the first diagnosed Ebola patient in the U.S. to die from the disease. But though mainstream media hyped it beyond belief, the Obama administration offered minimal assistance to…

Citizen science, amateurs who did science for the love of it rather than as a career, were once well-respected. They were often more elite than those who did it as an occupation, much like Sherlock Holmes was a superior detective because he was an amateur in a world where police forces were blue collar and lacked education.  Yet as science became more government-controlled and salaries skyrocketed, degrees began to matter most. The cost of modern science equipment spelled the death of citizen science, except in fields like astronomy. Yet it has come roaring back, even in the natural and…

Amid the many calls for scientists to engage with the general public, there are some who feel that scientists ought to remain aloof and disconnected from the broader public. They believe academics shouldn’t even attempt to communicate their research to common folk. And many scientists oblige them, by writing in a turgid manner that is highly effective at keeping the public (and their peers) at bay. So, here are a few of the tricks that scientists use to produce such turgid science writing. These methods restrict science to the smallest and most specialist audience possible. But writers beware…

In America it seems that Democrats are gaining ground and that therefore the culture is moving to the left. It's actually much different, Democrats have actually moved to the right. President Obama came into office campaigning against two wars but will leave office with three. He never closed Guantanamo Bay and even his lifting of "the ban" on human embryonic stem cell research was just a slight modification of the NIH funding policy under President George W. Bush. At the Democratic National Convention, President Obama announced the death of Osama Bin Laden at the hands of U.S. special…