Science
Kenneth P. Green and Hiwa Alaghebandian think they have identified why Americans seem to have less regard for science–and scientists–than they used to. Our theory is that science is not losing its credibility because people no longer like or believe in the idea of scientific discovery, but because science has taken on an authoritarian tone,…
Scientist priest Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk explains that a recent scientific achievement in the news was not so much the creation of life as a rebuilding of a fundamental component, citing a Princeton microbiologist: “Every cell is a microcosm of life, and neither the Venter team nor anybody else has come close to recreating the cell…
Further to this morning’s post about the use of science as an irrefutable cudgel in moral debates, I’d like to draw your attention to Eric Cohen and Yuval Levin’s comparison of the Bush and Obama treatments of the President’s Council on Bioethics. In effect, Bush’s version was designed to have an authority of its own…
Jonah Goldberg spotted in the news an instance in which the Obama Interior Department appears to have misrepresented the opinion of some scientists whom it consulted regarding a possible ban of offshore drilling: The draft these experts saw was substantively different from the document that bore their names. The draft called for a moratorium on…
Robert Chase restates a recurrent theme in a recent consideration of science fiction and religion: … Starting with Fred Hoyle, himself the author of such science-fiction novels as The Black Cloud, scientists have realized the universe is exquisitely fine-tuned to produce life. If protons were just 0.2 percent more massive, they would be unstable and…
People don’t like the idea of human cloning, and large constituencies aren’t comforted by proposals that would require scientists to kill the humans whom they create through that process. Fr. Nicanor Austriaco notes that the supposedly pro-life Congressman Jim Langevin has come across a curious means of skirting objections: The proposed legislation permits cloning-to-kill by…
This line of reasoning is increasingly irksome, here from a Peter Lord column about University of California History and Science Professor Naomi Oreskes: Oreskes said modern science has sent men to the moon, cured diseases and predicted tsunamis after the earthquake in Chile. Why do people believe science can’t get it right when it comes…
In case you missed it, the medical journal The Lancet has retracted it’s oft-cited study that purported to find a link between the Mumps/Measles/Rubella vaccine and autism: [T]he study by British surgeon and medical researcher Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues appeared in 1998 in The Lancet, “the arguments were considered by many to be proven…
A post-email-revelation tack being taken by global warming alarmists has been that we skeptics, as we’re called, have no qualifications to judge the science, and the scientific controversies that have filtered out to our ignorant outskirts are really just minor complaints against a vast body of knowledge all pointing to the truth of the alarmists’…
One hears, from time to time, statements that suggest that advancements in neurological science will negate belief that the self is anything other than an illusion created by electrical and chemical processes. I’ve always thought such a view to be astonishingly wrong-headed and, in some cases, deliberately misleading. Stephen Barr takes up the topic in…