It’s heartwarming to see Dr Dr Russel Blackford rise to the occasion and pen a laudatory essay praising Matt Nisbet. Praise the lord!
Wait…is sarcasm ethical?
At least, that’s the message I’m getting. You-know-who is once again trying to insist that the ethics of scientists includes everything except speaking the truth, and I’m not going to get into it —let Greg Laden deal with the heat from the stupid ‘framing’ argument this time.
I will say that I’m damned tired of the vapid claim that “Science and religion are different ways of understanding the world.”. It ignores the essential fact that one of those two is a useful, practical, and powerful way of understanding the world, and the other is silly, wrong, and misleading — if it is a way of understanding the world, then so is Dungeons & Dragons. Of course, no one sane pretends that D&D is a portrayal of reality.
Jerry Coyne says lots of basic (but well-stated) things about evolution, creationism, and education in an interview with American Scientist. Here’s a taste:
Some creationists seem to feel that it’s the scientists who are being dogmatic here–that you’re somehow invested in this idea or want it to be true, or that your training has blinded you to other possibilities. How do you respond to that?
I think they’re the ones who are dogmatic, because the difference between religion and science, which is the difference between religion and evolution, is that we question things. Nobody worships Darwin as a religion. We don’t adhere to a set of dogmas that are unchanging and unquestionable. We all recognize that Darwin was wrong about a lot of stuff. His theories of genetics were wrong, his theories of biogeography were wrong–that’s been corrected by plate tectonics–his stuff on sexual selection is very good but not complete. Evolutionary biology is constantly changing and revising its conclusions. But the main conclusions that Darwin made–that evolution occurred, that it occurred through natural selection, that there were common ancestry and splitting and that it happened slowly–those have all been supported.
Read it all.
John Timmer of Ars Technica gets a prominent write-up in Nature. It’s good stuff wrapped around a slightly silly question — can blogging replace science journalism? The answer, of course, is no, but the two media can play complementary roles, I think.
Even though my wife does think it makes our car a billboard for godless liberal scientism, I may have to add this one to the collection.
He’s going to be St Catherine’s in St Paul on 8 April. I may have to make the trip out there myself, even though these mid-week round-trip drives are killers. Anyway, if you want to go, you need to reserve tickets (which are free) ahead of time — follow the link for more information.
Hey, gang — help me out with this list of states with statewide grassroots organizations working to maintain and improve science education. I’ve found lists at Citizens for Science groups and NCSE, and here’s the roster so far (all the states in blue above have something in place):
If you know of another state group, leave a comment and I’ll update this list. And most importantly, if your state is one of the gray ones up above, start one yourself.
The inaugural meeting of Wisconsin Citizens for Science will be on 18 April at 2pm, in the Monona Public Library. You want to go. They are providing free cookies. Oh, yeah, and sciency information.
She is such a smarty-pants.
They even titled the announcement “And now for something completely different…”. I’m going to be doing a new monthly science column for the Guardian, so once again, I have blithely stacked another deadline on top of the groaning pile already on my desk. This should be fun, though, and one must constantly be building beachheads on other continents if one hopes to take over the world. Besides, I’ve also been promoted to “leading American evolutionary biologist”, which will surprise leading American evolutionary biologist everywhere, but which will look wonderfully pretentious on my CV.
It’s also going to be a weekly column — we’ll be cycling a stable of science writers, including Simon Singh, Chris French, and Andy Miah, to keep up some regular science content on the Guardian, and you have to applaud the effort of the paper to do that, especially when science coverage seems to be weakening everywhere else.
I’m already whipping up a little something for my inaugural column. It’s got snails in it. I hope it’s not too continental for the British.
