One of the remarkable things about science is that it works. It produces results that are repeatable, testable, and useful. So what is it about this enterprise that we call science that makes it so successful? Philosophers and historians of science have struggled for over a century to answer this question and the related question of how to distinguish science from non-science (the well-known ‘demarcation problem’), and have basically come up empty. [Read more…]

The story of our ancestors never ceases to be fascinating to me.

(This clip appeared on November 15, 2012. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)

You do not have to go to exotic places like Charles Darwin did to find evidence for evolution. In an article titled Evolution right under our noses, Carl Zimmer says that Manhattan and its surrounding areas are rich in examples, such as mice responding to urban stress, fish in the Hudson river responding to pollution by becoming resistant to PCBs, worms becoming resistant to cadmium, and so on. [Read more…]

Some years ago, I attended a seminar at our university on the ethics of genetic engineering. The panel of experts spoke about the new ability to modify the genes of people with genetic disorders in order to remove the cause of their ailments. Even when they successfully cured the child of an inherited disease, the treatment did not prevent the child from passing on the defective gene to their offspring. [Read more…]

I have been hammering away at cases of cheating in science, trying to make them more widely known. I feel that this is a really important issue for a crucial reason. [Read more…]

I am in Washington DC and today is a nice sunny day. This city was largely spared as Hurricane Sandy seems to have gone slightly north of here, hitting severely New Jersey and New York. [Read more…]

Peer review is an important part of the academic publication process. All scholarly articles undergo peer review from at least one other person familiar with the field (plus an editor of the journal), although two is the more common number of reviewers, and sometimes may be more if there is disagreement amongst the reviewers or a strong appeal from the author of a rejected paper. [Read more…]

Given the rapidly proliferating number of polls and models predicting the election, the interesting question to be answered after the election is which did the best job. Poll aggregator Sam Wang says that a good prediction should: [Read more…]

Some time ago, I discussed the question of whether Sherlock Holmes could be classed as a psychopath based on his behavior in the stories. In pursuing this question a little more, I came across an article in the Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders that elaborated on how psychopathy manifests itself. [Read more…]