This exquisitely designed house would be perfect for PZ Myers and Jerry Coyne. I’ll expand on that (and more) in the New Year (later this week). Meanwhile, here’s something from Margaret Atwood that reminds us why religion is not so easy to stamp out in the 21st-century: I think that the religious strand is probably part…Continue Reading…
What do you think happens at death? This I don’t know, but I don’t think everything is resolved with the destruction of the body. What science has to say seems to me insufficient and unsatisfying. This is from a Q & A with Saul Bellow, one of the literary giants of the 2oth-century. He might…Continue Reading…
Two long-running debates involving the supposed purity of science have flared anew. A recent editorial in the UK’s New Statesmen that cautioned against the politicizing of science (using climate change as a prime example) kicked up a Twitter storm and has provoked numerous responses, including this one from a science policy expert in the Guardian headlined (probably to the author’s…Continue Reading…
I have some good news for Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist who may be the most well known chemphobic in the United States: Help is on the way. Kristof, in case you weren’t aware, has been battling a bad case of chem fears for the last several years. It’s an unfortunate affliction, made all the more…Continue Reading…
Paul Nurse, a geneticist and the President of the UK’s Royal Society, gave an address last month titled, “Advising Society on Science.” He discusses the most controversial issues that characterize public debate on climate change and genetically modified foods. Much of what he says strikes me as thoughtful and reasonable, though I see his comments…Continue Reading…
We seem to be having a run of splashy, peer-reviewed GMO (genetically modified organism) studies that are of questionable merit. Several weeks ago, a team of French researchers published results that linked cancerous tumors in rats to the GM corn they were fed. But many scientists cast doubt on the study’s legitimacy almost immediately, and…Continue Reading…
It’s always a curious thing when liberals become conservatives (or vice versa), and people do an about-face on climate change or atheism. You wonder what triggered the conversion. Was it a gradual shift, an existential crisis, or an epiphany? On individual issues, I wonder if it depends on how deeply you are invested in a given position….Continue Reading…
In her book Doubt: A History, the scholar and poet Jennifer Hecht writes about having awe for the universe without being religious. She talked about this during a radio interview: It seems that if you have a doctrine, a version of rationalism or a version of atheism that makes it so that you have to be worried about using the…Continue Reading…
Anyone familiar with sensationalist media coverage of science knows that many stories need to be taken with a big dose of skepticism. Thus, people increasingly shake their heads at screaming headlines on the latest autism/red wine/exercise/gay parenting/climate change study. When it comes to GMOs (genetically modified organisms), however, plenty of people are also prepared, it…Continue Reading…
In Europe, anti-GMO activism has turned increasingly confrontational, which seems to have backfired in one recent case. In the United States, anti-GMO sentiment has taken a different form, which Amy Harmon of the New York Times wrote about last week in this excellent piece: For more than a decade, almost all processed foods in the United…Continue Reading…