“Science” a Dirty Word?

Posted by jns on March 29, 2005

Behold the British Press, willing to say what the American Media apparently prefer not to mention:

For Bush, science is a dirty word
In America’s right-to-die controversy the facts were not allowed to get in the way of evangelical populism

Admittedly, the piece was written by Tristram Hunt, a visiting professor of history at Arizona State University. Is it significant that his opinion was published not in America?
I’ll quote the thesis, and then suggest that you read the rest — it’s got too much good writing about really bad things.

Thanks to the policies and prejudices of the Bush administration, science has become a dirty word. The American century was built on scientific progress. From the automobile to the atom bomb to the man on the moon, science and technology underpinned American military, commercial and cultural might. Crucial to that was the presidency. From FDR and the Los Alamos laboratory to Kennedy and Nasa to Clinton and decoding the genome, the White House was vital to promoting ground-breaking research and luring the world’s scientific elite. But Bush’s faith-based, petro-chemical administration has reversed that tradition: excepting matters military, this presidency exhibits an abiding aversion to scientific inquiry that is in danger of affecting the entire country.

Pseudo-Science & Schools

Posted by jns on March 29, 2005

Some things just make you want to throw your hands up in the air, or scream and punch a brick wall or something. Somebody kindly pointed out this transcript of a report on yesterday’s Newshour with Jim Lehrer called “Creation Conflict in Schools“, reported by Jeffrey Brown.
Here were a few comments made by students — high-school students, in Kentucky:

I believe that God created the Earth and put life on this Earth. I don’t really believe in the whole evolution theory.

I believe that God also made us. I just think it’s a lot easier to believe than the big bang theory, or any of the other theories about apes.

I believe God molded man from the dust and he breathed life into it, and I believe we came out with two legs and thumbs and the thought capacity better then any other animal.

To say that this was all some big cosmic dice roll, and we went from fish to frogs to monkeys and monkeys to humans. It’s just kind of almost ridiculous.

I don’t think a human body could have just come about. I think God definitely had everything to do in it, it’s so complex, I don’t think it could have just come.

These were students in a science class. I am breathing deeply right now, and keeping my hands on the keyboard. There are some things I don’t understand, and then there are the things that I really, really don’t understand, like this whole anti-rational, anti-science, Darwin-spawn-of-Satan stuff.
In another post I might make clever, ironic comments about how it’s science, and not the bible, that keeps the IPod playing, keeps the cell phone transmitting and receiving, and keeps the airplanes from falling out of the sky. Later. This? This I just don’t understand.
Later in the piece (as reported in the transcript), neo-creationist Ken Ham (I’m sure he’d insist on being called an “Intelligent Design Advocate”, further insisting that ID has nothing to do with creationism) says some stupid things about the unknowable past. We even get a preview of his “creation museum” where one of the dinosaurs has a saddle on it, because how can we really know that humans and dinosaurs didn’t coexist?
You know, when I read that statistic that revealed that nearly half (42%) of Americans “can’t answer correctly when asked if the earliest humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs” (2001 National survey conducted by the California Academy of Sciences & Harris interactive), I thought that maybe they just got confused over the issue, despite the fact that it was a rather noticable 65 million years after the last dinosaur died before humans appeared (unless one is a young-earth creationist, then it’s still true, just not noticable). I didn’t know until today that some people actually promote the idea that humans and dinosaurs actually coexisted. All trying to cast a “shadow of doubt” over Darwinianism, I guess, as though they were amateur debaters fantasizing themselves making closing arguments in a cosmic courtroom of science.
Fortunately, there were some sane voices in this piece as well, but one despairs whether they will be heard and heeded.
First, Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education , remarks on the absurd notion that “Intelligent Design” should be taught as though it were an actual, credible scientific opponent of evolution, so that students could decide the issue:

“Teach the controversy” is a deliberately ambiguous phrase. It means ‘pretend to students that scientists are arguing over whether evolution took place.’ This is not happening.

I mean you go to the scientific journals, you go to universities like this one and you ask the professors, is there an argument going on about whether living things had common ancestors? They’ll look at you blankly. This is not a controversy.

Exactly. It is manufactured pseudo-controversy, a non-scientific controversy, stirred up to cast doubt on science.
Finally, Chris Barton, biologist at Centre College (also Kentucky):

Part of it is a failure to really understand the scientific process. Unfortunately, the United States falls far behind in terms of our scientific appreciation and scientific understanding.

Soon, the IPod may stop playing and the cell phones may go silent (metaphorically speaking, of course, since we’ll always be able to import technology from other, far-less God-fearing countries who still practice basic research and technology development).
It’s one reason, maybe the main reason, that I founded Ars Hermeneutica (see the links) last winter: to enlighten the public about the methods and meanings of science. The task looks bigger and bigger every day.

Key-Word-Based Science

Posted by jns on March 29, 2005

I was reading an interesting article at Science Blog, “Changes in Earth’s tilt control when glacial cycles end“, about a new report (written by “Peter Huybers, a postdoctoral fellow in the WHOI Geology and Geophysics Department, and coauthor Carl Wunsch of MIT”) suggesting that changes in the tilt of the earth’s axis may indeed be the cause of periods of glaciation and other large-scale climate changes. Fascinating stuff, but not what this post is about.
This post is about the advertising. There’s a box on the page that has links provided by amazon.com, evidently chosen by matching subject key words, which in this case must have included “climate” and “warming”. At least when I loaded the page, they suggest two items:

1. A book called Global Warming, by John Houghton, and
2. A Panasonic, window model, 5,200-BTU air conditioner

Rather in poor taste, I thought, and showing a keen insensitivity to the second law of thermodynamics, not to mention several of the probable causes of global warming all represented by one device (that would be the air conditioner, not the book).
Were they suggesting that better air conditioning might be a tonic that would reduce the problem of global warming? The idea puts me in mind of all those people who don’t yet understand (we’ll get to it sometime, folks) why you can’t cool the apartment by leaving the refrigerator door open. Which, by the way, is significantly different from the reason why you shouldn’t heat the apartment by running the gas oven. Oddly, though, you could heat the house by leaving the refrigerator door open, but it would not be very efficient.