Archive for the ‘Anti-Science’ Category

If you’ve been following the news over the last couple of days, you may have heard about Gary Goodyear, Canadian Minister of State for Science and Technology, and his strange remarks regarding evolution. On Tuesday it was reported that he was asked whether he believed in evolution, and his response was, “I’m not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don’t think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate.” This created a bit of a stir, naturally, and he has since changed his answer – now saying that he does believe in evolution, but that the question was irrelevant.

Irrelevant, Gary? No matter what your beliefs, evolution is currently one of the most contentious points between religion and science – and as you are the Minister for Science, I’d say it is pretty clear what side you should be on. The question is as relevant as ever, and your wishy-washy answers have got a lot of rationally-thinking people feeling uneasy. I’d like to note that I personally am fine with Mr. Goodyear being a Christian. Despite what my personal feelings are on the compatibility of his religion with science, the fact is that many brilliant and successful scientists in the past have been religious in one way or another. But the way he drags religion into a question that should be purely scientific, quite frankly worries me. It’s not too hard to picture him promoting so-called “intelligent design” as a valid alternative to evolution. This is a road that we as a country do not want to go down. We’ve done a good job so far of keeping religion out of our government, and I’d like to see it stay that way.

Despite the slow activity over the past several months, Lintbox is back on track, and to prove it, we introduce the next panel discussion!

As the LHC became active over the fall, those opposing its activation grew louder and received considerable attention on various news outlets.  On top of this, public opinion polls found that the majority of Americans felt that the risks (though debunked) of activating the LHC far outweighed its potential benefits.  The Large Hadron Collider’s opponents argue that the possible dangers resultant of the massive particle collider’s activity, ranging from the creation of micro black holes to the catastrophic invention of the mythical “strange matter” may damage or even destroy the planet.  These arguments have been resoundingly shot down by the entire scientific community as both scientifically inaccurate and too unlikely to be even considered possible.  However, as with any debate, there remains some ground to explore. Read the rest of this entry »

In this article, Hitchens talks about “the GOP ticket’s appalling contempt for knowledge and learning”. It saddens me that these things go largely unreported by the media, whereas past religious affiliations of Senator Obama can form a nation-wide scandal.

Found on this website, “Ten Questions to Ask Your Biology Teacher About Evolution” is meant to be a handy guide for students skeptical of evolution. According to this article at The New York Times, science teachers in the US are increasingly having to deal with similar anti-evolution ploys. Reading through the list gave me a few chuckles, so I thought — with only my knowledge from high school biology — I would go through the list and do my best to respond to the various challenges.

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1. ORIGIN OF LIFE. Why do textbooks claim that the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment shows how life’s building blocks may have formed on the early Earth — when conditions on the early Earth were probably nothing like those used in the experiment, and the origin of life remains a mystery?

It appears to be a favorite tactic of anti-evolutionists to try to tie evolutionary biology with the question of the origins of life. The truth is, biological evolution, natural selection, and common ancestry don’t say anything about how life began. Life could have started any number of ways; evolution is merely the proposed mechanism to explain the diversity and robustness of modern life.

That being said, we aren’t completely in the dark as to how life on Earth began. Unfortunately, we may never be able to prove how life on Earth began, but rather only likely ways that it could have began. While there is some controversy as to whether the Miller-Urey experiment replicated the atmospheric conditions of early Earth¹, it did show us the possibility of creating the building blocks of organic life from non-living materials. In that respect, it is still an important experiment, with implications for our search for the origin of life.

Regardless, this is not a criticism of evolution — it’s a criticism of the Miller-Urey experiment.
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In my recent article about Consumer Reports, I mentioned that there was no evidence to support the hypothesis that organically grown foods are any safer, tastier, or more nutritious than are their non-organically grown counterparts. Accepting this premise, you might say that it is still a legitimate choice to purchase organic food to support a more “natural” method of farming. Aside from the fact that this is quite fallacious, it is also very wrong.

The fact is that here in Canada — and in other countries that have modern farming practices — we have the most plentiful, healthful and safe food supply in all of recorded history (though you would not know it by talking to a naturopath). So much, in fact, that one of our biggest problems right now stems from an overabundance of food and the resulting over-consumption of certain types of foods. Short of obesity-related health problems, we live in a time and place where people are living longer than ever before.

Enter the organic food crowd, who believe that we are being slowly poisoned by the pesticides and antibiotics in our foods. The truth is even if evidence surfaced that eating non-organic food is harmful (none exists, to date), any negative health effects due to pesticide or antibiotic consumption would be vastly overshadowed by the health benefits accrued by modern farming techniques. In a way, organic food proponents bear some resemblance to anti-vaccine proponents. People who have never had to deal with nation-wide pandemics of measles or polio fail to see the importance of vaccinating their children and maintaining herd immunity against the diseases. Similarly, people who have grown up in a country with an abundant supply of safe and healthful food fail to appreciate all of the harms and waste that we have been able to eliminate through modern farming techniques.

The other problem with organic food is that even if we wanted to, we simply could not feed all of the people in Canada using organic farming techniques, let alone the world while maintaining affordable food prices (if you think increased food prices due to rising oil costs are bad…). Short of a mass extinction, there appears to be no way to reconcile this huge problem. Organic farming would only ever work as long as a small percentage of the population consumed organically grown foods — but proponents of organic foods believe that all food should be grown organically.

So why is organically grown food bad?

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Admittedly, there’s a fine line between skepticism and cynicism — one that’s easy to cross if you don’t watch where you step. Skeptics are accused of making the world a dull place by taking all of the magic and wonder out of everything. As the poet John Keats once said (back when Philosophy and Science were pretty much the same thing):

“Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings, conquer all mysteries by rule and line, empty the haunted air, and gnome mine unweave a rainbow.”

This criticism has been leveled both at me, personally, and has been leveled at the entire skeptical movement for quite some time. Most of the people I talk to about skepticism don’t understand why we have to go around raining on others’ parades. However, skepticism isn’t about parades or precipitation, but rather looking for the true beauty in the world around us, rather than settling for apparent surface beauty. Great skeptics, like Carl Sagan, have pointed out that we need not divorce our sense of wonder from our skeptical mindset in order to further scientific inquiry and understanding¹:

“The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.”²

Science has shown us that we can find more beauty through unweaving the rainbow then we could ever have hoped to find just by looking at, and being content with, the pretty colors in the sky. But there is another concern that is often raised about skepticism. Few people argue that logic and rationality lack a place in our understanding of the world, but some feel that skepticism fails to account for the magic and mystery of fantasy and fiction. Good stories are often capable of reaching people in ways that good logic and scientific inquiry often can’t, and appeals to emotion are able to evoke responses much stronger than can be generated through logic and reason.

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Well, we’ve recently hit a drought of posts here at Lintbox lately, due possibly to the fact that we’re lazy loafers.  I have recently, however, managed to fix quite a few remaining problems with the site’s layout, and have yet again updated the categories with new, flashier icons and a few additional topics.

We should be back in action soon!

In the meantime, be sure to check out Joss Whedon’s latest project, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog if you’re one of the very few remaining who haven’t.  The awesome series has become a huge online hit, and rightly so.  This is, after all, the Joss-Whedon’s-Firefly Joss Whedon we’re talking about.  If you’re late in the game, though, you should know that the series is scheduled to no longer be available for free today (As of the writing of this post, it’s still up).  Luckily, it can be found on iTunes for only $1.99 per act, and Dr. Horrible is worth every penny.

Also be sure to check out the related Captain Hammer’s Be Like Me, a wonderful short expository comic on the story’s antagonist (who is, ironically, a superhero).  The character Captain Hammer, as it turns out, is a brash, self-important and dim-witted brute who shows more interest in himself than the rest of society.  Most nefarious of all (and very related to the topic of skepticism) he follows the principles of figures such as Pol Pot in condemning the very appearance of intellectualism and the scientific pursuit in general.  Captain Hammer is, in fact, the very personification of the vapid, malicious anti-scientific sentiments skeptics and scientists alike aim to expunge.

In short, it’s awesome.  Watch it as many times as our linear timeframe may allow (or more)!

This is just a purely awesome video. I’ll give it to you up front; with my reasons for posting it below.

So what does this video have to do with science/skepticism?

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A couple weeks ago, I wrote about the Louisiana Science Education Act, a bill blatantly constructed to set the precedent for an anti-scientific, religious curriculum to be taught in public schools.  The bill, furthermore, is allegedly tied to The Discovery Institute, an anti-evolution organization famous for losing the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case, in which it was ruled that the teaching of Intelligent Design was in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  They are also known for their well-publicized Wedge Strategy, a manifesto stating its purpose as to “reverse the stifling materialist world view and replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions” as well as “affirm the reality of God.”

Well, in a sad, but predictable turn of events, the bill has since been enacted by governor Bobby Jindal.

Quote:

The bill has been opposed by every scientific society that has voiced a position on it, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science. AAAS CEO Alan Leshner warned that the bill would “unleash an assault against scientific integrity, leaving students confused about science and unprepared to excel in a modern workforce.”

Jindal, who was a biology major during his time at Brown University, even received a veto plea from his former genetics professor. “Without evolution, modern biology, including medicine and biotechnology, wouldn’t make sense,” Professor Arthur Landy wrote. “I hope he [Jindal] doesn’t do anything that would hold back the next generation of Louisiana’s doctors.”

Link.

Science and religion have an unstable relationship. Oftentimes they are content to stay separate and do their own things. Occasionally, they clash over certain issues of public policy. However, are these two world-views actually compatible, and if not, which one is correct?

Let us look at the last part of that statement first. A favorite argument of the Young Earth Creationists and the Answers in Genesis crowd is to state that science and religion provide different worldviews– That the systems use different assumptions about our world and reality and are therefore destined to arrive at different conclusions.  Some go as far as to label science as a religion, and why shouldn’t they? Science is based on a bunch of presuppositions as is any other system of belief. So why is science a more legitimate worldview? Because it lets us get at the truth. In order to understand why science is not “just another religion”, we have to understand what science really is as well as the presuppositions upon which it is based.

Science can only reveal empirical truth, and not metaphysical truth. Some people see this as a shortcoming of science, but even if metaphysical truth existed, of what use would it be to us? Philosophy is an interesting intellectual pursuit, but even Descartes had the common sense to see that the way we view the world through philosophy fails to alter our worldviews when we leave our study and go outside afterward. Whether religious, scientific, or both, we all tend to judge the truth in the same way: By what matches our observations¹. The religious person still looks both ways before they cross the road, and they wash their hands before they sit down to eat dinner. From any moderate perspective, it is obvious that science and religion do not conflict in basic worldviews, as some extremists would have you think. In fact, science and religion are both dependent upon empiricism; the only main difference is that religion assumes that one can talk with god (an all-knowing supernatural entity that imparts divine wisdom).

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