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Writing for the Finance section of Townhall.com (wait, the Finance section?), Mark Baisley has great hopes for the future of science. Galileo was a true scientist. I like Wikipedia’s description, “He displayed a peculiar ability to ignore established authorities, most notably Aristotelianism. In broader terms, his work marked another step towards the eventual separation of [...]
Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
Analytical thinking and religious belief
April 28th, 2012 
Deacon Duncan I bet we hear more about this one: a study at the University of British Columbia has found that analytical thinking actually decreases religious belief. The study, which will appear in tomorrow’s issue of Science, finds that thinking analytically increases disbelief among believers and skeptics alike, shedding important new light on the psychology of religious [...]
Aiming for stupidity
April 17th, 2012 Deacon Duncan The Happy Scientist took a look at the test questions for Florida’s FCAT exam, used to assess whether or not fifth graders have achieved expected levels of scientific literacy for their age group, and found some problems. I expected the Test Item Specifications to be a tremendous help in writing simulated FCAT questions. What I [...]
Kickstarter for science
April 15th, 2012 Deacon Duncan Crowd-funding sites like Kickstarter have proven popular for groups and individuals looking to get a consumer product, movie, music or video game project off the ground. Now a group of researchers and scientists is adopting a similar crowd-funding model to raise money for scientific research projects. The Microryza website, which launched this week, lets the [...]
Preach the controversy
April 11th, 2012 Deacon Duncan Chalk up another win for the “Preach the Controversy” gambit injecting creationism into public schools. The governor of Tennessee has decided not to sign the bill, and not to veto it either. This will allow the bill to become law without necessarily making the governor personally accountable for its contents—which are pretty bad. In any [...]
1981 global warming predictions
April 6th, 2012 Deacon Duncan In August of 1981, James Hansen and 6 other authors wrote a paper describing the projected impact of CO2 emissions on global temperatures. And now those predictions have once again come to light. In the ongoing debate over climate change, it’s at times a good idea to check in with historial predictions made by climate [...]
Does God show up through miracles?
April 3rd, 2012 Deacon Duncan Today I’d like to look at Mighty Timbo’s claim that he has evidence of God, in the form of a miracle that allegedly happened to his wife. It follows the traditional outline for miracle stories, so we can reasonably call this a typical case. And that’s a good thing because it also gives us at [...]
ID creationists and their grasp of “reality”
March 31st, 2012 Deacon Duncan The Coppedge v. JPL and CalTech lawsuit is living up to its early promise and perhaps even surpassing it. David Coppedge himself has submitted a deposition which includes—I am not making this up—a screenplay in which he fantasizes about his co-workers reduced to tears and desperately searching for a way to escape from the invincible [...]
Conservative trust in science in sharp decline
March 29th, 2012 Deacon Duncan From the color-me-surprised department comes news of this study showing a very clear trend towards anti-science hostility among conservatives and/or people who regularly attend church. Relying on data from the 1974-2010 waves of the nationally representative General Social Survey, the study found that people who self-identified as conservatives began the period with the highest trust [...]
Posted in Current Events, Denialism, Education, Politics, Science, Secularism, Society 
10 Comments »Resistance is… persecution?
March 15th, 2012 Deacon Duncan This is really not going to end well for the ID creationist community… “David Coppedge alienated his co-workers by the way he acted with them, and blamed anyone who complained about those interactions,” according to JPL in their response. “He accuses his former project supervisor and line manager of making discriminatory and retaliatory employment decision, [...]
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