Coyne and I seem to have achieved consensus in our opinion of the Safina column, without talking to each other about it. It’s true, once you reach a certain level of Darwin Consciousness, you gain the ability to read minds. And also levitate.
The other problem with media coverage is that certifiable idiots get to open their mouths and their noise goes unquestioned in print. Here’s a regrettable example of an ignorant opinion piece, one so egregiously stupid that even Ian Musgrave is reduced to indignant spluttering.
The problem I face is weariness with science-based dialogue partners like Richard Dawkins. It surprises me he is not chided for his innate scientific conservatism and metaphysical complacency. He won’t take his depiction of Darwinism to logical conclusions. A dedicated Darwinian would welcome imperialism, genocide, mass deportation, ethnic cleansing, eugenics, euthanasia, forced sterilisations and infanticide. Publicly, he advocates none of them.
You would think that, since Darwin himself did not consider any of those actions to be either commendable or a consequence of his theory, maybe someone would realize that perhaps those aren’t logical conclusions of “Darwinism”. You would think that somebody would consider that, while Newton described the acceleration of falling bodies accurately, it does not imply in any way that he he advocated pushing people off of tall buildings. Rational people might be able to see that.
The author of the piece is a professor of theology, though, so we ought to have lower expectations. I’m pretty sure he is probably capable of eating with a fork without putting his eye out.
I must recommend an excellent editorial in the Guardian. Somebody there gets it; all the “he said she said” journalism that we get is a failure of the media to get to the basic truth of a story.
There can be no such equivocation in the week of a survey which showed that only around half of all Britons accept that Darwin’s theory of evolution is either true or probably true. In a democracy, citizens should respect each other’s beliefs; and citizens have a right to express their beliefs. But in a democracy, a newspaper has an obligation to what is right. The truth is that Darwin’s reasoning has in the last 150 years been supported overwhelmingly by discoveries in biology, geology, medicine and space science. The details will keep scientists arguing for another 200 years, but the big picture has not changed. All life is linked by common ancestry, including human life. The shameful lesson of this 200th anniversary of his birth is that Darwin’s contemporaries understood more clearly than many modern Britons.
That’s the lesson to be taught in this week, at the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. There is a hard core of fact to science, and all the waffling about to negate the ideas of common descent and natural selection is driven by ideology, not evidence.
How strange: The Economist is running this graph, of people’s acceptance of evolutionary theory by country.
Look familiar? It should. It seems to be some of the same data used in this well known figure (not from New Scientist, by the way, but Science):
Miller JD, Scott EC, Okamoto S (2006) Public acceptance of evolution. Science 313:765-766.
So, The Economist has taken a chart, stripped out half the data, put it into new colors that make my eyes hurt, and put it on a background with chimpanzees having a snack — said chimpanzees occupying almost half the space allotted.
Shock horror! I am offended! The monkey is unhappy! My sensibilities, in particular, recoil. Someone send the illustrators at The Economist some copies of Tufte’s books. I think I’ll stick with Miller et al.’s version.
There are days when you just want to slap a few journalists. The latest absurdity comes from the LA Times, in which an ignorant reporter waxes snarky over the fact that the vice president’s wife is addressed as “Dr. Biden”, since she has a doctorate in education, and snootily claims that:
Newspapers, including The Times, generally do not use the honorific “Dr.” unless the person in question has a medical degree.
And then she trots out Bill Walsh of the Post and the vapid little god-bunny, Amy Sullivan, to agree that you only call medical doctors “Dr.”
Yeah, right. How many appendectomies have Dr Kissinger, Dr Condoleezza Rice, and Dr Martin Luther King done, huh?
They claim that this is the convention. Step onto any college campus. Look at the directories and ask around. You’ll find that the formal title for faculty and staff with doctoral degrees is “Dr.” (although you’ll also find that many of us prefer not to be addressed quite so formally). All I can assume is that these lazy journalists are completely unfamiliar with higher education…and I am not surprised.
You can find more reactions from Mike Dunsford and Wesley Elsberry. I anticipate more — this is a fine example of media contempt for intellectuals.
As part of an ongoing program of reducing their relevance and demolishing their credibility, CNN has just completely shut down their Science, Space and Technology unit. Who needs good science coverage, after all, since nothing important happens in that area…and as the US continues to dumb down its educational system, the number of interested viewers is probably dropping, too.
The media knows where the profits lie, and it’s not in that expensive journalism stuff — it’s in the cheap and popular domain of opinionated airheads shouting at each other. This is symptomatic of a deep intellectual rot in this country.
Seed Media has created a special offer: you can donate a subscription to Seed magazine to the school of your choice for only $14.95. It’s a good strategy in general: help out your local schools by giving their libraries good science resources.
I’ll be on the air on radio station WDAY out of Fargo in a few minutes. After yesterday’s exhibition, I expect plenty of phone calls, so don’t let me down. Give me good, short, sharp questions, too!
One of our regular commenters here, BrokenSoldier, has a story to tell — an all-too-common tale of our government’s neglect of the men and women sent out to fight, and returning damaged to a bureaucracy that isn’t willing to do the right thing and support them. If anyone out there is willing to help get this story out, here’s an opportunity — it’s practically written out for you. This is a broken soldier’s story:
This is a request for help. Disabled veterans are being treated as if they are a burden on the government’s checkbook, and the government is getting away with it, mainly because the situation is so far out of the public’s collective eye that the military can quite effectively sweep it under the rug. Politicians are using our sacrifices as political capital in front of the nation, while the Army medical system turns around to our face and disdainfully treats us as if we are asking for something we do not deserve. All we want is the care we were promised, and all we are getting is organized resistance from the military medical bureaucracy. In some cases, this resistance amounts to the pure manipulation – and even alteration – of the medical regulations, for the sole purpose of reducing the amount of money the Army has to pay disabled vets upon their separation. I have turned to this kind of appeal, frankly, because I am out of options. I believe that
the only thing that can even begin to fix a problem such as this one is true exposure to the bright lights of public scrutiny.When wounded soldiers comes home, they have to go through an evaluation process in which a panel of Army doctors determines what their final disability rating will be. If they decide that the soldier rates less than 30%, then they can separate that soldier with merely a severance check, and never dole out another dollar to him or her again. Should the rating be above 30%, the Army is required to medically retire that soldier, and send him or her a monthly check after they leave the service. In principle, this makes sense. But this is being abused by those doctors, in that they are intentionally low-balling wounded vets in order to get them under the 30% ceiling and get them out, for obvious reasons of saving money. Just in my case alone, I have seen doctors lie on official reports about what I told them, make childishly snide comments about the appeals that I have written to the Physician Evaluation Board (PEB), and one doctor even suggested that a
previous diagnosis was invalid simply because I was “fine” on the day he saw me. (And I have proof – to include hard copies of documents showing the offenses.) This does not stop with the low-level doctors, by any means. The Army PEBs operate on instructions given to them by their command, and one in particular is very telling. Since soldiers began coming home with serious concussion injuries, the Army medical community has seen fit to publish instructions to its PEBs concerning certain ratings and how they are to be ‘interpreted’ pertaining to veterans’ disability claims. One of them that I ran directly into deals with the occurrence of migraine headaches, which many veterans with concussion injuries suffer from, and how they are to be viewed. The schedule that lists ratings that are to be applied states that for a 50% rating, migraines must meet the frequency requirement of at least two pper month, and the severity must be prostrating. After
veterans began receiving this rating for their complications from IED-induced concussions, an instruction to physicians was published informing them that from then on, the word ‘prostrating’ was not to be interpreted as it is defined, but rather for migraines to be considered prostrating for rating purposes, the soldier must have stopped and sought immediate, emergency medical attention. Due to the fact that it is very difficult for someone laying prostrate from a migraine to get up and make it to the ER, you can imagine how well this worked in reducing the number of veterans that received disability ratings for their migraines.And aside from the failings of the rating process, once the soldier is done with that, then there is the incompetent bureaucracy within the ranks of those handling retired service members to deal with. I was retired in January, but did not see a single cent of my retirement money until June. And when it did begin, taxes were being deducted – which shouldn’t happen, because combat wounded vets get tax exemption from their disability checks. After getting that fixed, I recently discovered that I have absolutely no medical coverage whatsoever – which I found out while trying to get my prescriptions filled – because my retirement documents never got to the agency responsible for administering my care as a medical retiree. The incompetence of those that handled my retirement file ensured that the necessary paperwork failed to reach almost all of the necessary agencies. And I am by no means the only one this type of injustice is happening to, but instead
it is a widespread occurrence. The reason for this is that once the soldier leaves the service and begins the fight for his or her benefits, it is simply that soldier against the entire framework of the Army bureaucracy, and that is far from a fair fight. (They do allow you a liaison in order to to help you navigate the system, but if mine was any indication, this is more of a burden than a help – in asking her to participate in a conference call to discuss why I disagreed with my initial rating of 10%, she resisted and actually said to me, “I’m not here to hold your hand through this.”) So I have ended up in a position quite familiar to veterans – broke, living with my parents, in debt up to my ears from the months without income, and having no consistent medical coverage.So, if you read through this and it seems wrong to you, especially if it makes you a bit angry, then I’m asking for your help. The only thing that will fix this problem is to shine a spotlight on what is happening, because once that happens, the freedom of action that the Army medical community has enjoyed in bullying the wounded soldiers applying for disability will be gone. Once the public is cognizant of exactly what has been done to the veterans the government so profusely praises for their sacrifice, their hypocrisy will be laid bare. If you know anyone – journalist or not – that will take this story and tell it to the public, please let me know. The above injustices are only the tip of the iceberg, even in my case, and I have documentation of many more transgressions.
A disabled vet has fought far too much already to have to continue to fight with their own government like this when they get home. In this case, it is the soldier who is looking to citizen for help with this fight.
If you’re willing to help get the word out, contact Gary E. Ford.
Yikes. As everyone seems to have noticed, their cover story this week is Lincoln vs. Darwin, an absurd premise driven by the coincidence of their common birthday, which stoops to quoting their horoscope at us.
As soon as you do start comparing this odd couple, you discover there is more to this birthday coincidence than the same astrological chart (as Aquarians, they should both be stubborn, visionary, tolerant, free-spirited, rebellious, genial but remote and detached–hmmm, so far so good).
And of course, this being our brain-dead media, it can’t actually discuss them as independent people who made their own unique contributions to the world, it has to turn it into a horse race and ask, “Who was more important?” (I won’t give the answer away, but here’s a hint: which one was American?) It’s a glib and superficial bit of tripe.
The only good part is that it does define what a scientist is. This will be handy when people ask what I do for a living.
And Darwin, at least at the outset, was hardly even a scientist in the sense that we understand the term–a highly trained specialist whose professional vocabulary is so arcane that he or she can talk only to other scientists.
You can read more about this major media event at the Sandwalk and RichardDawkins.net. Sad to say, I don’t seem to share a birthday with any major historical figures, precluding any hypothetical rivalries. Although I was born on the same day as a major earthquake in the Aleutian Islands, if that means anything.
