If only more journalists had this attitude…

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.

Alert Edward Tufte!

How strange: The Economist is running this graph, of people’s acceptance of evolutionary theory by country.

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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.

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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.

She is “in the condition to have babies”

Italy is experiencing its own version of the Terry Schiavo case. A woman, Eluana Englaro, was in a car crash 17 years ago that caused catastrophic brain damage — she’s been in a vegetative state ever since, and the family has been engaged in a legal fight for many years to pull the plug and allow her to die with a little dignity. They finally won that battle recently, and are easing her off life support and a feeding tube.

Cue the right wing. Silvio Berlusconi, Bush-like Prime Minister of Italy, has rushed to impose an emergency decree blocking the suspension of life support, a decision made after consulting with the Vatican. Here’s a good rule: never consult the priesthood of a death cult before making a life-and-death decision. They always give stupid and evil advice.

Berlusconi’s rationalization is appalling and repugnant. He claims to be “rescuing” Englaro — not true, since she was effectively dead 17 years ago — and in what has to be the most tasteless and disgusting excuse made yet for the actions of these villains of the right, has further justified it by saying that physically she is “in the condition to have babies”. So, what is Berlusconi going to do next in his bizarro Prince Charming act? Fertilize her eggs?

It’s nice to know that the Catholic Church’s criteria for the value of a woman’s life focus on the functionality of her ovaries rather than the existence of her mind.

Snubbing degrees as a new kind of snobbery

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.

Another movie I’m not going to see

I thought Expelled was an awful concept, but now there’s another movie that’s come out that is even worse: The Day the Earth Stood Still. I haven’t seen it, and I don’t plan to, since I was horrified by the trailers … and now Gary Farber has collected the key points of many reviews. There ought to be a law that no remakes can be released that are worse than the originals, just to discourage this kind of abomination.

The original movie was a wonderful SF classic. I’ve got it on DVD here, and I think just to spite the hacks who ripped it off, I’m going to watch Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal sometime this weekend. It has some great lines in it: “It isn’t faith that makes good science, Mr. Klaatu, it’s curiosity” and “I am fearful when I see people substituting fear for reason”, and of course, “klaatu barada nikto”. And the theremin! I’d watch it right now if I didn’t have a lot of work to do tomorrow…

CNN screws the pooch

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.