Recently in Science Category

Amazing findings -- newborns cry in tones native to the language of their mothers, suggesting that they begin acquiring rudiments of language in the womb.

What does this say about the humanity of the unborn? Hmm?

The biologist Olivia Judson says that science is about a lot more than mere measurements. Excerpt:

I mention this because science is usually presented as a body of knowledge -- facts to be memorized, equations to be solved, concepts to be understood, discoveries to be applauded. But this approach can give students two misleading impressions.

One is that science is about what we know. One colleague told me that when he was studying science at school, the relentless focus on the known gave him the impression that almost everything had already been discovered. But in fact, science -- as the physicist Richard Feynman once wrote -- creates an "expanding frontier of ignorance," where most discoveries lead to more questions. (This frontier -- this peering into the unknown -- is what I especially like to write about.) Moreover, insofar as science is a body of knowledge, that body is provisional: much of what we thought we knew in the past has turned out to be incomplete, or plain wrong.

The second misconception that comes from this "facts, facts, facts" method of teaching science is the impression that scientific discovery progresses as an orderly, logical "creep"; that each new discovery points more or less unambiguously to the next. But in reality, while some scientific work does involve the plodding, brick-by-brick accumulation of evidence, much of it requires leaps of imagination and daring speculation.

Did you know that creationism (versus natural selection) is mainstream in the Islamic world -- and that a secretive Turk named Harun Yahya has a lot to do with it? Steve Paulson reports for Slate:

Creationist stories are now popping up in Turkish high-school science textbooks, and some government officials in the AKP, the ruling Islamic party, freely criticize evolution. In Ankara, the government's point man on religious issues, Mehmet Gormez, told me, "All the holy texts say human beings are created by God. I think evolutionary theory is not scientific, but ideological."

The Quran doesn't have a detailed origins story like the six days of creation found in Genesis, but it does say Adam was created out of clay in a heavenly paradise and later banished to earth, along with Eve. Various polls show that many Muslim countries are predominantly creationist, but Turkey has recently emerged as a hub of global opposition to evolution. In 2006 Science magazine found that only 25 percent of Turks accepted the theory of natural selection--the lowest rate among any of the 34 countries surveyed. (The second-lowest was in the United States.)

Why Islamic creationism has exploded in Turkey is a complicated story that may have as much to do with politics as religion. Unlike most Muslim countries, which simply ignore the science of life's origins, Turkey's high schools have taught evolution for decades--the legacy of Ataturk's campaign to secularize Turkey's public culture. Creationism has become a way for political Islamists to attack the secular elite that governed Turkey until the recent rise of the AKP. Oktar's own agenda isn't confined to evolution. He's calling for a "Turkish-Islamic Union," a Turkish super-state that would stretch from Kazakhstan to Indonesia and western Africa--a revamped Ottoman Empire for today's Muslims.

I did not know that. I remember being in Istanbul and seeing an English-language pamphlet or a book, can't remember which, using a photograph of a piece of chewing gum to make some sort of creationist point. It was surreal. I had no idea that creationism was such a big deal in the Islamic world. Though when you think about it, it makes perfect sense.

(Countdown to the deployment of a variation of Manning's Corollary in the combox thread...)

What's causing the honeybees to die? Here's an argument from Discover saying that in the name of industrial efficiency, we've turned them into weak-chinned inbreds. Excerpt:

The problem is hardly trivial. A third of the total human diet depends on plants pollinated by insects, predominantly honeybees. In North America honeybees pollinate more than 90 crops with an annual value totaling almost $15 billion. Indeed, that importance lies at the root of what went wrong. In trying to make bees more productive, apiarists have torn the insects from their natural habitats and the routines they mastered over millions of years. As a result, today's honeybees are sickly, enslaved, and mechanized. "We've looked at bees as robots that would keep on trucking no matter what," says Heather Mattila of Wellesley College, who studies honeybee behavior and genetics. "They can't be pushed and pushed."

In the beginning, honeybees and their partners, the flowers, drove an explosion of natural diversity. While most bees preferred a specific type of plant, honeybees were equal-opportunity pollinators--"pollen pigs," beekeepers called them. The most socially complex of the bees, they thrived in colonies led by the egg-laying queen, who ensured the genetic fitness of her progeny by breeding with multiple male drones from other colonies.

All that began to change in the early 20th century, when farms and orchards started enlisting honeybees to pollinate their crops. Bees that were adapted to harvesting pollen from a variety of plants suddenly spent a month or more at a time surrounded by nothing but almond or apple trees. Farmers eager to increase their crop yields turned to commercial beekeepers, who offered up massive wooden hives stocked with queen bees genetically selected to produce colonies of good pollinators. These breeding practices slashed the genetic variety that helps any species survive infections, chemicals, and other unforeseen threats.

Guess who's won the Richard Dawkins Award for service to atheist materialism? Why, it's medical conspiracy theorist Bill Maher. Mark Shea is on the case:

You know, Bill Maher who tells us that germ theory is bunk, who says vaccination is a fraud, who knows more than the whole medical community about the illusion we call "AIDS", who is a vocal and dangerous advocate of all manner of scientific quackery. That's the guy the Apostle of Reason and Science Richard Dawkins selected to receive his prize. Why? Because he's a noisy atheist and that's all that matters.

Naturally, of course, PZ Myers makes excuses, cuz he's all about science and reason. But some aren't drinking the Kool-Aid and have a number of pertinent questions for the Great Apostle of Science and Reason.
What cracks me up about all this is that, quite simply, nobody will ever die from thinking God created the universe or having some doubts about the proposition that hydrogen is a substance which, if you leave it alone for 13.5 billion years, will turn into Angelina Jolie.

All it takes to win the Dawkins Award is to be a famous atheist, no matter how kooky your views on science are? Wow, and I thought the Nobel Peace Prize standards had been compromised by politics.

Fascinating Brooks column today, on the cultural implications of new findings in neuroscience. Brooks writes about how neuroscientists are finding that not only does biology (through genetics) influence behavior (which is not news), but that behavior influences our biology. Excerpt:...

I've been meaning to write about a conversation I had recently with Dr. K, a scientist who works in the climate field. When I found out what he did for a living, I told him I'd been working on an...

Just got word that on October 1, the application window for the 2010 Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion will open. As regular readers know, I was a T-C fellow this past summer. I can't recommend the program highly...

I'm working on an essay based on a lecture given in Cambridge this summer by Dame Gillian Beer, who discussed how Darwin's findings were assimilated by Victorian popular culture. I blogged about it at the time here. What I'd like...

I received a thoughtful e-mail the other day from a reader, which I share here with his permission. It's long, and I've edited it where I thought I could do so without taking away from the fullness of his expression....

I'm reading a great book now, "Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture," by Ellen Ruppel Shell. It's a thorough, and highly readable (meaning: non-boring) history of discounting, which includes the psychology of salesmanship. I found this passage fascinating for...

Here's an L.A. Times essay arguing that the confrontational attitude towards religion taken by Dawkins, Dennett et alia -- and their denunciation as wimps of scientists and science educators who don't follow their hard line -- actually hurts the cause...

Wendell Berry, in "Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition," on the limits of science as a way of knowing: The truest tendency of art is toward the exaltation, not the reduction, of its subjects. The highest art,...

We're back in Cambridge for the concluding week of the Templeton Cambridge program. We've just heard our first presentation, a tour of modern cosmological ideas conducted by Michael Hanlon, science editor of the Daily Mail. Mike began by telling us...

One of the most popular posts ever on this blog was one from May of this year, in which I discussed linguist Daniel Everett's experience living deep in the Amazon rainforest with a primitive tribe. Read it here. I wrote...

This is not the kind of story you think it will be from the headline. Anglican priest Michael Reiss is a leading British bioethicist and science educator. Until late last year, he ran the Royal Society's science education division. Why...

One of my colleagues at the Templeton Cambridge fellowship, Edwin Cartlidge, decided to do his Templeton project on philosophical materialism and its relationship to science. He approached A.C. Grayling and Daniel Dennett, two prominent materialists, and asked for an interview...

Without question, the best thing that's happened to me being here is being introduced to the thought and writing of John Gray, the British political philosopher. I can't think of anyone like him in the US. He is a secular...

On Friday here at the Templeton fellowship conference, we had a terrific session with Dame Gillian Beer, who lectured on how Darwin's work was interpreted by Victorian literary and popular culture. This served as a springboard for a broader discussion...

That was the fundamental question raised by this morning's lecture from Simon Conway Morris, a Cambridge professor of evolutionary paleobiology. To cut to the chase: he didn't answer it definitively, because, he says, we don't have the evidence to draw...

The second lecture today in Cambridge was from the cosmologist John D. Barrow, winner of the 2006 Templeton Prize. He spoke about simplicity and complexity in science, and the conflict between them. Barrow said that physicists deal in fundamental laws,...

This morning at Templeton-Cambridge, we heard a fascinating lecture by Dr. Denis Alexander, a prominent Cambridge biochemist, on the history of science in the West. The main point was that the idea that science and religion are in irresolvable conflict...

Stanley Fish is back with further reflections on his earlier encomium to Terry Eagleton's new book. This time, he answers back his anti-theist critics. Excerpt: A mind without chains - a better word would be "constraints" - would be free...

The Wall Street Journal has a piece by Gautum Naik about the practical uses to which the bizarre insights of quantum physics are being put. Excerpt: One of quantum physics' crazier notions is that two particles seem to communicate with...

Yesterday after liturgy, I was talking to a Russian scientist friend in the parish about my intention this summer at Cambridge to compare Eastern and Western Christian approaches to metaphysics, and see if I can come up with an Orthodox...

Here's a great read: a NYT Magazine profile of the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, a widely respected grey eminence in the world of science who has cheesed off many folks with his skepticism of global warming orthodoxy. Excerpt: FOR MORE...

Hanna Rosin, writing in the Atlantic, sets off a daisy-cutter in the Mommy Wars, by laying out a case against breast-feeding. She breast-fed her children, but started to chafe under the social pressure among her class to breast-feed. But she...

Good news for me, bad news for Blighty: Your Working Boy is going to Cambridge for three weeks this summer as a Templeton Cambridge Fellow in Science and Religion. Thank goodness Amy Sullivan is also going, so I have a...

In context of a discussion about growing Christian concern over climate change and environmental degredation, Mark I. Pinsky writes in the Harvard Divinity Journal about Christian scientists (that is, scientists who are Christians, not Mrs. Eddy's disciples) who are inspired...

Here's a fun thread in the making. The Edge World Question for 2009 is as follows: What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see? If you're familiar with The Edge's annual survey of scientists, science...

How crazy was anthrax suspect Dr. Bruce Ivins? Batshit crazy is putting it mildly. From the Times: But more than a year before the 2001 anthrax attacks, the scientist admitted to himself that he was losing his grasp on reality....

Some evolutionists have concluded that life sure is complicated. From the Telegraph: But these virtual landscapes have turned out to be surprisingly barren. Prof Mark Bedau of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, will argue at this week's meeting - the...

Writing in Salon, physicist Karl Giberson identifies P.Z. Myers as a Torquemada in the Religion of Science: As a fellow scientist (I have a Ph.D. in physics), I share Myers' enthusiasm for fresh eyes, questioning minds and the power of...

I found this Olivia Judson column in the New York Times to be an interesting look at Charles Darwin and the likely festivities that will surround two important anniversaries soon to be celebrated: The party is about to begin. In...

Andrew Sullivan brings us a link to an amazing invention from Texas Instruments: a device that allows you to communicate wordlessly, via neurological impulses interpreted by a strap around your neck. Watch this: Voila, the voiceless wireless phone call. Pretty...

Love this Father Michael Heller, who has won the $1.6 million Templeton Prize. From the Times: Much of Professor Heller’s career has been dedicated to reconciling the known scientific world with the unknowable dimensions of God. In doing so, he...

Paul Davies is not a creationist. In fact, he's a theoretical physicist and cosmologist, who is currently working in the relatively new field of astrobiology, a branch of science that intends to research and discover more about the origin and...

We all know, because the media tell us, that troglodytic right-wing Christians are enemies of science. The truth is that more than a few traditional Christians are not at all enemies of science, but rather of scientism, which is science-as-ideology....