In the battle for ideas, scientists could learn from Christopher Hitchens
SCIENCE VALUES DATA and statistics and champions the virtues of evidence and experimentation. Those of us “viewing the world with a rational eye” (as the new descriptor for this column in Scientific American reads) also have another, underutilized tool at our disposal: rapier logic like that of Christopher Hitchens, a practiced logician trained in rhetoric. Hitchens—who is “leaving the party a bit earlier than I’d like” because of esophageal cancer, as he lamented to Charlie Rose in a recent PBS interview—has something deeply important to offer on how to think about unscientific claims. Although he has no formal training in science, I would pit Hitchens against any of the purveyors of pseudoscientific clap trap because of his unique and enviable skill at peeling back the layers of an argument and cutting to its core. (continue reading…)
Physics shows that cell phones cannot cause cancer
Baseball legend Yogi Berra is said to have fretted, “I don’t want to make the wrong mistake.” As opposed to the right mistake? A mistake that is both wrong and right is the alleged connection between cell phone use and brain cancers. Reports of a link between the two have periodically surfaced ever since cell phones became common appendages to people’s heads in the 1990s. As recently as this past May 17, Time magazine reported that despite numerous studies finding no connection between cell phones and cancer, “a growing band of scientists are skeptical, suggesting that the evidence that does exist is enough to raise a warning for consumers — before mass harm is done.” (continue reading…)
Mixing science and politics is tricky but necessary for a functioning polity
DO YOU BELIEVE IN EVOLUTION? I do. But when I say “I believe in evolution,” I mean something rather different than when I say “I believe in liberal democracy.” Evolutionary theory is a science. Liberal democracy is a political philosophy that most of us think has little to do with science.
That science and politics are nonoverlapping magisteria (vide Stephen Jay Gould’s model separating science and religion) was long my position until I read Timothy Ferris’s new book The Science of Liberty (HarperCollins, 2010). Ferris, the best-selling author of such science classics as Coming of Age in the Milky Way and The Whole Shebang, has bravely ventured across the magisterial divide to argue that the scienti!c values of reason, empiricism and antiauthoritarianism are not the product of liberal democracy but the producers of it. (continue reading…)
Genome sequencing has revealed our common humanity
According to the late Harvard University biologist Ernst W. Mayr, the greatest evolutionary theorist since Charles Darwin, “species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations which are reproductively isolated from other such groups.”
Reproductive isolation is the key to understanding how new species form, and many types of barriers can divide a population and split it into two different groups: geographic (such as a mountain range, desert, ocean or river), morphological (a change in coloration, body type or reproductive organs), behavioral (a change in breeding season, mating calls or courtship actions), and others. After isolation, if members of the split populations encounter one another and cannot produce viable offspring that can themselves later successfully interbreed and produce viable offspring (hybrids such as mules are infertile), then these two populations constitute two different species. (continue reading…)
Fraud, deception and lies in research reveal
how science is (mostly) self-correcting
In his 1974 commencement speech at the California Institute of Technology, Nobel laureate physicist Richard P. Feynman articulated the foundation of scientific integrity: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool… After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”
Unfortunately, says Feynman’s Caltech colleague David Goodstein in his new book On Fact and Fraud: Cautionary Takes from the Front Lines of Science, some scientists do try to fool their colleagues, and believing that everyone is conventionally honest may make a person more likely to be duped by deliberate fraud. Nature may be subtle, but she does not intentionally lie. People do. Why some scientists lie is what Goodstein wants to understand. He begins by debunking myths about science such as: (continue reading…)
