Recent posts at the Post-Darwinist and Mindful Hack

Apparently, in Britain, where the ID controversy (that was supposed to disappear after some court decision in the United States) rages and rages, an ID-friendly group called Truth in science is taking on one of the most famous frauds in biology, at museum – Haeckel’s nineteenth-century embryo drawings, reproduced in hundreds of textbooks worldwide, to demonstrate the incontrovertible truth of Darwin’s theory of evolution. The only problem is that Haeckel made up most of it. Embryos from various classes of vertebrates simply do not look as similar as he made them out to be. Read more at the http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/  

One of Canada’s national papers, the National Post, ran an op-ed (November 22, 2006) by a scientist who is a global warming skeptic. S. Fred Singer, professor emeritus, University of Virginia, and former director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, talks about how he was horsed around by ideologues, and it makes for interesting reading. For example, he writes that he was accused of being “in the pay of the tobacco lobby,” because he questioned extreme claims about the dangers of second hand smoke:

… I hate tobacco smoke and sit on the board of the anti-smoking American Council on Science and Health. But I don’t tolerate the misuse of science, even by anti-smokers. So I gladly assented when, more than a decade ago, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute asked me to serve as a consultant for a couple of months to review and contribute to a report on misuse of science in environmental policies.

I soon discovered that in their anti-smoking zeal the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had cooked the data on second-hand tobacco smoke, claiming 3,000 lung cancer deaths a year. Specifically, I uncovered a report to the US Congress by the Congressional Research Service (CRS-95-1115) that documents how the EPA had “cherry-picked” the available evidence. My contribution in all of this was simply to use the CRS analysis.

Now, that situation rang some bells with me because, years ago, when I was an editor on a high school anthology, I was asked to process an article providing “scientific evidence” of the dangers of second-hand smoke. The article turned out to be a Statistics Canada study of how much Canadians feared second-hand smoke. As I pointed out to the head ed, the fact that so many Canadians fear second-hand smoke is interesting and valuable to know, BUT it no more proves that the stuff is dangerous than beliefs about the health benefits of broccoli prove that broccoli prevents cancer. I got the distinct impression that the head ed wished I would just go away, and I wouldn’t be very surprised if that study did indeed end up getting billed as “science evidence that second hand smoke is dangerous”, after I transferred out. Unnecessary disclaimer: I have never smoked and also hate tobacco smoke. But I hate earnest, politically correct nonsense even more. Read more at http://post-darwinist.blogspot.com/  

 

At Mindful Hack: 

1. Freudian analysis “not science”: In real science, things are given names because they have value- hence the words “atom” and “molecule.” In Freudian psychoanalysis, things have value because they are given names “Oedipus complex,” “castration anxiety” – and only because enough people have been convinced of their value.

2. “This is anti-science,” says Anita L. Nelson, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California at Los Angeles. No, she is not talking about ID here, but about a women’s health clinic that combines high tech methods with respect for the teachings of the Catholic Church. Remember this when materialists claim that they are not “against” other faiths. They are.

3. John Searle on the hard problem of human consciousness (hard if you are a materialist): “We know from high school physics that in presenting an equation you have to be referring to the same dimension on both of its sides. The equation one dollar = one hundred cents can work because both sides are sums of money. But you couldn’t have one hundred cents = one month, because cents and months are in different dimensions. Mind and brain appear to be in different dimensions, because mind has qualitative subjectivity and brain does not.”

For more go to http://mindfulhack.blogspot.com/

4. Thinkquote of the Day: Psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple on a fundamental error of materialist psychiatry. For more go to http://mindfulhack.blogspot.com/ and use the archives on the left hand side.