It’s a tough job, but someone has to talk to two Nobel Laureates in two days. Wednesday Jim Watson; Thursday Walter (Wally) Gilbert. Gilbert’s name isn’t as familiar to laypeople as Watson’s, but it certainly deserves to be. First of all, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980, along with Fred Sanger and […]
This clip was highlighted, without comment, at Sean Carroll’s Preposterous Universe website. I’ll post it, too, but add a comment: It shows Tyson losing it in a science discussion with Brian Greene, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Tracy Day, Ira Flatow, and Bill Nye. The discussion was at an Arizona State University panel on “The Storytelling […]
Yesterday’s New York Times reports on the arrival of a new science magazine: Nautilus: Science Connected. The NYT piece,”A glossy science magazine or a living fossil?“, notes that the magazine is funded by the Templeton Foundation (in fact, there’s no mention of any other funding), will appear quarterly on paper for a fee of $49/year, […]
“Natural theology” is the discipline that attempts to find evidence for God in the natural world. The most famous example of this doomed exercise is, of course, the erstwhile use of animal and plant “design” as evidence for God’s beneficence. But Darwin dispelled that in 1859. Earlier, Newton cited the regular and stable orbits of […]
Maybe if more Americans knew about science, two radio announcers from Florida wouldn’t have been fired—and wouldn’t be facing felony charges—for an April Fool prank. According to ZME Science: Florida country radio morning-show hosts Val St. John and Scott Fish are currently serving indefinite suspensions and possibly criminal charges for what can only be described […]
THE CLAIMS “The question of truth is as central to [religion's] concern as it is in science. Religious belief can guide one in life or strengthen one at the approach of death, but unless it is actually true it can do neither of these things and so would amount to no more than an illusionary […]
When my friend Andrew Berry, who teaches at Harvard, told me this story two days ago, I realized that it would be a great post for Wallace Year. (This is the centenary of the death of the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, aka The Man Who Also Thought of Natural Selection.) I begged Andrew, an […]
Yesterday I put up the video of an absolutely dreadful anti-scientific talk by woomeister Rupert Sheldrake, a talk that he gave it for TEDx Whitechapel. After I kvetched about it here, I sent an email complaint to Emily McManus, an editor at TED.com (her TED biography notes that she’s an atheist!), adding a link to […]
Yesterday I described an experiment I conducted with my late tomcat Teddy. When he trotted from the hallway of my apartment (where he greeted me in front of the elevator), into the apartment itself, his tail changed from the wary horizontal position to the happy vertical position. At what point during the transit from hallway […]
This is Teddy, my last cat: a beloved white tom who arrived unceremoniously at my old digs by walking through the catflap about 15 years ago. He was of indeterminate age when he arrived, and had clearly lived through several Chicago winters outdoors—a remarkable achievement. It is cold here! Teddy was snow white, but was […]
