Via Brad Plumer, I see Cato’s Jerry Taylor is riled at responses to an open letter ad the Institute published in which a group of scientists signed off on a statement questioning the strength of the case for catastrophic climate change. I’m broadly sympathetic with his irritation at the proportion of ad hominem attacks in […]

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Woah.

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So, at some point you’ve probably seen that absurd clip of Kirk Cameron and some Aussie preacher arguing that the banana is “the atheist’s nightmare,” because its perfect adaptation to human food needs implies a divine creator. This would be a hopeless argument under any circumstances, of course. (Obvious first question: Then why aren’t all […]

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Tom Leherer’s classic “New Math”: Bo Burnham’s “New Math”—arguably (will I be struck by lightning for blasphemy?) funnier:

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The Boston Globe runs a piece arguing that the “gender gap” in the sciences may be attributable, not to institutional discrimination, but rather gendered differences in career interests.   Jessica Valenti replies that there are these three girls who are awesome at science, so there. In other words, the way to rebut the scurrilous stereotype […]

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China is so going to own us in a decade.

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Robert VerBruggen has a pretty shockingly unfair critique of a short book on creationism and evolution recently released by the National Academy of Sciences. First, he complains that the document, which is quite obviously meant as a basic primer for lay audiences, “makes a number of assertions that, simply put, no one seriously disputes.” Introductory […]

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Sure, a presidential debate about science sounds like a good idea, but given that most Americans reject even the notion of divinely-guided evolution, I can imagine some depressing trajectories for such an event.

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The BBC reports on intriguing new research positing, on the basis of DNA evidence, that human evolution has sped up dramatically—perhaps by a factor of 100—over the last 5,000 years. The study authors offer growing population size as a possible explanation. This makes some intuitive sense: More organisms mean more opportunities for new genetic variations […]

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Back when I interviewed the (now late) philosopher Robert Nozick about his final book Invariances, I asked him about a phrase in the book that had puzzled me: He had referred to superstring theory as an interesting branch of metaphysics. He replied: Well, I think that science, as it probes realms that aren’t just at […]

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