Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
Given the date, it is perhaps appropriate and traditional to mull over some seasonal aspect. For this year, I’d like to ask a question regarding the timing of the authorship of the Gospels. These are the alpha sources for much of our cultural inheritance. I’m not going to simply quote some dates at you, nor … Read more
From last August there is a great Canadian article that lays out a good way to effectively communicate to people who have serious doubts about vaccines. It is worth reading in full, but since they have proposed seven steps, I’d like to chime on and comment on each myself. There was and still is a … Read more
A new paper has been published within the Personality and Social Psychology bulletin entitled … Not All Skepticism Is Equal: Exploring the Ideological Antecedents of Science Acceptance and Rejection We report three studies—including an analysis of large-scale survey data—in which we systematically investigate the ideological antecedents of general faith in science and willingness to support … Read more
Recently a right-wing Facebook “friend” shared an article from the Daily Caller that claimed that Satellite data showed no acceleration in warming for the past 23 years. Apart from the rather obvious “How did this guy get on my FB friends list?” question, I do actually find it fascinating to observe how such “truth” is … Read more
A new scientific study published a few days ago within a reputable peer-reviewed journal by some leading Climate Science scientists has generated rather a lot of heat within the climate denial community. Entitled “Internet Blogs, Polar Bears, and Climate-Change Denial by Proxy” and published within BioScience, it examines the reporting of Arctic Sea Ice and … Read more
The news is that the UK’s publicly funded National Health Service has blacklisted Homeopathy and also Herbal remedies. Now, you might be tempted to think that they have finally decided to pay attention to the evidence that clearly demonstrates that it simply does not work at all … right? Nope, that is not the driving force … Read more