Science and People pt. 1 (by: Eugene J. Nemeth)

[genegenethedm]

Recently I was reminded about what I call "unscientific shinanigins (where's my broomstick?), which are framed as being 'science'" in my genetics class. However I believe I should save my rant about the misuse of quantitative genetics, "scientific racism (which really has very little to do with science)", and deception in the book "The Bell Curve"

Comments

[genegenethedm]

Wow! First to comment. Anyways, I would like to make a couple of clarifications on the comment that I made to tyrannicalalien and copied/pasted in the entry above.

A) "...the matter of statistical significance to determine if evidence collected is accurate..." I didn't mean "accurate" so much as I meant that the evidence gathered was not collected solely by chance. Statistical significance gives an indication if data is valid.

B) "...I want to see those quotes in context." By this I mean that I want to see if the quotes were accurately copied from the movie more or less.

kthxbai! Oh, and please comment!

[nomadicjack]

I think the American public are ambivalent at best when it comes to science, and often have serious misconceptions. Things like "Expelled" and ID (and related pseudosciences) aren't helping our scientific literacy. I'm not sure why science and religion always have to be at odds, but it can't be good for our country.

[genegenethedm]

I completely agree and, honestly, who could really blame most people being ambivalent when so much information is being dumped on them? In my opinion, I can't totally blame the general public (well I could, but lets say I am more sympathetic) for a lack of scientific literacy. Obviously, the most reliable sources of scientific information are published in professional journals where it can has been critically analyzed and peer-reviewed by several creditable members of that field's community. Books, movies, news broadcasts, and other popular media mediums are not under the same critical scrutiny but reach a far greater audience. Because people grant these forms of media authority in providing news related to politics or sports, that doesn't mean they should be granted scientific authority (it seems like they sadly are though, ehh

[genegenethedm]

Alright! Thank you, thank you, thank you! Yeah, I really haven't explored a lot of material on pseudoscience related to sexism before and this would be a great start. I am not against all science literature that isn't in an academic journal really, it is A LOT easier (and more entertaining)to read information in a creditable book or magazine.

Yeah, I really would love to get a hold of an issue or two of Bitch. It always looked really sweet and anything involving gender/sex/women's studies is just plain fascinating.

Thank you! ^.^