Category Archives: Science

What if it were NASA that said the Earth is flat?

Posted on 04/06/2019 by Jon Garvey

My pastor drew my attention to this BBC article last week. I’m not entirely sure how much this is new news, and how much old news repackaged, in that I have been aware that “gender identity disorder” has been rebranded in various national indices of medical disorders as a “gender dysphoria.” The “news” seems to be the ratification of this by the “World Health Assembly” last week, so it will appear in ICD-11, the international gold standard of diagnostic categores, as “gender incongruence, a marked and persistent incongruence between a person’s experienced gender and assigned sex.”

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science | 4 Comments

Where the bee doesn’t suck…

Posted on 02/06/2019 by Jon Garvey

Longstanding (and longsuffering) readers may remember that I often like to delve in the story of any interesting new species I come across, and I virtually always find that they are exceptions to the evolutionary rules. The most recent is this handsome plant that has appeared, apparently for the first time, in my ongoing wildflower meadow project.

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Extinction Miscalculation

Posted on 31/05/2019 by Jon Garvey

The recent press story of mass global warming extinctions came from a policy summary published well in advance of the scientific survey on which it is said to be based (so that governments get their policies in place before being distracted by  complicated science?). But the core of it was based on the IUCN Red List of endangered and recently extinct (vertebrate) species, of which a graph was included on a century by century scale, indeed showing a dramatic escalation from the 16th century.

Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science | 1 Comment

Nobel Prize pseudoscience v Classics orthodoxy

Posted on 21/05/2019 by Jon Garvey

Returning to my long thread on science in the media over at Peaceful Science, at one stage the accusations of irrational climate denialism were expressed, by a classics graduate, no less, thus: This is the language of the science denialist. Which anti-science cause will you champion next, chiropractic and homeopathy?

Posted in Creation, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science | 9 Comments

Models of probity

Posted on 14/05/2019 by Jon Garvey

There is still no substantive response to the evidence I gave at Peaceful Science for the misrepresentation of walrus deaths in a David Attenborough film. But “T_aquaticus” has taken it upon himself to apply the “climate denialist” insinuations of people on the thread (I have not denied climate change there), and to sigh, in that exasperated tone that scientistic types always use when they think they’re dealing with people who read as little as they do. He writes: “I’m guessing that no amount of information is going to budge you?”

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | 2 Comments

Big oil = big chums!

Posted on 11/05/2019 by Jon Garvey

My thread on Peaceful Science, “Media Science” has gone, so far, to over 400 comments, but despite the stern admonitions from the skeptical scientist types there to “follow the data, not the propaganda,” none of them has even attempted to address the subject of the post, which was the data about the misinformation about walrus deaths being due to climate change on a David Attenborough documentary.

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Science | 6 Comments

Simplifying good government

Posted on 08/05/2019 by Jon Garvey

When I was a medical student, I got to meet the wife of one of my then-favourite Sci-Fi writers, James Blish, after she’d had a minor accident on a London bus. This was around the time of the author’s declining health, so it must have been a particularly stressful time for Mrs Blish.

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Science | 2 Comments

Short memory and easy distraction

Posted on 06/05/2019 by Jon Garvey

As I mentioned in a previous post, in a Radio Times article puffing the recent David Attenborough Doom Documentary on climate, he drew attention to the deforestation of the Philippines and Borneo. These are indeed serious problems, though not upon consideration any result whatsoever of climate change. Rather they result from various economic and social factors, including the high premium placed on timber for biomass as a result of misguided measures taken to prevent climate change .

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If governments followed science

Posted on 04/05/2019 by Jon Garvey

Let me first return to Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, which I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, and especially here (hat-tip to Clinton Ohlers’s work), since it can be used to explore many aspects of modern science, especially in relation to faith.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | Leave a comment

Rebellion Extinction

Posted on 29/04/2019 by Jon Garvey

The spontaneous grass-roots occupation of central London last week, in order to force the government to implement drastic climate-change measures by democratic … civil disobedience, immediately reminded me of the equally spontaneous demonstrations of my youth that turned out, in due course, to be orchestrated by highly motivated societal manipulators, with highly ideological agendas.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | 2 Comments