Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
xylu
Published Letters: 189 Editor's Choice: 21
I make no claims about the accuracy of the following, other than that it is my opinion.
This author makes many huge mistakes in his article claiming that the end of scientific progress is nigh.
He may be absolutely right about certain limits beyond which science can't go. (E.g., we might never be able to prove anything about conscious awareness, or the flow of time, or determinism vs. free will.) Although he probably believes this for the wrong reasons.
But that is very different from his claims that science as a whole will more or less slow down to a crawl and stop.
He complains about the dearth of articles written about the absence of progress in certain fields of science. Right. Let's have more articles that take 20 paragraphs to say No Important New Developments Occurred in Oceanography in the Last Four Months . (And why not a NY Times headline: Nothing Significant Happened in Zambia Yesterday ?) Sure, John.
The biggest mistake by this scam artist is his claim that he is a science journalist. After his "The death of proof" article in Scientific American (October, 1993) and his book "The End of Science" (1996) -- not to mention an August 12, 2005 NY times op-ed piece, "In Defense of Common Sense", and this article in Salon -- he is undeterred by the absence of any evidence that any portion of his predictions has occurred. In these writings he also shows, beyond a scintilla of doubt, that his understanding of how science works is nonexistent.
At all times since the dawn of science, there has been a great deal of science that was not known then but was discovered later. There is more scientific research being published now than at any time in the past.
The rhythm of scientific progress is not steady; rather it is punctuated by spates of discovery when a valuable new viewpoint is put forth. (Cf. H. Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolution".)
This bloke has definitively proven himself a crackpot of the first water.
Despite that the letter-writer is "completely convinced" that individuals can be "hard-wired" for alcoholism, this seems extremely unlikely to me, given what I know about genes and evolution.
To conclusively prove this one way or the other, the following study would need to be performed:
A large number of twins separated at birth -- both identical and fraternal -- would have to be located. (I believe this to be quite feasible.) Then the extent of their alcoholism at some adult age would need to be assessed with some uniform yardstick.
If the difference between the alcoholism of the pairs of fraternal twins were significantly more than that of the pairs of identical twins, this would be virtually conclusive proof that alcoholism is genetic. If, instead, the fraternal-twin differences and the identical-twin differences were essentially the same, this would tend to prove alcoholism is *not* genetic.
And, Yes! I think that the facts of this issue are crucial to answering the letter-writer's question. If there is no basis for concern about the children's "alcoholism genes", then there is no pressing reason to inform them of the father's past alcoholism.
What should be done is to educate them convincingly about the very real dangers of alcoholism.
I'm skeptical of "scientific" studies performed by people who have a preconceived notion they are trying to prove.
I have little doubt there are more women nowadays who are single, earning a decent wage, and especially for financial reasons are distinctly less desperate to couple than were many single women of the past.
But are these single women really loving life on their own" ? That may be true of sociologist Trimberger, but I suspect she may be overreaching when she asserts this is common among single women in general, even the good wage earners.
The modern feminist movement triggered by Betty Friedan has had some very positive effects on society, one of which is to greatly open up career possibilities for women. This has had the side effect of removing old parental role models for adult living, since many of those role models are simply inapplicable today.
This means that men and women are having to pioneer new modes of living by making it up as we go along -- and that's not easy.
So finding the "right" partner can be much harder for enlightened single adults than it used to be, since who knows what "right" means anymore? And once someone has lived alone for a decade or two, it's not that easy to suddenly surrender half your independence and share your domicile with an intimate partner.
The letter-writer can probably best improve relations between the sexes by acting well towards
women as an individual. Every little bit helps.
I find Mr. Tennis's cynicism incomprehensible.
Actually, women cannot be "made" to feel guilty, despite what Traister claims.
If a sign saying "Babies were born to breastfeed" leads a woman to feel guilty, it is because she has allowed herself to be influenced by the sign.
In this society, women, men, boys, girls are bombarded with ads trying to convert them to someone else's point of view. If you don't develop a certain cynicism toward such ads, then if you are an adult, you are probably dysfunctional in this society.
As to the fact of the matter, questioned in the headline over Traister's typical microtantrum as "Baby we were born to breastfeed?" (it's not my grammar), well, Yes! If you happen to believe in Darwinian evolution and know the first thing about it, then you know that babies were born to breastfeed.
Fwiw. This doesn't mean that bottle-feeding isn't a perfectly viable alternative. But babies were born to experience the skin-to-skin contact that breastfeeding affords (cf. the book "The Continuum Concept" by Jean Liedloff). So if a baby is bottle-fed, they still need that extra dose of skin contact.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
