We all know that the media networks helped beat the drums to invade Iraq. It's clear from these stats: out of the 343 interviews conducted by network news prior to the Iraq invasion, only three involved an antiwar spokesperson. Glenn Greenwald has now shown the incredible extent to which the…
Ouch! The serious study of philosophy or neuroscience might make you less moral. That’s my take-away from a recent article: “The Value of Believing in Free Will: Encouraging a Belief in Determinism Increases Cheating,” by Kathleen D. Vohs and Jonathan W. Schooler. This particular article by Vohs and Schooler purports…
There's a lot of bad information floating around on the Internet. For instance, many conservatives blame environmental regulations, but this argument is way off base. Why? Because 75% of the cost of gasoline is in the cost of the crude oil, not in the refining. At Salon.com, Andrew Leonard spells…
Nate Beeler, The Washington Examiner Mike Lester, The Rome News-Tribune Parker, Florida Today Pavel Constantin, Romania Parker, Florida Today
I started thinking about the the “reductionist attitude” in presenting science when I read Erich’s Post To deal with “arrogant” scientists we need to move beyond reductionism and break the “Galilean Spell” (from May 7, 2008). Curricula seem to begin with biology, work through chemistry, and finally introduce physics. If English were taught categorically as science is now, students would go through phases in this order:
The alphabet of science is made up of basic natural “laws” as discovered by Newton, Maxwell, Mendeleev, Heisenberg, and so on. Sentences and paragraphs are like molecules and chemical syntheses. And finally you have enough structure to begin to see how biology works from cells (essays) through organisms (stories) and populations (novels).
One could be taught holistic science, building to the grand ideas from the simple ones. By constructing the ideas instead of breaking them down, the interrelationship and the interactions of the parts can be seen, as well as the nature and function of the parts themselves. A whole is never the sum of the parts; it is the sum of the interactions between the parts set on a foundation of the parts themselves. This becomes obvious when building, but is obscured when deconstructing.
No wonder Americans doubt the “theory of evolution”. Schools try to teach this advanced and universal concept without any foundation. By the …