Let’s face it: science has gone woke. What used to be an ideological virus afflicting the arts and humanities has now spread through the entire university, STEMM fields included. That’s why Minding the Campus is renewing our focus on the sciences through a new, ongoing article series called Minding the Sciences. Here, we’ll cover wokeism in STEMM, scientific integrity, research funding, climate science, scientific associations, and much more.
The language and tone of the recent U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation report, “D.E.I. Division. Extremism. Ideology. How the Biden-Harris NSF Politicized Science,” is very partisan, which makes the report less persuasive than it otherwise might be. Still, the report identifies and criticizes a growing failure of objectivity by the National Science […]
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Research misconduct scandal after research misconduct scandal has surfaced in the science world as of late. Between neuroscientist and National Institute of Health (NIH) officer Eliezer Masliah, who Minding the Campus contributor David Randall reported on in late September, and superconductivity physicist Ranga Dias, whom I reported on, news of scientific misconduct has become increasingly […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Judith Curry on November 13, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. On the 12th of November, the Hague Court of Appeal ruled in the “climate case of the century” that Milieudefensie (“FoE”) filed against Shell in 2019. FoE demands […]
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Research misconduct. It is defined by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as “fabricating, falsifying, and/or plagiarizing in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results.”[1] It is deplorable and shameful behavior, grounds for serious disciplinary action. And it is alarmingly on the rise in the science world. In mid-September, science journalism was […]
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“Expect to bring a cot into the lab because research will become your life.” These were the words spoken to me last spring by a potential research advisor for a Neuroscience Ph.D. program to which I had applied. As a devout Christian, the first thought that entered my mind at that moment was how I […]
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For a time, I worked at a South African university, where my department still upheld the civilized practice of morning tea. One morning, I happened to arrive a few minutes late but found an open seat at a table just as a senior professor was opining—in very orotund tones, naturally—to some Honours students, “Wouldn’t it […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClear Science on November 4, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission. The latest research fraud scandal concerns one Eliezer Masliah. He’s one of the world’s leading researchers into Alzheimer’s and it looks as if he fabricated a good deal of his data. […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is a short excerpt from an article originally published on the author’s Substack Purpose and Desire on October 16, 2024. With edits to fit MTC’s style, it is crossposted here with permission. I have a recent publication in Minding the Sciences concerning the “irreproducibility crisis”—also variously named the “replication crisis” or “reproducibility crisis.” The crisis, […]
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Science has a trustworthiness problem. Public trust in science, scientists, and in the worthiness of scientific research for society, has been on a steady decline since 2019, according to Pew Research Center. To be frank, “science” is lucky its trustworthiness problem is not worse, because the public has long been unaware just how deep the […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on the author’s Substack, Science Is Not The Answer, on September 10, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. One reason there is so much Bad Science, as I have said many times, is that there is too much science. Rather, too much activity in the name of science. […]
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A prime piece of scientific research intended to ameliorate the irreproducibility crisis has itself been withdrawn for failing to adhere to proper reproducibility standards. One of the prime directives of reproducibility reformers is to preregister your research—say in advance what you intend to do and how you will do it—so we know you didn’t repurpose […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is a short excerpt from an article originally published on the Substack Heterodox Stem on September 1, 2024. With edits to fit MTC’s style, it is crossposted here with permission. Is the tide turning against the woke mind-virus? There are hopeful signs for sure, as universities and companies are beginning to eliminate mandatory diversity statements, or are gutting […]
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Last month, California assemblyman James C. Ramos started a state legislative meeting with a prayer; it was appropriate for a meeting that would end with the funeral of anthropology in California. The California legislators met with tribal leaders and California State University (CSU) and University of California (UC) officials to review the progress California’s public universities are […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is a short excerpt from an article originally published on the author’s Substack Purpose and Desire on August 21, 2024. With edits to fit MTC’s style, it is crossposted here with permission. Jennifer Hernandez has a useful piece in a recent City Journal, about how the Green New Deal is actually harmful to the poor. Well, […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is a short excerpt from an article originally published by James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on September 4, 2024. With edits to fit MTC’s style, it is crossposted here with permission. For decades, aspiring college students have had to submit with their applications scores from standardized tests, such as the SAT […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is a brief excerpt from the author’s in-depth essay, “Using the Cultural Mandate of Genesis 1:28 and the Ten Commandments as the Foundation for a Christian Ethic of Earth Stewardship,” originally published by the Cornwall Alliance on November 7, 2023. Shared here with permission. Introduction As recently as the 2018 Gallup […]
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During a discussion about whether government funding of academic science was a good idea, I argued that it was a net negative—a prominent physicist once told me that there was no particle physics before World War II. I remember thinking to myself: “Who’s going to tell him? No particle physics? Maxwell? Planck? Rutherford? Einstein?” My […]
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In the last year, there has been a rapid increase in actions that involve removing human remains and photographs of human remains from anthropology and archaeology classrooms, conference halls, publications, and museums, including the American Museum of Natural History, the Penn Museum, and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. These museums and many others around […]
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The Wall Street Journal cries alarum: “Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures.” Dozens of scientific journals have become paper mills—homes for rings of pseudo-academics to cite one another, review another, and puff up their publications with bogus research to secure the rewards of academic employment. After it bought its Egyptian rival Hindawi, academic […]
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Fraud was uncovered last week at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, the world’s biggest science fair, put on by the non-profit group Society for Science. The 17-year-old winner beat out nearly 1,700 competitors to take home a $50,000 cash prize, along with an additional $5,000 bonus, the hopeful start of an impressive science […]
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On April 19, the “New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness” was announced to some fanfare. Mark your calendars because the Declaration was hailed as a momentous change in our thinking about animals. Science says so! Forty scientists signed the Declaration! More scientists’ signatures are coming in! NBC News and MSN, among other media, are breathless […]
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The era of Big Science began formally in 1950, when the National Science Foundation opened its doors. Its mission was to fulfill a hopeful promise: for government to fund the very best academic science, to explore science’s “endless frontier,” in the inspiring words of Vannevar Bush, President Roosevelt’s—and subsequently President Truman’s— science czar. There was […]
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A New Science Culture In 1959, British novelist and one-time scientist C. P. Snow delivered a lecture at Cambridge called “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” He accused humanists of being scientifically ignorant and not knowing about the second law of thermodynamics—not to mention the non-conservation of parity. Science and literature—the humanities—were two separate […]
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Wicked problems need wicked science to, minimally, frame what is puzzling. Wickedness is not a moral judgment. Instead, it is tied to the limits of knowing—when rationality is encumbered by ambiguity and uncertainty and when control over the variables is limited or currently impossible. Predictions that emerge from modeling, especially those that reach decades into […]
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It is not news that the Lancet is politicized. The once-respected journal, the gold standard for medical research publication, has been hawking radical left policy in the guise of “medical policy” for a generation and more. America’s medical establishment may never be quite as radical as the Lancet, but it usually adopts Lancet’s positions with […]
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Scientists are figuring out how to make scientific research more reliable. The federal government should take what they’ve learned and make it mandatory. Since 2018, the National Association of Scholars (NAS) has been beating the drum about the irreproducibility crisis. That’s the failure of an enormous amount of modern scientific research to meet an elementary […]
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This is the first of a series of articles exploring the scientific deep state. Here, Dr. J Scott Turner will explore basic questions, including how many scientists are employed by the federal government, where they work, what they do, and what are their qualifications? Articles to come will present case studies of how the scientific […]
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On October 10, 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom—whose Democratic party claims to be the party of science and science education—signed two anti-science education bills (AB226 and AB389) into law. These bills require the University of California and the California State University systems to bar the use of skeletal collections that cannot be affiliated with any […]
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Remember those pathetic photographs of polar bears standing on tiny ice floes, scanning the horizon for the tasty seals that were no longer there? Those viral photos of an emaciated polar bear, starving because its prey has disappeared along with the sea ice that has melted away due to climate change? The very same […]
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Over the past three years, the general public has been inundated with appeals to “Trust the science.” In spite of this, many have grown increasingly distrustful of both science and scientists. It is the height of hypocrisy to expect people to put their blind faith in scientific authority—for that is what “trust the science” amounts […]
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