Free Republic

Michael Crichton has written that rarest of books, an ­intellectually dishonest novel. Crichton has made a fortune exploiting the public’s fears: Prey (fear of nanotechnology), Rising Sun (fear of Japanese technological supremacy), and Jurassic Park (fear of biotechnology). These books attack the hubris of those who use technology without wisdom. In Prey, he warns, “The total system we call the biosphere is so complicated that we cannot know in advance the consequences of anything that we do.” Given the author’s past, one might expect that a Crichton book on global warming would warn about the risk of catastrophic climate change—the...

Judy Ettenhofer: Gore's 'Truth' needs to be acted upon now By Judy Ettenhofer, June 21, 2006 When "Fahrenheit 9/11," the Michael Moore screen diatribe against our current president, arrived in Madison theaters shortly before the 2004 presidential election, people sympathetic to its message couldn't get enough of it. They flocked to screenings and breathlessly implored their friends to see the movie that bolstered all their reasons for hating George W. Bush. It is my profound hope that the same kind of passionate evangelism occurs as a result of a much, much more crucial film that arrived at Westgate and Eastgate...

Early Canid Domestication: The Farm Fox Experiment Foxes bred for tameability in a 40-year experiment exhibit remarkable transformations that suggest an interplay between behavioral genetics and development. When scientists ponder how animals came to be domesticated, they almost inevitably wind up thinking about dogs. The dog was probably the first domestic animal, and it is the one in which domestication has progressed the furthest - far enough to turn Canis lupus into Canis familiaris. Evolutionary theorists have long speculated about exactly how dogs' association with human beings may have been linked to their divergence from their wild wolf forebears,...

Columnist Carl Hamilton in Aftonbladet writes about a very troubling conflict between science and politics in Sweden. My translation: The government bans opinions on men's and women's brains In one respect Sweden's government is unique in the world. It has a definite opinion about a scientific controversy: whether women's and man's brains are different, or not. The first time i realised that the government had involved itself in neurobiology, was when gender equality minister [! - ed] Jens Orback in a speech about sexual deviations and living with horses [!!! - ed], affirmed: - The government considers female and male...

April 26, 2004 Bush-League LysenkoismThe White House bends science to its will By The Editors Image: J.SCOTT APPLEWHITE AP Photo STANDING UP for science--or stepping on it? Starting in the 1930s, the Soviets spurned genetics in favor of Lysenkoism, a fraudulent theory of heredity inspired by Communist ideology. Doing so crippled agriculture in the U.S.S.R. for decades. You would think that bad precedent would have taught President George W. Bush something. But perhaps he is no better at history than at science. In February his White House received failing marks in a statement signed by 62 leading scientists, including 20...