Oh boy...another free for all!
The Harvard president makes a simple statement that said that we should look beyond discrimination to explain why there are relatively few women in the sciences.
The Harvard faculty goes nuts and is still bouncing off walls, the president says he did a bad thing. "I deeply regret the impact of my comments and apologize for not having weighed them more carefully. . .[I will do better including] carefully avoiding stereotypes, being alert to forms of subtle discrimination, and doing everything we can to remove obstacles to success."
Is Harvard mature enough, the origins of life is nuclear compared to how many women are in the sciences.
(BTW, after his confession the two heavily armed guards that flanked him on the flatbed truck allowed him to hold his head up and removed the hand-lettered sign hanging from his neck. He was forced off the truck and had to walk the several blocks to his home as jeering, threatening faculty members surrounded him.)
More politics disguised as "Science".
Why don't all you evolution fanatics admit you want to attack religion and "Evolution" is just a handy stick?
E=mc2; thats science. No one debates it. People dont call it each other names other it. It can be proved; hence it is science.
The Big Bang Theory - unprovable vapor. Belongs in a philosphy class.
The Harvard project, which is likely to start with about $1 million annually from the university, will bring together scientists from fields as disparate as astronomy and biology, to understand how life emerged from the chemical soup of early Earth, and how this might have happened on distant planets. (emphasis mine)
Seems to me they've already concluded how life began.
Whatever this endeaver is, it certainly isn't science.
One million bucks? What is that these days with Harvard overhead rate, about one and a half professors?
INTREP - I sense a rising panic amongst the Disciples of Darwin
No no no no no. Don't go there. Evolution has nothing to say about the origins of life. The origins of life have nothing to do with evolution. Neither does the question of how matter can organize itself without an intelligent agent. Just let evolution stay in the classroom and be taught as science. Please please please please please!!!
they must see the tide shifting from textbooks that have evolution only. they're getting a head start on the curricula to come. must be some money in it somewhere.
[such as the discovery of water on Mars and an increased understanding of the chemistry of early Earth ]
There have been a few popular speculations in the last few years that the complex "ingredients" of early life were delivered to Earth from comet or asteroid impacts and not built up from chemicals in an "organic soup" that already existed on Earth.
Is this a major question that this Harvard initiative will consider, or are they going to assume by default a purely terrestrial origin?
And be just as perplexed.
Well, that's easy. Didn't Mithras slay a bull?
There's little debate going on, mostly dogmatism from both sides. Since dogma is a fact of our transient and ignorant lives, we simply cannot get by without it, I'll take my dogma at church and not from hypocritical and imaginative theorists. As for my kids, I give them the healthy advice that they should not believe everything they hear or read, unless it comes verbatim from the Bible.