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Religious belief is a very different kind of thing. It is not restricted only to those with a certain education or knowledge, it does not require years of training, it is not specialized and it is not technical. (I’m talking here about the content of what people who regularly attend church, mosque or synagogue take themselves to be thinking; I’m not talking about how theologians interpret this content.)

while religious belief is widespread, scientific knowledge is not. I would guess that very few people in the world are actually interested in the details of contemporary scientific theories. Why? One obvious reason is that many lack access to this knowledge. Another reason is that even when they have access, these theories require sophisticated knowledge and abilities, which not everyone is capable of getting.

most people aren’t deeply interested in science, even when they have the opportunity and the basic intellectual capacity to learn about it. Of course, educated people who know about science know roughly what Einstein, Newton and Darwin said. Many educated people accept the modern scientific view of the world and understand its main outlines. But this is not the same as being interested in the details of science, or being immersed in scientific thinking.

This lack of interest in science contrasts sharply with the worldwide interest in religion. It’s hard to say whether religion is in decline or growing, partly because it’s hard to identify only one thing as religion — not a question I can address here. But it’s pretty obvious that whatever it is, religion commands and absorbs the passions and intellects of hundreds of millions of people, many more people than science does. Why is this? Is it because — as the new atheists might argue — they want to explain the world in a scientific kind of way, but since they have not been properly educated they haven’t quite got there yet? Or is it because so many people are incurably irrational and are incapable of scientific thinking? Or is something else going on?

Some philosophers have said that religion is so unlike science that it has its own “grammar” or “logic” and should not be held accountable to the same standards as scientific or ordinary empirical belief. When Christians express their belief that “Christ has risen,” for example, they should not be taken as making a factual claim, but as expressing their commitment to what Wittgenstein called a certain “form of life,” a way of seeing significance in the world, a moral and practical outlook which is worlds away from scientific explanation.

This view has some merits, as we shall see, but it grossly misrepresents some central phenomena of religion. It is absolutely essential to religions that they make certain factual or historical claims. When Saint Paul says “if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is in vain and our faith is in vain” he is saying that the point of his faith depends on a certain historical occurrence.

Theologians will debate exactly what it means to claim that Christ has risen, what exactly the meaning and significance of this occurrence is, and will give more or less sophisticated accounts of it. But all I am saying is that whatever its specific nature, Christians must hold that there was such an occurrence. Christianity does make factual, historical claims. But this is not the same as being a kind of proto-science. This will become clear if we reflect a bit on what science involves.

The essence of science involves making hypotheses about the causes and natures of things, in order to explain the phenomena we observe around us, and to predict their future behavior. Some sciences — medical science, for example — make hypotheses about the causes of diseases and test them by intervening. Others — cosmology, for example — make hypotheses that are more remote from everyday causes, and involve a high level of mathematical abstraction and idealization. Scientific reasoning involves an obligation to hold a hypothesis only to the extent that the evidence requires it. Scientists should not accept hypotheses which are “ad hoc” — that is, just tailored for one specific situation but cannot be generalized to others. Most scientific theories involve some kind of generalization: they don’t just make claims about one thing, but about things of a general kind. And their hypotheses are designed, on the whole, to make predictions; and if these predictions don’t come out true, then this is something for the scientists to worry about.

Religions do not construct hypotheses in this sense. I said above that Christianity rests upon certain historical claims, like the claim of the resurrection. But this is not enough to make scientific hypotheses central to Christianity, any more than it makes such hypotheses central to history. It is true, as I have just said, that Christianity does place certain historical events at the heart of their conception of the world, and to that extent, one cannot be a Christian unless one believes that these events happened. Speaking for myself, it is because I reject the factual basis of the central Christian doctrines that I consider myself an atheist. But I do not reject these claims because I think they are bad hypotheses in the scientific sense. Not all factual claims are scientific hypotheses. So I disagree with Richard Dawkins when he says “religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims.”

Taken as hypotheses, religious claims do very badly: they are ad hoc, they are arbitrary, they rarely make predictions and when they do they almost never come true. Yet the striking fact is that it does not worry Christians when this happens. In the gospels Jesus predicts the end of the world and the coming of the kingdom of God. It does not worry believers that Jesus was wrong (even if it causes theologians to reinterpret what is meant by ‘the kingdom of God’). If Jesus was framing something like a scientific hypothesis, then it should worry them. Critics of religion might say that this just shows the manifest irrationality of religion. But what it suggests to me is that that something else is going on, other than hypothesis formation.

Religious belief tolerates a high degree of mystery and ignorance in its understanding of the world. When the devout pray, and their prayers are not answered, they do not take this as evidence which has to be weighed alongside all the other evidence that prayer is effective. They feel no obligation whatsoever to weigh the evidence. If God does not answer their prayers, well, there must be some explanation of this, even though we may never know it. Why do people suffer if an omnipotent God loves them? Many complex answers have been offered, but in the end they come down to this: it’s a mystery.

Science too has its share of mysteries (or rather: things that must simply be accepted without further explanation). But one aim of science is to minimize such things, to reduce the number of primitive concepts or primitive explanations. The religious attitude is very different. It does not seek to minimize mystery. Mysteries are accepted as a consequence of what, for the religious, makes the world meaningful.

Religion is an attempt to make sense of the world, but it does not try and do this in the way science does. Science makes sense of the world by showing how things conform to its hypotheses. The characteristic mode of scientific explanation is showing how events fit into a general pattern.

Religion, on the other hand, attempts to make sense of the world by seeing a kind of meaning or significance in things. This kind of significance does not need laws or generalizations, but just the sense that the everyday world we experience is not all there is, and that behind it all is the mystery of God’s presence. The believer is already convinced that God is present in everything, even if they cannot explain this or support it with evidence. But it makes sense of their life by suffusing it with meaning. This is the attitude (seeing God in everything) expressed in George Herbert’s poem, “The Elixir.” Equipped with this attitude, even the most miserable tasks can come to have value: Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws/ Makes that and th’ action fine.

None of these remarks are intended as being for or against religion. Rather, they are part of an attempt (by an atheist, from the outside) to understand what it is. Those who criticize religion should have an accurate understanding of what it is they are criticizing. But to understand a world view, or a philosophy or system of thought, it is not enough just to understand the propositions it contains. You also have to understand what is central and what is peripheral to the view. Religions do make factual and historical claims, and if these claims are false, then the religions fail. But this dependence on fact does not make religious claims anything like hypotheses in the scientific sense. Hypotheses are not central. Rather, what is central is the commitment to the meaningfulness (and therefore the mystery) of the world.

while religious thinking is widespread in the world, scientific thinking is not. I don’t think that this can be accounted for merely in terms of the ignorance or irrationality of human beings. Rather, it is because of the kind of intellectual, emotional and practical appeal that religion has for people, which is a very different appeal from the kind of appeal that science has. Stephen Jay Gould once argued that religion and science are “non-overlapping magisteria.” If he meant by this that religion makes no factual claims which can be refuted by empirical investigations, then he was wrong. But if he meant that religion and science are very different kinds of attempt to understand the world, then he was certainly right.

Frustrated with the Google-owned video site, Bieber instead uploaded his video using Facebook’s video app onto his Facebook page. “no one keeps my music from my fans. nobody,” he wrote on Twitter.

There’s a level of irony to the situation. Bieber got his start on YouTube, where home videos of him on his account singing covers of hip-hop songs

You would think if anyone deserved to be able to upload his own music videos to YouTube, it would be Bieber. So why couldn’t he? The answer lies in the complicated legalities behind copyright law and new media. It comes down to the question: who owns the video? In Bieber’s case, the answer depends on who you ask.

According to the YouTube website where Bieber’s upload was blocked, it appears that UMG has ownership. YouTube has a Content ID copyright protection system in place. Content ID automatically detects whether new content being uploaded to the website infringes on any copyrighted material in YouTube’s vast video database, using video and audio recognition techniques. The rights-holder can preselect what YouTube should do to the video in response: A) block it outright, B) monetize it by overlaying an ad on the video or C) do nothing, but be able to track the video’s viewership.

And why was Bieber able to upload his video to Facebook with no problems? Facebook also says it has a copyright protection scheme in place. But if it has a similar Content ID system to YouTube, it doesn’t have the same amount of video content that YouTube does, meaning a given uploaded video to the social network is less likely to automatically ring warning bells.

"This group feels strongly that science and politics can't be divorced and that we need to take bold measures to not only communicate science but also to aggressively engage the denialists and politicians who attack climate science and its scientists," said Scott Mandia, professor of physical sciences at Suffolk County Community College in New York.

However, a greater concern lies in the notion of climate change itself. Climate change is in essence one kind of nature-society relationship, in which humans influence the climate through greenhouse gas (particularly CO2) emissions, and the climate strikes back by heating up and going crazy at times. This can be further simplified into a battle between humans and CO2: reducing CO2 guards against climate change, and increasing it aggravates the consequences. This view is anchored in scientists’ recommendation that a ‘safe’ level of CO2 should be at 350 parts per million (ppm) instead of the current 390. Already, the need to reduce CO2 is understood, as is evident in the push for greener fuels, more efficient means of production, the proliferation of ‘green’ products and companies, and most recently, the Cancun talks.

So can there be anything wrong with reducing CO2? No, there isn’t, but singling out CO2 as the culprit of climate change or of the environmental problems we face prevents us from looking within. What do I mean? The enemy, CO2, is an ‘other’, an externality produced by our economic systems but never an inherent component of the systems. Thus, we can declare war on the gas or on climate change without taking a step back and questioning: is there anything wrong with the way we develop?  Take Singapore for example: the government pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 16% under ‘business as usual’ standards, which says nothing about how ‘business’ is going to be changed other than having less carbon emissions (in fact, it is questionable even that CO2 levels will decrease, as ‘business as usual’ standards project a steady increase emission of CO2 each year). With the development of green technologies, decrease in carbon emissions will mainly be brought about by increased energy efficiency and switch to alternative fuels (including the insidious nuclear energy).

Thus, the way we develop will hardly be changed. Nobody questions whether our neoliberal system of development, which relies heavily on consumption to drive economies, needs to be looked into. We assume that it is the right way to develop, and only tweak it for the amount of externalities produced. Whether or not we should be measuring development by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or if welfare is correlated to the amount of goods and services consumed is never considered. Even the UN-REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) scheme which aims to pay forest-rich countries for protecting their forests, ends up putting a price tag on them. The environment is being subsumed under the economy, when it should be that the economy is re-looked to take the environment into consideration.

when the world is celebrating after having held at bay the dangerous greenhouse gas, why would anyone bother rethinking about the economy? Yet we should, simply because there are alternative nature-society relationships and discourses about nature that are more or of equal importance as global warming. Annie Leonard’s informative videos on The Story of Stuff and specific products like electronics, bottled water and cosmetics shed light on the dangers of our ‘throw-away culture’ on the planet and poorer countries. What if the enemy was instead consumerism? Doing so would force countries (especially richer ones) to fundamentally question the nature of development, instead of just applying a quick technological fix. This is so much more difficult (and less economically viable), alongside other issues like environmental injustices – e.g. pollution or dumping of waste by Trans-National Corporations in poorer countries and removal of indigenous land rights. It is no wonder that we choose to disregard internal problems and focus instead on an external enemy; when CO2 is the culprit, the solution is too simple and detached from the communities that are affected by changes in their environment.

We need hence to allow for a greater politics of the environment. What I am proposing is not to diminish our action to reduce carbon emissions, for I do believe that it is part of the environmental problem that we are facing. What instead should be done is to reduce our fixation on CO2 as the main or only driver of climate change, and of climate change as the most pertinent nature-society issue we are facing. We should understand that there are many other ways of thinking about the environment; ‘developing’ countries, for example, tend to have a closer relationship with their environment – it is not something ‘out there’ but constantly interacted with for food, water, regulating services and cultural value. Their views and the impact of the socio-economic forces (often from TNCs and multi-lateral organizations like IMF) that shape the environment must also be taken into account, as do alternative meanings of sustainable development. Thus, even as we pat ourselves on the back for having achieved something significant at Cancun, our action should not and must not end there. Even if climate change hogs the headlines now, we must embrace more plurality in environmental discourse, for nature is not and never so simple as climate change alone. And hopefully sometime in the future, alongside a multi-lateral conference on climate change, the world can have one which rethinks the meaning of development.

It’s not simply a matter of lifting the burden of toxic resentment or of immobilizing guilt, however beneficial that may be ethically and psychologically.  It is not a merely therapeutic matter, as though this were just about you.  Rather, when the requisite conditions are met, forgiveness is what a good person would seek because it expresses fundamental moral ideals.  These include ideals of spiritual growth and renewal; truth-telling; mutual respectful address; responsibility and respect; reconciliation and peace.

Are any wrongdoers unforgivable?  People who have committed heinous acts such as torture or child molestation are often cited as examples.  The question is not primarily about the psychological ability of the victim to forswear anger, but whether a wrongdoer can rightly be judged not-to-be-forgiven no matter what offender and victim say or do.  I do not see that a persuasive argument for that thesis can be made; there is no such thing as the unconditionally unforgivable.  For else we would be faced with the bizarre situation of declaring illegitimate the forgiveness reached by victim and perpetrator after each has taken every step one could possibly wish for.  The implication may distress you: Osama bin Laden, for example, is not unconditionally unforgivable for his role in the attacks of 9/11.  That being said, given the extent of the injury done by grave wrongs, their author may be rightly unforgiven for an appropriate period even if he or she has taken all reasonable steps.  There is no mathematically precise formula for determining when it is appropriate to forgive.

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.

At first, he assumed that he’d made an error in experimental design or a statistical miscalculation. But he couldn’t find anything wrong with his research. He then concluded that his initial batch of research subjects must have been unusually susceptible to verbal overshadowing. (John Davis, similarly, has speculated that part of the drop-off in the effectiveness of antipsychotics can be attributed to using subjects who suffer from milder forms of psychosis which are less likely to show dramatic improvement.) “It wasn’t a very satisfying explanation,” Schooler says. “One of my mentors told me that my real mistake was trying to replicate my work. He told me doing that was just setting myself up for disappointment.”

In private, Schooler began referring to the problem as “cosmic habituation,” by analogy to the decrease in response that occurs when individuals habituate to particular stimuli. “Habituation is why you don’t notice the stuff that’s always there,” Schooler says. “It’s an inevitable process of adjustment, a ratcheting down of excitement. I started joking that it was like the cosmos was habituating to my ideas. I took it very personally.”

The most likely explanation for the decline is an obvious one: regression to the mean. As the experiment is repeated, that is, an early statistical fluke gets cancelled out. The extrasensory powers of Schooler’s subjects didn’t decline—they were simply an illusion that vanished over time. And yet Schooler has noticed that many of the data sets that end up declining seem statistically solid—that is, they contain enough data that any regression to the mean shouldn’t be dramatic. “These are the results that pass all the tests,” he says. “The odds of them being random are typically quite remote, like one in a million. This means that the decline effect should almost never happen. But it happens all the time!

this is why Schooler believes that the decline effect deserves more attention: its ubiquity seems to violate the laws of statistics. “Whenever I start talking about this, scientists get very nervous,” he says. “But I still want to know what happened to my results. Like most scientists, I assumed that it would get easier to document my effect over time. I’d get better at doing the experiments, at zeroing in on the conditions that produce verbal overshadowing. So why did the opposite happen? I’m convinced that we can use the tools of science to figure this out. First, though, we have to admit that we’ve got a problem.”

In 2001, Michael Jennions, a biologist at the Australian National University, set out to analyze “temporal trends” across a wide range of subjects in ecology and evolutionary biology. He looked at hundreds of papers and forty-four meta-analyses (that is, statistical syntheses of related studies), and discovered a consistent decline effect over time, as many of the theories seemed to fade into irrelevance. In fact, even when numerous variables were controlled for—Jennions knew, for instance, that the same author might publish several critical papers, which could distort his analysis—there was still a significant decrease in the validity of the hypothesis, often within a year of publication. Jennions admits that his findings are troubling, but expresses a reluctance to talk about them publicly. “This is a very sensitive issue for scientists,” he says. “You know, we’re supposed to be dealing with hard facts, the stuff that’s supposed to stand the test of time. But when you see these trends you become a little more skeptical of things.”

the worst part was that when I submitted these null results I had difficulty getting them published. The journals only wanted confirming data. It was too exciting an idea to disprove, at least back then.

the steep rise and slow fall of fluctuating asymmetry is a clear example of a scientific paradigm, one of those intellectual fads that both guide and constrain research: after a new paradigm is proposed, the peer-review process is tilted toward positive results. But then, after a few years, the academic incentives shift—the paradigm has become entrenched—so that the most notable results are now those that disprove the theory.

Jennions, similarly, argues that the decline effect is largely a product of publication bias, or the tendency of scientists and scientific journals to prefer positive data over null results, which is what happens when no effect is found. The bias was first identified by the statistician Theodore Sterling, in 1959, after he noticed that ninety-seven per cent of all published psychological studies with statistically significant data found the effect they were looking for. A “significant” result is defined as any data point that would be produced by chance less than five per cent of the time. This ubiquitous test was invented in 1922 by the English mathematician Ronald Fisher, who picked five per cent as the boundary line, somewhat arbitrarily, because it made pencil and slide-rule calculations easier. Sterling saw that if ninety-seven per cent of psychology studies were proving their hypotheses, either psychologists were extraordinarily lucky or they published only the outcomes of successful experiments. In recent years, publication bias has mostly been seen as a problem for clinical trials, since pharmaceutical companies are less interested in publishing results that aren’t favorable. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that publication bias also produces major distortions in fields without large corporate incentives, such as psychology and ecology.

While publication bias almost certainly plays a role in the decline effect, it remains an incomplete explanation. For one thing, it fails to account for the initial prevalence of positive results among studies that never even get submitted to journals. It also fails to explain the experience of people like Schooler, who have been unable to replicate their initial data despite their best efforts

an equally significant issue is the selective reporting of results—the data that scientists choose to document in the first place. Palmer’s most convincing evidence relies on a statistical tool known as a funnel graph. When a large number of studies have been done on a single subject, the data should follow a pattern: studies with a large sample size should all cluster around a common value—the true result—whereas those with a smaller sample size should exhibit a random scattering, since they’re subject to greater sampling error. This pattern gives the graph its name, since the distribution resembles a funnel.

The funnel graph visually captures the distortions of selective reporting. For instance, after Palmer plotted every study of fluctuating asymmetry, he noticed that the distribution of results with smaller sample sizes wasn’t random at all but instead skewed heavily toward positive results.

Palmer has since documented a similar problem in several other contested subject areas. “Once I realized that selective reporting is everywhere in science, I got quite depressed,” Palmer told me. “As a researcher, you’re always aware that there might be some nonrandom patterns, but I had no idea how widespread it is.” In a recent review article, Palmer summarized the impact of selective reporting on his field: “We cannot escape the troubling conclusion that some—perhaps many—cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their biological significance and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a-priori beliefs often repeated.”

Palmer emphasizes that selective reporting is not the same as scientific fraud. Rather, the problem seems to be one of subtle omissions and unconscious misperceptions, as researchers struggle to make sense of their results. Stephen Jay Gould referred to this as the “shoehorning” process. “A lot of scientific measurement is really hard,” Simmons told me. “If you’re talking about fluctuating asymmetry, then it’s a matter of minuscule differences between the right and left sides of an animal. It’s millimetres of a tail feather. And so maybe a researcher knows that he’s measuring a good male”—an animal that has successfully mated—“and he knows that it’s supposed to be symmetrical. Well, that act of measurement is going to be vulnerable to all sorts of perception biases. That’s not a cynical statement. That’s just the way human beings work.”

One of the classic examples of selective reporting concerns the testing of acupuncture in different countries. While acupuncture is widely accepted as a medical treatment in various Asian countries, its use is much more contested in the West. These cultural differences have profoundly influenced the results of clinical trials. Between 1966 and 1995, there were forty-seven studies of acupuncture in China, Taiwan, and Japan, and every single trial concluded that acupuncture was an effective treatment. During the same period, there were ninety-four clinical trials of acupuncture in the United States, Sweden, and the U.K., and only fifty-six per cent of these studies found any therapeutic benefits. As Palmer notes, this wide discrepancy suggests that scientists find ways to confirm their preferred hypothesis, disregarding what they don’t want to see. Our beliefs are a form of blindness.

John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, argues that such distortions are a serious issue in biomedical research. “These exaggerations are why the decline has become so common,” he says. “It’d be really great if the initial studies gave us an accurate summary of things. But they don’t. And so what happens is we waste a lot of money treating millions of patients and doing lots of follow-up studies on other themes based on results that are misleading.”

In 2005, Ioannidis published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that looked at the forty-nine most cited clinical-research studies in three major medical journals. Forty-five of these studies reported positive results, suggesting that the intervention being tested was effective. Because most of these studies were randomized controlled trials—the “gold standard” of medical evidence—they tended to have a significant impact on clinical practice, and led to the spread of treatments such as hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women and daily low-dose aspirin to prevent heart attacks and strokes. Nevertheless, the data Ioannidis found were disturbing: of the thirty-four claims that had been subject to replication, forty-one per cent had either been directly contradicted or had their effect sizes significantly downgraded.

The situation is even worse when a subject is fashionable. In recent years, for instance, there have been hundreds of studies on the various genes that control the differences in disease risk between men and women. These findings have included everything from the mutations responsible for the increased risk of schizophrenia to the genes underlying hypertension. Ioannidis and his colleagues looked at four hundred and thirty-two of these claims. They quickly discovered that the vast majority had serious flaws. But the most troubling fact emerged when he looked at the test of replication: out of four hundred and thirty-two claims, only a single one was consistently replicable. “This doesn’t mean that none of these claims will turn out to be true,” he says. “But, given that most of them were done badly, I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

the main problem is that too many researchers engage in what he calls “significance chasing,” or finding ways to interpret the data so that it passes the statistical test of significance—the ninety-five-per-cent boundary invented by Ronald Fisher. “The scientists are so eager to pass this magical test that they start playing around with the numbers, trying to find anything that seems worthy,” Ioannidis says. In recent years, Ioannidis has become increasingly blunt about the pervasiveness of the problem. One of his most cited papers has a deliberately provocative title: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”

The problem of selective reporting is rooted in a fundamental cognitive flaw, which is that we like proving ourselves right and hate being wrong. “It feels good to validate a hypothesis,” Ioannidis said. “It feels even better when you’ve got a financial interest in the idea or your career depends upon it. And that’s why, even after a claim has been systematically disproven”—he cites, for instance, the early work on hormone replacement therapy, or claims involving various vitamins—“you still see some stubborn researchers citing the first few studies that show a strong effect. They really want to believe that it’s true.”

scientists need to become more rigorous about data collection before they publish. “We’re wasting too much time chasing after bad studies and underpowered experiments,” he says. The current “obsession” with replicability distracts from the real problem, which is faulty design. He notes that nobody even tries to replicate most science papers—there are simply too many. (According to Nature, a third of all studies never even get cited, let alone repeated.)

Schooler recommends the establishment of an open-source database, in which researchers are required to outline their planned investigations and document all their results. “I think this would provide a huge increase in access to scientific work and give us a much better way to judge the quality of an experiment,” Schooler says. “It would help us finally deal with all these issues that the decline effect is exposing.”

Although such reforms would mitigate the dangers of publication bias and selective reporting, they still wouldn’t erase the decline effect. This is largely because scientific research will always be shadowed by a force that can’t be curbed, only contained: sheer randomness. Although little research has been done on the experimental dangers of chance and happenstance, the research that exists isn’t encouraging

John Crabbe, a neuroscientist at the Oregon Health and Science University, conducted an experiment that showed how unknowable chance events can skew tests of replicability. He performed a series of experiments on mouse behavior in three different science labs: in Albany, New York; Edmonton, Alberta; and Portland, Oregon. Before he conducted the experiments, he tried to standardize every variable he could think of. The same strains of mice were used in each lab, shipped on the same day from the same supplier. The animals were raised in the same kind of enclosure, with the same brand of sawdust bedding. They had been exposed to the same amount of incandescent light, were living with the same number of littermates, and were fed the exact same type of chow pellets. When the mice were handled, it was with the same kind of surgical glove, and when they were tested it was on the same equipment, at the same time in the morning.

The premise of this test of replicability, of course, is that each of the labs should have generated the same pattern of results. “If any set of experiments should have passed the test, it should have been ours,” Crabbe says. “But that’s not the way it turned out.” In one experiment, Crabbe injected a particular strain of mouse with cocaine. In Portland the mice given the drug moved, on average, six hundred centimetres more than they normally did; in Albany they moved seven hundred and one additional centimetres. But in the Edmonton lab they moved more than five thousand additional centimetres. Similar deviations were observed in a test of anxiety. Furthermore, these inconsistencies didn’t follow any detectable pattern. In Portland one strain of mouse proved most anxious, while in Albany another strain won that distinction.

The disturbing implication of the Crabbe study is that a lot of extraordinary scientific data are nothing but noise. The hyperactivity of those coked-up Edmonton mice wasn’t an interesting new fact—it was a meaningless outlier, a by-product of invisible variables we don’t understand. The problem, of course, is that such dramatic findings are also the most likely to get published in prestigious journals, since the data are both statistically significant and entirely unexpected. Grants get written, follow-up studies are conducted. The end result is a scientific accident that can take years to unravel.

This suggests that the decline effect is actually a decline of illusion.

While Karl Popper imagined falsification occurring with a single, definitive experiment—Galileo refuted Aristotelian mechanics in an afternoon—the process turns out to be much messier than that. Many scientific theories continue to be considered true even after failing numerous experimental tests. Verbal overshadowing might exhibit the decline effect, but it remains extensively relied upon within the field. The same holds for any number of phenomena, from the disappearing benefits of second-generation antipsychotics to the weak coupling ratio exhibited by decaying neutrons, which appears to have fallen by more than ten standard deviations between 1969 and 2001. Even the law of gravity hasn’t always been perfect at predicting real-world phenomena. (In one test, physicists measuring gravity by means of deep boreholes in the Nevada desert found a two-and-a-half-per-cent discrepancy between the theoretical predictions and the actual data.) Despite these findings, second-generation antipsychotics are still widely prescribed, and our model of the neutron hasn’t changed. The law of gravity remains the same.

Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren’t surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.) The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

It further challenges claims made in a 2007 report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the glaciers would be gone by 2035.

Although the head of the panel Dr Rajendra Pachauri later admitted the claim was an error gleaned from unchecked research, he maintained that global warming was melting the glaciers at "a rapid rate", threatening floods throughout north India.

The new study by scientists at the Universities of California and Potsdam has found that half of the glaciers in the Karakoram range, in the northwestern Himlaya, are in fact advancing and that global warming is not the deciding factor in whether a glacier survives or melts.

Dr Bodo Bookhagen, Dirk Scherler and Manfred Strecker studied 286 glaciers between the Hindu Kush on the Afghan-Pakistan border to Bhutan, taking in six areas.Their report, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, found the key factor affecting their advance or retreat is the amount of debris – rocks and mud – strewn on their surface, not the general nature of climate change.

Glaciers surrounded by high mountains and covered with more than two centimetres of debris are protected from melting.Debris-covered glaciers are common in the rugged central Himalaya, but they are almost absent in subdued landscapes on the Tibetan Plateau, where retreat rates are higher.

In contrast, more than 50 per cent of observed glaciers in the Karakoram region in the northwestern Himalaya are advancing or stable.

"Our study shows that there is no uniform response of Himalayan glaciers to climate change and highlights the importance of debris cover for understanding glacier retreat, an effect that has so far been neglected in predictions of future water availability or global sea level," the authors concluded.

Dr Bookhagen said their report had shown "there is no stereotypical Himalayan glacier" in contrast to the UN's climate change report which, he said, "lumps all Himalayan glaciers together."

Dr Pachauri, head of the Nobel prize-winning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has remained silent on the matter since he was forced to admit his report's claim that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was an error and had not been sourced from a peer-reviewed scientific journal. It came from a World Wildlife Fund report.

this latest tawdry addition to the pathetic lies of the Reality Deniers. If you go to a proper source which quotes the full study such as:http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...you discover that the findings of this study are rather different to those portrayed here.

only way to consistently maintain a lie is to refuse point-blank to publish ALL the findings of a study, but to cherry-pick the bits which are consistent with the ongoing lie, while ignoring the rest.

Bookhagen noted that glaciers in the Karakoram region of Northwestern Himalaya are mostly stagnating. However, glaciers in the Western, Central, and Eastern Himalaya are retreating, with the highest retreat rates -- approximately 8 meters per year -- in the Western Himalayan Mountains. The authors found that half of the studied glaciers in the Karakoram region are stable or advancing, whereas about two-thirds are in retreat elsewhere throughout High Asia

glaciers in the steep Himalaya are not only affected by temperature and precipitation, but also by debris coverage, and have no uniform and less predictable response, explained the authors. The debris coverage may be one of the missing links to creating a more coherent picture of glacial behavior throughout all mountains. The scientists contrast this Himalayan glacial study with glaciers from the gently dipping, low-relief Tibetan Plateau that have no debris coverage. Those glaciers behave in a different way, and their frontal changes can be explained by temperature and precipitation changes.

I made it clear that I’m not concerned about simple underrepresentation. I did not even make the moral argument that we need ideological diversity to right an injustice. Rather, I focused on what happens when a scientific community shares sacred values. A tribal moral community arises, one that actively suppresses ideas that are sacrilegious, and that discourages non-believers from entering. I argued that my field has become a tribal moral community, and the absence of conservatives (not just their underrepresentation) has serious consequences for the quality of our science. We rely on our peers to find flaws in our arguments, but when there is essentially nobody out there to challenge liberal assumptions and interpretations of experimental findings, the peer review process breaks down, at least for work that is related to those sacred values. (

The fact that you criticized me without making an effort to understand me is not surprising.

Rather, what sets you apart from all other bloggers who are members of the academy is what you did next. You accused me of professional misconduct—lying, essentially–and you speculated as to my true motive: I suspect that Haidt is either an incompetent psychologist (not likely) or is disingenuously saying the sort of things controversial enough to get him in the New York Times (more likely).

As far as I can tell your evidence for these accusations is that my argument was so bad that I couldn’t have believed it myself. Here is how you justified your accusations: A serious social scientist doesn’t go around crying out discrimination just on the basis of unequal numbers. If that were the case, the NBA would be sued for discriminating against short people, dance companies against people without spatial coordination, and newspapers against dyslexics

Accusations of professional misconduct are sensibly made only if one has a reasonable and detailed understanding of the facts of the case, and can bring forth evidence of misconduct. Pigliucci has made no effort to acquire such an understanding, nor has he presented any evidence to support his accusation. He simply took one claim from the Tierney article and then ran wild with speculation about Haidt’s motives. It was pretty silly of him, and down right irresponsible of Pigliucci to publish that garbage without even knowing what Haidt said.

I challenge you to watch the video of my talk (click here) and then either 1) Retract your blog post and apologize publicly for calling me a liar or 2) State on your blog that you stand by your original post. If you do stand by your post, even after hearing my argument, then the world can decide for itself which of us is right, and which of us best models the ideals of science, philosophy, and the Enlightenment which you claim for yourself in the header of your blog, “Rationally Speaking.” Jonathan Haidt

One might think that such an esteemed organization would prove an insurmountable challenge for a bunch of disaffected kids to hack. World-renowned, government-recognized experts against Anonymous? HBGary should be able to take their efforts in stride. Unfortunately for HBGary, neither the characterization of Anonymous nor the assumption of competence on the security company's part are accurate, as the story of how HBGary was hacked will make clear. Anonymous is a diverse bunch: though they tend to be younger rather than older, their age group spans decades. Some may still be in school, but many others are gainfully employed office-workers, software developers, or IT support technicians, among other things. With that diversity in age and experience comes a diversity of expertise and ability.

That paper, like a lot of research, required a lot of effort.  So it was very disappointing to E&E in the years that followed identify itself as an outlet for alternative perspectives on the climate issue. It has published a number of low-quality papers and a high number of opinion pieces, and as far as I know it never did get ISI listed.

Boehmer-Christiansen's quote about following her political agenda in running the journal is one that I also have cited on numerous occasions as an example of the pathological politicization of science. In this case the editor's political agenda has clearly undermined the legitimacy of the outlet.  So if I had a time machine I'd go back and submit our paper elsewhere!

A consequence of the politicization of E&E is that any paper published there is subsequently ignored by the broader scientific community. In some cases perhaps that is justified, but I would argue that it provided a convenient excuse to ignore our paper on that basis alone, and not on the merits of its analysis. So the politicization of E&E enables a like response from its critics, which many have taken full advantage of. For outside observers of climate science this action and response together give the impression that scientific studies can be evaluated simply according to non-scientific criteria, which ironically undermines all of science, not just E&E.  The politicization of the peer review process is problematic regardless of who is doing the politicization because it more readily allows for political judgments to substitute for judgments of the scientific merit of specific arguments.  An irony here of course is that the East Anglia emails revealed a desire to (and some would say success in) politicize the peer review process, which I discuss in The Climate Fix.

For my part, in 2007 I published a follow on paper to the 2000 E&E paper that applied and extended a similar methodology.  This paper passed peer review in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Pielke, Jr., R. A. (2007), Future economic damage from tropical cyclones: sensitivities to societal and climate changes. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 365 (1860) 2717-2729 http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-2517-2007.14.pdf

Over the long run I am confident that good ideas will win out over bad ideas, but without care to the legitimacy of our science institutions -- including journals and peer review -- that long run will be a little longer.

s it a proper mission of the State to demand that its citizens not think these thoughts? Is it the proper use of State power to deny or severely limit access to such ideas? It is all the more ridiculous when this film The Kids Are All Right has been nominated for four Oscars this year — for Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor. Much of the world is talking about the film and the issues it raises, and the Singapore government is determined to make up our minds about the matter and give Singaporeans as little opportunity as possible to see the film for ourselves. All the while, the propaganda goes on: We are a world-class global city.

The root problem, as I have argued many times before, is the failure of our government to respect the constitution, which mandates freedom of expression. Instead, their guiding policy is to allow majoritarian views to ride roughshod over other points of view. Worse yet, sometimes it is even arguable whether the view being defended has majority support, since in the matter of film classification, the government appoints its own nominees as the “public”  consultation body. How do we know whether they represent the public?

As the press report above indicates, the government is waving, in this instance, the film classification guidelines because somewhere there is the clause that ‘Films that promote or normalise a homosexual lifestyle cannot be allowed’, words that the government itself penned. The exact words, not that I agree with them, in the current Guidelines are: Films should not promote or normalise a homosexual lifestyle. However, nonexploitative and non-explicit depictions of sexual activity between two persons of the same gender may be considered for R21. – http://www.mda.gov.sg/Documents/PDF/FilmClassificationGuidelines_Final2010.pdf, accessed 17 Feb 2011.

By the example of the treatment of this film, we now shine new light on the censorship impulse:  gay sex can be suggested in non-explicit ways in film, but gay people living ordinary, respectable lives, doing non-sexual things, (e.g. raising a family and looking after children) cannot. It really boils down to reinforcing a policy that has been in effect for a long time, and which I have found extremely insulting: Gay people can be depicted as deviants that come to tragic ends, but any positive portrayal must be cut out.

You would also notice that nowhere in this episode is reference made to the 2009/2010 Censorship Review Committee’s Report. This Committee I have already lambasted as timid and unprincipled. Yet, its (gutless) words are these: It is also not surprising that the CRC received many submissions calling for a lighter hand in the classification of films and plays which contain homosexual themes.  Homosexuality and other nontraditional lifestyles remain contentious issues for Singapore. While the MDA’s content regulators have to calibrate their decisions on ratings according to the majority, the CRC agrees that minority interests should also be considered and that a flexible and contextual approach should be taken for content depicting homosexuality. At the same time, clear and specific audience advisories should accompany the ratings so that the content issues will warn away those who think they may be offended by such content. – http://www.crc2009.sg/images/pdf/CRC%202010%20Report%20%28website%29.pdf, accessed 17 Feb 2011, para 24.

The government, in its Response to the CRC’s Report, said 63. Recommendation: A flexible and contextual approach for homosexual content should be adopted. Govt’s response: Agree. The current practice is already sufficiently flexible. Industry and artists must also be prepared to be more explicit in advising consumers on homosexual content. – http://www.crc2009.sg/images/pdf/Govt%27s%20Response%20to%20CRC%20Recommendations.pdf, accessed 17 Feb 2011.

And what do the civil servants do? They tighten up. They seize up like frigid vaginas and assholes at the very introduction of an Other. These civil servants create a new rule that limits the classified film to just one copy. They violate their own name and mission — “Film Classification” — by doing more than classification, branching into distribution limitation. To serve whose agenda?

The finding comes at a critical moment for NOAA as some newly empowered Republican House members seek to rein in the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, often contending that the science underpinning global warming is flawed. NOAA is the federal agency tasked with monitoring climate data.

The inquiry into NOAA’s conduct was requested last May by Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, who has challenged the science underlying human-induced climate change. Mr. Inhofe was acting in response to the controversy over the e-mail messages, which were stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England, a major hub of climate research. Mr. Inhofe asked the inspector general of the Commerce Department to investigate how NOAA scientists responded internally to the leaked e-mails. Of 1,073 messages, 289 were exchanges with NOAA scientists.

The inspector general reviewed the 1,073 e-mails, and interviewed Dr. Lubchenco and staff members about their exchanges. The report did not find scientific misconduct; it did however, challenge the agency over its handling of some Freedom of Information Act requests in 2007. And it noted the inappropriateness of e-mailing a collage cartoon depicting Senator Inhofe and five other climate skeptics marooned on a melting iceberg that passed between two NOAA scientists.

The report was not a review of the climate data itself. It joins a series of investigations by the British House of Commons, Pennsylvania State University, the InterAcademy Council and the National Research Council into the leaked e-mails that have exonerated the scientists involved of scientific wrongdoing.

But Mr. Inhofe said the report was far from a clean bill of health for the agency and that contrary to its executive summary, showed that the scientists “engaged in data manipulation.”

“It also appears that one senior NOAA employee possibly thwarted the release of important federal scientific information for the public to assess and analyze,” he said, referring to an employee’s failure to provide material related to work for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a different body that compiles research, in response to a Freedom of Information request.

The participants who lived long, happy lives "were not cynical rebels and loners" but accomplished people who were satisfied with their lives. Many knew that worrying is sometimes a good thing. The authors also looked at a study of Medicare patients that found that "neuroticism was health-protective."

spending 30 minutes at least four times a week expending energy at a moderate to intense level is "good up-to-date medical advice but poor practical advice."

Being active in middle age was most important to health and longevity in the study. But rather than vow to do something to get in shape (like jogging) and then hate it and not stick with it, find something you like to do."We looked at those who stayed active," Friedman says. "It wasn't the kids on sports teams. It's the ones who had activities at one point and had the pattern of keeping them ... They were doing stuff that got them out of the chair ... whether it was gardening, walking the dog or going to museums."

One of the best childhood personality predictors of longevity was conscientiousness — "qualities of a prudent, persistent, well-organized person, like a scientist or professor — somewhat obsessive and not at all carefree,"

the most obvious reason "is that conscientious people do more things to protect their health and engage in fewer activities that are risky."

"What characterized the people who thrived is a combination of their own persistence and dependability and the help of other people," Friedman says. The young adults who were thrifty, persistent, detail-oriented and responsible lived the longest.

Those with the most career success were the least likely to die young. Those who moved from job to job without a clear progression were less likely to have long lives than those with increasing responsibilities.

"continually productive men and women lived much longer than the laid-back comrades. ... This production orientation mattered more than their social relationships or their sense of happiness or well-being."

those who were most engaged in pursuing their goals.

a sexually satisfying and happy marriage is a very good indicator of future health and long life," but being single for a woman can be just as healthy as being in a marriage, especially if she has other fulfilling social relationships.

The married men in the study lived the longest. Single men outlived remarried men but didn't live as long as married men. Among women, the number who divorced their husbands and stayed single lived nearly as long as steadily married women."Being divorced was much less harmful to a women's health," the authors say.