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Vermont Should Stop Showing Leadership In Overruling Scientists On Farming

Despite Vermont's Agricultural  Innovation Board (AIB), created to inform regulatory recommendations...

Evolutionary Psychology: Your Parents Income During Pregnancy Made You Gay

Evolutionary psychology, the discipline that claimed we're being manipulated by flowers and evolved...

Oil Kept Congo From Starving - Western Academics Don't Seem To Like That

If even a wealthy like Germany has to lie about emissions to placate government-funded environmentalists...

China Sells Western Progressives Solar Panels While Switching To Nuclear Power

China has quietly overtaken France to become the world's second-largest producer of nuclear energy. ...

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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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Two decades after colleges got politicians to declare a college education a 'right' (fuzzy correlation/causation statistics showing a college education meant higher lifetime earnings made that part easy), schools that have put up lots of new buildings and had the culture turn on them due to bits of high-profile chicanery like charging $89,000 for a two-year program in "environmental journalism", are fighting back the same way government fights back when they overspend and the public doesn't want to pay more in taxes to cover it; they start trotting out high-profile sacrificial lambs.
In an open science community like Science 2.0, people will feel like they can just sign up and babble about anything and if you protest that what they are doing is not really science (wormholes, brand new theory of everything, social psychology, etc.), they will object with a few predictable responses certain to make everyone chuckle. They go something like; Galileo was oppressed too, Einstein did his best work as a patent clerk, etc.
Ron Breslow of Columbia University in New York has denied charges he plagiarized...himself.

Hey, science is tough.  You have to cite pretty thoroughly. There are lots of instances where entire papers have been sent back from peer review because authors did not cite the reviewers or their friends enough times. It's pretty competitive out there.  
Let's be honest - in the 21st century the wussification of men has been in full force.   Being a man is out if that means not being a politically correct, hyper-sensitive, asexual, homogenized follower of all that is cool and popular among the cultural intelligentsia.

But testosterone levels are dropping and that could mean any number of consequences for the future of our species. Now you have one more science excuse to sack up and stop identifying as a metrosexual; a group of researchers concluded in 2010 that modest males endure social backlash because they are not 'macho' enough. We may not like arrogant people but meek people are annoying too.
It's taken decades but the U.S. Forest Service is finally being allowed to use science in managing America's natural resources.

Instead of environmental activists tying up science and the government by using other government regulations and red tape to block meaningful improvements, we can actually reduce wildfires, manage water responsibly and protect endangered species, instead of pitting those outcomes against each other, as environmental lawyers had successfully done in the past.
Evolution has various mechanisms and one of them is natural selection. While most religious people have no disagreement with science overall, Biblical literalists contend man cannot have changed or evolved.  Some confusion about evolution is understandable - evolution is darn complex - and the disagreement with evolution does not fall strongly into any demographic except the religious. In America, we hear more about 'the religious right' but primarily we hear about them from the secular left - while noting that 39% of Republicans don't accept evolution they fail to mention 30% of Democrats don't either.