Your humanist community for scientific, skeptical, secular, and rational inquiry
By Scott Douglas Jacobsen There have been some recent reports about the possibility of life on Venus. Is this an empirically verified or confirmed assertion from some recent news reportage? First things first: definitions. The question is not necessarily, “What is life?”, but rather, who studies that which has been defined as “life” on planets other…
By Zack Dumont In past editions of Critical Links we have covered marketing and hype made in the image of the scientific process, and the ultimate impact — positive or negative — on the conclusions we draw and how we react. There are examples of influence all around us, all the time. While tuned into the…
CFIC is retracting this article, as we did not sufficiently investigate some of the claims that were made. Here is a portion of the most recent statement from the American Psychological Association (APA) on the subject: “APA’s governing Council of Representatives seated a task force to review its August 2015 resolution in light…
By Stephen Watson Recent years have seen a resurgence of “racial science” (the attempt to establish races as robust biological categories) and with it the attempt to ascribe the psychological and intellectual characteristics of people of different races to genetics (called “hereditarianism”). If the hereditarian thesis is correct, then the disparity in performance between black…
By Sandra Dunham Bayer is set to pay out $10.9 billion to settle a class action lawsuit from thousands of Americans who claim that their non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma was caused by the well known herbicide Roundup. Case mediator, Ken Feinberg, claims that this is the “wise” thing for Bayer to do, rather than “roll the dice in American…
Read More “The Cost of Bad Science in the Agri-Food Industry” »
