Links for August 27th – Waldo Jaquith

MSNBC: Santorum—GOP not ‘anti-science’
Good for Jon Huntsman for acknowledging that the first step to getting the Republican Party out of the intellectual wilderness is to stop being anti-science. (Anti-science is anti-facts, and being anti-facts doesn't work for long.) Unsurprisingly, Rick Santorum says that his party isn't anti-science. He claims, by inference, that Huntsman asserted that believing in God is anti-science. That's a pretty fringy assertion that obviously Huntsman didn't make.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: A new way to detect secret nuclear tests—GPS
GPS signals are affected significantly by atmospheric disturbances, and compensating for those disturbances has always presented a challenge. These researchers have devised and successfully tested a method of using that problem for the purpose of detecting nuclear explosions anywhere in the world. This is brilliant.
ThinkProgress: Just One Week Into His Campaign, Rick Perry Disavows His Nine-Month-Old Book
"Why, that old thing? That book is what I thought LAST year."

One reply on “Links for August 27th”

Michael says:

August 29, 2011 at 9:12 am

What I don’t get is that Santorum is known as a pretty hardcore Catholic, and that the Catholic Church has been supporting science (specifically evolution) for a loooooooong time now. To wit, a statement endorsed by Joseph Ratzinger (now pope) in 2004:

According to the widely accepted scientific account, the universe erupted 15 billion years ago in an explosion called the ‘Big Bang’ and has been expanding and cooling ever since. Later there gradually emerged the conditions necessary for the formation of atoms, still later the condensation of galaxies and stars, and about 10 billion years later the formation of planets. In our own solar system and on earth (formed about 4.5 billion years ago), the conditions have been favorable to the emergence of life. While there is little consensus among scientists about how the origin of this first microscopic life is to be explained, there is general agreement among them that the first organism dwelt on this planet about 3.5–4 billion years ago. Since it has been demonstrated that all living organisms on earth are genetically related, it is virtually certain that all living organisms have descended from this first organism. Converging evidence from many studies in the physical and biological sciences furnishes mounting support for some theory of evolution to account for the development and diversification of life on earth, while controversy continues over the pace and mechanisms of evolution.

People sometimes talk about “cafeteria Catholics” picking and choosing which parts of the faith they want to follow, so why doesn’t someone ask Rick Santorum about this?

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One reply on “Links for August 27th”