No true scientists: the Royal Society, climate change and the No True Scotsman fallacy

When is an august scientific body not an august scientific body? When it releases a report you don’t like. This week the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences released a thoroughly calm and clear report on climate change, “Climate change: evidence & causes“. It explains the realities and complexities of climate science, the…

Zircon: the history of the Earth in a grain of sand

A tiny piece of zircon discovered in Australia holds the secrets of our cosmos – and ourselves It’s a grain of sand, really. A grain of sand, found in the dust of the Jack Hills, in Western Australia. But it’s a grain of sand that has seen continents rise and fall. It was already ancient…

My newborn son Billy, four billion years old today

My son, Billy, was born three weeks and two days ago. People say he looks like me, but he very obviously looks like a baby, or at a pinch Sir Winston Churchill; he sleeps, and feeds, and poos, and when he wants us to help in the process of one of those things, he cries….

Why delaying the NHS data-sharing system will cost lives

Modern medicine runs on data. That’s how it works. That’s how we know that vaccines don’t cause autism, how we know which treatments work better, how we know that smoking causes cancer and that exercise makes you live longer. It’s a relatively simple concept: if you look at 1,000 people who share some characteristic (“obese”,…

Doge: such grammar. Very rules. Most linguistics. Wow

You know an internet meme has pretty much breathed its last when the Today programme brings in someone to talk about it and explain why it’s funny, while the presenter patronises them and pronounces the word “online” as though they’re picking it up with tweezers. Today, that happened to Doge. (In fairness Evan Davis, for…

There’s nothing wrong with looking for ‘gay genes’

The Left loves to tell the Right that it’s anti-science, pointing (not without reason) to the correlation between conservative beliefs and a failure to come to terms with the scientific facts of evolution and human-caused climate change. But there’s a subtler tendency on the Left; a fear of research into human nature, in case the…