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PubMed2006

Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action.

We review here the current political landscape and our own efforts to address the attempts to undermine science education in Wisconsin. To mount an effective response, expertise in evolutionary biology and in the history of the public controversy is useful but not essential. However, entering the fray requires a minimal tool kit of information. Here, we summarize some of the scientific and legal history of this issue and list a series of actions that scientists can take to help facilitate good science education and an improved atmosphere for the scientific enterprise nationally. Finally, we provide some model legislation that has been introduced in Wisconsin to strengthen the teaching of science.

Animals↗
PubMed1998

Galvanic cultures: electricity and life in the early nineteenth century.

Electricity has long proved to be a powerful tool for investigating the properties of life. Towards the beginning of the nineteenth century new discoveries and inventions in electricity stimulated a new popular fascination with such questions. Electricity seemed a good way of understanding the machinery of life. It was the key to unlocking the secrets of vitality. Looking at these early nineteenth-century debates and discussions provides a good way of focusing on the cultural connections and ramifications of science. As electricity provided tools for understanding life, it provided tools for understanding culture also.

Animals↗
PubMed1989

Eugenic sterilization: a preliminary comparison of the Scandinavian experience to that of Germany.

The paper argues that historical analysis and explanation of eugenics in Germany can benefit much from systematic comparison to Scandinavia. Common cultural background and quite similar development up to 1933 provides a background for isolating salient causes in Nazi population policies. This comparison will also help a more precise understanding of the mutual dependence between science and politics in the case of eugenics. The author holds that many of the geneticists who participated in the eugenics debates of the 1930's and 1940's had a clearer grasp of the distinction between science and politics than most present day historiographers of eugenics.

Eugenics↗
PubMed1999

Psychosomatic research and the theory of science.

In terms of current scientific paradigms, absolute knowledge in the understanding of science is beyond the capacity of the human mind. Today, linear and dualistic science are struggling against emerging new paradigms such as psychosomatic medicine, which threaten the established medical truths of contemporary society.

Humans↗
PubMed1995

The conceptualisation and communication of clinical facts: a consideration of the 75th anniversary edition IJPA.

The contributors to the Anniversary Edition of the IJPA attempt to respond to the Babel of ideas within contemporary psychoanalysis and to grapple with our methodology for discovering and validating our facts. Underlying this ambitious endeavour is the complex question of the status of psychoanalysis as a discipline--is it science, art, hermeneutics, or religion? Those who contribute to the volume have varying points of view on this question, reinforcing our ongoing confusion of tongues. The author argues that while we must tread very carefully to preserve the creativity and art of our discipline, we desperately need to address the basic science of psychoanalysis. Whether, and to what extent, we can succeed in doing so will perhaps best answer the question of what kind of discipline psychoanalysis is or can be. Many of us wish to view psychoanalysis as capable of scientific discourse and yet remain very ambivalent about embracing scientific methodology. What is unique to psychoanalysis must not be lost in turning to empirical research, nor in facile, 'reductive' translations to other models from other disciplines. However, if we are to make the claims of a scientific method, we must accept the burdens of it as well. In this regard, the author argues in favour of machines and brain, and against those who view such methods as 'radically' empiricist or reductionist. To truly test and reject our hypotheses, we must creatively and adaptively make use of empirical research methods that historically we have been very reluctant to embrace.

Anniversaries and Special Events↗
PubMed1974

The dilemma of science and morals.

The conflicts between science and morals which still continue to arise despite the apparent hegemony of atheistic scientism over traditional Judeo-Christianity in the twentieth century reflect a basic contradiction in the metaphysical foundation of Western lives. As was set forth by Machiavelli, the contradiction inherent in Western ethics is that it is based on the simultaneous belief in both objectively valid moral truths and purely relative values of communal purpose. The achievements of twentieth century science have intensified these contradictions. Modern physics has put in question the validity of its own metaphysical basis, namely the belief in Natural Law, and modern biology has been unable to come to terms with the Cartesian dualism of body and soul. By contrast, Chinese lives are comparatively free of these contradictions, being founded on the philosophies of Confucianism and Taoism, to which the concepts of objectively valid truth or Natural Law are foreign. Recent developments in Western attitudes regarding science and morals can be interpreted as a movement away from the traditional belief in absolute truths towards a Chinese relativism.

China↗
PubMed2002

Four fatal flaws in recent spirituality research.

The answer to the question of whether clinical pastoral education and professional chaplaincy need become more scientific should be a Tillichian "yes and no." Pastoral care and counseling is both an art and a science. The field is thus subject ineluctably to scientific examination. However, its artistic dimensions are elusive and impenetrable to scientific scrutiny.

Chaplaincy Service, Hospital↗
PubMed1988

Misuses of biology in the context of the paranormal.

Public suspicion of science stems from science's challenging of perceptions and myths about reality, and a public fear of new technology. The result is a susceptibility to pseudoscience. In claiming that creation 'science' is as valid as evolution the creationists misquote scientists and seek to spread their own 'scientific' myths concerning a young age for the earth, an act of creation based on a particular literalist interpretation of the Christian Bible and a single worldwide flood. They use methods of debate and politics, rather than scientific research. A selection of their arguments is examined and the nature of the evidence for evolution is discussed. Problems with the creation 'science' model are noted. In the myth of the hundredth monkey phenomenon, original research is misquoted to denigrate scientific research and support sentimental ideas of paranormal events. The misuse of science is seen as damaging to society because it reduces the effective gathering and application of scientific information. However, pseudoscience provides a valuable guide to gaps in public scientific education.

Animals↗
PubMed2003

Whatever happened to the soul? Theological perspectives on neuroscience and the self.

Traditional religious teachings about the nature of the person, especially body-soul dualism, influence majority views of the self. Following a historical overview, it is argued that a purely physicalist account of human nature is equally compatible with contemporary science and with Christian thought. However, an account that reduces higher human capacities to neurobiology is unacceptable from a theological perspective.

Ego↗
PubMed2003

Wonderful secrets of nature. Natural knowledge and religious piety in Reformation Germany.

Sixteenth-century Germany witnessed a tremendous flourishing of vernacular literature. An unprecedented number and variety of texts were produced for new groups of readers. This essay analyzes one underexplored genre of this vernacular literature: texts on the natural world. Numerous books on animals, plants, minerals, and natural marvels rolled off the German presses in this period, indicating a widespread curiosity about the natural world. These texts give valuable insight into the views of nature available to a broad lay audience, literate in German but not necessarily in Latin. They reveal a pervasive sense of nature as divinely created and a deep conviction that contemplation of the natural world would lead to greater piety. The divine and the mundane were thoroughly intertwined in vernacular natural histories. While other historians of science have seen the sixteenth century as a period of increasingly secular ways of thinking about nature, I argue for the persistence, and even the intensification, of profoundly religious attitudes toward the natural world.

Animals↗