"The pride and scorn for science that saw most people through the 20th-century is now giving way to fear. Why the change? Jargon and methodology, more than ever, are raising the wall between the cognoscenti and Everyone Else. After all, it is a truism that we fear that which we don't understand, and nothing obfuscates quite as easily as a scientist stacking up one unknown word upon another. ...

How can Joe Public, after a hard day at work, come home and be expected to tease out the pros and cons, weigh up the risks, consider all the implications, and differentiate the "yuck" from the reality. Wouldn't it be much easier to sit back in a past where everyone was 100% human, with their human values and understanding: the post comes three times a day, there are no mobiles, emails, or videos, perhaps no planes -- and, of course, no freedom from toothache, infections and early death."

"Science, you see, is the optimum belief system: because we have the error bar, the greatest invention of mankind, a pictorial representation of the glorious undogmatic uncertainty in our results, which science is happy to confront and work with. ...

And so I give you my taxonomy of bad science, the things that make me the maddest. First, of course, we shall take on duff reporting: ill-informed, credulous journalists, taking their favourite loonies far too seriously, or misrepresenting good science, for the sake of a headline. They are the first against the wall.

Next we'll move on the quacks: the creationists, the new-age healers, the fad diets. They're sad and they're lonely. I know that. But still they must learn. Advertisers, with their wily ways, and their preposterous diagrams of molecules in little white coats: I'll pull the trigger.

And the same goes for the quantum spin on government science. I'm watching you all.

And finally, let us not forget the strays, the good scientists who have passed to the dark side. Was it those shares in that drug company, or the lust for fame and glory? Bad scientists, your days are numbered."

Links are mine -- ed.

"Welcome to the new battlegrounds of American science. No conspiracy, nor even one political agenda, links the incidents above. But US scientists say they are indicative of a new climate that has emerged under the Bush administration: one driven partly by close relationships with big business, but just as much by a fiercely moral approach to the business of science. The approach is not exclusively religious, nor exclusively rightwing, but is spreading worry as never before through the nation's laboratories and lecture halls."

"It's a general rule that 90% of material published in scientific research journals will turn out to be wrong. However, 90% of what goes on to appear in a textbook will be right."

"Of course, they are only warning signs -- even a claim with several of the signs could be legitimate.

1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media. ...
2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work. ...
3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection. ...
4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal. ...
5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries. ...
6. The discoverer has worked in isolation. ...
7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation."

"Bush's quarrel is not simply with the democrats (I initially assumed this should read "Democrats", as in "the opposition party". But maybe not., the liberals, or even the scientists; his quarrel is with nature itself. This is a contest that he is fated to lose, and so long as we associate ourselves with his delusions, we too will lose, all of us: ourselves, our fellow species, our posterity."

"From my reading of many reviews, the criticisms tend to center around the fact that Behe is either selectively ignorant of the evolutionary literature that exists, or that he just doesn't know how to do a computer search! For example, at Lincoln he said that if one looks in the scientific literature for evidence of Darwinian evolution, this literature "is absent." In Darwin's Black Box (p.179) he is even more emphatic: "There has never been a meeting, or a book, or a paper on the details of the evolution of complex biochemical systems." How then could John Catalano [see Publish or Perish] have done a keyword search of the word "evolution" and come up with 13,000 articles describing the evolution of the immune system, cilium, flagellum, blood-clotting system, eyes -- subjects that Behe says do not exist! Perhaps Behe could be forgiven for being sloppy in 1996 when his book came out, but to make this statement in 1999 indicates either continuing ignorance or arrogance."