New Scientist shows its bias again

The New Scientist magazine has a real problem with anyone who disagrees with its philosophy.

I've just picked up the 18 April 2009 edition, which I found under some papers on my desk at work, and a quick flick through picks up these extremely scientific statements:

1. In a book review of Quantum Gods by Victor Stenger, the reviewer (Amanda Gefter) writes at one point: Like most scientists, Stenger believes that most religious claims can be dealt with scientifically, so beliefs such as creationism or astrology aren't immune to science, they are merely wrong.
Most scientists? Most religious claims? And what does 'immune to science' mean?

2. On page 23, for no apparent reason except that it maybe fills up a space, the editors have put a heading: Essential Number. This is followed by a very large 48, and then the words: per cent of Americans think religion will help answer the US's problems, a Newsweek poll has found - the lowest proportion ever. What has this particular comment got to do with anything? Are the New Scientist readers so insecure that they need such information?

3. On the same page, they have a box in which the word AGNOTOLOGY appears. Beneath this is the 'explanation': The study of deliberately created ignorance - such as the falsehoods about evolution that are spread by creationists. Oh dear, creationists spread false information? Let's not even get into the false information spread by scientists: whole humanoid chains produced by a skull and a bit of jawbone; climate change models that can't actually tell us what they claim they can; the huge debate about global warming....
Methinks the pot calleth the kettle black.

When you check out the section that 2 and 3 appear in, it turns out to be the Opinion page. Okay, so who's opinion are we getting? Neither the 48 or the Agnotology have a by-line, which is unusual in an opinion 'piece.'

Anyway, it was worth checking out what the Newsweek poll actually said.
Yes, the 48 percent figure is correct, but it has to be counterbalanced against this information from the very same Poll:
Americans' personal beliefs about religion haven't changed much in the last 20 years. The number of Americans with faith in a spiritual being—nearly nine in 10—has not changed much over the past two decades, according to historical polling. Seventy-eight percent said prayer was an important part of daily life, an increase of 2 points since 1987. Eighty-five percent said religion is "very important" or "fairly important" in their own lives—a number that hasn't changed much since 1992. Nearly half (48 percent) described themselves as both "religious and spiritual," while another 30 percent said they were "spiritual but not religious." Only 9 percent said they were neither religious nor spiritual.

Next time it might be worth giving us a more of the information, New Scientist, and letting less of your bias show.

Incidentally, there's an intriguing piece by the Skepticism Examiner on the Examiner.com site, in which he writes that New Scientist pulled a piece by Amanda Gefter in which she claimed to be able to reject books on the basis of their 'creationist' code. The piece was re-instated with a rebuttal by James le Fanu, the author of the book Gefter was reviewing. His comments are well worth reading

Heresy, Jim, but not as we know it

A couple of posts back I noted that the cover of the latest New Scientist magazine states: Darwin was wrong.
Basically what the article in question was saying is that Darwin was wrong about a particular facet of his evolutionary theory. What I didn’t notice until today was that in the editorial the magazine basically ‘covers its back’ regarding the provocative cover headline (excuse the pun). They say:
We await a third revolution that will see biology changed and strengthened. [The first was Darwin’s original theory, the second the introduction of Mendelian genetics.]
The editorial goes on: None of this should give succour to creationists, whose blinkered universe is doubtless already buzzing with the news that ‘New Scientist has announced Darwin was wrong.’ Expect to find excerpts ripped out of context and presented as evidence that biologists are deserting the theory of evolution en masse. They are not. Nor will the new work do anything to diminish the standing of Darwin himself. When it came to gravitation and the laws of motion, Isaac Newton didn’t see the whole picture either, but he remains one of science’s giants. In the same way, Darwin’s ideas will prove influential for decades to come.
As my wife always says, the best method of defence is attack,. Seems to me that the person who wrote the editorial is getting in first, before those he/she regards as naysayers come out of the woodwork. But the interesting thing is that it’s the magazine that’s being provocative by putting such a statement on its cover. It knows it will get anti-Darwinists to read the mag to see what’s going on.
Seems to me there's an element of dishonesty here: one hand waving the marketing gimmick while the other tries to show the integrity card. Scientists like to proclaim that they're above all sorts of human foibles in their thinking; regrettably they're just as prone to them as the rest of us.

Incidentally, quite by chance I came across a book hilariously titled: Darwin's Winky. The blurb reads:
Author Joseph Druski leaves no stone unturned in his bid to overturn Evolution. From Darwin's "Finches" to Richard Dawkins' underwear, Druski leaves a trail of devastated icons of evolution in his wake in this 402 page exposé on the dirty underbelly of the Theory of Evolution.
I doubt if it's truly the scientific masterpiece the site proclaims, but it would be fun to read all the same!
The site in question, craptaculus.com, is fairly oddball: it proclaims intelligent design, but doesn't particularly seem to defend it. And very strangely, it looks as if someone has substituted a photo of Richard Dawkins for that of someone called Sam McCain. Perhaps the whole site is a joke!

Heresy!

I couldn't resist picking up the latest copy of New Scientist, a magazine that can be irritatingly dogmatic about scientific matters. But any edition of this particular magazine that has a cover saying, Darwin was wrong needs to be checked out at the very least.
The article in question is actually entitled: Uprooting Darwin's Tree - the tree of life, that is, which, according to author Graham Lawton is no longer one of the iconic concepts of evolution but a figment of our imagination. I wait in hope for the day New Scientist proclaims evolution a figment of our imagination as well, but I may be waiting a while yet.
Let me quote the last couple of paragraphs of this article, which is fairly densely written in terms of DNA and RNA and genes and so on:
[Michael] Rose goes even further. "The tree of life is being politely buried, we all know that," he says. "What's less accepted is that our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change." Biology is vastly more complex than we thought, he says, and facing up to this complexity will be as scary as the conceptual upheavals physicists had to take on board in the early 20th century.
If he is right, the tree concept could become biology's equivalent of Newtonian mechanics: revolutionary and hugely successful in its time, but ultimately too simplistic to deal with the messy real world. "The tree of life was useful," says [Eric] Bapteste. "It helped us to understand that evolution was real. But now we know more about evolution, it's time to move on."

While checking out the address of New Scientist on the Web I discovered that they pretty much put everything in their magazines online - so I could have saved myself the NZ$8 that I just spent to buy the magazine - after all, I only wanted to see what they had to say about Darwin. But the magazine does have a number of other interesting articles and being able to read these online is a bonus.