The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Social Science Isn’t Scientific

“Unlike physics or biology, the social sciences have not demonstrated the capacity to produce a substantial body of useful, nonobvious, and reliable predictive rules about what they study — that is, human social behavior, including the impact of proposed government programs.” — Jim Manzi, “What Social Science Does — and Doesn’t — Know,” City Journal

More on Sex and ‘Science’

Judith Reisman is about to publish Sexual Sabotage, her latest and most comprehensive book on Alfred Kinsey’s fraudulent research, which came to mind when I saw this Time magazine article: Women ages 27 through 45 report not only having more sexual fantasies (and more intense sexual fantasies) than women ages 18 through 26 but also having […]

Sex, Science, Monogamy and Survival

While checking in to see what Dave Weigel was doing at Andrew Sullivan’s “Daily Dish” — addressing the Trig Truther problem, among other things — I came across Chris Bodener’s latest post in a series, “The Evolutionary Case Against Monogamy,” which is every bit the bass-ackward exercise in Darwinian pretzel-logic that you might imagine. Let’s begin with […]

From Mecca to the Moon!

Astro-dhimmis: [NASA chief Charles] Bolden created a firestorm after telling Al Jazeera last month that President Obama told him before he took the job that he wanted him to do three things: inspire children to learn math and science, expand international relationships and “perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out […]

Heartache: ‘Female Viagra’ Fails

No little blue pills for you, ladies:  The drug didn’t boost women’s desire any more than a placebo in two clinical trials. . .  [t]he FDA staff who reviewed the results said the so-called response rate isn’t “particularly compelling.” In a statement posted on the FDA website, manufacturer Boehringer Ingelheim maintains that flibanserin really works, […]

Science Validates Bible

To a fundamentalist, there was kind of a “well, duh” reaction to this recent headline: Studies Show Jews’ Genetic Similarity It’s scarcely surprising to learn that members of an ethno-religious group — whose ancient scriptures advocate endogamy and proscribe marrying outside the group — would be genetically similar. What I didn’t realize, however, was that some revisionist historians have cast doubt […]

Kagan’s Clone Wars

They’re not dead babies, they’re just clumps of cells: White House memos from 1997, when Elena Kagan was a top domestic policy advisor to President Clinton, show that Kagan — nominated to the Supreme Court by President Obama — recommended that the Clinton administration permit cloning of human embryos for research purposes. Writing just months after Scottish […]

The Pill at 50: Unhappy Un-Birthday

The 50th anniversary of The Pill — oral contraceptives were first marketed in May 1960 — has resulted in a good deal of thoughtless journalism. Gail Collins spins a wondrous myth of The Pill as the pharmaceutical sunshine of a sexual-scientific enlightenment.  The Associated Press calls The Pill “America’s favorite birth control method,” which is not true: Female Sterilization is the […]

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