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...and Taking It Seriously

By Jack Meadows | January 12, 1987

Suppose you were faced with the following examination question: Which of the following statements do you think is more applicable to science? (1) "History is more or less bunk" [Henry Ford]; (2) "If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us!" [S.T. Coleridge]. How would most scientists answer? Some—such as those involved in taxonomy—might opt for the second alternative, but I suspect a majority would prefer the first. Yet it is difficult to avoid all history in sci

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A New Entry In Evolution Controversy

By Alexander Rosenberg | January 12, 1987

The Blind Watchmaker. Richard Dawkins. W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1986. 332 pp., illus. $18.95. Well-informed, imaginative and stylistically pleasing introductions to evolution and the theory of natural selection have hitherto been the special preserve of Stephen J. Gould. Hitherto—but not hereafter. Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker bids fair to become at least as influential a guide to controversies in evolutionary theory as the best of Gould's wonderful books. This is probab

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A Wake-Up Call for Technological Somnambulists

By Alvin Weinberg | January 12, 1987

The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Langdon Winner. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1986. 214 pp. $17.50. These 10 graceful essays, grouped under the headings A Philosophy of Technology; Technology: Reform and Revolution; and Excess and Limit, explore the intimate connection between technologies and the political structures in which they are embedded. Winner insists that since many of today's technologies threaten our ecological and social well-bein

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Autobiographies and Public Understanding

By Nevill Mott | January 12, 1987

The review of my book A Life in Science (The Scientist, November 17, 1986, p. 23) leads me to remember other autobiographies I have enjoyed, including that of Max Born showing how little help he got in the German universities before 1914 and that of my friend Rudolf Peierls on the role he played in the Manhattan Project. I think that many of us in the scientific community, who know and respect our colleagues, are fascinated to know what they think about themselves. An important question, however

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Bordeaux Welcomes Aerospace

By Jacques Richardson | January 12, 1987

BORDEAUX—Nearly 200 years after the French Revolution, this city may face another upheaval. More than 2,000 scientists, engineers and technicians at the core of France's military aerospace effort cast off their normal shyness about self-promotion and turned out in force for the Techno-Espace exhibit and conference held here in early December. This first-ever exposition was intended to offset the dominant position of the civil aerospace industry in the ToulouseMontpellier region to the sout

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Co-Author Responsibility Issue Under Study

By Susan Walton | January 12, 1987

Recent incidents of scientific misconduct have made researchers and their institutions more aware that credit given on papers is not always credit due. But major research universities and journals in the life sciences have taken few steps to develop policies or guidelines on responsible co-authorship, according to an informal study by The Scientist. The School of Basic Health Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University adopted such a policy in August in response to national concern and because

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Creationism Coverage Insults Reader's Intelligence

By Brian Nordstrom Embry-riddlle | January 12, 1987

I just read my first issue of The Scientist and am relieved I had not yet paid for the subscription. Please take my name off your mailing list. You have insulted my intelligence by your treatment of creationism versus evolution [The Scientist, November 17, 1986, pp. 10-11]. The presentation is totally one-sided. Apparently, you do not believe your readers can be trusted to make up their own minds about controversial issues. I am not interested in a publication that cannot present both sides of a

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Creationism is Bad Science, Bad Theology, Too

By Andrew Szebenyi | January 12, 1987

There is another aspect to scientific creationism (The Scientist, November 17, 1986, pp.10-11) that nobody seems to mention. The obvious aim of the fundamentalism-oriented scientific creationists is to combat atheism. In this endeavor, they render great disservice to science because they identify evolutionary science with atheism. This is well known. What is being missed, however, is that they also render great disservice to sound theology as well. Jean Danielou, S.J., a scripture scholar, state

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Creationism Is Simpleminded

By Muckle | January 12, 1987

The statements on creationism (The Scientist, November 17, 1986, pp.10-11), have stimulated me to write. I believe they all missed the main point. Fundamentally, the difference between creationism and science is that the former is simpler. Thus, it is more likely to be espoused by the uninformed, the simpleminded, the intellectually idle. Comprehension and evaluation of scientific evidence about something like evolution is really very hard work, and is unlikely to be done at the highest level by

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Drug Agency Hikes Spending For Research

January 12, 1987

WASHINGTON—The National Institute on Drug Abuse will award more than $155 million in research funds this year. The 77 percent increase over last year is due largely to the President's initiative on drug abuse, and the drug-AIDS connection. Officials said $31 million will be directed toward AIDS research, a 340 percent increase over last year. The administration's $1.5 billion program to combat drugs, which includes funds for military interdiction and anti-crime measures, contains $27 milli

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