On Saturday, February 16th, biologist and noted public intellectual Richard Dawkins tweeted about eugenics. Dawkins provided no context. No ongoing dispute he was inserting himself into. No obvious interlocutor. And certainly not anything as convenient as a few previous tweets to set the stage for this surprising announcement. As someone interested in science communication, genetics, and ethics, I find it worth exploring how he screwed up, how he didn’t screw up, and what any of this means for science…
General Science
Groundhog Day 2020: Probability in perspective
This post is from ScIU’s archives. It was originally published by Lana Ruck in February 2018 and has been lightly edited to reflect current events. Tomorrow will be the 134th official Groundhog Day in the United States. Celebrated in Canada, Germany, and the U.S., the holiday derives from a long-standing German-Dutch tradition, which we’ve been… Read more »
Urban green spaces: How to bring nature into our cities
Humans are increasingly moving away from rural areas to live in urban environments. Since 2009, the number of people living in urban centers has surpassed the number in rural areas. This pattern only seems to be continuing, with a mass exodus away from the farm and towards the skyscraper. As populations have shifted toward urban… Read more »
Share our rejections
My cat comforted me as I read my latest rejection letter: my manuscript had once again been denied by a scholarly journal. Rejection letters make us feel awful. Whether these letters are just a few lines of text, or printed with elaborate letterheads on sturdy paper, we always feel grief and disappointment. I argue that… Read more »
This is your DNA on drugs
In the 80’s and 90’s, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America released several public service announcement commercials, which aimed to inform the public about the dangers of drugs of abuse. The commercials, which have made a lasting impact on society and pop culture, featured a shot sequence and narration of your brain (an uncracked egg),… Read more »
Brain technology in Black Mirror: Technological myths or real possibilities? Part III
In the third part of this blog series, we will finish looking into human consciousness by thinking about what happens to it after death. If you have not seen the episodes, do not worry, spoilers are kept at a minimum! You can read parts 1 and 2 here. San Junipero is a virtual afterlife into… Read more »
Machines can talk like humans now?
There are a variety of text messaging applications available that make communicating with friends easy. These applications typically require users to sign up for a username as a form of identification. Friends can add each other on the application by sharing their usernames, and then friends can initiate and respond to chats from each other…. Read more »
Brain technology in Black Mirror: Technological myths or real possibilities? Part II
In the second part of this blog series, we will look at three episodes where proposed technologies involve human consciousness. We will see if these technologies can become real possibilities in the near future. If you have not seen the episodes, do not worry, spoilers are kept at a minimum! You can also read part… Read more »
Strength in Numbers? The Meaning of Scientific Consensus
“Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.”… Read more »
Creating a Science Communication Collective at IU
As you might know, here at ScIU, we like to publish weekly blog posts about science happening on campus — especially science that might not be reaching other news outlets — because a lot of the work happening here at IU is amazing, and we believe that broader audiences should have access to it. Another… Read more »