Scientists on religion 2 May 2010 This book looks interesting: empirical work on what scientists actually think about religion… according to the blurb, more than 50% are religious. I’m not sure if this should surprise anyone – most groups in a society will be largely composed of people who match the standards in their society; the real question is to what degree that class deviates from the norms. OUP: If you want to send me a review copy, my details are on the Contact page. Epistemology Religion Science
Biology David Hull’s philosophy 12 Aug 2010 David Hull was one of the first graduates from the University of Indiana’s HPS program. During that program he attended a seminar with Karl Popper in the course of which he wrote a paper on essentialism in biology. Popper took it upon himself to send this, without telling Hull, to… Read More
Biology The Velvet Underground of… 8 Oct 2010 Recently there have been a couple of “Velvet Underground” posts, of the kind that the VU were a very unknown but amazingly influential group. As Chad Orzel says, “only of order a thousand people bought the first Velvet Underground record, but every one of them went on to start a… Read More
History The first biological species concept 10 May 200918 Sep 2017 Before this text in 1686, the term species just meant some sort or kind of organism. It was a Latin word in ordinary use without much meaning in natural history, but then arguments began whether or not there were one or more species for this or that group, and so… Read More
Note that – as often happens – this book seems to relate exclusively to scientists in the US. As the US is usually assumed to be the most religious Western society, I wonder if these results can be taken as typical.
Well they will indicate the proportion of scientists who are religious as a fraction of the overall population. One might expect that in less religious societies, scientists will be correspondingly less religious.
An advisor of mine received a review copy the other day, and his first impressions are that it’s largely a good book on a good topic, but that some of the data could have been handled better. For example, while there IS a breakdown of religiosity by field, when comparing the views of scientists to the larger US population no such distinctions appear to be made. All the same, when it hits a general release I’ll be picking it up.