Scientific heresy. Matt Ridley

It is a great honour to be asked to deliver the Angus Millar lecture.

I have no idea whether Angus Millar ever saw himself as a heretic, but I have a soft spot for heresy. One of my ancestral relations, Nicholas Ridley* the Oxford martyr, was burned at the stake for heresy.

My topic today is scientific heresy. When are scientific heretics right and when are they mad? How do you tell the difference between science and pseudoscience?

Let us run through some issues, starting with the easy ones.


Astronomy is a science; astrology is a pseudoscience.
Evolution is science; creationism is pseudoscience.
Molecular biology is science; homeopathy is pseudoscience.
Vaccination is science; the MMR scare is pseudoscience.
Oxygen is science; phlogiston was pseudoscience.
Chemistry is science; alchemy was pseudoscience.
Are you with me so far?

A few more examples. That the earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare is pseudoscience. So are the beliefs that Elvis is still alive, Diana was killed by MI5, JFK was killed by the CIA, 911 was an inside job. So are ghosts, UFOs, telepathy, the Loch Ness monster and pretty well everything to do with the paranormal. Sorry to say that on Halloween, but that’s my opinion.


Continue reading in Watts Up With That?

El mar tampoco por Antón Uriarte

Vía co2.

A pesar del incremento del CO2 en el aire y el lío montado con el supuesto achicharramiento climático que provoca, la temperatura global del agua superficial de los océanos no ha subido nada en la década primera de este siglo. Se ha mantenido de media entre unos 18ºC y 18, 5 ºC. Tuvo un pico de bajada durante los meses del evento de la Niña en el Pacífico, en los meses finales del 2007, el cual hizo que la media global descendiera un poco.

Dyson on Economics by Russ Roberts

I’m interviewing Freeman Dyson tomorrow for EconTalk. Here is what he says about climate change.

When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories. Many of the basic processes of planetary ecology are poorly understood. They must be better understood before we can reach an accurate diagnosis of the present condition of our planet. When we are trying to take care of a planet, just as when we are taking care of a human patient, diseases must be diagnosed before they can be cured. We need to observe and measure what is going on in the biosphere, rather than relying on computer models.

Replace “climate change” with “macroeconomics.” Same problem.