Skeptophilia

One of my problems with resolving ethical questions is that I so often have a hard time deciding the difference between moral, ethical, reas...

There's a fundamental problem when elected officials are charged with creating laws and policies surrounding issues that they simply do ...

If I had to pick one technology that I think will make the most different to human quality of life thirty years from now, I would pick CRISP...

In the movie Gattaca , the future has become a divided society -- split between the "valids" (people who were conceived through in...

One of the most frustrating of logical fallacies is the package-deal fallacy  -- the tendency to lump together things that are similar (even...

Can we once, just once, face a problem in the world and find a solution based in logic?  And, fer cryin' in the sink, not ascribe it to ...

There's a logical fallacy I've seen a lot lately.  It's called  argumentum ad Monsantum  (also known as argumentum ad Hitlerum )...

It may sound biased of me, but I think one thing should be an ironclad requirement for holding public office: an adequate understanding of s...

A couple of days ago there was a story out of North Dakota that's been making the rounds of the "Weird News" departments of v...

There is a frightening tendency for policymakers to request advice from scientists, and then ignore it if said advice doesn't agree with...

In the iconic movie (and book) Jurassic Park , scientists use genetic technology -- and samples of blood from the stomachs of mosquitoes pre...

Please allow me to start today's post with a brief genetics lesson. There is a feature of the genetic code called universality .  Put ...