As promised, here are some more thoughts on Steve Fuller’s contribution to the Crooked Timber seminar on Chris Mooney‘s book, The Republican War on Science. My last post on Fuller’s essay took up his picture of the workings of science, where it seemed to me he was gesturing toward the influence of democratic politics as an antidote to the influence of an elite scientific oligarchy in steering the course of science. In this post, I examine Fuller’s comments on democracy, science education, and the fortunes of Intelligent Design in the scientific community.
Category Archives: Science and pseudo-science
Fuller on Mooney on science.
By now you have seen the excellent Crooked Timber seminar on Chris Mooney‘s book, The Republican War on Science. In addition to the CT regulars, sociologist of science (and Kitzmiller vs. Dover expert witness) Steve Fuller contributed an essay to the seminar. While some in these parts have dismissed it rather quickly, I want to give it a slightly less hasty response.
Qigong in science class?
A reader of this blog reports:
My children went to a [public charter] school in which pseudoscience was taught to them. However, it was something more insidious than “intelligent design.” It was Qigong taught as science. One of my daughter’s classmates fell unconscious while she was performing these exercises. Then the Qigong instructor ran to the victim and began moving his hands over her body, telling the students that he was healing her by moving his hands over her which was mainpulating body energy or “Chi.”
I assume that the girl was OK in the end … but, this gives one pause.
What should we say about the teaching of Qigong in public schools? What should we say about the teaching of Qigong as science?