Bioethics journals have lagged behind medical and science journals in exploring the threat of conflict of interest (COI) to the integrity of publications. Some recent discussions of COI that have occurred in the bioethics literature are reviewed. Discussions of what has been termed the ?Healy affair? unintentionally demonstrate that the direct and indirect influence of undisclosed COI may come from those who call for protection from the undue influence of industry. Paradoxically, the nature and tone of current discussions may serve (...) to dull sensitivities to what is indeed a serious set of issues facing bioethics. Some proposals are presented to address COI and other challenges to the integrity of bioethics and its journals. COI is too important a topic to be left to ideologues, and there is no substitute for readers' caution and skepticism as tools in dealing with the full range of biases that exist in published papers. (shrink)

Maarten Boudry and Jerry Coyne have written a piece, forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology, called “Disbelief in Belief,” in which they criticize my recent paper “Religious credence is not factual belief” (2014, Cognition 133). Here I respond to their criticisms, the thrust of which is that we shouldn’t distinguish religious credence from factual belief, contrary to what I say. I respond that their picture of religious psychology undermines our ability to distinguish common religious people from fanatics. My response will appear (...) in the same issue as their paper. (shrink)

Review Article on Jerry A. Coyne, Faith versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible.

Jerry Coyne on the truth of evolution as a fact.

In the past five years, there have been a series of papers in the journal Evolution debating the relative significance of two theories of evolution, a neo-Fisherian and a neo-Wrightian theory, where the neo-Fisherians make explicit appeal to parsimony. My aim in this paper is to determine how we can make sense of such an appeal. One interpretation of parsimony takes it that a theory that contains fewer entities or processes, (however we demarcate these) is more parsimonious. On the account (...) that I defend here, parsimony is a ‘local’ virtue. Scientists’ appeals to parsimony are not necessarily an appeal to a theory’s simplicity in the sense of it’s positing fewer mechanisms. Rather, parsimony may be proxy for greater probability or likelihood. I argue that the neo-Fisherians appeal is best understood on this interpretation. And indeed, if we interpret parsimony as either prior probability or likelihood, then we can make better sense of Coyne et al. argument that Wright’s three phase process operates relatively infrequently. (shrink)

This essay is my review of Philip Booth’s ...and the Pursuit of Happiness: Wellbeing and the Role of Government. The book is an anthology of original articles by eminent researchers in modern happiness economics, such as: Booth himself; Paul Omerod; David Sacks, Betsey Stephenson, and Justin Wolfers; Christopher Snowden; J. R. Shackleton; Christian Bjornskov; Peter Boettke and Christopher Coyne; and Pedro Schwartz. I conclude by offering several criticisms of the work.

Are physics and chemistry sufficient to provide a basis for a theory of everything? The worldview of materialist naturalism that forms the foundation of NeoDarwinian evolution, Big Bang cosmogony, and molecular biology in general has been subjected to challenge for its monumental failure to explain life, consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality. Two recent books, Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne [1], and Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist NeoDarwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly (...) False [2], both authors being atheists, reflect the deep rift we find, not only in the religious conflict between creation and evolution, but in the fundamental awareness we all have that we are more than just molecular matter. This common sense understanding can only escape the notice of a particularly shallow ideological dogmatism that insists it has all the answers based solely on its unprecedented technological success. Science has come to represent two different things: (a) a body of knowledge, and (b) a method for acquiring knowledge. The problem arises when it is forgotten that there is no independent body of knowledge for science apart from its method – it keeps changing according to the results of the latest findings of the scientific method. The method is not to be abandoned because of those who would like to replace it with a fixed body of knowledge, which then becomes ideology. If biogenesis is hypothesized as the law of Nature, and we observe that life comes from pre-existing life in all our experience, while the hypothesis of abiogenesis, that life comes from matter, is never backed by any observation, then according to the scientific method—which one is to be accepted as true scientific knowledge? Obviously, the one backed by empirical observation. It is necessary to get free of ideological “knowledge,” and return to science as a method for gathering evidence that may lead to conclusions beyond the material naturalist view of Nature, and conforms to what we experience and rationally understand about the world in which we live. (shrink)

This essay is my review of Philip Booth’s Wellbeing and the Role of Government. The book is an anthology of original articles by eminent researchers in modern happiness economics, such as: Booth himself; Paul Omerod; David Sacks, Betsey Stephenson, and Justin Wolfers; Christopher Snowden; J. R. Shackleton; Christian Bjornskov; Peter Boettke and Christopher Coyne; and Pedro Schwartz. I conclude by offering several criticisms of the work.