My profession often gets bad press for a variety of sins, both actual and imagined: arrogance, venality, insensitivity to moral issues about the use of knowledge, pandering to sources of funding with insufficient worry about attendant degradation of values. As an advocate for science, I plead 'mildly guilty now and then' to all these charges. Scientists are human beings subject to all the foibles and temptations of ordinary life. Some of us are moral rocks; others are reeds. I like to think (though I have no proof) that we are better, on average, than members of many other callings on a variety of issues central to the practice of good science: willingness to alter received opinion in the face of uncomfortable data, dedication to discovering and publicizing our best and most honest account of nature's factuality, judgment of colleagues on the might of their ideas rather than the power of their positions.

I love to read the dedications of old books written in monarchies-for they invariably honor some (usually insignificant) knight or duke with fulsome words of s…

I like to summarize what I regard as the pedestal-smashing messages of Darwin's revolution in the following statement, which might be chanted several times a d…

True majorities, in a TV-dominated and anti-intellectual age, may need sound bites and flashing lights-and I am not against supplying such lures if they draw c…

There is one feature I notice that is generally missing in 'cargo cult science'... It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that …

'[P]eople talk about the potential for good that can come from destroying these little embryos and how we might be able to solve the problem of juvenile diabet…

In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works…