What Evolution Really Tells Us About Life | A Conversation with Steven Pinker
What Evolution Really Tells Us About Life | A Conversation with Steven Pinker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvwGhlBI1hA
Tag: science
CDC gets new acting director as leadership turmoil leaves agency reeling
“The nation’s top public health agency was left reeling Thursday as the White House worked to expel the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director and replace her with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ‘s current deputy.
The turmoil triggered rare bipartisan alarm as Kennedy tries to advance anti-vaccine policies that are contradicted by decades of scientific research.
Two administration officials said Jim O’Neill, the second-in-command at the Department of Health and Human Services, would supplant Susan Monarez, a longtime government scientist. O’Neill, a former investment executive who also served at the federal health department under President George W. Bush, does not have a medical background.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/departing-cdc-officials-monarezs-firing-161134622.html
Turmoil at C.D.C., a School Shooting in Minneapolis, Israel’s Exhausted Soldiers
Trump damaging the CDC, which is losing key employees due to the administration not understanding scientific evidence.
Some Israeli military units are exhausted and not showing up for the new invasion of Gaza.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQtLQNCgagQ
America’s Two-Front War on Science
“The administration’s attempts to paint all university faculty as woke are misguided. Many leading scientists and scholars have continued to push the boundaries of knowledge while either ignoring ongoing culture wars or avoiding administrative activists on their campuses. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is never a good idea, nor is schadenfreude worth risking the future of knowledge. The proper way to fight one form of intolerance is not to impose your own brand of intolerance.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/14/americas-two-front-war-on-science/
MAHA Is a Bad Answer to a Good Question | The Ezra Klein Show
The clearest success that worked against Covid was the vaccines, and it is the main thing Trump, RFK, MAGA, and MAHA are attacking. These substantial attacks will result in deaths.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCaD4vh4XhI
How the U.S. Just Handed the Renewable Future to China
Trump’s big beautiful bill takes away money from growing renewable energy that employs more jobs than coal and toward dying coal. It’s not just bad for the environment, it’s bad business. The bill makes it difficult to use components from China, even though China is one of our key suppliers. This will limit U.S. production.
The bill expands fossil fuel subsidies. Subsidies are essentially giving money to companies. This should be done when certain industries are important to emphasize above and beyond the incentive for profit-making, like environmental benefits. Considering fossil fuels cause deadly air pollution as well as contribute to global warming, subsidizing them makes no sense.
Fossil fuel industries are already built out, so subsidies pay such companies for doing stuff that they were doing anyways. Renewable industries are still developing and growing, so subsidies actually create new business. Once you consider the environmental impacts, fossil fuel subsidies net a negative return.
Trump’s bill has led to a lot of fired scientists. Foreign countries are offering bonuses to hire these scientists. These nonsense policies are producing American brain drain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tNp2vsxEzk
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Impact So Far: ‘The Worst Possible Case’ | ‘The Opinions’ podcast
MRNA vaccines are developed faster, so can more quickly deal with a new virus, and can more quickly be adapted to mutating viruses like the flu.
MRNA technology may also be able to help fight cancer.
Good data don’t support links to negative health from food dyes. So, using government influence to get companies to remove them is uneconomical and a foolish government policy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NykuDzUJDvA
Can Geoengineering Save Us—Or Cook the Planet?
Man-caused climate change is real, but it isn’t an existential crisis. It’s not going to destroy human civilization like a nuclear war would. Climate change will greatly damage economies and kill a lot of people, so it’s a serious issue that needs to be dealt with, but it isn’t existential.
Technologies like solar and windmills are good, but have trade offs. Many rightwing arguments like how inefficient these technologies are or how many birds they kill are based on original versions of these technologies that have been greatly improved upon; so these critiques are no longer valid and people making them either are ignorant on how outdated their information is, haven’t done their due diligence, or are being dishonest.
Cost benefit analyses on the benefits of reducing carbon emissions have already been done, and they overwhelmingly show that reducing emissions is worth it. However, it is only worth it if we cut emissions slowly. Cutting too fast likely makes the costs of cutting greater than the benefits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbRBtpzjaVs
Boss Time: Summits, Cold Wars, and Universities, with Condoleezza Rice | GoodFellows
Companies are worried about quarterly earnings. The U.S. does not have a plan B for long-term research. We need to maintain the funding and focus on research in universities. Many technologies that are changing the world today are based on university research from decades ago.
Trump’s trade agreements are not trade agreements. They are not even trade deals. They are more press releases. It’s likely that many of Trump’s tariffs won’t even be legal under U.S. law.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-HvpdbtJSA
RFK Jr. Shifts $500 Million From mRNA Research to ‘Safer’ Vaccines. Do the Data Back That Up?
“in June, vaccine manufacturer Moderna reported the results of a clinical trial pitting its mRNA influenza vaccine against both high-dose and standard-dose licensed seasonal influenza vaccines. The conventional vaccines used inactivated flu viruses to induce an immune response. Moderna’s mRNA-1010 achieved a relative vaccine efficacy against influenza illness of 26.6 percent in the trial. That means that the mRNA-1010 group had 26.6 percent fewer influenza cases than the group that got the standard-dose flu shot. For example, if the standard flu vaccine group had 100 cases per 1,000 people, the mRNA-1010 group would have had about 73–74 cases per 1,000.
The clinical trial roundly contradicts RFK Jr.’s claim that mRNA vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections, especially in comparison to old-fashioned flu vaccines.
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A simple Google Scholar search for mRNA vaccine trials for infectious diseases turns up over 10,000 results for just 2025 alone. But let’s just take a look at a comprehensive new review of promising vaccine formulations for emerging infectious diseases. In that study, a team of Korean researchers compares the pros and cons of different vaccine production platforms, including whole-organism-based, live-attenuated, subunit, virus vector-based immunity, and nucleic acid-based (DNA and RNA) vaccines.
The researchers’ analysis concludes that “mRNA vaccine formulations offer significant advantages, such as rapid development and production, over other vaccine platforms.” They also note that it is “necessary to develop an analysis system that can verify the effectiveness and safety of the mRNA vaccine, as well as the development process of the vaccine itself.” Just what the now-cancelled BARDA mRNA vaccine contracts could have helped to figure out.
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These vaccines might indeed have a significant impact on mitigating the spread of infectious diseases, if RFK Jr. would just stop standing athwart biomedical progress yelling, “Stop.””
https://reason.com/2025/08/07/rfk-jr-shifts-500-million-from-mrna-research-to-safer-vaccines-does-the-data-back-that-up/