Tag - John Brockman

Why evolution isn’t “true”

How many people in the US, do you suppose, believe in evolution? According to a survey reported in The New Scientist in 2006, a high percentage don’t. Another survey carried out here, indicated that 50% of us Brits don’t either.

If only, as Ian Stewart reminded us in the 2009 Lunar Society Annual Lecture, it were zero percent who believed in evolution!

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The start of it all

I’d been thinking about publishing for some time, ever since web-based technologies began radically changing the publishing game. Between collecting a buspass in late 2008 and gaining my first grandchild in the spring of 2009, I decided to act on a simple idea.

The idea was this. To ask John Brockman’s question What are you optimistic about? of leading scientists here in the West Midlands.

I realised if I published their responses in time for the 2010 British Science Festival to be held here in Brum in the September some 18 months away, there was a ready market of a few tens of thousands of people. ( I’d found myself on the Festival Programme Committee, so knew about it a-happening early on.)

Not many people realise the science base that we have here. The Med School is one of the biggest and most important in the world, with all the lab scientists and researchers such an organisation needs. There’s a world-class hospital under construction there too. Add in the specialist Aston University, plus all that’s going on at Warwick . . . let alone the other universities.

I concluded that much could be achieved with insouciance, a laptop on the kitchen table and this simple if harebrained idea. I began to phone some scientists . . .

That’s how it started.