It’s difficult to come up with more quantitative measurements to look at how technology has impacted law. One could look at the development of new technologies (via patent applications, perhaps?) and then look to see how soon afterwards the invention began to show up in legal cases. Another interesting idea would be to see if changes in technology–the development of new citation systems, more rapid dissemination of decisions and publications, and later the creation of electronic repositories such as Lexis and Westlaw–had any impact on the way lawyers and judges developed law.
So illustrious a source as the Fred von Lohmann at the Electronic Frontier Foundation recommends the new book by Adrian Johns.
Myth #4 in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion is Syed Nomanul Haq’s article entitled “That Medieval Islamic Culture was Inhospitable to Science.”
In “Islam and Science,” an article written for the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, Nasr attempts to give a broad overview of the relationship of Islam to modern science and technology. He makes some key points regarding to criticism of Western science from an Islamic point a view.
Since at least McLean v. Arkansas in 1981, Creationists — Christian fundamentalists who oppose evolution — have turned, intriguingly, to philosophy of science to try to justify the inclusion of Creationism alongside evolution in science classrooms.
There is a philosophical thesis (attributed jointly to Pierre Duhem and Willard Quine) that, when simplified, explains how a given set of facts can produce more than one apparently true conclusion: essentially, different background assumptions lead to different conclusions. A related concept is known as underdetermination: that a given set of evidence can be explained by more than one–potentially conflicting–theory.
There is a long history of opposition to vaccination, opposition that dates back to its earliest uses in Europe and North America to fight smallpox. Opponents have made claims ranging from accusations that vaccination interferes with “God’s will” to claims that it actually contributed to the spread of smallpox instead of preventing it.
Why is it that modern Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists seem to struggle with accepting science today? Why does this struggle emerge especially around biology, particularly evolution? And why have many evangelicals turned to approaches like “Intelligent Design,” which instead of replacing science with religion, instead seeks to co-opt science within terms acceptable to Protestant evangelicalism?
300 years ago Saturday, the Statute of Anne created the first modern system of copyright.
By near the end of the nineteenth century, Jennerian vaccination had become a generally (but not universally) accepted medical practice. But it still had its critics.
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