Science Is Pro-Kamala

Vote for Kamala Harris to Support Science, Health and the Environment

Kamala Harris has plans to improve health, boost the economy and mitigate climate change. Donald Trump has threats and a dangerous record

Opinion

In the November election, the U.S. faces two futures. In one, the new president offers the country better prospects, relying on science, solid evidence and the willingness to learn from experience. She pushes policies that boost good jobs nationwide by embracing technology and clean energy. She supports education, public health and reproductive rights. She treats the climate crisis as the emergency it is and seeks to mitigate its catastrophic storms, fires and droughts.

In the other future, the new president endangers public health and safety and rejects evidence, preferring instead nonsensical conspiracy fantasies. He ignores the climate crisis in favor of more pollution. He requires that federal officials show personal loyalty to him rather than upholding U.S. laws. He fills positions in federal science and other agencies with unqualified ideologues. He goads people into hate and division, and he inspires extremists at state and local levels to pass laws that disrupt education and make it harder to earn a living.

Only one of these futures will improve the fate of this country and the world. That is why, for only the second time in our magazine’s 179-year history, the editors of Scientific American are endorsing a candidate for president. That person is Kamala Harris.

Before making this endorsement, we evaluated Harris’s record as a U.S. senator and as vice president under Joe Biden, as well as policy proposals she’s made as a presidential candidate. Her opponent, Donald Trump, who was president from 2017 to 2021, also has a record—a disastrous one. Let’s compare.

Health Care

The Biden-Harris administration shored up the popular Affordable Care Act (ACA), giving more people access to health insurance through subsidies. During Harris’s September 10 debate with Trump, she said one of her goals as president would be to expand it. Scores of studies have shown that people with insurance stay healthier and live longer because they can afford to see doctors for preventive and acute care. Harris supports expansion of Medicaid, the U.S. health-care program for low-income people. States that have expanded this program have seen health gains in their populations, whereas states that continue to restrict eligibility have not. To pay for Medicare, the health insurance program primarily for older Americans, Harris supports a tax increase on people who earn $400,000 or more a year. And the Biden-Harris administration succeeded in passing the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which caps the costs of several expensive drugs, including insulin, for Medicare enrollees. Harris’s vice presidential pick, Tim Walz, signed into law a prohibition against excessive price hikes on generic drugs as governor of Minnesota.

When in office, Trump proposed cuts to Medicare and Medicaid (Congress, to its credit, refused to enact them.) He also pushed for a work requirement as a condition for Medicaid eligibility, making it harder for people to qualify for the program. As a candidate, both in 2016 and this year, he pledged to repeal the ACA, but it’s not clear what he would replace it with. When prodded during the September debate, he said, “I have concepts of a plan” but didn’t elaborate. Like Harris, however, he has voiced concern about drug prices, and in 2020 he signed an executive order designed to lower prices of drugs covered by Medicare.

The COVID pandemic has been the greatest test of the American health-care system in modern history. Harris was vice president of an administration that boosted widespread distribution of COVID vaccines and created a program for free mail-order COVID tests. Wastewater surveillance for viruses has improved, allowing public health officials to respond more quickly when levels are high. Bird flu now poses a new threat, highlighting the importance of the Biden-Harris administration’s Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy.

Trump touted his pandemic efforts during his first debate with Harris, but in 2020 he encouraged resistance to basic public health measures, spread misinformation about treatments and suggested injections of bleach could cure the disease. By the end of that year about 350,000 people in the U.S. had died of COVID; the current national total is well over a million. Trump and his staff had one great success: Operation Warp Speed, which developed effective COVID vaccines extremely quickly. Remarkably, however, Trump plans billion-dollar budget cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, which started the COVID-vaccine research program. These steps are in line with the guidance of Project 2025, an extreme conservative blueprint for the next presidency drawn up by many former Trump staffers. He’s also talked about ending the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, calling it a pork project.

Reproductive Rights

Harris is a staunch supporter of reproductive rights. During the September debate, she spoke plainly about her desire to reinstate “the protections of Roe v. Wade” and added, “I think the American people believe that certain freedoms, in particular the freedom to make decisions about one’s own body, should not be made by the government.” She has vowed to improve access to abortion. She has defended the right to order the abortion pill mifepristone through the mail under authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, even as MAGA Republican state officials have tried—so far unsuccessfully—to revoke those rights. As a U.S. senator, she co-sponsored a package of bills to reduce rising rates of maternal mortality. In August, Trump said he would vote against a ballot measure expanding access to abortions in Florida, where he lives. The current Florida “heartbeat” law makes most abortions illegal after six weeks of pregnancy, before many people even know they are pregnant.

Trump appointed the conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, removing the constitutional right to a basic health-care procedure. He spreads misinformation about abortion—during the September debate, he said some states support abortion into the ninth month and beyond, calling it “execution after birth.” No state allows this. He also refused to answer the question of whether he would veto a federal abortion ban, saying Congress would never approve such a ban in the first place. He made no mention of an executive order and praised the Supreme Court, three justices of which he placed, for sending abortion back to states to decide. This ruling led to a patchwork of laws and entire sections of the country where abortion is dangerously limited.

Gun Safety

The Biden-Harris administration closed the gun-show loophole, which had allowed people to buy guns without a license. The evidence is clear that easy access to guns in the U.S. has increased the risk of suicides, murder and firearm accidents. Harris supports a program that temporarily removes guns from people deemed dangerous by a court.

Trump promised the National Rifle Association that he would get rid of all Biden-Harris gun measures. Even after Trump was injured and a supporter was killed in an attempted assassination, the former president remained silent on gun safety. His running mate, J. D. Vance, said the increased number of school shootings was an unhappy “fact of life” and the solution was stronger school security.

Environment and Climate

Harris said pointedly during the September debate that climate change was real. She would continue the responsible leadership shown by Biden, who has undertaken the most substantial climate action of any president. The Biden-Harris administration restored U.S. membership in the Paris Agreement on coping with climate change. Harris’s election would continue IRA tax credits for clean energy, as well as regulations to reduce power-plant emissions and coal use. This approach puts the country on course to spend the authorized billions of dollars for renewable energy that should cut U.S. carbon emissions in half by 2030. The IRA also includes a commitment to broadening electric vehicle technology.

Trump has said climate change is a hoax, and he dodged the question “What would you do to fight climate change?” during the September debate. He pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement. Under his direction the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies abandoned more than 100 environmental policies and rules, many designed to ensure clean air and water, restrict the dangers of toxic chemicals and protect wildlife. He has also tried to revoke funding for satellite-based climate-research projects.

Technology

The Biden-Harris administration’s 2023 Executive Order on Safe, Secure and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence requires that AI-based products be safe for consumers and national security. The CHIPS and Science Act invigorates the chipmaking industry and semiconductor research while growing the workforce. A new Trump administration would undo all of this work and quickly. Under the devious and divisive Project 2025 framework, technology safeguards on AI would be overturned. AI influences our criminal justice, labor and health-care systems. As is the rightful complaint now, there would be no knowing how these programs are developed, how they are tested or whether they even work.

The 2024 U.S. ballots are also about Congress and local officials—people who make decisions that affect our communities and families. Extremist state legislators in Ohio, for instance, have given politicians the right to revoke any rule from the state health department designed to limit the spread of contagious disease. Other states have passed similar measures. In education, many states now forbid lessons about racial bias. But research has shown such lessons reduce stereotypes and do not prompt schoolchildren to view one another negatively, regardless of their race. This is the kind of science MAGA politicians ignore, and such people do not deserve our votes.

At the top of the ballot, Harris does deserve our vote. She offers us a way forward lit by rationality and respect for all. Economically, the renewable-energy projects she supports will create new jobs in rural America. Her platform also increases tax deductions for new small businesses from $5,000 to $50,000, making it easier for them to turn a profit. Trump, a convicted felon who was also found liable of sexual abuse in a civil trial, offers a return to his dark fantasies and demagoguery, whether it’s denying the reality of climate change or the election results of 2020 that were confirmed by more than 60 court cases, including some that were overseen by judges whom he appointed.

One of two futures will materialize according to our choices in this election. Only one is a vote for reality and integrity. We urge you to vote for Kamala Harris.

Today's Occam's Razor

William of Ockham

When the whole world is calling you a crook,

one thing you have to stop and consider is that

maybe you're a fucking crook.

Thinking

1. There
2. are
3. no
4. simple
5. 10-word
6. answers
7. to
8. the
9. important
10. questions

There's a floor to how simply the truth can be stated, and still be the truth.

Falsehoods don't have that. There is no limit to how simple an idea can be when it doesn't have to conform to reality.

A Word On Management

I confess to having been a near-fanatical devotee to the short-sighted, and borderline demonic pronouncements of Ayn Rand.

30 years ago, I finally started to see the faulty reasoning of Rand's "Objectivism", and I won't bore the hell outa everybody with those details. Suffice to say her philosophy insists on sprinting to The Logical Extreme, which is where even good ideas go to die in sometimes epic implosions.

With Ayn Rand, you get things like this:

What the boss says goes.

Rule 1: The boss is always right

Rule 2: If the boss is ever wrong, refer to rule 1

While there's an element of truth to it, there's no room in that cutesy shit for the kind of clear-eyed, pragmatic reasoning that a Randian likes to believe he's mastered.

The most glaring of such reasoning is: The boss does not exist in a vacuum, where he needs no help from anyone.

The only pure rugged individualist is a hermit who starts out naked and alone, and somehow manages to make or otherwise acquire everything he needs all by himself with no help or input of any kind from anyone else - weapons, tools, food, clothing, shelter - all of it.

Wanna know why you never heard of such people? Because they all died before they could get their genetic material into any succeeding generations. Every one of them ended up scattered across the landscape in piles of leopard shit - or bear shit, or fellow-hominin shit - and in very short order.

We are all descended from people who knew how to cooperate - people who knew collaboration and collective action were essential to our survival as a species.

So - New Rules:

1. The boss can be wrong, and the employees can be right. So it's best if everybody gets the benefit of the doubt, and we can hash it all out as we go.

2. Although this is a business and not a democracy, it's a business that exists within a democracy, and democracy is not a business. We all have rights that are not relinquished in exchange for a paycheck.

3. Earn cookies, get cookies. Earn shit, get shit. And that goes for bosses and employees alike.

 That's it - let's get back to work.

Time For An Oldie

We are a species that's survived because we got very very good at pattern recognition.

And of course, eventually some asshole politician figured out how to manipulate us because of it.

Michael Schermer from about 9 years ago.

What Matters

It doesn't matter whether a fetus is a person if it doesn't matter that a pregnant woman is a person.

What matters is that a woman be granted the full compliment of rights.

Without the right to bodily autonomy - the right of an autonomous person to self-determination - there's not much point to any of the other rights.

Today's Quote

Science Literacy empowers you to know when others lie about objective realities.

--Neil deGrasse Tyson

@neiltyson

A Brief Manifesto

A reminder. A short list of items to help us stay grounded:

• Earth is not flat
• Vaccines work
• We've been to the moon
• Climate change is a thing
• The universe is expanding
• Math is the universal language
• Chemtrails aren't a thing
• Weather weapons aren't a thing
• We are made of star stuff
• Science is like magic, only real

Today's Lesson

Michael Shermer - Morality: absolute and otherwise

Without god, there can be no "Objective Morality"?

How do you claim anything is objective if it's based on something as subjective as a belief in god?

If you start with a premise that's false, it's almost impossible to reach a conclusion that's true.

Social Good

This is a new one for me - Social Good Now on YouTube

hat tip = FB pal Carol B

And the first one ties in with Michael Shermer's explanation of Type 1 and Type 2 Logic (or Cognition) Errors:

So, you don't have to sit around wondering why so many "conservatives" reject your arguments even though what you're saying is accurate and provable. 

And also too - you don't have to wonder why so many of those "conservatives" are at least pretending to be devoutly Christian. They've been thoroughly conditioned to accept religious nonsense without evidence - why would they need facts when deciding what Political Religion to follow?

Let's review:

What are the tools we use to detect lies?

a) the absence of confirming evidence

b) the presence of conflicting evidence

What do Faith and Ideology often demand that we disregard?

a) the absence of confirming evidence

b) the presence of conflicting evidence

The Silo Effect

Columbia Journalism Review:

While concerns about political and media polarization online are longstanding, our study suggests that polarization was asymmetric. Pro-Clinton audiences were highly attentive to traditional media outlets, which continued to be the most prominent outlets across the public sphere, alongside more left-oriented online sites. But pro-Trump audiences paid the majority of their attention to polarized outlets that have developed recently, many of them only since the 2008 election season.

Attacks on the integrity and professionalism of opposing media were also a central theme of right-wing media. Rather than “fake news” in the sense of wholly fabricated falsities, many of the most-shared stories can more accurately be understood as disinformation: the purposeful construction of true or partly true bits of information into a message that is, at its core, misleading. Over the course of the election, this turned the right-wing media system into an internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them from journalism that challenged it. The prevalence of such material has created an environment in which the President can tell supporters about events in Sweden that never happened, or a presidential advisor can reference a non-existent “Bowling Green massacre.”

It's the narrow-mindedness, stupid.

While you're trying to see country and party and candidates from a perspective that includes as many aspects as possible, Alt-Right Conservatives (eg) are being fed a steady diet of binary purity, narrowing the perspective down to some pretty ridiculous bumper sticker sloganeering that sometimes contradicts itself.

"My guys are always and only good which means your guys can't be anything but always and only bad."

But there's a kind of Orwellian contradiction to it too. If I start with that binary, but then apply the negative component to "the system of a corrupt duopoly" (eg), then the benefit of the smear accrues to whoever I can make you believe is standing against whatever's being smeared. So while the overall approval for Congress is low and constantly beat down by relentless generalized attacks on "idiots in da gubmint", I can condition you at the same time to see "our guys" as fighting the noble fight to hold back the onslaught of the ruinous agenda of tax-n-spend libruls and blah blah blah.

Remember that while the approval numbers for Congress as a whole are dismal, 90-95% of these people get re-elected. A big bunch of the reason for  that on the GOP side is gerrymandering and voter suppression, but let's put all that together with a message of "they all suck, but my guy's one of the good ones - he's lookin' out for me".  Now we have that the cult thing - isolation and indoctrination, which is where that thing about The Breitbart Sphere comes in.

And not to get all Both-Sides-ey on ya, but it's become a lot more visible on the left as well. The big myth being peddled the hardest is that Hillary didn't win because "she's not Democrat enough". "She's a creature of Neo-Liberalism." "She abandoned traditional Democratic Party values". None of that is flat-out untrue, but it illustrates for me that the Purity Warriors are revving up, and I'm not going along with that because I see it as having full potential to be translated to little more than fulfillment of the Both-Sides prophesy.

Analogy Alert

We're almost completely off the pavement on the righthand shoulder, and we have to steer  to the left to keep from hitting the bridge abutment up ahead. But if we yank the wheel and over-correct, we run just as big a risk of veering all the way over into the left lane and being smushed head-on by a cement truck.

The point being that The Logical Extreme is where good ideas go to die. Keeping it down the middle isn't sexy and it's not terribly satisfying and it can feel just like losing, but it's what we have to do in order to sustain this little experiment in self-government.

In the end it all depends on factual information, and the ability to test the information so we can make accurate assessments of its veracity.

Let's review:

In the presence of confirming evidence

and

the absence of conflicting evidence,

the statement is more likely to be true

I the presence of conflicting evidence

or

the absence of confirming evidence,

the statement is more likely to be false

Once More From The Top

Test for truth:

The presence of Confirming Evidence

--and--

The absence of Conflicting Evidence

Test for bullshit:

The absence of Confirming Evidence

--or--

The presence of Conflicting Evidence

Fact Averse Knotheads

My morality starts with my commitment to care about what's true and what's not true.

Michael Shermer in American Scientific

Have you ever noticed that when you present people with facts that are contrary to their deepest held beliefs they always change their minds? Me neither. In fact, people seem to double down on their beliefs in the teeth of overwhelming evidence against them. The reason is related to the worldview perceived to be under threat by the conflicting data.

Creationists, for example, dispute the evidence for evolution in fossils and DNA because they are concerned about secular forces encroaching on religious faith. Anti-vaxxers distrust big pharma and think that money corrupts medicine, which leads them to believe that vaccines cause autism despite the inconvenient truth that the one and only study claiming such a link was retracted and its lead author accused of fraud. The 9/11 truthers focus on minutiae like the melting point of steel in the World Trade Center buildings that caused their collapse because they think the government lies and conducts “false flag” operations to create a New World Order. Climate deniers study tree rings, ice cores and the ppm of greenhouse gases because they are passionate about freedom, especially that of markets and industries to operate unencumbered by restrictive government regulations. Obama birthers desperately dissected the president's long-form birth certificate in search of fraud because they believe that the nation's first African-American president is a socialist bent on destroying the country.

In these examples, proponents' deepest held worldviews were perceived to be threatened by skeptics, making facts the enemy to be slayed. This power of belief over evidence is the result of two factors: cognitive dissonance and the backfire effect. In the classic 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, psychologist Leon Festinger and his co-authors described what happened to a UFO cult when the mother ship failed to arrive at the appointed time. Instead of admitting error, “members of the group sought frantically to convince the world of their beliefs,” and they made “a series of desperate attempts to erase their rankling dissonance by making prediction after prediction in the hope that one would come true.” Festinger called this cognitive dissonance, or the uncomfortable tension that comes from holding two conflicting thoughts simultaneously.

Two social psychologists, Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (a former student of Festinger), in their 2007 book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) document thousands of experiments demonstrating how people spin-doctor facts to fit preconceived beliefs to reduce dissonance. Their metaphor of the “pyramid of choice” places two individuals side by side at the apex of the pyramid and shows how quickly they diverge and end up at the bottom opposite corners of the base as they each stake out a position to defend.

In a series of experiments by Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan and University of Exeter professor Jason Reifler, the researchers identify a related factor they call the backfire effect “in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.” Why? “Because it threatens their worldview or self-concept.” For example, subjects were given fake newspaper articles that confirmed widespread misconceptions, such as that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. When subjects were then given a corrective article that WMD were never found, liberals who opposed the war accepted the new article and rejected the old, whereas conservatives who supported the war did the opposite ... and more: they reported being even more convinced there were WMD after the correction, arguing that this only proved that Saddam Hussein hid or destroyed them. In fact, Nyhan and Reifler note, among many conservatives “the belief that Iraq possessed WMD immediately before the U.S. invasion persisted long after the Bush administration itself concluded otherwise.”

If corrective facts only make matters worse, what can we do to convince people of the error of their beliefs? From my experience, 1. keep emotions out of the exchange, 2. discuss, don't attack (no ad hominem and no ad Hitlerum), 3. listen carefully and try to articulate the other position accurately, 4. show respect, 5. acknowledge that you understand why someone might hold that opinion, and 6. try to show how changing facts does not necessarily mean changing worldviews. These strategies may not always work to change people's minds, but now that the nation has just been put through a political fact-check wringer, they may help reduce unnecessary divisiveness.

And here's the formula again:

The probability for a TRUE argument goes up in the presence of confirming evidence and the absence of conflicting evidence.

The probability for a FALSE argument goes up in the absence of confirming evidence or the presence of conflicting evidence.

All that said, there's practically no point arguing anything with somebody who demonstrates he doesn't care about what's true or real or factual.

hat tip = Facebooker Gretchen Lynn Demarah

The Logic Problem

This has been making the rounds on Facebook and elsewhere:

Alice, Bob, and Chris are taken to the police station for questioning. Detectives know that one of them is the thief and that only one of them tells the truth.

Alice says, "I am not the thief."

Bob says, "Alice is the thief."

Chris says, "I am not the thief."

Who is the thief?

And there's all kinds of good reasoning going on as people weigh in and suss it all out; and I'm OK at such things, but I'm really not very adept at the Game Theory thing (or whatever I'd have to be good at to get through this kinda stuff), so I just have to take an awful lot of people's word for things, y'know?

And that's OK as long as you've learned a thing or two, and are at least marginally skilled at figuring out whose word you can probably take on a given subject, and who you should doubt - which is kinda the point, but that's more about the politics than logic, and now I'm heading off into the weeds again which should give you an idea what a cluttered jumble my brain can make of this shit, but that's not really the point, but it might be, but anyway...

So here's one logic string:

If Alice is the thief - 

1. What she says is a lie... we have one liar

2. What Bob says is truth... we have the one saying truth.

3. I am not the thief... as we need a second liar, Chris saying he's not the thief is a lie, hence he's the thief... but we started assuming Alice was the thief. So, since we don't have two thieves, we discard it.

If Bob is the thief -

1. What Alicia says is truth... we have our one saying truth

2. What Bob says is truth as we started assuming Bob is the thief... this would be the second saying the truth. We know we can't have two persons saying the truth. Then Bob is NOT the thief.

If Chris is the thief -

1. What Alice says is truth... we have our one saying truth.

2. What Bob says is a lie... as Alice is NOT the thief. We have our first liar.

3. What Chris says is a lie... as he is indeed the thief..... We have our second liar.

So, if Chris were the thief, we have exactly two liars and one person saying the truth, as the problem states.

Therefore, Chris is the thief.

I had to read through it 3 or 4 times before I started to get it, and that brought me to what I think is a bit better understanding of the anti-intellectual shit that essentially gives us a political atmosphere where this is what makes sense to too many people:

*Way too complicated - let's do this instead:
1) Elect Donald Trump
2) Waterboard all three
3) Put them in prison camps where they become slave labor
4) Seize their wealth and redistribute it to political appointees
5) Declare lots of a national holidays to extol the virtues of freedom and enterprise and the entrepreneurial spirit

6) AMERICA!

No muss, no fuss, no need for all that tiresome thinking.

*this was not actually posted - this is just what too many Pro-Trump comments sound like to me

Pick A Bias, Any Bias

The more we learn, the more we understand how little we actually know.

A cognitive bias refers to a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, whereby inferences about other people and situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion.[1] Individuals create their own "subjective social reality" from their perception of the input.[2] An individual's construction of social reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behaviour in the social world.[3] Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality.[4][5][6]

Some cognitive biases are presumably adaptive. Cognitive biases may lead to more effective actions in a given context.[7] Furthermore, cognitive biases enable faster decisions when timeliness is more valuable than accuracy, as illustrated in heuristics.[8] Other cognitive biases are a "by-product" of human processing limitations,[9] resulting from a lack of appropriate mental mechanisms (bounded rationality), or simply from a limited capacity for information processing.[10]

A continually evolving list of cognitive biases has been identified over the last six decades of research on human judgment and decision-making in cognitive science, social psychology, and behavioral economics. Kahneman and Tversky (1996) argue that cognitive biases have efficient practical implications for areas including clinical judgment.[11]

Some examples:

What We Choose To Believe

If I project backwards 40 or 50 thousand years, it's not hard to understand how a species capable of rational thought could look at this and make the simplest Type 1 Error by ascribing agency to it.  How do you not when you have no way of knowing otherwise?



Now, as a species capable of rational thought, and knowing what we know, how do we look at this and stop wondering just because we're more comfortable with ignorance and superstition?

Some Alternatives Are Worse Than Others

There's no such thing as Alternative Medicine.  If a therapy has been properly tested and proven effective, then we just call it 'Medicine'.

That's not to say you shouldn't do something if it makes you feel better, but the first order of business is to be skeptical - let's be careful out there.



Here's the guy's website: What's The Harm?

Logical Fallacies Explained

Your Logical Fallacy Is (website - you can scroll thru them all and get a good synopsis for each one)

Buy This Book Right Fucking Now

Equivocation

Equivocation exploits the ambiguity of language by changing the meaning of a word during the course of an argument and using the different meanings to support some conclusion. A word whose meaning is maintained throughout an argument is described as being used univocally. Consider the following argument: How can you be against faith when we take leaps of faith all the time, with friends and potential spouses and investments? Here, the meaning of the word “faith” is shifted from a spiritual belief in a creator to a risky undertaking.

A common invocation of this fallacy happens in discussions of science and religion, where the word “why” may be used in equivocal ways. In one context, it may be used as a word that seeks cause, which as it happens is the main driver of science, and in another it may be used as a word that seeks purpose and deals with morals and gaps, which science may well not have answers to. For example, one may argue: Science cannot tell us why things happen. Why do we exist? Why be moral? Thus, we need some other source to tell us why things happen.

(The illustration is based on an exchange between Alice and the White Queen in Lewis Carroll'sThrough the Looking-Glass)