[Contest now judged. here. “Impress your friends with a piece of Mars is open until Saturday, May 28, 2011. The “Why do people refuse to read books they are attacking?” contest is open till Saturday June 4.] In this version of the very long-running human evolution soap opera (Ewen Callaway, Nature News, 9 May 2011), we didn’t kill the Neanderthals; they died before we got there. (Episode 4440). In a different episode, they were our squeezes and in-laws – which is probably why we killed them. Anyway, they weren’t as stupid as they pretended, either. Some folk, looking at all this, say “Science, unlike religion, changes its mind in the light of new evidence.” That may be so (the evidence Read More ›

Jane Harris Zsovan, author of Eugenics and the Firewall talked to Uncommon Descent recently about her book on the controversial topic of social Darwinist eugenics in Western Canda in the mid-twentieth century.

Denyse: The thing that struck me, reading your book, was how widespread the idea was in the province of Alberta, that sterilizing “socially challenged” people was a great idea. You write, “Many early eugenicists were leftists, but most important, Social Darwinist ideas behind right-wing eugenics absolved the wealthy of responsibility to help the poor.” (p. 8.) True, and many were pastors and churchgoing people. Today’s evangelicals would likely have a hard time believing that, but it’s a fact.

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I thank Professor Feser for his reply to my latest question. Feser’s reply appears to bring us much closer together, though I am not sure, so I must probe a bit more. First of all, let me clear some things out of the way: 1.  No, I do not expect Feser to agree to bad arguments for a conclusion merely because he accepts the conclusion on other grounds. 2.  Yes, I understand that Feser has allowed that God designed the world and that we can know that He has. 3.  I have never argued or implied that living things are exactly like artifacts; I have argued only that the two have something in common, i.e., an orderly arrangement and co-operation of Read More ›

Non-materialist neuroscientists like Jeffrey Schwartz and Mario Beauregard are usually at least sympathetic to ID, just as their materialist counterparts are not. At issue is whether the mind is real or simply an illusion created by the activities of neurons. One argument for the mind’s reality is neuroplasticity, as this recent CBC documentary shows: For centuries the human adult brain has been thought to be incapable of fundamental change. Now the discovery and growing awareness of neuroplasticity has revolutionized our understanding of the brain – and has opened the door to new treatments and potential cures for many diseases and disorders once thought incurable.Neuroscience is past viewing the human brain as a machine, as it once did, where, if one Read More ›

“if you include a link to a site “where hate material is posted”, you could go to jail for two years.”

This is how, as a Canadian commentator explains:

If you wanted to confirm the notion that elections are a waste of time, you could hardly do it more swiftly than the new Canadian Conservative majority government is with its omnibus crime bill. Clause Five criminalizes the “hyperlink” – that’s to say, if you include a link to a site “where hate material is posted”, you could go to jail for two years.[ … ] Read More ›

by being too trite for words: Here’s a sample from Sean Kean’s pod tranny:

One example is a book called The Rape of Troy by Jonathan Gottschall. And what he does is, he analyzes the sources of the conflicts in The Iliad – a little bit in The Odyssey too, but mostly in The Iliad – and he tries to look at it from the point of view of the number of available young women for men in the society, and he finds that there’s a lot of conflict. And most of the major conflicts in The Iliad are based on trying to find young women for the men to marry. That’s a little bit of a simplification, of course, but that’s the basic conflict in the book – over and over again they’re fighting about having women to marry. And it sort of gets at that they’re really fighting – even if they talk about honor or wealth or other things – in some fundamental sense, they’re really fighting for their evolutionary legacy.

Mmm, just as I suspected Sean Kean is suffering from evolutionary tone deafness. As it happens, the story really is about honor and wealth (to the extent that wealth confers honor), and about one man’s anger when he is dissed: To make that clear, it begins, Sing, Goddess, the wrath of Achilles … ”

Sure, all those guys wanted girls, except for the ones who wanted guys. In some places we take that for granted, like going to the bathroom. Read More ›

From Alan Boyle at MSNBC (May 10, 2010), we learn: Sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid ranks as one of the top goals for NASA’s retooled vision for space exploration. A year ago, President Barack Obama told NASA to gear up to take on such a mission by the year 2025. Up to that time, NASA had been focusing on a return to the moon — which means that the agency had to retool its mission plans. This week’s engineering tests, organized by NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations, or NEEMO, will help NASA get ready to set off for its new target.”Even experts don’t know what the surface of an asteroid is going to be like,” NEEMO project manager Bill Read More ›

The thing to see is that their worldview – even if they are Catholic – would not allow them to get it right.

If they did, they could hardly get the words published in a respectable paper. Remember that when you renew your subscription: The constrained language of current media reporting does not usually permit these people to tell us a straight story. On anything.

Here, Jay Richards at Discovery Institute, himself a Catholic, comments on the reaction to the Pope saying, at Easter, Read More ›

Here’s a project to test that: Read More ›

Darwinists are drunks looking for their keys under a lamppost, when their keys are not even in the same neighborhood as the lamppost. Math represents the most rigorous of all the sciences. Without a logical and clearly defined proof, nothing in mathematics is taken seriously. This is in direct contradiction to Darwinism, which proposes an unlimited universe of thoroughly unsubstantiated speculation, none of which is subject to any rigorous analytical scrutiny. Yet, we are told that anyone who even questions this unlimited universe of unsubstantiated speculation is “an enemy of science.” The reverse is precisely the case. Darwinism is the quintessential enemy of science. Science is the pursuit of knowledge about the way things really are, and when logic, evidence, Read More ›

In Nature, Philip Ball asks “Are scientific reputations boosted artificially?” (6 May 2011), Does everyone in science get the recognition they deserve? Obviously, your work hasn’t been sufficiently appreciated by your peers, but what about everyone else? Yes, I know he is vastly over-rated, and it’s a mystery why she gets invited to give so many keynote lectures, but that aside — is science a meritocracy? How would you judge? Reputation is often a word-of-mouth affair; grants, awards and prizes offer a rather more concrete measure of success. But increasingly, scientific excellence is measured by citation statistics, not least by the ubiquitous h-index1, which is intended to quantify the impact of your literary oeuvre. Do all or any of these Read More ›

In this episode, “Were Neandertals and Modern Humans Just Ships in the Night?”, Michael Balter (Science 9 May 2011) adds to the legends of the state of the, er, relationship between modern humans and Neanderthals: Read More ›

… the drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost (in connection with mathematics invading biology): There is another old joke, about a drunk searching under a lamp post for his keys. “Did you drop them here?” “No, but this is the only place where there’s enough light to look.” The original context, in Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum, was an analogy with science, and his point was the exact opposite of the usual interpretation of the joke. In science, you have to search under the lamp post, or you’ll never find anything. Even if the keys are somewhere along the road in the gutter, you might find a torch under the lamp post. Then you can Read More ›

In “The limits of knowledge: Things we’ll never understand” (New Scientist 09 May 2011), Michael Brooks offers to explain “From the machinery of life to the fate of the cosmos, what can’t science explain?”

We live in an age in which science enjoys remarkable success. We have mapped out a grand scheme of how the physical universe works on scales from quarks to galactic clusters, and of the living world from the molecular machinery of cells to the biosphere. There are gaps, of course, but many of them are narrowing. The scientific endeavour has proved remarkably fruitful, especially when you consider that our brains evolved for survival on the African savannah, not to ponder life, the universe and everything. So, having come this far, is there any stopping us?The answer has to be yes: there are limits to science. There are some things we can never know for sure because of the fundamental constraints of the physical world. Then there are the problems that we will probably never solve because of the way our brains work. And there may be equivalents to Rees’s observation about chimps and quantum mechanics – concepts that will forever lie beyond our ken.

So now we come up against the ultimate failure of materialism. Read More ›