check her ID: On Friday, Michele Bachmann (R-MN) — incredibly, a Presidential front-runner for the Republicans — said this: I support intelligent design […] What I support is putting all science on the table and then letting students decide. I don’t think it’s a good idea for government to come down on one side of scientific issue or another, when there is reasonable doubt on both sides. Why is that incredible? Most Americans, in poll after poll, find Darwinism unbelievable. So they should fund it? Sponsor persecutions on its behalf? Note: UD News can’t help the fact that an entire field in science is having a collective nervous breakdown about the idea that anyone would question their total devotion to Read More ›

“In Genetic Basis for Crime: A New Look” New York Times (June 19, 2011) , Patricia Cohen tells us

Researchers estimate that at least 100 studies have shown that genes play a role in crimes. “Very good methodological advances have meant that a wide range of genetic work is being done,” said John H. Laub, the director of the justice institute, who won the Stockholm Prize in Criminology last week. He and others take pains to emphasize, however, that genes are ruled by the environment, which can either mute or aggravate violent impulses. Many people with the same genetic tendency for aggressiveness will never throw a punch, while others without it could be career criminals. 

The subject still raises thorny ethical and policy questions.

In which case, these findings should – or should not – Read More ›

“Are we all travelling “incognito“, my latest at MercatorNet June 21, 2011), looks at Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist David Eagleman’s book Incognito, focusing on his proposed neuroscience fix for criminal law:

“Those who break the social contracts need to be warehoused, but in this case the future is of more importance than the past.”

“Warehoused”? How, exactly, is that a reform? We are also told that a criminal’s “actions are sufficient evidence of a brain abnormality, even if we don’t know (and maybe will never know) the details.” Yes, but one may as well say that a criminal’s “actions are sufficient evidence of infestation by Square Circle Disease, even if we don’t know (and maybe will never know) the details.”

More. Also:

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Editor’s note: ‘‘A Second Look at the Second Law’’

An article, ‘‘A Second Look at the Second Law,’’ by Dr. Granville Sewell, Professor of Mathematics at University of Texas at El Paso, was submitted on October 21, 2010 to the Journal of Applied Mathematics Letters. Dr. Sewell’s article was peerreviewed and accepted for publication on January 19, 2011.

On March 2, 2011, the Editor-in-Chief of Applied Mathematics Letters, Dr. Ervin Rodin, decided to withdraw the articlewithout consultation with the author, not because of any errors or technical problems found by the reviewers or editors,but because the Editor-in-Chief subsequently concluded that the content was more philosophical than mathematical and, as such, not appropriate for a technical mathematics journal such as Applied Mathematics Letters.

The Journal of Applied Mathematics Letters and its Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Rodin, provide their sincere and heartfelt apologies to Dr. Sewell for any inconvenience or embarrassment that may have been caused by their unilateral withdrawal of his article, and wish Dr. Sewell the best in the future and welcome Dr. Sewell’s submission of future articles for possible publication.

Dr. Sewell’s article as accepted by Applied Mathematics Letters can be viewed at:

http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/sewell/AML_3497.pdf.

It is on line, but it’s only free if you have a science direct subscription.

Further:

Breaking, breaking: ID friendly math prof gets apology and damages from journal Read More ›

In Gil’s recent ANNOUNCEMENT thread, Dr Liddle has made a summary of her core challenge to design thinkers, at no 6:

One of the few books of Stephen Jay Gould I never read was his Mismeasure of Man. I suppose it was a low priority – as I have never considered cranial capacity a measure of intelligence or state of advancement. This is partly because of an awareness that women tend to have smaller skulls than men and yet this has no bearing on their cognitive skills. I knew that Gould was taking Samuel George Morton to task because Morton had considered cranial capacity to be significant for ranking human races in some sort of hierarchical order. Gould considered that Morton provided a case study of someone who had “finangled” his data and his analysis to reach unwarranted conclusions. His 1978 Read More ›

Remember, autism was – one author claims – a useful adaptation in “evolutionary history”?

Caroline Crocker at AITSE discusses that in the most recent newsletter, after addressing the theories of autism’s cause that are worth taking seriously:

Jared is writing his first paper as a doctoral candidate and so, should be given credit for a very imaginative hypothesis. But, his professors should be held accountable for their lamentable lack of guidance. The young man then goes on to bury himself even deeper in the evolutionary psychology mumbo jumbo and begins to compare the behavior of those with ASDs with that of orangutans and the behavior of non-autistics with that of chimpanzees. He does give a disclaimer on page 221, saying that “no offense is intended towards autistic individuals in this comparison with orangutans,” but by then the reader is finding it hard to focu on his meaning for laughing at this poor student’s politically correct squirming. 

[Most people looking for answers are pretty desperate, and don’t appreciate this kind of thing.] Read More ›

At MSNBC’s Cosmic Log, we learn that “growing crops made us smaller” (June 20, 2011), John Roach tells us that the beginnings of agriculture were not obviously successful for our ancestors, as is often assumed:

People got shorter and sicker everywhere in the world when they started to farm about 10,000 years ago, according to a recent study that suggests the transition to an agricultural lifestyle came at a biological cost.

[ … ]

As people gave up the diverse diet of foraged foods and settled on eating a few staple food crops they “experienced nutritional deficiencies and had a harder time adapting to stress,” Amanda Mummert, an anthropology graduate student at Emory University, said in a news release.

Compounding the problem, growth in population density spurred by agricultural settlements led to an increase in unsanitary conditions ripe for spreading infectious diseases and the transmission of novel viruses from livestock to humans, she added.

Some would add that the earliest crop plants were probably just pampered weeds, from the modern farmer’s perspective. The precious seed stock for food grains that are well suited to human stomachs must have been a work of centuries, done with only the knowledge of plant genetics that one might gain from observation and experience. It’s doubtful our ancestors would have persisted without Read More ›

Or so we learn: in “Bacteria develop restraint for survival in a rock-paper-scissors community” (ScienceDaily, 20-Jun-2011):

It is a common perception that bigger, stronger, faster organisms have a distinct advantage for long-term survival when competing with other organisms in a given community.But new research from the University of Washington shows that in some structured communities, organisms increase their chances of survival if they evolve some level of restraint that allows competitors to survive as well, a sort of “survival of the weakest.” Read More ›

After much thought and consideration, I have decided to announce at UD that I believe in evolution.
Read More ›

At HuffPost, Jonathan Dudley (“a seminary graduate now training to be a medical scientist”) allows us to know that “Christian Faith Requires Accepting Evolution” (06/18/11), because (among other things)

Many think the widespread rejection of evolution doesn’t really matter. Evolution is about what happened in the past, the argument goes, so rejecting it doesn’t have an impact on policies we make today. And aside from school curricula, they may be right.But the belief that scientists can discover truth, and that, once sufficiently debated, challenged and modified, it should be accepted even if it creates tensions for familiar belief systems, has an obvious impact on decisions that are made everyday. And it is that belief Christians reject when they reject evolution.

In doing so, they’ve not only led America astray on questions ranging from the value of stem cell research to the etiology of homosexuality to the causes of global warming. They’ve also abandoned a central commitment of orthodox Christianity. Read More ›

As we noted earlier, in “Why the universe wasn’t fine-tuned for life” (New Scientist, 14 June 2011), Marcus Chown reports on physicist Victor Stenger’s “devastating demolition” of the argument that the laws of physics of our universe were “fine-tuned” to foster life, in The Fallacy of Fine-tuning: Even if some parameters turn out to be fine-tuned, Stenger argues this could be explained if ours is just one universe in a “multiverse” – an infinite number of universes, each with different physical parameters. We would then have ended up in the one where the laws of physics are fine-tuned to life because, well, how could we not have?Religious people say that, by invoking a multiverse, physicists are going to extraordinary lengths Read More ›

In “A Survey and an Assertion: Twelve potted philosophers and a theory of human values” (The American Scholar, 2011) Carlin Romano asks, regarding philosophy,

How can it be that philosophy, the world’s oldest profession without climactic satisfactions, remains so ill-defined? No matter where you turn, from academic pronouncement to middlebrow mulling to literary speculation, the thumbnails of it differ.  Read More ›

Here at Listverse. Also rans include Mein Kampf (7) and the The Manifesto of the Communist Party (3) The author’s thesis is: On the list because: It fuels fundamentalist attacks on Science By arguing against aspects of Darwin’s theories, this book has given fuel to the fundamentalists who argue that a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis is the only possible manner in which the earth was created. Despite much refutation from the Scientific community, many fundamentalists still use this as a “source” for proof that evolution is not true. The book itself was not peer reviewed as Behe claimed under oath, and the Science community has overwhelming rejected it. It should be noted that Behe himself is not Read More ›

Since it is liable otherwise to be lost in the flood of distractive tangential comments,  I here headline my markup of PZM’s recent remarks on Dr Jonathan Wells.

Pardon some fairly direct comments, but unless we specifically expose capital examples of what we are objecting to, the destructive misbehaviour will continue:

[“They said it: Judge Jones of Dover …” is here. – UD News]

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