2011

John Horgan, who took it on the ear some years ago for prophesying the end of science, now asks, provocatively I suppose, whether theorizing about alternative universes is immoral: These multiverse theories all share the same fundamental defect: They can be neither confirmed nor falsified. Hence, they don’t deserve to be called scientific, according to the well-known criterion proposed by the philosopher Karl Popper. Some defenders of multiverses and strings mock skeptics who raise the issue of falsification as “Popperazi” – which is cute but not a counterargument. Multiverse theories aren’t theories – they’re science fictions, theologies, works of the imagination unconstrained by evidence. And they’re fun too. They’re everything except science, and good on Horgan for pointing it out. Read More ›

Ken Connor, commenting on Jonah Lehrer’s New Yorker piece (December 13, 2010) on the loss of replicability of science findings over time, writes, But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. . . . For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated Read More ›

Canada’s National Post tears into the Canadian Association of University Teachers’ “investigations” of Christian universities: The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) — which describes itself as Canada’s “national voice for academic staff” — says it has investigated four small Christian colleges and universities in the past 18 months because it wants parents to know what kind of institutions their sons and daughters might attend. In other words, we are told, there is nothing nefarious in the 65,000-member union’s action. It is merely performing a valuable public service.This is disingenuous nonsense. The CAUT is on a thinly disguised anti-Christian witch hunt. There is no other way to describe it. [ … ] The investigations were instigated entirely by CAUT executive Read More ›

As if evolution was not silly enough already evolutionists are now claiming that the fact that different plants all have leaves is a compelling evidence for their belief that all of nature just happened to spontaneously arise, all by itself. I occasionally enjoy a good spoof, but this is no joke. You can see this evolutionary logic for yourself right here. Some may find this unbelievable but this example, while stupefying, is actually representative of evolutionary thinking.  Read more

Here’s a good one: NCSE’s Eugenie Scott Serves as Chief of Darwinian Thought Police for University of Kentucky Faculty Casey Luskin February 11, 2011 9:29 AM As reported on ID the Future interview, Martin Gaskell’s attorney Frank Manion stated that during the course of Gaskell’s lawsuit, it became clear that Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), consulted University of Kentucky (UK) faculty about whether UK should hire Gaskell. She gave Gaskell a clean bill of health–not because she endorsed hiring Darwin-skeptics, but because at the time she believed Gaskell was a died-in-the-wool evolutionist–“accepting of evolution.” According to her e-mail, Eugenie Scott wrote: Gaskell hasn’t popped onto our radar as an antievolution activist. Checking his Read More ›

From the Australian (Paul Monk, February 7, 2011), on the dangers of consensus in science: … we are justified in being wary of foreclosing major debates based on scientific consensus, since it can be in error. Second, it shows that the way to challenge and correct scientific consensus is not through polemic or denial, but through specifying crucial variables and deductions and testing them scrupulously, in the manner of Hubble. Third, it shows that there is, nonetheless, such a thing as scientific consensus and that when handled in the manner just described, it tends to prove self-correcting. Fourth, it shows that ideally such correction will occur, as it did between Hubble and Shapley, on the basis of lucid examination of Read More ›

A  friend reminds me of this 2004 paper on the busted molecular clock: For almost a decade now, a team of molecular evolutionists has produced a plethora of seemingly precise molecular clock estimates for divergence events ranging from the speciation of cats and dogs to lineage separations that might have occurred ,4 billion years ago. Because the appearance of accuracy has an irresistible allure, non-specialists frequently treat these estimates as factual. In this article, we show that all of these divergence-time estimates were generated through improper methodology on the basis of a single calibration point that has been unjustly denuded of error. The illusion of precision was achieved mainly through the conversion of statistical estimates (which by definition possess standard Read More ›

Like, this got past somebody: I’ve been reading and talking to anthropologists about the demonic-males theory for years, and I’ve turned from a believer to a skeptic. Here are some reasons why:Wrangham and other chimpanzee researchers often present the rate of “intercommunity killing” in terms of annual deaths per 100,000 population. Mitani, for example, estimates the mortality rate from coalitionary attacks in Kibale to be as high as “2,790 per 100,000 individuals per year.” But the researchers witnessed only 18 coalitionary killings. All told, since Jane Goodall began observing chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park in 1960, researchers have directly observed 31 intergroup killings, of which 17 were infants. I obtained these figures by adding numbers from a 2006 paper Read More ›

It looks like New Mexico is next up for the scientific controversies wars. A new bill has been introduced that would allow teachers to inform students of controversies with respect to science, and specifically would prohibit them from being punished for doing so. The bill states ” A teacher who chooses to provide such information shall be protected from reassignment, termination, discipline or other discrimination for doing so.” Entire bill (less than 1 page), here. This should bring the science tax burden mediocrities out in force. We can’t stress enough how New Mexicans need to be protected from any suggestion that the Beard or some other nabob might not know all the answers.

One of the pleasures of walking through a wood is hearing the distant drumming of woodpeckers. We know they are searching for food, but few of us grasp the extraordinary nature of their achievement. Drumming rates of about 20 impacts per second are normal, with decelerations of 1200 g, and the drumming sessions may be repeated 500-600 times per day. By contrast, humans can lose consciousness when experiencing 4-6 g and are left concussed with a single deceleration of about 100 g. The authors of a recent analysis of the woodpecker’s shock-absorbing mechanism describes it as “advanced” and “special”. By looking at video material of drumming and CT scans of the bird’s head and neck, they found four structures that Read More ›

As the Urey-Miller model of abiogenesis has grown weaker with time, interest in extra-terrestrial sources of amino acids has increased. The phrase “building blocks of life” is well-used: in 2005, space.com referred to amino acid precursors formed “in the winds of dying stars and spread all over interstellar space”; in 2008, National Geographic used the phrase when reporting on the detection of a precursor of glycine in the galaxy Arp 220. In December 2010, Nasa reported the presence of 19 amino acids in a carbon-rich meteorite and commented: “Finding them in this type of meteorite suggests that there is more than one way to make amino acids in space, which increases the chance for finding life elsewhere in the Universe.” Read More ›

turns out to be a “theistic evolutionist”? Astronomer sees room for God in sciencesThe two are not wholly exclusive, Christian scientist who won lawsuit says Gaskell, who studies supermassive black holes at the University of Texas in Austin, said he considers himself a “theistic evolutionist”: a Christian who accepts Darwin’s theory along with evidence that the earth is billions of years old. “We believe that God has done things through the mechanisms he’s revealing to us through science,” he said. He has also written that evolution theory has “significant scientific problems” and includes “unwarranted atheistic assumptions and extrapolations.” – Dylan Lovan, MSNBC, 2/9/2011 Okay, so Gaskell didn’t fall down and worship the Beard. Do you? This is just a Yank Read More ›

Image processing is but one of the many very clever design features in our eyes. Mores the pity that many who are focused on the blind spot cannot understand eyes to be Intelligently Designed. The fovea of the eye captures the small section of our visual field where we are looking directly. It is richly replete with colour sensing cones. It requires more light but has very high precision. When we look directly at someone or something in good light, that is where we get the detail from. In contrast to a TV screen and a video camera, which have the same detail all over the screen, the eyes economically concentrate on our point of direct interest, and scan the remaining Read More ›

Evolution Sunday was couple weekends back, right? Never got there.* But the thought intrigued me, could we help these forlorn people out by composing some praise songs? Hey, how about”mutation” instead of “salvation” or “selection” instead of “perfection” … Brainstorming just to get you started. No blasphemy now. Our list guvs are all devout Christians. But, given popular iconography, we may certainly refer to the atheists’ object of adoration as “the Beard,” and help them look openly as well as privately ridiculous. (*At my church that Sunday, we were mostly doing what churches have done for 2000 years, so we must be doing everything wrong, right? The competition says so, and we of course agree with them politely and go Read More ›