2014

People who hold the view that “there is a non-scientific source of knowledge about the natural world, such as divine revelation or the historical teachings of a church, that trumps all other claims to knowledge,” are a menace to science. That’s the claim made by mathematician Jason Rosenhouse, in his latest post over at his Evolution Blog. Science, avers Rosenhouse, is not just a collection of facts; it’s “an attitude, one that says that all theories must be tested against facts and that evidence must be followed wherever it leads.” In an earlier 2009 post, Rosenhouse criticizes the claim that “science is not the only way of knowing,” and forthrightly declares: “The ways of knowing that are unique to religion, Read More ›

Ground crews around the country are battling permafrost for the upcoming baseball season, the Coast Guard is dealing with 30 inch ice on Lake Superior and another major snow storm just put Philadelphia over 67 inches of snow making this winter the second snowiest on record there while another major Nor’Easter appears to be shaping up. March certainly isn’t going out like a lamb and all of this is merely an exclamation point on the frigid cold from earlier in the season. From the snow in Cairo to the coldest football game ever played, the weather has not cooperated with the so-called AGW (anthropogenic, or man-made, global warming) theory. AGW has a trail of failed predictions and years ago leaked Read More ›

An article by Tim Ball, Ph.D.  Excerpt: The recent article by Nancy Green at WUWT is an interesting esoteric discussion about models. Realities about climate models are much more prosaic. They don’t and can’t work because data, knowledge of atmospheric, oceanographic, and extraterrestrial mechanisms, and computer capacity are all totally inadequate. Computer climate models are a waste of time and money. Inadequacies are confirmed by the complete failure of all forecasts, predictions, projections, prognostications, or whatever they call them. It is one thing to waste time and money playing with climate models in a laboratory, where they don’t meet minimum scientific standards, it is another to use their results as the basis for public policies where the economic and social Read More ›

You wake up after what you thought was minor surgery and … … it’s not just that it doesn’t feel like your body, it actually isn’t. Oops. Bureaucratic oversight at the hospital. They say it never happens. Okay, well, sometimes. Actually, it seems there is an investigation going on but … oh, get over yourself! … Actually, the subject of brain implants was seriously discussed recently in the Wall Street Journal (where  benefits are identified, along with risks): Many people will resist the first generation of elective implants. There will be failures and, as with many advances in medicine, there will be deaths. But anybody who thinks that the products won’t sell is naive. Even now, some parents are willing to Read More ›

Professor Larry Moran has kindly responded to my recent post questioning whether he, or anyone else, understands macroevolution. In the course of his response, titled, What do Intelligent Design Creationists really think about macroevolution?, Professor Moran posed a rhetorical question: I recently wrote up a little description of the differences between the human and chimpanzee/bonobo genomes showing that those differences are perfectly consistent with everything we know about mutation rates and the fixation of alleles in populations [Why are the human and chimpanzee/bonobo genomes so similar?]. In other words, I answered Vincent Torley’s question [about whether there was enough time for macroevolution to have occurred – VJT]. That post was met with deafening silence from the IDiots. I wonder why? Read More ›

In my first post I discussed the concept of information, in particular whether information is contained in a physical object by its mere existence.  In this post I would like to consider an additional issue relating to information, namely, the point at which information arises or comes into existence. Information is often closely associated with meaning – meaning that is transmitted from a sender to a receiver.  As a result, some have suggested that information only exists when there is both a sender and a receiver who have a prior agreement about the protocols to encode the information and after there is a successful transmission, receipt and understanding of the information. However, viewing information as existing only after it has been transmitted Read More ›

Here. It is tempting to decry frustrating restrictions on academic research as violations of academic freedom. Yet I would encourage student and worker organizers to instead use a framework of justice. After all, if we give up our obsessive reliance on the doctrine of academic freedom, we can consider more thoughtfully what is just. Freedom only for the just. And who gets to decide what is just? We do of course. How far behind can the brown shirts be?

In his Dead Dog post Sal quotes Jonathan Wells as follows: If we place a small amount of sterile salt solution in a test tube at just the right temperature and acidity, add a living cell, and then poke a hole in that cell with a sterile needle, the contents will leak out. We will have in our test tube all of the molecules needed for life, in just the right proportions (relative to each other) and already assembled into complex specified DNAs, RNAs, proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates. But we will not be able to make a living cell out of them. We cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Later Sal specifically addresses Neil Rickert with the following question: Read More ›

Like contemporary hairstyles in a western movie, evolution also has its anachronisms. As we have discussed before, when the leading edge in biology was breeding, evolution was cast as  Read more