The boss here is an American, so he tends to be courteous.   Canadians, like some of his help, were raised on ice hockey, so  … Anyway, in response to Reasonable people doubt science the way we doubt used car dealers, one of Darwin’s wise has responded, Every thing we know is a belief of one sort or another. We believe the Sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning because that’s what it’s always done. We don’t step off the top off tall buildings without any other means of support because we believe we’ll fall to the ground and be killed. Reasonable people stop believing in vaccines and we start seeing a resurgence of measles or polio. Most of Read More ›

Long suspected: SA’s Hubble Space Telescope has the best evidence yet for an underground saltwater ocean on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. The subterranean ocean is thought to have more water than all the water on Earth’s surface. Identifying liquid water is crucial in the search for habitable worlds beyond Earth and for the search for life, as we know it. “This discovery marks a significant milestone, highlighting what only Hubble can accomplish,” said John Grunsfeld, assistant administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C. “In its 25 years in orbit, Hubble has made many scientific discoveries in our own solar system. A deep ocean under the icy crust of Ganymede opens up further exciting possibilities for life Read More ›

Here: Science is the use of observation to guide thinking about the world to understand it. This grand, idealistic, with-a-big-S Science is not broken. However, much of the actual, concrete with-a-small-s science, i.e. the activity of scientists today, is not good Science. Some aspects of how modern science works go against the principles of Science. For instance, one of the key theories of how Science ought to work is Karl Popper‘s notion of falsifiability. Popper argued that for a theory to be considered scientific, it had to be falsifiable. That is, a theory should make predictions that could be tested and, potentially, proven wrong. An unfalsifiable theory is just not science. A falsifiable theory might be right or wrong – Read More ›

A friend sends info re this National Geographic edition, reinforcing the essential message: Fund us, you twits We are science! For example: “Those of us in the science-communication business are as tribal as anyone else, he told me. We believe in scientific ideas not because we have truly evaluated all the evidence but because we feel an affinity for the scientific community. When I mentioned to Kahan that I fully accept evolution, he said, “Believing in evolution is just a description about you. It’s not an account of how you reason.” Look, anyone who “believes in” evolution is either a twit or a ripoff artist looking for funding from public service unions (or some similar group). Evolution isn’t something we Read More ›

Further to: First, the blow-dried TV crowd don’t know anything about evolution, if you don’t count the Inherit the Wind productions they took in at school. All nonsense and falsehood. All nonsense and falsehood, actually, about the neighbours the TV crowd sneered at and left behind, and felt themselves superior for doing so—while they invested their lives in their losing media industries. And distanced the people who would have cared about them. Who really thinks Scott Walker’s opinions about “evolution” are good TV?  Isn’t it just TV’s own losers who care? Anyway, friend says,   Tom Bethell: I watch the PBS NewsHour, but less and less. It was much better when Jim Lehrer was still on board. Today I feel confident Read More ›

… people who are hired to say the opposite. Reader Douglas Ell writes, responding to the elite worry that recent ENCODE findings don’t support Darwinism to say, ENCODE is only one of many recent scientific rejections of the Atheist argument from ignorance — the argument that, when we find something we don’t immediately understand, we should conclude the organism was not designed. Other examples include whale hips, the appendix, and the reverse-wired photoreceptors in our eyes. In each of these cases, but most strikingly in human DNA, as we learn more, we uncover evidence of design. Sure. Except when we uncover some slender reasons to say the opposite.

When writing this story, there were two traps I started falling into: The first one is, act like there is something really great about the person who notices that the universe shows evidence of design. No, that’s just normal. The Darwinists and the Christian Darwinists, paid off by Templeton for example, are earning their keep by casting doubt. But some people don’t depend on such sources. So they report facts. Lennox is one. Good to hear. But we need to get past being grateful for someone who tells the truth. Second, the event happened in Canada. I made a point of not mentioning that at first. So you won’t fall asleep behind the wheel, okay?: For the info of no Read More ›

Carl Sagan was famous for his aphorism, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The Sagan standard, as it has been called, is often invoked by skeptics such as John Loftus and Professor Larry Moran (see here and here). However, these skeptics fail to distinguish between two kinds of skepticism: one good, one bad. If someone makes an extraordinary claim such as, “I saw a flying saucer land in my backyard last night,” then it is reasonable to consider the possibility that they did not see anything land in their backyard last night, as well as the possibility that they did see something land in their backyard, but it was not a flying saucer. What I intend to argue in this post Read More ›

Biology teachers think understanding faith, teaching evolution not mutually exclusive No, they wouldn’t. Their faith is Darwin = jobs and facts don’t matter: Critics of evolution often take advantage of a teacher’s limited understanding of evolution to foster doubt in the science and make the science seem less settled than it actually is, according to Berkman, who worked with Eric Plutzer, professor of political science and academic director at the Survey Research Center. These critics need only a slight opening to sow that doubt, he added. “You don’t have to necessarily prove an alternate theory, you just have to shed sufficient doubt on the prevailing scientific consensus,” said Berkman. “This is not an original idea. A variety of people and Read More ›

It seems to be time to call in the energy audit police. Let us explain, in light of an ongoing sharp exchange on “compensating” arguments in the illusion of organising energy thread. This morning Piotr, an objector (BTW — and this is one time where expertise base is relevant —  a Linguist), at 288 dismissed Niwrad: Stop using the term “2nd law” for something that is your private misconception. You’ve got it all backwards . . . This demands correction, as Niwrad has done little more than appropriately point out that functionally specific complex organisation and associated information cannot cogently be explained away by making appeals to irrelevant energy flows elsewhere. Organisation is not properly to be explained on spontaneous Read More ›

Christians around the world would say: If only. The current exponent of that view is Steve Pinker: The Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: a history of violence and humanity (2011) has not only been an international bestseller – more than a thousand pages long and containing a formidable array of graphs and statistics, the book has established something akin to a contemporary orthodoxy. It is now not uncommon to find it stated, as though it were a matter of fact, that human beings are becoming less violent and more altruistic. Ranging freely from human pre-history to the present day, Pinker presents his case with voluminous erudition. Part of his argument consists in showing Read More ›

The best attested effect in medicine. Here: One common explanation for the efficacy of some alternative medicine is the ‘placebo effect’. If there is a placebo effect, it still has the healing effect. So why not go with that? It doesn’t really matter what’s in the black box: the mechanism of healing isn’t the crucial thing, all that matters is that when you take this particular tablet, it relieves your headache. Yes, a placebo can be very useful, and it may be that some of the effect of conventional medicine is achieved through placebo. But, of course, we know that it’s not just placebo when we’ve done the science. We know that, in fact, these drugs really do have medicinal Read More ›

It would be a full time job to track down, monitor and document the scientific misrepresentations in the evolution literature. From textbooks and articles to websites, videos, popular books and the rest, the evolution literature is a continual stream of exaggerations and misrepresentations of the scientific evidence. Here is an example regarding the genetic code from the Public Broadcasting Service website:  Read more

Probably. Some guy actually asks questions we have all been wondering about: reflecting on the current cover story in National Geographic, “The War on Science”: : Anyone who expresses any doubt in what National Geographic calls “the consensus of experts” is a crank or a nut. From the magazine’s perspective, no other explanations are even worth consideration. And the article featured a reproduction of an 1893 map of the “Stationary and Square Earth” drawn up by a South Dakota businessman who insisted that the Earth was flat. It was an illustration, National Geo says, of how “we subconsciously cling to our intuitions” about the world even when experts tell us we are wrong. Among the many things missing from the Read More ›

Otherwise, how to explain this?: There are a few university administrations that still seem committed to making academic freedom a leading value, even though it is a distinctly difficult value to monetize (and is indeed one that may be a consistent money-loser). For instance, the University of Chicago recently issued a strong statement on academic freedom. But that effort, headed by University of Chicago law professor and former provost Geoffrey Stone, seems increasingly to be the exception rather than the rule. What are we to do? Well, I believe we as university-based researchers should at least be quite concerned when academics have to worry about being “off-brand.” We should, I think, be pretty agitated when a university professor has to Read More ›