Three items from Retraction Watch: 1. Unhelpful retractions: A group of authors have withdrawn a 2011 Journal of Biological Chemistry paper, but then appear to have re-published almost the same paper a month later, only this time with just five of the original nine authors. … As we’ve come to expect from the JBC, here’s the full retraction notice, in all its inexplicit glory … If you ever find out what happened, tell us. 2. Faked data: In what can only be described as a remarkable and swift series of events, one of the authors of a much-ballyhooed Science paper claiming that short conversations could change people’s minds on same-sex marriage is retracting it following revelations that the data were Read More ›

Biases? In science? From Nautilus: Sometimes it seems surprising that science functions at all. In 2005, medical science was shaken by a paper with the provocative title “Why most published research findings are false.”1 Written by John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, it didn’t actually show that any particular result was wrong. Instead, it showed that the statistics of reported positive findings was not consistent with how often one should expect to find them. As Ioannidis concluded more recently, “many published research findings are false or exaggerated, and an estimated 85 percent of research resources are wasted.” It’s likely that some researchers are consciously cherry-picking data to get their work published. And some of the problems surely Read More ›

Here, from Stan Persky’s review of Barry Dainton’s Self: Philosophy in Transit: Many well-known and respected philosophers and scientists deny that selves exist in any meaningful way and suggest that our sense of having or being a self is simply an illusion. As Barry Dainton puts it in the book under review, It is worth noting that in some contemporary intellectual circles the doctrine that there exists anything resembling a self as traditionally conceived — a fundamentally mental thing that is in principle separable from a body — is widely assumed to have been wholly discredited, regardless of how most people might think of themselves. Indeed, the banishment of the self as traditionally conceived is sometimes seen as a hallmark of Read More ›

My new Discovery Institute Press book “In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design (2nd edition),” includes an Epilogue entitled “Is God Really Good?” which attempts to deal with the “problem of pain.” Given that one of the primary criticisms of ID is the inaccurate claim that it is just an attempt to dress up theology as science, why would I include an explicitly theological chapter in a book on intelligent design? The answer is that while it is widely believed that Darwinism is good science, and that its critics just do not like its philosophical and theological implications, after writing and arguing about ID for over 30 years it is completely obvious to me by now that the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The discovery is the first evidence that an even earlier group of proto-humans may have had the thinking abilities needed to figure out how to make sharp-edged tools. The stone tools mark “a new beginning to the known archaeological record,” say the authors of a new paper about the discovery, published today in the leading scientific journal Nature. “The whole site’s surprising, it just rewrites the book on a lot of things that we thought were true,” said geologist Chris Lepre of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Rutgers University, a co-author of the paper who precisely dated the artifacts. The tools “shed light on an unexpected and previously unknown period of hominin behavior and can tell us a Read More ›

Truth be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn’t evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of ‘like begets like’. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at Read More ›

Let’s start our day off right with some nonsense from the BBC The average human height has gone up in industrialised countries ranging from the United Kingdom to the United States to Japan, with gains of up to 10 centimetres. But for height gains over the last 150 years, one nation stands head and shoulders above all others. Today, young Dutch men and women average around 184cm and 170cm in height, respectively – both, on average, 19cm taller than their mid-19th Century counterparts. “That’s a good number to shock people with,” says John Komlos, professor emeritus of economic history at the University of Munich. Why have humans in general, and the Dutch in particular, got taller? Does this altitudinous trend Read More ›

O’Leary for News’ blog on new media Yes, we need to crack down on cyberbullying But victims must help! STOP being victims! Will your hologram replace you? At home and at work? How the Internet become a haven for tyranny: Disinfect our right to be angry about the loss of the civil liberty to complain about aggression. Helping teens stay real in the age of virtual: Do teens learn about “click farms” in school? Should they? Would it make a difference? Does the Internet contribute to childhood obesity? New tech devices like smartphones, iPads, and iPods mainly exercise fingers and eyes. Coping with the shamestorms of social media: First, grow an alligator hide. Follow UD News at Twitter!

Good question to ponder overnight. John Hartnett quotes cosmologist Lee Smolin*: It is true that mathematics is not a human invention, but more of a discovery, and thus has objective existence in that sense. But to declare the magnificent edifice of Mathematics to inhabit an orthogonal dimension that is inaccessible to scientific scrutiny, is a hypothesis that cannot in principle be falsified, and thus, it is not a scientific hypothesis but more of a belief, for those who are inclined to believe it. Best read the whole thing. But is this part of the current, quite serious, war on falsifiability? If not, how not? Readers? (*see also: Should we be nicer to cosmologist Lee Smolin? ) Follow UD News at Twitter!

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more fulsome: It is difficult to define a whole school of political ideology precisely, but one may reasonably define liberalism (as opposed to conservatism) in the contemporary United States as the genuine concern for the welfare of genetically unrelated others and the willingness to contribute larger proportions of private resources for the welfare of such others. In the modern political and economic context, this willingness usually translates into paying higher proportions of individual incomes in taxes toward the government and its social welfare programs. Liberals usually support such social welfare programs and higher taxes to finance them, and conservatives usually oppose them. Defined as such, liberalism is evolutionarily novel. Humans (like other Read More ›

It was puzzling, at best, to hear (last night) commenter REC, try to spin at this post, To All of Those We Mutilated, “Our Bad, But At Least We Weren’t Science Deniers” this idea: Eugenics was not, from first to last, a Darwinian project. Everyone who knows anything about the subject knows that it was a Darwinian project. Yet REC writes, Some famous (then and now) geneticists opposed eugenics. So? Clearly, no one paid attention to them. Darwinism ruled. It was enforced through the legal system, which was precisely Barry Arrington’s point. About 45 years ago, I was even briefly involved in the campaign to get rid of the practice in a Canadian province where – surprise, surprise – east Read More ›

In 1921 the Second International Eugenics Congress was held in New York at the American Museum of Natural History.  Leonard Darwin (Charles Darwin’s son) was the keynote speaker, and he used the opportunity to advocate aggressive eugenics programs for the “elimination of the unfit.”  Eugenics had already made some headway in the United States, but after the Second Congress it really took off in the scientific community.  Hundreds of universities instituted courses in the subject, and prestigious foundations like the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation began funding Eugenics research programs. Public policy soon followed the scientific consensus of the time and eventually 36 states adopted eugenics laws of some kind.  In 1927 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., writing for the Read More ›

The authors explain that the meta-incentives encouraging rewards given to co-operators in social dilemmas significantly prevent cooperative incentive-non-providers who shirk their duty to provide incentives to others, or the second-order free riders. The authors focused on one human trait, a linkage, which means individuals who are willing to provide incentives would automatically provide meta-incentives as well. Allowing a reward-to-reward linkage, rather than a punishment system, can resolve the social dilemma without any social costs for formal incentive systems. “Unexpectedly, the role of the reward system in resolving social dilemmas is significant,” says Okada. “We would apply it to real social and biological situations in the absence of the strong institutions by analyzing the efficiency of incentives required for keeping cooperation. Read More ›

Never boils. But that somehow never matters. Do readers remember these stories? The multiverse circus is coming back to a PBS affiliate near you? And If you’ve ever doubted that popular culture loves the multiverse… Well, here is public broadcasting on Gravitational Waves From Bubble Universe Collisions: Follow inflation to what many theorists think is its logical conclusion, though, and things get very strange. That’s because many versions of inflation lead straight to a multiverse: that is, a cosmos in which our universe is just one of many universes, each with different laws and fundamental constants of physics. The idea is controversial, not least because there is no guarantee that we would ever be able to prove or disprove the Read More ›

Yesterday, johnnyb asked whether doubt is the engine of science: The narrative goes like this: science proceeds by taking everything we think we know and hold dear and doubting it; this doubt is what allows the progress of knowledge. Christopher Hitchens said he was “a skeptic who believes that doubt is the great engine, the great fuel of all inquiry, all discovery, and all innovation.” Here’s one approach: Doubt isn’t “the engine” of anything at all. Doubt is by definition a retardant: It causes us to stop, hold back, get more advice, check the stats, read the manual again, phone someone, don’t shoot, don’t shoot, don’t shoot … wait for backup, wait for backup … As johnnyb points out, doubt Read More ›