Theodore Dalrymple here: Listening as I do every day to the accounts people give of their lives, I am struck by the very small part in them which they ascribe to their own efforts, choices, and actions. Implicitly, they disagree with Bacon’s famous dictum that “chiefly the mould of a man’s fortune is in his own hands.” Instead, they experience themselves as putty in the hands of fate. It is instructive to listen to the language they use to describe their lives. The language of prisoners in particular teaches much about the dishonest fatalism with which people seek to explain themselves to others, especially when those others are in a position to help them in some way. As a doctor Read More ›

We are informed in the Chronicle Review that We have entered an age of willful ignorance To see how we treat the concept of truth these days, one might think we just don’t care anymore. Politicians pronounce that global warming is a hoax. An alarming number of middle-class parents have stopped giving their children routine vaccinations, on the basis of discredited research. Meanwhile many commentators in the media — and even some in our universities — have all but abandoned their responsibility to set the record straight. (It doesn’t help when scientists occasionally have to retract their own work.) No indeed, it doesn’t help. The mounting scandals in science make it difficult to regard many disciplines as sources of legitimate Read More ›

As some researchers using a computational model claim, according to ScienceDaily: Evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould is famous for describing the evolution of humans and other conscious beings as a chance accident of history. If we could go back millions of years and “run the tape of life again,” he mused, evolution would follow a different path. A study by University of Pennsylvania biologists now provides evidence Gould was correct, at the molecular level: Evolution is both unpredictable and irreversible. Using simulations of an evolving protein, they show that the genetic mutations that are accepted by evolution are typically dependent on mutations that came before, and the mutations that are accepted become increasingly difficult to reverse as time goes on. Read More ›

In “The Importance of Not Being Certain: Understanding why the science is never settled,” Charlie Martin writes There’s this thing “science” that people talk about a lot. Climate science, political science, social science, and not to leave out my own field, computer science. And, of course, areas of study that don’t need to have “science” in their names, like chemistry and physics. But what is this thing “science”? I’ve been thinking a lot and reading a lot about it, and no, I don’t have a final answer… and then it occurred to me that “I don’t have a final answer” is really the key to understanding “science.” I think the perfect example is in mechanics. In scientific terms, “mechanics” is Read More ›

Apparently yes. From Nautilus: Five Things We Still Don’t Know About Water Including: There is something remarkable about the mist surrounding Niagara Falls: The individual droplets move as if they are negatively charged. Together with his colleagues, David Chandler, of the University of California, Berkeley, used a theory capable of describing such rare events, called transition path sampling, to calculate the water evaporation coefficient. They arrived at a value near one. This corresponds fairly well to recent liquid microjet experiments that produce a value of 0.6 for both normal water and heavy water. However, there are a couple of wrinkles. For one thing, it remains unclear why experiments performed under more atmospherically relevant conditions yield much lower values. Also, the Read More ›

By working scientists. A friend writes to tell us: The International Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS) (Web) Kizugawa, Kyoto, Japan, has proposed 15 open questions on the origin of life: 02. Why is the origin of life still a mystery? Premise: Why is the origin of life still a mystery? Yes, we all in science accept 1924 Oparin’s idea that life on Earth originated from the inanimate matter via a series of chemical steps of increasing molecular complexity and functionality. However, the turning point nonlife-life has never been put into one experimental set up-actually it has never be clarified this from a conceptual point of view either. There are of course several hypotheses, and this plethora of ideas means already Read More ›

Further to: Dawkins is destroying his reputation? (He is now generally accepted as a figure of fun, when not just bloody offensive. A threat only to his allies): Brian Eno tells us, It’s a subject that deserves serious, courageous discussion, and nobody has been more effective in stimulating that discussion than Richard Dawkins. I think that’s all that needs to be said. We agree. We would vastly prefer that Dawkins make the case for Darwinism (the creation story of new atheism)  and against any view that assigns actual meaning to life than anyone else. See also: Dawkins empties bank accounts in Minnesota (A threat only to his allies, unless you bring your charge card.) Follow UD News at Twitter!

Give the premise that humans are merely evolved animals (the 99% chimpanzee schtick*), it is hard to see how a fight against global warming (if it exists and however caused) would not devolve into a morass of oppression. After all, our behaviour is ruled by selfish genes which mechanically replicate themselves. That process creates the illusion of purpose. So if the chatterati who take Darwin (and Dawkins) for granted also want to remake the world to “fight anthropogenic global warming,” their cause will mainly turn out to be helpful to the “alpha apes.” And that would be nature unfolding as it simply must. In the Hobbesian war of all against all, there is no appeal to ethics, which are one Read More ›

I too would like to know why race is immutable but sex is a social construct.  

… and there is considerable evidence of that (Rare Earth Principle*), what difference would that make to global warming, if caused by humans? If not caused by humans? Readers? Re Vince Torley’s Straight talk about global warming: an open letter to the Catholic clergy: As I said here, it is good that someone is trying to come up with the real costs of whatever people say we must DOOOO!! NOWWW!! Usually a recipe for disaster except for a few profiteers. Solyndra, anyone? Oh, and tinpot dictators just love that sort of thing because they can regulate vast new classes of activities without dumping any old ones – and it doesn’t matter if they fail. There are no costs to the Read More ›

Reverend Fathers, Since the Pope’s upcoming encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si, is due to be released later this month, I’m sure you will be very busy telling the world’s 1.2 billion Catholic laypeople (including myself) what the encyclical means. My reason for writing this post is that while most people (including members of the clergy) are quite well-informed about the science of global warming, they tend to be poorly informed about the solutions to the problem of man-made global warming, as well as the costs of implementing those solutions. Some of you may think that these are technical issues, which the clergy need not concern themselves with. But Scripture itself counsels us to be prudent servants of the Lord, Read More ›

That’s the claim at Wired : For the first time ever a computer has managed to develop a new scientific theory using only its artificial intelligence, and with no help from human beings. Computer scientists and biologists from Tufts University programmed the computer so that it was able to develop a theory independently when it was faced with a scientific problem. The problem they chose was one that has been puzzling biologists for 120 years. The genes of sliced-up flatworms are capable of regenerating in order to form new organisms — this is a long-documented phenomenon, but scientists have been mystified for years over exactly what happens to the cells to make this possible. Really? Physicist Rob Sheldon writes to Read More ›

From Casey Luskin at Evolution News & Views: Recently a friend sent me a link to a TEDx talk, “Digital biology and open science — the coming revolution,” which affirms that life’s “complex interacting molecular machines” reveal “molecular clockwork is real and pervasive” and appear to be “built by an engineer a million times smarter than” we are. The speaker is biologist and engineer Stephen Larson, who holds a PhD in neuroscience from University of California, San Diego, and is CEO of MetaCell, a systems biology research and consulting company that seeks to understand biology through computation. Now I don’t think that Dr. Larson is pro-intelligent design, which makes his descriptions of biology all the more striking. In fact, after Read More ›

New Scientist asks Island of wild children: Would they learn to be human? … The sound comes again across the tops of the trees. Hooting, and then distant replies. High-pitched and repetitive, the sounds are not words. But they mean something anyway: the hunters are coming home. They emerge one by one from the foliage, stepping out cautiously into a wide and sandy bay. There are five of them, all males. The basic concept was done fifty years ago by William Golding in Lord of the Flies (1954). The difference is, in these times, the line between fact and fiction is increasingly blurry. What Golding meant as a parable of universal (and contemporary) human nature told as fiction, dollars to Read More ›

I am afraid, because progressives don’t think my mind is right, and progressives are never satisfied until everyone’s mind is right.  I am afraid that in the not-too-distant future I am going to be playing Luke to some progressive Boss Paul: Luke: Don’t hit me anymore…Oh God, I pray to God you don’t hit me anymore. I’ll do anything you say, but I can’t take anymore. Boss Paul: You got your mind right, Luke? Luke: Yeah. I got it right. I got it right, boss. [He grips the ankles of the guard] Boss Paul: Suppose you’s back-slide on us? Luke: Oh no I won’t. I won’t, boss. Boss Paul: Suppose you’s to back-sass? Luke: No I won’t. I won’t. I got Read More ›