From the probably overfunded Smithsonian mag:The Scopes Trial Redefined Science Journalism and Shaped It to What It Is Today In one photo, as if in testament to the success of the town’s publicity stunt, three men stand posing behind a small round table. On the table is posted a sign that reads: “At this table the scopes evolution case was started May 5, 1925.” Perhaps the men had not quite grasped the extent to which Dayton was being ridiculed around the country as a reservoir of ignorance and zealotry. More. Principally due to the activities of fashionable bigot H. E. Mencken, adored by the cocktail crowd, then and now. Except, it isn’t funny any more. William Jennings Bryan, don’t let’s Read More ›

Sure. For the same reasons as if some claim appears in the supermarket checkout counter tabloids it must be true. The tabs are probably stocked by the checkout because typical readers wouldn’t have visited the magazine section, where one could buy Scientific American or National Geographic. Okay, seriously, a friend writes to complain about the usual garbage at Wikipedia about design in nature. He cites the site’s support for consensus science as an apparent justification for the clown car. The last two times I heard the term, “consensus science,” were 1) the executive director of a do-nothing organization of Christians in science (which takes a back seat on design in nature) and 2) a top science writer denouncing consensus science Read More ›

With a small army of evolutionists working on it, and several National Science Foundation grants funding it, the University of California at Berkeley’s “Understanding Evolution” website has a surprising number of errors. One of the more egregious ones is on a page that is intended to clarify the concept of natural selection. It is entitled “Misconceptions about natural selection,” but it begins with what is perhaps the worst of all: “natural selection can produce amazing adaptations.”  Read more

A friend asks us to notice again science writer Matt Ridley’s complaint about the Climate Wars’ Damage to Science, quoting: The great thing about science is that it’s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad, because experiments get replicated and hypotheses tested — or so I used to think. Now, thanks largely to climate science, I see bad ideas can persist for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious defenders they become intolerant dogmas. Previous notice here. To some of us, the biggest problem was the wholesale manipulation of data, as in Climategate and data fudging. We were used to this with Darwinism, etc., but then some people began doing it with stuff your nephew or your granny should care Read More ›

Well, maybe. Remember Templeton winner Martin Rees? Proponent of multiverses and “our universe as possible simulation” wins this year’s Templeton Prize His latest is: So vast are the expanses of space and time that fall within an astronomer’s gaze that people in my profession are mindful not only of our moment in history, but also of our place in the wider cosmos. We wonder whether there is intelligent life elsewhere; some of us even search for it. People will not be the culmination of evolution. We are near the dawn of a post-human future that could be just as prolonged as the billions of years of Darwinian selection that preceded humanity’s emergence. The far future will bear traces of humanity, Read More ›

Yes, says Rupert Sheldrake, worth a listen: If we think information is not just an illusion: Rupert Sheldrake: The Extended Mind Some of us find it difficult to account for the intelligence of an insect colony that clearly does not reside in the brain of the individual insect. Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

In a review of Piers J. Hale’s Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the politics of evolution in Victorian England , Gregory Radick writes, Although attracted to Morris’s vision initially, Wells became disenchanted, and at exactly the moment when socialist London found itself under new pressure from Darwinian quarters. In 1888, Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog”, published a lecture entitled “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society”, which depicted nature as pitilessly gladiatorial, and humans as challenged to find and follow the path of morality even as human society remained – on pain of degeneration – subject to struggle’s stern discipline. The Left’s reply to Huxley came from Kropotkin, in a series of articles and, ultimately, a book arguing that co-operative Read More ›

The first thing that needs to be said about Professor Jerry Coyne’s new book, Faith vs. Fact, is that it gets right to the heart of the matter, in addressing the central conflict between science (or as I would say, scientism) and religion. Coyne views the conflict as an epistemic one: as he recently put it, “It’s a conflict between how you justify, or how you have confidence in, what you believe – or what you know.” Scientists accept hypotheses as true only after a rigorous process of testing, while most ordinary people (especially religious believers) would maintain that there are at least some beliefs which are warranted without any need for further testing on our part – for example, Read More ›

Rob Sheldon: RE: Einstein vs Bergson, science vs philosophy and the meaning of time:At the risk of making the waters muddier, I think the problem we are all addressing by different methods is that of Dualism–the incompatibility of material and spiritual existence. When the Enlightenment put the emphasis of the objective experience, it produced an explosion of scientific and technological progress that misled the inte lligentsia into embracing Materialism. The 20th century showed the fruit of a materialist, atheistsociety, which wasn’t pretty. But the solution–attempted many times, for example by Romanticism in the 19th century– of grafting a spiritual dimension onto the material, never really took. The graft just never got enough sustenance to survive, and so Romanticism, Gnosticism, Liberalism Read More ›

From Discover: If a signal is ‘space-time separable’, this means in effect that one can hold either space or time constant, and then measure the other. For instance, in an EEG experiment, we typically consider the signal from one particular electrode (i.e. holding space constant) and plot a graph of how it varies over time. In a task-based fMRI experiment, we hold time constant and plot the spatial extent of activity at that time point. By doing this, we are assuming that activity in the brain takes the form of standing waves. However, Alexander et al. say that while we can treat brain activity in this way, we shouldn’t, because brain activity is dominated by travelling waves, activations or deactivations Read More ›

From O’Leary for News’s other desk at MercatorNet: Why screen addiction matters to children. Many parents seem unaware of the harm. Fake news is coming to your town. And mine. Big time. And we are talking genuine fakes here. Mobile phones: Accessible banking for developing Africa? Mobile phones simply make more logistical and environmental sense. Millennials feel buyers’ remorse over social media? Maybe because it is just not safe any more. Disney world joins attractions banning selfie sticks But this is a civilization issue, not just a safety issue Do Big Box stores go to heaven when they die? Innocent victims, murdered by the Internet? Follow UD News at Twitter!

Just add: Attention schema. Get published. Case you wondered. From Aeon: Artificial intelligence is growing more intelligent every year, but we’ve never given our machines consciousness. People once thought that if you made a computer complicated enough it would just sort of ‘wake up’ on its own. But that hasn’t panned out (so far as anyone knows). Apparently, the vital spark has to be deliberately designed into the machine. And so the race is on to figure out what exactly consciousness is and how to build it. I’ve made my own entry into that race, a framework for understanding consciousness called the Attention Schema theory. Would we give up naturalism to solve the hard problem of consciousness? Follow UD News Read More ›

… must’ve told a bud who seems to have put it up here: One thing the ENCODE consortium drove home is that DNA acts like a Dynamic Random Access memory for methylation marks. That is to say, even though the DNA sequence isn’t changed, like computer RAM which isn’t physically removed, it’s electronic state can be modified. The repetitive DNA acts like physical hardware so even if the repetitive sequences aren’t changed, they can still act as memory storage devices for regulatory information. ENCODE collects huge amounts of data on methylation marks during various stages of the cell. This is like trying to take a few snapshots of a computer memory to figure out how Windows 8 works. The complexity Read More ›

In his blog post this week on the neuroscience research of Columbia’s Sean Escola, NIH Director Francis Collins makes the obvious, yet too often overlooked point that each of the hundred billion or so neurons in the human brain is different. In our profound ignorance it is easy to view the brain like a pile of pudding, achieving its fantastic abilities through a lucky mixture of the right chemicals. But of course, nothing could be farther from the truth and Collins’ observations helps to disabuse us of such folly. If you have ever wired up a machine you will understand. It is not just a pile of wires that somehow happen to get it right. Each wire has its own, Read More ›

That is doubted in a new paper: Can we learn without being aware of what we’re learning? Many psychologists say that ‘unconscious’, or implicit, learning exists. But in a new paper, London-based psychologists Vadillo, Konstantinidis, and Shanks call the evidence for this into question. … Essentially, this suggests that the reason why only 21.5% of the studies detected a significant recognition effect, is that the studies just didn’t have a large enough sample size to reliably detect it. Vadillo et al. show that the median sample size in these studies was 16, so the statistical power to detect an effect of dz = 0.31 with that sample size is just 21% – which, of course, is exactly the proportion that Read More ›