All that follows is from commenter RDM: Perhaps the greatest irony of this whole discussion, given that it is primarily dealing with materialists and their objections to self-evident moral truths, is two-fold. First, consider that in many respects, philosophical arguments are simply plausibility comparisons. One argument/view is simply more plausible than another. Now, in terms of a plausibility comparison between “it is always and everywhere wrong and evil to torture a child for fun” and “materialism is true and thus it is not always wrong to torture a child for fun”, the former is light-years more plausible and certain than the latter. Any worldview that rejects that moral truth is infinitely less plausible than the moral truth itself. In fact, Read More ›

In, where else, the New York Times: An initiative called the Reproducibility Project at the University of Virginia recently reran 100 psychology experiments and found that over 60 percent of them failed to replicate — that is, their findings did not hold up the second time around. The results, published last week in Science, have generated alarm (and in some cases, confirmed suspicions) that the field of psychology is in poor shape. But the failure to replicate is not a cause for alarm; in fact, it is a normal part of how science works.More. Unless it is happening most of the time. Presumably, the spinmistress heard about this: only one-third of published psychology research is reliable Sure,  and that guy Read More ›

From the BBC: What is our Universe made of? Billions of dark matter particles pass through us every second. “They are in your office, in your room, everywhere,” says Frenk. “They are crossing through your bodies at a rate of billions per second and you feel nothing.” There have been some false alarms along the way In theory we should be able to spot the little flashes of gamma rays from these collisions. The trouble is, lots of other things are also passing through, including radiation in the form of cosmic rays, and this swamps the signal from the dark matter. Hence the underground experiments: the rocks above block most radiation, but allow dark matter through. So far, most physicists Read More ›

In a comment to a prior post “daveS” writes: AFAIK, 2 + 2 = 4 could very well be a self-evident truth. I assume “AFAIK” means “as far as I know.” If that is the case, daveS should know that it is in the nature of self-evident truth that putting the qualifiers “AFAIK” and “could very well be” in front of the self-evident truth in question MYLLAI. “MYLLAI” for those who don’t know, means “makes you look like an idiot.”

For some weeks now, in the teeth of repeated correction, SS [attn, LH, DK etc] has been abusing the Golden Rule by dragging it as a red herring across the track of the issue of grounding OUGHT in a world-root level IS, and then setting up a strawman argument on how reciprocity adequately founds moral government of responsibly free agents. He has done it yet again in the ongoing DK -Euthyphro dilemma thread, and so, it is now necessary to headline(and augment)  a corrective for record: ______________ >>SS, 130, I have addressed the world-root level grounding question on this thread and other places and times on UD, as well as extensive comments about the so-called OUGHT-IS gap (bridged by reciprocity Read More ›

From BioTechniques: A molecular motor that transports damaged DNA is also necessary for its repair. Double-strand breaks in DNA are a source of stress and sometimes death for cells. But the breaks can be fixed if they find their way to repair sites within the cell. In yeast, one of the main repair sites resides on the nuclear envelope where a set of proteins, including nuclear pore subcomplex Nup84, serves as a molecular hospital of sorts. The kinesin-14 motor protein complex, a “DNA ambulance,” moves the breaks to repair sites, according to a new study in Nature Communications (1). “To think of motor proteins moving DNA inside cells-it was very surprising,” said corresponding author Karim Mekhail at the University of Read More ›

The BBC, having announced that chimps have “entered the Stone Age” (because they smash stuff with rocks, as do birds), has also announced that humans are unique super-predators. Actually, the point made is mostly a sensible one (for once): The analysis of global data details the ruthlessness of our hunting practices and the impacts we have on prey. It shows how humans typically take out adult fish populations at 14 times the rate that marine animals do themselves. And on land, we kill top carnivores, such as bears, wolves and lions, at nine times their own self-predation rate. But perhaps the most striking observation, say authors Chris Darimont and colleagues, is the way human beings focus so heavily on taking Read More ›

From Nature: Quantum ‘spookiness’ passes toughest test yet It’s a bad day both for Albert Einstein and for hackers. The most rigorous test of quantum theory ever carried out has confirmed that the ‘spooky action at a distance’ that the German physicist famously hated — in which manipulating one object instantaneously seems to affect another, far away one — is an inherent part of the quantum world. … In quantum mechanics, objects can be in multiple states simultaneously: for example, an atom can be in two places, or spin in opposite directions, at once. Measuring an object forces it to snap into a well-defined state. Furthermore, the properties of different objects can become ‘entangled’, meaning that their states are linked: Read More ›