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New Atheism: Not a cult, but a religion

Over at Heather’s Homilies, Heather Hastie has written a post titled, Is New Atheism a Cult?, in which she argues convincingly for the negative position. Cults tend to share certain characteristics which, by and large, don’t apply to New Atheism: The group members display an excessively zealous, unquestioning commitment to an individual. The group members are preoccupied with bringing in new members. Members are expected to devote inordinate amount of time to the group. Members are preoccupied with making money. Members’ subservience to the group causes them to cut ties with family and friends, and to give personal goals and activities that were of interest to the group. Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other Read More ›

Group thought, aka sheep on steroids

From the National Association of Scholars: The Pressure of Group Thought Academic “consensus” is in the news. Stetson University professor of psychology Christopher Ferguson, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, recently gave a run-down on how the American Psychological Association supposedly compromised itself by manipulating a task force into endorsing harsh interrogations of prisoners. Ferguson says the APA “crafted a corrupted ‘consensus’ by excluding those who might disagree.” Ahem. Never mind “disagree.” What if most of the evidence fails to support a politically crafted “consensus,” often enforced from the bench? Cf Darwin in the schools. The left today is infatuated with “consensus” as a tool that can be used to ostracize views it would rather not have to debate. Read More ›

Noticed: Science as checkout counter mag

Someone else has noticed: Benedict Carey describes a University of Virginia-led effort to reproduce the findings of 100 key psychological studies published in top journals. Over 250 researchers chose some of the most often cited findings in their field and tried to replicate the results with their own experiments. The outcomes, published in the journal, “Science,” weren’t pretty. Of the 100 studies tested, 60 did not yield the results their authors reported. In other words, the findings couldn’t live up to a basic requirement of science—repeatability. It’s a revelation Carey says confirms many scientists’ worst fears. Why should that be those scientists’ worst fears. Can’t they compel us all to fund them anyway? “The vetted studies,” he explained, “were considered Read More ›

Back to ID Basics, 0: The distinct identity, “A is itself, A = A” challenge

It is time to get back to basics (BTB henceforth) on ID, but as step zero, we have to set first principles of right reason straight. For instance, it seems that — once we are certain that we can be certain of nothing falls apart in absurdity — the fallback position on the issue of distinct identity is that it is only about an empty tautology, A = A that sets up a tiresome little game we call logic, when we would rather be playing another game, Science . . . actually, a priori Evolutionary Materialist Scientism and/or its fellow travellers. (Now, I know I know, this is not about the scientific specifics that some crave getting back to the Read More ›

“Landscape” approach to human evolution

Further to Roll dice twice, see what turns up (One game changer, however, is this: As more is discovered about the past of life on Earth, evolution becomes less a grand theory (cf Darwinism) and more a history (cf World War II)): Evolution and dispersal of the genus Homo: A landscape approach Here’s the abstract: The notion of the physical landscape as an arena of ecological interaction and human evolution is a powerful one, but its implementation at larger geographical and temporal scales is hampered by the challenges of reconstructing physical landscape settings in the geologically active regions where the earliest evidence is concentrated. We argue that the inherently dynamic nature of these unstable landscapes has made them important agents Read More ›

Roll dice twice, see what turns up

Interesting new approach to evolution studies: Rolling the Dice Twice: Evolving Reconstructed Ancient Proteins in Extant Organisms (Betul Kacar) Scientists have access to artifacts of evolutionary history (namely, the fossil record and genomic sequences of living organisms) but they have limited means with which to infer the exact evolutionary events that occurred to produce today s living world. An intriguing question to arise from this historical limitation is whether the evolutionary paths of organisms are dominated by internal or external controlled processes (i.e., Life as a factory) or whether they are inherently random and subject to completely different outcomes if repeated under identical conditions (i.e., Life as a casino parlor). Two experimental approaches, ancestral sequence reconstruction and experimental evolution with microorganisms, Read More ›

Science laff: Sex simpler if we were bonobos

From Real Clear Science: Not only are bonobos liberal in their lovemaking, they also aren’t shy about requesting it. Researchers report in the journal Scientific Reports that wild female bonobos will make blatant gestures asking for genital-on-genital rubbing. Subtlety is not their specialty. The two moves the scientists observed were foot-pointing, in which the female used her foot to point at her genitals, and the “hip shimmy,” in which she wiggled her genitals to mimic rubbing. Some 83% of the time, another female responded, giving the signaller exactly what she wanted. More. Everything would be simpler if we were bonobos. But try suing a bonobo for chimp support. No wonder they are an endangered species. See also: Why the human Read More ›

Before you bet on homo Naledi, read this

From Evolution News & Views: The technical paper, “Homo naledi, a new species of the genus Homo from the Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa,” appeared in a lesser-known journal, eLife. It’s a great find due to the sheer number of bones that were find, but to my mind its publication in eLife is immediate hint that this fossil isn’t an earthshattering “transitional form,” because if it were, we almost unquestionably would have seen the fossil published in Science or Nature. The question has been raised before, why it wasn’t published in Nature. In principal, it is up their alley, no? The specimens found in this cave are very diverse, suggesting they might belong to multiple species. But if that’s the case, Read More ›

Climate Alarmists: Prosecute Skeptics As If They Were Gangsters

“A Disgrace to the Profession”: The World’s Scientists on Michael E Mann, his Hockey Stick and their Damage to Science by Mark Steyn Defend Free Speech September 18, 2015 One of the most malodorous and disreputable aspects of American jurisprudence is the way laws intended to have very narrow application metastasize to target almost anyone the government is minded to stick it to. Thus, the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act – RICO – which, as its name suggests, was originally aimed at racketeers, but by 2007 was being deployed against, for example, my old boss Conrad Black. US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald decided to deploy RICO against Canadian newspaper publishers he’d taken a dislike to because he could. That’s Read More ›

A friend suggests visualizing the culture war …

… by viewing Wikipedia edits via this handy new tool: Friend says, “Enter any controversial topic and enjoy.” Possible last-ditch therapy for any who take Wikipedia seriously. See also: How Wikipedia can turn fiction into fact Follow UD News at Twitter!

Exact values of constants said to drive physicists crazy

Further to “Water’s unique sense of time” (amazing, these accidental freaks of nature,) we also learn, this time from Aeon, about the conundrum of universal constants, like the speed of light: Light travels at around 300,000 km per second. Why not faster? Why not slower? A new theory inches us closer to an answer Electromagnetic theory gave a first crucial insight 150 years ago. The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell showed that when electric and magnetic fields change in time, they interact to produce a travelling electromagnetic wave. Maxwell calculated the speed of the wave from his equations and found it to be exactly the known speed of light. This strongly suggested that light was an electromagnetic wave – as was Read More ›

Water’s unique sense of time

From ScienceDaily: Using innovative ultrafast vibrational spectroscopies, the researchers show why liquid water is unique when compared to most other molecular liquids. (Actually, usage note: To be unique, water must survive comparison with all other molecular liquids. But let’s get on with the story.) Water is a very special liquid with extremely fast dynamics. Water molecules wiggle and jiggle on sub-picosecond timescales, which make them undistinguishable on this timescale. While the existence of very short-lived local structures — e.g. two water molecules that are very close to one another, or are very far apart from each other — is known to occur, it was commonly believed that they lose the memory of their local structure within less than 0.1 picoseconds. Read More ›

Encyclopedia of the tree of life

  From ScienceDaily: ‘Tree of life’ for 2.3 million species released Presumably, “tree of life” is placed in quotation marks because it so little resembles a tree. Didn’t it used to be capped, as Tree of Life? 😉 The new style is probably a good sign. The first draft of the tree of life for all 2.3 million named species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes has been released. Thousands of smaller trees have been published over the years for select branches, but this is the first time those results have been combined into a single tree. The end result is a digital resource that is available online for anyone to use or edit, much like a ‘Wikipedia’ for evolutionary Read More ›

Climate change shaped “key moments” in human evolution?

From New Scientist: The ways in which climate affected human evolution have been hotly debated for over a century. A persistent idea is that the challenging climate of southern Africa – a sparsely vegetated, dry savannah – drove humans to walk on two legs, grow large brains and develop technology. “I was hooked on the savannah-adaptation idea in my studies in the 1980s,” says Rick Potts from the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC (see diagram). But by the 1990s, Potts had a new theory. “I realised that the critical part of the human evolutionary story is how our lineage was able to become so versatile… capable of invading habitats everywhere,” he says. We’re not master savannah inhabitants, we’re master invaders. Read More ›

Making the solar system to scale

A friend recommends this fun vid about the scale of our solar system, made by self-described “highly intelligent goofballs.” Follow UD News at Twitter!