2015

As just noted, a discussion thread on responding to abuse of the privilege of developing and implementing curriculum has been trollishly hijacked in what looks like an escalation of the tactics coming from a circle of objector sites. At the end, on a topic dealing with 12 year olds, sexually tinged vulgarity has been injected by word plays on a participant’s handle in an attempt to trigger a spiral to the gutter. That is the sort of ruthless nihilistic amorality and domineering disrespect we have been seeing in answer to exposure and correction of patent education abuse — of 12 year olds in Critical Thinking class . . . as in: pretending and trying to enforce under colour of education Read More ›

I headline as a notice, to deal with trollish misconduct: >>I warned about hijacking threads of discussion, took time to give pointers of correction and even link where there are discussions of this sort of sophomoric parody, e.g. http://www.truefreethinker.com…..l-part-2-4 (as in: this sort of foolishness has long since been corrected, that which is made of parts is essentially composite thus contingent and cannot be a necessary being [a major feature of the idea of God in relevant Systematic Theology and Philosophy of Religion, both significant academic disciplines that the mocking objectors were pointed to but willfully ignored showing malicious threadjacking intent and incorrigibility in the face of an important issue on the table], and to try to redefine components as Read More ›

From Salvo, a comparison: Our Dystopia, the worst of both worlds Orwell’s vs. Huxley’s dystopias (1984 vs. Brave New World) Unsettlingly, Orwell is gaining on Huxley “So who wins? Huxley retains a slight advantage in my view because a perpetual 1984 reign of terror may be less viable over time than a BNW technotopia where few would be sober enough to rebel. But the growth in size and scope of government in recent decades has narrowed Huxley’s lead, and that is sobering. The attitude to science is interesting. Both novelists foresee their dystopias as inevitable outcomes of post-Enlightenment thinking. But significantly, while the World State of BNW is a technotopia, its interest in science apart from technology is quite limited. Read More ›

Wake up. From ScienceDaily: Scientists have found eight well-preserved fossilized peach endocarps, or pits, in southwest China dating back more than two and a half million years. Despite their age, the fossils appear nearly identical to modern peach pits. … “We found these peach endocarp fossils just exposed in the strata,” Su said. “It’s really a fantastic finding.” Su said the discovery provides important new evidence for the origins and evolution of the modern fruit. Peaches are widely thought to have originated in China, but the oldest evidence had been archeological records dating back roughly 8,000 years. No wild population has ever been found, and its long trade history makes tracing its beginnings difficult. More. Of course, humans have done Read More ›

Whiggish? That is, a history that simply decides who is right. Readers may recall Steven Weinberg, Nobelist (1979) and multiverse theorist. From his recent piece in the New York Review of Books: Nevertheless, in teaching courses on the history of physics and astronomy, and then working up my lectures into a book, I have come to think that whatever one thinks of whiggery in other sorts of history, it has a rightful place in the history of science. It is clearly not possible to speak of right and wrong in the history of art or fashion, nor I think is it possible in the history of religion, and one can argue about whether it is possible in political history, but Read More ›

A whopping 97 percent of the media elite are pro-choice, according to a 1995 survey conducted by Stanley Rothman and Amy E. Black, which attempted to partly replicate a 1981 study of journalists working at top media outlets. Reporting their findings in a Spring 2001 article for the journal Public Interest, Rothman and Blacks found that the media elite held strikingly liberal views on abortion and a range of other issues. Among the findings: Nearly all of the media elite (97 percent) agreed that “it is a woman’s right to decide whether or not to have an abortion,” and five out of six (84 percent) agreed strongly. Three out of four journalists (73 percent) agreed that “homosexuality is as acceptable Read More ›

Further to A biologist explains epigenetics: Picture an orchestra (DNA is only the violin section), … From The Scientist : Antidepressant Exerts Epigenetic Changes … “Depression is considered a stress-related disease and it has been known for a while that stress can change long-term behavior, probably by reprogramming gene activity,” said study coauthor Theo Rein of Max Planck. Several groups previously demonstrated that environmental factors could influence epigenetic changes associated with psychiatric disorders, including depression. Different classes of antidepressant drugs have also been found to induce epigenetic changes in both animal brain cells and in clinical studies. “In depression, we’ve seen alterations in gene expression that coincide with DNA methylation and other epigenetic changes,” explained Rein. The present study builds Read More ›

From biologist Daniel Currier at Salvo 35: Exponential Life Epigenetics Deepens the Mystery of Design While DNA “sentences” are certainly essential for life, they are not sufficient to build an organism. So biologists today are asking whether the cell contains other vital receptacles of information. For illustration, let’s picture an orchestra assembled to play a large-scale symphonic work. The piece is scored for many different instruments, some of which will be played continuously throughout the piece, while others will produce music only intermittently or for only a few measures. A successful performance of the piece, however, will depend upon all the instruments being played correctly and at the proper times. So it is with the cell, the foundational unit of Read More ›

Yesterday, I highlighted a case in Texas in which a School-level Critical Thinking Curriculum has been manipulated to set an assignment (in a section for 20 points) gives a question requiring the answer that “There is a God” is not fact or credible view but a cultural commonplace, poorly supported and dubious assertion that apparently students felt was effectively equivalent to “myth.” Documents: Today, we need to begin to address this attempt to discredit ethical theism under colours of education. At first level, ethical theism is foundational to the charter of modern Constitutional Democracy, the US Declaration of Independence, 1776. Something that can and should be memorised by school students (and which it would be difficult indeed for educators or Read More ›

The best book I have read about ethology is “Nature’s I.Q. — Extraordinary animal behaviors that defy evolution”, by Balazs Hornyanszky and Istvan Tasi, Torchlight Publishing Inc. 2009. I suggest reading it. The authors provide a rich summary of almost all animal behaviors about predation, defense, construction of complex structures (webs, nets, traps…), disguise, deception, feeding, partnership, language and communication, navigation, coupling and mating, etc. The most animal skills are innate and hereditary. They ask: How do the animals know when and how they should do what they do? Where does nature’s I.Q. come from? […] Different animal species are also equipped with specific problem-solving abilities; however most of these work not in a conscious, but in an automatic hereditary Read More ›

In 1996, Lehigh University professor of biochemistry, Michael Behe, published his first book Darwin’s Black Box, which famously advanced the concept of irreducible complexity (IC) to prominent status in the conversation of design in biology. In his book, Professor Behe described irreducible complexity as: A single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. In illustrating his point, Behe used the idea of a simple mousetrap — with its base and spring and holding bar — as an example of an IC system, where the removal of any of these parts would render the mousetrap incapable of its Read More ›

Here (make sure to watch the embedded Fox26 video which I doubt I can embed at UD). Is it reasonable to be putting such a question to 12 year old students in class? (And if you think this was just one teacher, note how it came up the next day in other classes and in multiple classes on the day in question; somebody with responsibility wrote this into a curriculum with intent to create the view that per critical thinking, belief in God is little more than a widely believed, religiously backed [itself a loaded issue] questionable opinion with little warrant.) Is the view that God is real merely a religious belief with no serious weight of evidence or argument? Read More ›

Hard on the heels of the Atlantic noting the resistance to valid new ideas in science, we hear from Inside Science that : Scientific Consensus Is Almost Never Wrong – Almost The man who shifted the geology paradigm was Alfred Wegener and he was never mentioned in my Geology 101 class. How this happened was discussed at a meeting of the Geology Society of America in Baltimore earlier this month. … No one knows how it happened, but likely one day Wegener simply looked at a globe and noted that you could slide South America right up against Africa. The bulge in Brazil near the city of Natal, would fit snugly into the bight of Africa near Cameroon. There are Read More ›

From The Atlantic: The strangeness of the geology and fossil evidence behind the theory of continental drift helped drive a half-century of resistance to the idea. Siddhartha Mukherjee documented in his book The Emperor of All Maladies how a fixation on the cure for a misconceived disease inhibited recognition of the complexity of cancer for a generation. It took decades before physicists came to grips with experiments that showed that the speed of light was constant for every observer—and even then, only the very young Einstein took that observation seriously enough to produce his first relativity theory. In the long run, it’s true: Reality imposes a final and authoritative judgment on the rights and wrongs of any idea. In the Read More ›

Amid media speculation about the possible motivation of the Colorado Springs shooter who killed three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic last Friday, one thing seems to have been overlooked: the slain officer, The Rev. Garrett Swasey, was actually a pro-life pastor (h/t Terry Mattingly). Time magazine reports that the officer was “heavily involved in his church, a non-denominational evangelical place of worship called Hope Chapel where he was a co-pastor.” Hope Chapel’s doctrinal statements can be viewed online here. The Chapel’s statement on marriage is doctrinally conservative, firmly opposed to gay marriage, and its affirmation that “children, from the moment of conception, are a blessing and heritage from the Lord” is staunchly pro-life (emphases mine – VJT): It is Read More ›