2015

From BBC News, reporting on an interesting experiment: These results show that crows will avoid an area or thing that is deemed dangerous to their own species. In other words, they know what death is and know to fear it. No. Crows are smart birds and learn quickly to avoid danger. But they don’t “know what death is” because, as noted earlier, “death,” unlike danger, is an abstraction. Just like “irreversible.” “It tells us that crows view death, at least in part, as a ‘teachable moment’ to borrow an anthropomorphic phrase. It’s a signal of danger and danger is something to be avoided,” explains Swift. This work is another example of how crows have evolved to live so successfully with Read More ›

We’ve been short on religion news recently, due to many new atheists seemingly going to relationship counselling instead of going to law with each other or having rows in elevators , and Richard Dawkins deciding to rant constructively for once (about the decline of intellectual freedom at universities) 😉 But here’s a review worth reading of a book on science and religion: This brings us back to an earlier question: who stands to benefit from this reconfiguration of religio as “religion” and scientia as “science”? And who benefits from the endurance of the conflict myth? This is where Harrison’s nuanced attention to contingency is perhaps most illuminating. As he persuasively points out, in 17th-century England we see Christianity sowing the Read More ›

Interesting discussion from NOVA: Zeno’s paradox is solved, but the question of whether there is a smallest unit of length hasn’t gone away. Today, some physicists think that the existence of an absolute minimum length could help avoid another kind of logical nonsense; the infinities that arise when physicists make attempts at a quantum version of Einstein’s General Relativity, that is, a theory of “quantum gravity.” When physicists attempted to calculate probabilities in the new theory, the integrals just returned infinity, a result that couldn’t be more useless. In this case, the infinities were not mistakes but demonstrably a consequence of applying the rules of quantum theory to gravity. But by positing a smallest unit of length, just like Zeno Read More ›

Interesting new book by scientist/filmmaker Randy Olson from U Chicago Press: Ask a scientist about Hollywood, and you’ll probably get eye rolls. But ask someone in Hollywood about science, and they’ll see dollar signs: moviemakers know that science can be the source of great stories, with all the drama and action that blockbusters require. That’s a huge mistake, says Randy Olson: Hollywood has a lot to teach scientists about how to tell a story—and, ultimately, how to do science better. With Houston, We Have a Narrative, he lays out a stunningly simple method for turning the dull into the dramatic. Drawing on his unique background, which saw him leave his job as a working scientist to launch a career as Read More ›

So then Hawking’s attack on philosophy was misguided? From Nautilus: Science can’t tell us whether science explains everything. … Even the greatest scientists have seen that the intelligibility of the world is a mystery. Actually, it is generally the greatest scientists who do get that. It’s the talk show poseurs who don’t. The logical independence of physical reality from mind and understanding gives science its point. The problem, as philosophers over the centuries have pointed out, is that this can open wide the gate to skepticism. If we are embedded in a reality that can be beyond our reach, how can we hope to achieve any knowledge at all? Perhaps Kant was right, and what we think we know may Read More ›

Here: “Yes, fitness is the central concept of biology, but it is an elusive concept. Almost everyone who looks at it seriously comes out in a different place. There are literally dozens of genuinely different definitions, which I won’t review here. At least two people have called fitness indefinable, a biological primitive. (A primitive is an undefined initial term in logic.) I don’t think that helps. Stearns (1976) once described it as ‘something everyone understands but no one can define precisely.’ Or is it that we can’t define it because we don’t understand it?” – L. Van Valen, “Three Paradigms of Evolution,” Evolutionary Theory 9 (1989):1-17. See also: Natural selection: Could it be the single greatest idea ever invented? and Read More ›

Here: Dawkins worries about the way US university campuses are becoming places for unlearning liberty. Well yes, but neither Dawkins nor Maher seems able or willing to understand that progressivism is not about liberty; it is about control of an increasingly subject and dependent population. They congratulate themselves on being “liberals,” but might find out the hard way that progressives are not liberals in any classical sense. Note:  I was originally alerted to this item by a friend who noted, in what may have been an earlier version of the clip (I saw it), that they started by focusing on how wrong the idea of design in nature is.  Can’t currently find that version at Mediaite.  

From New Scientist: Living fossil nautilus re-emerges after 30 years of hiding Ward, who is a biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and his colleague Bruce Saunders first described A. scrobiculatus in 1984. Its shell shape looks unwieldy compared with the more streamlined shells of other animals in the Nautilidae family, but it appears to have evolved that way relatively recently. “It turned on its head what we thought of as primitive,” says Ward. Stop using the term “primitive.” What does it mean anyway? See also: Species assumed to be extinct sometimes turn up again. In part, this is probably due in part to the relatively shorter time today before extinction fears arise. For example, “They swim just Read More ›

Here: Perhaps his silliest statements have to do with our own solar system. Carson claims that our solar system is perfectly ordered—but, in fact, the motion of the planets is chaotic in the long term, and, although we can predict the motion of comets over the seventy-year period he discusses, for longer time horizons, such as millions or billions of years, the complexity of our solar system makes that practically impossible.More. If it isn’t perfectly ordered, why is there so much life here, but we are forever hearing about endless other habitable planets that turn out probably not to be. Anyway, fine words from a crackpot cosmologist who thinks all scientists should be militant atheists . Election season brings ‘em Read More ›

It is important, as we go on to deal with understanding the deadlock on discussions about design theory, to understand how many evolutionary materialists and fellow travellers address evidence and reasoning. For example, in recent weeks, here at UD, we have had to address how not even self-evident first principles of reason are regarded by many objectors to design thought. Similarly, once record (or testimony) does not fit the preferred narrative, it is going to be dismissed as inadequate and/or delusional or as suspected of fakery.  In effect, after all, our senses and perceptions are not utterly reliable, so if something does not fit the lab coat clad evolutionary materialist narrative, something must be wrong. The case of Jesus of Read More ›

They just stare at me.  See more

Where you write, Later in the story we learn that no one believes the shooter was motivated by religious rage. Rather, he was motivated by anti-religious rage and singled out Christians for death. MSN’s writers and editors are shameless, utterly shameless. I’ve tried to get cred to say this in Canada on the eve of an election, but apparently can’t, so must say it here*: Briefly, I suspect, MSN personnel are simply responding to the desires of their present and probable future viewers: – No party wants the votes of serious Christians or observant Jews any more. Or thoughtful atheists. No one cares what we think. Our rights can be so easily stripped and our property taken or taxed away. Read More ›

In this story.   Here is the headline: Probe in college slayings peers into Web rants and possible religious rage Here is the lede: The gunman who cut a deadly path through a college campus appeared armed for an extended siege, a report said Friday, as investigators probed deeper into suspicions the shooter may have been driven by religious rage Later in the story we learn that no one believes the shooter was motivated by religious rage.  Rather, he was motivated by anti-religious rage and singled out Christians for death.  MSN’s writers and editors are shameless, utterly shameless.    

Here: Bones of Contention: Why Cal Paleo Expert is So Skeptical That Homo Naledi Is New Species … Amid all the hoopla and confetti, however, a growing number of scientists are advising caution. They’re not denying the importance of the find; the fossils, they say, are invaluable. But they contend that the bones may not represent a new species. The evidence these skeptics point to suggests that the finds may actually be bones from Homo erectus, the earliest known hominid to manifest the general proportions, stance and gait of modern humans. H. erectus had a long tenure on the planet, living from about 2 million to 70,000 years ago. The species was widely distributed (from Africa to East Asia and Read More ›

Dr Torley has recently responded to Tayler’s Article as headlined. On a day when news is still somewhat emerging about a mass murder on a community College campus where those who affirmed that they were Christians were shot in the head, it is important to take up the issue, especially in light of the underlying, all too patent, New Atheist/Evolutionary materialism and fellow traveller concept that they have cornered the market on reasonableness and responsibility. We cannot neglect the assertions of Dawkins and co, that Bible-believing Christians are ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked. That lines right up with the sub-title of Tayler’s Salon post: “The right-wing’s religious delusions are killing us—and them.” Nor is the obvious immediate trigger, the attacks Read More ›