2015

They weren’t shopping at Bulk Barn? Here. The image of a Stone-Age man grasping the bony end of a bloody mammoth leg and chomping down on it with powerful gnashers is taking a bit of a battering. We already know that Neanderthals were partial to delicacies such as fish and small birds, with a healthy helping of plants. Now some are saying they might have flavoured their meaty feasts with wild herbs, too. Without a time machine to take us back 40,000 to 50,000 years, the suggestion remains highly speculative. But our long-lost cousins were clearly not the carnivorous beasts we once assumed them to be. And you assumed them to be so because … oh yes, once upon a Read More ›

As usual William J. Murray says it better than I. All that follows is his: 1. Whether or not the universe is determined, the logically consistent moral subjectivist admit that under materialism, all things are ultimately explicable by the interactions of matter and energy under the guiding influences of natural law and mechanical probability. 2. Matter and energy are neither conscious or intentional agencies under materialism, but rather only produce effects that we label with those terms. However, those labels – under materialism – do not and can not indicate anything categorically different from matter and energy interacting according to law and probability. There is no such thing as anything “intervening” in the lawful and probabilistic outcomes of material processes Read More ›

Sometimes a statement comes along that is so pristine in its lack of coherence, so mind-boggling in its pure, immaculate and flawless freedom from logic, that I just have to stop and call special attention to it. Eigenstate has favored us with such a statement: If I stipulate for the purposes of argument here that there is no choice and the world is rigidly deterministic, “moral” and “social” are just as meaningful and carry the same semantic freight as if it were otherwise. Empathy in a completely deterministic universe is just as much a moral dynamic as a empathy in universe with “libertarian free will”, allowing for the moment that that concept is not logically incoherent. Second quote of the Read More ›

New Scientist’s usual inventive PC gabble: Allegedly, women invented weapons Women could have been the first humans to use weapons to hunt. An analysis of spear-wielding chimps, most of which are females, suggests the idea may not be as eccentric as it might sound. It is still pretty eccentric. Aw come on. “Pitches like girl” is an epithet. “Pitches like boy” is not. If you do not understand what you are reading, you have spent too much time with politically correct trash.

Here.

In several previous posts, RDFish stumbled into a serious philosophical error that needs to be addressed. Barry Arrington had made the unassailable point that materialism (understood as physicalism) is incompatible with such concepts as good, evil, and objective morality. The reason is clear: Materialism reduces all choices to electro-chemical processes in the brain. With that model, all apparent moral decisions are really nothing more than chemcial-physical operations or functions.   Though RDF failed to refute the argument, confront the argument, or even define his own terms, he sought, nevertheless, to attack it through the back door, claiming that past atheist philosophers embraced both metaphysical materialism and objective morality. His list includes such notables as David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Ayn Rand, Read More ›

The Capitanian extinction, which did in a lot of brachiopods 262 mya From ScienceDaily: The widespread loss of carbonates across the Boreal Realm also suggests a role for acidification. The new data cements the Middle Permian crisis’s status as a true “mass extinction.” Thus the “Big 5” extinctions should now be considered the “Big 6.” More. Follow UD News at Twitter!

This will be my last post on this subject.  In the comments to my prior post, groovamos wrote a comment that contains a personal history followed by a gut wrenching story (which is in bold): I am in no sense as qualified as most on this thread to debate philosophy. However as one who embraced materialism TWICE in my youth, separated by a 3 year period of interest in mysticism, I’ll have a go. At the end of sophomore year I had converted to the typical campus leftist stance of the day, cultural zeitgeist being the driver, sexual license sealing the deal. Not outwardly religious as a kid, I quickly gave up belief in a supreme being. And just as Read More ›

Here: Our fascination with the brain seems to come from a longing to make psychology more like a hard science and hence, we assume, more useful. Physics gave us electricity, skyscrapers, and the Internet. Chemistry gave us medicine and more fresh food. Psychology is still taking baby steps, designing empirical tests of unsurprising observations. It may be too much to expect science to reliably save marriages, but how desperately we need the secret to stopping people from burning others alive. More. Psychology is like looking in a mirror and expecting objectivity. See also: The human mind Follow UD News at Twitter!

From ScienceDaily: The ability to make a Lower Paleolithic hand axe depends on complex cognitive control by the prefrontal cortex, including the “central executive” function of working memory, a new study finds. PLOS ONE published the results, which knock another chip off theories that Stone Age hand axes are simple tools that don’t involve higher-order executive function of the brain. “For the first time, we’ve showed a relationship between the degree of prefrontal brain activity, the ability to make technological judgments, and success in actually making stone tools,” says Dietrich Stout, an experimental archeologist at Emory University and the leader of the study. “The findings are relevant to ongoing debates about the origins of modern human cognition, and the role Read More ›

Professor Jerry Coyne makes a surprising admission on the origins of altruism in a recent post titled, David Sloan Wilson tells the BBC that the evolution of altruism in humans is “solved”: it’s group selection (of course). In his no-holds-barred critique of David Sloan Wilson’s “group selection” theory of how altruism arose, Coyne is refreshingly frank in his acknowledgement of what scientists don’t know about altruism: The fact is that human ‘altruism’ is a mixture of diverse and complex behaviors, only one of which corresponds to the real evolutionary issue of altruism: reproductive self-sacrifice by people that benefits unrelated people who give nothing back. And we simply haven’t the slightest idea whether that form of altruism evolved, or even if Read More ›

I’d like to follow-up on Barry Arrington’s announcement of UD’s 10th birthday. When I started UD 10 years ago to the day (April 15, 2005), I wasn’t sure what I was getting into. Blogging was fairly new at the time. Moreover, I had a strong preference that my best writing efforts should go into longer sustained arguments as appear in articles and books. Still, it was a time of ferment for ID. The Kitzmiller-Dover trial was gearing up. Interest in media for intelligent design was high. I had lots of speaking engagements. And I was curious how much influence a blog might have. If I had to say the best thing that’s come out of UD, it’s the camaraderie of Read More ›

On April 15, 2005 Bill Dembski posted the first post on UD. Ten years later we have had 14,507 posts accompanied by 330,807 comments. From that humble beginning we have grown so that today we get hundreds of thousands of page views and over 50,000 unique visitors each month. We have 49,502 registered users. So I say, thank you Bill for kicking this site off and thank you to our authors, regular readers, and commenters for continuing to make it interesting and worthwhile.

Again, I extend my hearty thanks to Seversky for breaking the dike here. Now other materialists are following his brave lead and admitting the obvious (but nevertheless frequently resisted) implications of materialism: Graham2 There doesn’t seem to be anything remarkable in what Sev has said. Its little more than what us heathens have been repeating. Indeed Graham2. Why don’t you tell RDFish, who is still resisting with all his might? Mark Frank: As a materialist and subjectivist I agree with Seversky: A ) Personal preferences can be reduced to the impulses caused by the electro-chemical processes of each person’s brain. B) There is no such thing as objective good and evil. C) Statements about good and evil are expressions of Read More ›

As an adaptation, if it is even that, here: But, some theorists argue, religion is actually a bad adaptation. Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne attributes Americans’ doubt about Darwinian evolution theories to religious faith, which, he claims, correlates highly with social dysfunction. He goes on to claim that the United States is “one of the most socially dysfunctional First World countries.” That’s a tough contest to judge, considering the cutbacks riots and secularist-Islamist clashes that are increasingly common in secular post-modern Europe. And it is, in any event, difficult to discuss social dysfunction if societies do not even share basic values. These theories about religion (useful, useless, harmful) have two things in common: First, they typically spill forth with no real Read More ›