2015

… have a really hard time figuring out why anyone tries to be good? The current barf is The carriers of the evolutionary process are populations. Populations consist of reproducing individuals, such as cells, viruses, plants, animals, and people. Offspring inherit fundamental information from their parents. This information is encoded in genomes, if we focus on genetic evolution. Occasionally modifications arise. These new genetic variants are called “mutants.” Mutation generates new types, new molecular ideas. This constitutes the first half of the evolutionary process. The second half is “natural selection.” The mutations might affect reproductive rates. Some mutant genes spread faster in the population than others. Nature becomes a gigantic breeder selecting for advantageous traits. Survival of the fittest is Read More ›

Yeah. Here. You wouldn’t even think the concept still existed, if Darwin were right: The fact is that we don’t “make” anything of our compulsions, or use them to “realize the self”. We have no ability to “realize” our self; all we can do is rationalize what we do and re-brand it as “freedom” so people don’t get scared. So Eagleton’s simply engaging in nonsense when he says stuff like this: Freedom is not a question of being released from the forces that shape us, but a matter of what we make of them. The world, however, is now divided down the middle between off-the-wall libertarians who deny the reality of such forces, and full-blooded determinists such as the US Read More ›

Here. REMEMBER PLUTO? TINY lonely rock orbiting the sun at the edge of the solar system? And then, in 2006, researchers summarily defrocked the little world of its status as a planet. Poof! Gone. This kind of thing has happened before. Many decades ago, paleontologists similarly decided that there wasn’t enough evidence to support the existence of the beloved Brontosaurus. Instead, they said that the noble thunder lizard was just an Apatosaurus. Poof. But mourn the Brontosaurus no longer! A team of heroes may have rescued it from paleontological purgatory. By cross-referencing the digitized bones from hundreds of long-necked cousins, a team of European scientists now says that they’ve identified enough unique anatomical details to reinstate the Brontosaurus at the Read More ›

Otherwise, what does this ngram mean?

The Christian Scientific Society: The Truth, Wherever It Leads Details for the Annual Meeting, April 17-18 in Pittsburgh here: J.P. Moreland, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Talbot School of Theology, Biola University “The irrelevance of neuroscience for formulating and addressing the fundamental problems in philosophy/theology of mind.” In the first part of my talk, I will lay out the autonomy and authority theses in philosophy and identify the central questions in the four key areas of the mind/body problem. In the second section, I will show why neuroscience cannot even formulate, much less address these central questions. I will also clarify what it means to say that two or more theories are empirically equivalent and go on to argue that Read More ›

It is always good to go back to basics every once in a while. This piece is a short introduction to Intelligent Design for those reading about it or studying it.
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Newsweek tells us, “aliens are enormous, science suggests,” here: Aliens, if they exist, are likely huge. At least that’s the conclusion of a new paper by cosmologist Fergus Simpson, who has estimated that the average weight of intelligent extraterrestrials would be 650 pounds (300 kilograms) or more. ET would have paled in comparison to these interstellar behemoths. The argument relies on a mathematical model that assumes organisms on other planets obey the same laws of conservation of energy that we see here on Earth—namely, that larger animals need more resources and expend more energy, and thus are less abundant. There are many small ants, for example, but far fewer whales or elephants. Thus, throughout the universe, as is the case Read More ›

In other threads, certain people have claimed that personal experience and testimony are not as valid as other forms of evidence. In fact, some would dismiss thousands of years and the accumulation of perhaps billions of witness/experiencer testimonies because, in their view, personal experience and testimony is not really even evidence at all. The problem with this position is that everything one knows and or believes is gained either through  (1) personal experience (and extrapolation thereof), or (2) testimony (and examination thereof), for the simple fact that if you did not experience X, the only information you can possibly have about X is from the testimony of others. In a courtroom, for example, the entire case depends on testimony, even Read More ›

Here: I’m often asked what I do for a living. My answer, that I am a professor at the University of Kentucky, inevitably prompts a second question: “What do you teach?” Responding to such a question should be easy and invite polite conversation, but I usually brace for a negative reaction. At least half the time the person flinches with disapproval when I answer “evolution,” and often the conversation simply terminates once the “e-word” has been spoken. Occasionally, someone will retort: “But there is no evidence for evolution.” Or insist: “It’s just a theory, so why teach it?” At this point I should walk away, but the educator in me can’t. I generally take the bait, explaining that evolution is Read More ›

We thought that kind of thing only happened to us ID folk. We’re used to it. Any mediocrity can make his name in Tax-Funded Science attacking us. You pay, you enjoy. Or not. You pay anyway. But now this from Discover: A psychiatry journal, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (JNMD), has just published a remarkable attack on another journal, Frontiers in Psychology. Here’s the piece: it’s by the JNMD’s own Statistics Editor. In it, he writes that: To be perfectly candid, the reader needs to be informed that the journal that published the Lakens (2013) article, Frontiers in Psychology, is one of an increasing number of journals that charge exorbitant publication fees in exchange for free open access Read More ›

First, it isn’t about Nick Lane or his new book. It is more about the pop science culture in which this stuff originates: The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is? is a new book by Nick Lane that is due out on April 23rd. His question is not one for a static answer but rather one for a series of ever sharper explanations—explanations that apply at different resolutions to specific increments in the continuous chain of life, to the whole, and to generalizations of the process to other instances. For example, we might now boldly assert that an explanation for whether life evolved, or could have evolved, in the same way more than once on our own Read More ›

Not Even Wrong wonders, and he’s generally credible: There are rumors going around tonight that there’s been a hoax perpetrated on the arXiv, something like the Sokal hoax. This has to do with an hep-th posting entitled Riding Gravity Away from Doomsday, which has appeared under the name of a very prominent string theorist, Ashoke Sen, winner of the $3 million Milner Fundamental Physics Prize. What I’m hearing is that no one can believe that Sen could possibly have seriously written something this silly, so it must be some sort of hoax. Speculation is that the hoax could have been carried out to make the hep-th moderators look bad, by showing that they’ll agree to anything, no matter how absurd, Read More ›

From a review of Psychology gone wrong They show how study results can get distorted and changed in re-telling. Remember the Little Albert experiment? An infant was conditioned to develop a fear of white rats by exposing him simultaneously to a white rat and a loud noise. This confirmed a popular theory, so it was immediately accepted as evidence that early childhood experiences could create lasting phobias that would extend to similar objects (in this case, to anything white and furry). Most psychology textbooks have misrepresented the facts about that experiment. They get the child’s age wrong, say he was conditioned with a white rabbit, and make up other stimuli that he supposedly reacted to, like a puppy and a Read More ›

Here’s another item of note: Readers of his columns and works of philosophy may wonder why he chose to tackle this through the medium of the novel. ‘I’ve always taken the view that works of art are not just things that we enjoy. They can convey truths about the world more vividly and to greater effect than ordinary philosophical prose can because they don’t just deal in ideas but show the emotional reality of them. And I think that our society has gone terribly wrong because people have not been confronting the great issues — the loss of the Christian faith, the inability to confront Islam, the loss of the sense of the sacredness of the sexual relation, and the Read More ›

From Starts with a Bang: The simple division of our solar system into rocky and gassy worlds is the result of a complex planetary dance that in many ways defies the odds, and lies on the outskirts of what’s “normal” or, at least, average. But the galaxy is a very large place, with somewhere around 300 billion stars, and therefore, 300 billion chances at life, and of having rocky, Earth-like planets in their habitable zones. While there are likely many other planetary systems similar to ours, the vast majority will be devoid of anything like our home world. With uniqueness comes realizations. Here for why this is not welcome news for many. (cosmology).