From Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, written by a couple of paleo types: Stop writing “scientists believe” This one is for journalists and other popularizers of science. I see a lot of people writing that “scientists believe” this or that, when talking about hadrons or hadrosaurs or other phenomena grounded in evidence. Pet peeve: believing is what people do in the absence of evidence, or despite evidence. Scientists often have to infer, estimate, and even speculate, but all of those activities are grounded in evidence and reason, not belief.1 Utter nonsense, and the author himself, Mike Taylor, adds in a footnote, in mouseprint type: I realize that I am grossly oversimplifying – evidence, reason, and belief can interact in Read More ›

Just a quick reminder to everyone that if you want to present at the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism Online Conference, you have until March 15th (that’s Tuesday) to submit your abstracts! Read More ›

From The Scientist: Why can science still not define this most basic biological process? … This may come as a shock to the uninitiated, but a conclusive definition of sleep still eludes scientists and probably will continue to do so until the function of sleep is fully established. That’s not to say science doesn’t have a working definition of sleep. … Here is the paradox: although it seems sleep is conserved across the animal kingdom, our most precise definition of the phenomenon relies on recordings of the neocortex, the least-conserved part of the vertebrate nervous system (and altogether absent in invertebrates). … While a subcortical definition of sleep across vertebrates would already be a leap forward, it would still not Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: “Surprisingly, we found that in many ways the gorilla Y chromosome is more similar to the human Y chromosome than either is to the chimpanzee Y chromosome,” said Kateryna Makova, the Francis R. and Helen M. Pentz Professor of Science at Penn State and one of two corresponding authors of the paper. “In regions of the chromosome where we can align all three species, the sequence similarity fits with what we know about the evolutionary relationships among the species — humans are more closely related to chimpanzees. However, the chimpanzee Y chromosome appears to have undergone more changes in the number of genes and contains a different amount of repetitive elements compared to the human or gorilla. Moreover, Read More ›

From Not Even Wrong: It turns out the multiverse does exist, just off the A76, 25 miles north of Dumfries in Scotland. It’s called the Crawick Multiverse and is now open 10 am to 4 pm. Admission is 5 pounds, but parking is free. … The idea seems to be that the park is a modern take on Neolithic monuments such as Stonehenge, which paid tribute to the movements of the Solar System – but this time the focus is on the latest advances in physics, such as chaos theory and the idea of parallel universes. More. But wait! Stonehenge was actually useful, wasn’t it? Figures these days they’d be building a monument to flapdoodle. See also: The multiverse: Where Read More ›

Bonobo society is female-run and bonobos have a lot of sex. And there is supposed to be a message for humans in that: “And considering that both bonobos and chimpanzees are humans’ closest living relatives, each sharing roughly 99% of their DNA with us, it is a question whose answer could also reveal a lot about ourselves.” From RealClearScience: Bonobos are highly-intelligent primates that reside in a 190,000-square-mile area of the Congo Basin in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Their peaceful nature is even more remarkable when compared to that of chimpanzees. Though the two species share the same genus and are almost physically identical to each other when viewed with an untrained eye, their behavior couldn’t be any Read More ›

… Johannes Kepler freelanced as an astrologer. From Wonders and Marvels, : There were a variety of specializations within the field of astrology, from the very respectable basics of using heavenly observations to make general predictions about the weather, finances, etc., to the more controversial practice of casting a chart based on the moment a question was posed and then providing an answer according to celestial aspects.[ii] And Catherine was hardly the only monarch employing astrology or astrologers in decision-making. The severe and devout Philip II of Spain consulted them, even upon the creation of his tomb. And who has not heard of John Dee in connection with England’s Elizabeth I? It was not until the opening years of the Read More ›

From New Scientist: Why one lake contains more than 1000 species of the same fish One thousand species of the “same fish” in Lake Malawi? We used to think the word “species” meant something. The huge number of closely related species living together has meant they feature prominently in models of species diversification. But what made them so diverse has remained a mystery. Some think environmental forces drove the diversification, others that the underlying cause was biological, says Scholz. For example, some females are colour-blind to males that are a different colour to them, which can drive sexual isolation between different groups of fish. In humans, we call that  behaviour “demography.” People who don’t speak the same language or move Read More ›

Statisticians interviewed for Five-Thirty-Eight think so: It may sound crazy to get indignant over a scientific term that few lay people have even heard of, but the consequences matter. The misuse of the p-value can drive bad science (there was no disagreement over that), and the consensus project was spurred by a growing worry that in some scientific fields, p-values have become a litmus test for deciding which studies are worthy of publication. As a result, research that produces p-values that surpass an arbitrary threshold are more likely to be published, while studies with greater or equal scientific importance may remain in the file drawer, unseen by the scientific community. More. P-values? From Rob Sheldon The “p-value” is a Fisher Read More ›

Brought to you by the team that uncovered the water crisis in Flint, Michgan: Citizens in Flint could smell, taste and see that their water was contaminated almost immediately following the switch. But when they tried to bring their concerns to public officials’ attention, they were ignored, dismissed and ridiculed. (pause for sneering at the anti-science rubes) We became involved in April 2015 when Lee Anne Walters, a Flint resident and mother of a lead-poisoned child, contacted Dr. Marc Edwards, our research adviser at Virginia Tech. After the city detected elevated lead in the Walters family’s water, and she was refused help by MDEQ, Mrs. Walters took her case to EPA Region 5 employee Miguel Del Toral, who collaborated with Read More ›

Waynesburg University (Pennsylvania) biology prof Wayne Rossiter, author of In the Shadow of Oz, offer some thoughts on the recent PLOS One uproar over a paper that mentioned a creator: Nothing says tolerance, reasonability and openness like the impetuous knee-jerk proscription of the innocent.  The psychological condition of the modern scientist was again on display this past week in the journal PLOS One, where a conga line of educated professionals reverted to the primitive behavior of irrational vitriol and chimp-like poo-slinging. It all started when (what appears to be) a faulty Chinese-English translation resulting in the term “Creator” being inserted in a scientific It all started when (what appears to be) a faulty Chinese-English translation resulting in the term “Creator” Read More ›

American philosopher Bill Vallicella responds to the claim that design in nature is a form of circular reasoning: It would be circular to try to explain complexity in terms of complexity. But it is not circular to explain one form of complexity in terms of another. The complexity that needs to be explained is the complexity that seems to have been designed. To invoke a crude analogy, it is not the complexity of a pile of rocks that needs personal explanation, but the complexity of a cairn, a pile of rocks whose assembly shows that they mark the trail. Now I cannot account for a pile of rock’s being a cairn by invoking natural processes; I need to invoke an Read More ›

A week ago, I wrote an article, Feet to the fire, in response to Dr. Stacy Trasancos’s essay, Does Science Prove God Exists? Dr. Trasancos has been gracious enough to respond to my article. In this post, I’d like to make a final reply, and I will happily give her the last word, if she wishes to make a closing rebuttal. Dr. Trasancos’s question for the Intelligent Design community I’d like to begin by answering the (rather lengthy) question which Dr. Trasancos poses at the end of her response to my article. She writes: If 1) certain molecules provide the best evidence for a Designer; and if 2) the “primordial Fiat Lux, uttered at the moment when, along with matter, Read More ›

Nye sounds like old Uncle John discoursing on the “big issues” after six beers, except he is stone sober. Check it out:   Why Are So Many Smart People Stupid About Philosophy?

We asked physicist Rob Sheldon: “Front-loading” is something I picture as an elaborate “Rube Goldberg” machine. Here’s a sampling of real-life front-loading by brilliant engineers with too much time on their hands. Okay, if engineers could do that, couldn’t God make the flagellum out of spare parts by a properly front-loaded machine? I think the answer here is “yes”. But of course that begs the question, “doesn’t the machine show much more design than the thing it makes?” Of course. But our goal wasn’t to minimize design effort, our goal was to create a “front-loaded” machine, which is what was asked. Now we have another problem. Isn’t the “front-loading machine” a lot more fragile than the thing it made, the Read More ›