From Sharon Begley at Stat: Although such behavioral genetics studies might once have been trumpeted as “genes for going to college,” the international consortium of 253 researchers reached a more modest conclusion: Altogether, the 74 genes explain slightly less than one-half of 1 percent of the differences between people’s education levels. “The authors are pretty careful to explain that the effect size is small [and] that these are not ‘genes for educational attainment,’” said Nita Farahany of Duke University School of Law, an expert on the ethical, legal, and social implications of behavioral genetics and a member of President Obama’s bioethics commission. “Whenever you study things close to IQ there is a real fear that people will see this as Read More ›

Nancy Pearcey, offers an article based on Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes, her most recent book. The public has responded swiftly and strongly against the Obama administration’s demand that public schools admit transgender students into the showers, locker rooms, and sports teams of their choice. But to be successful, the response must also be informed. Where did transgender ideology come from, and how can we respond more effectively? The answer may surprise you. If we dig deeply, we discover that the turning point, historically, was Darwin’s theory of evolution. It had a lasting impact in at least three ways. Matter Does Not Matter Let’s tease out its impact through the language of the Read More ›

June 10–11, 2016 From NY/NJ Philosophy of Science group: ===========ABSTRACTS================ Title: Everettian Quantum Mechanics and Evil Author: Jason Turner Abstract: The problem of evil has been around for a long time: How can an all-powerful and all-good God allow evil of the sorts we see in the world? If the Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, though, then there is a lot more evil in the world than what we see. This suggest a second problem of evil: If Everettianism is true, how can an all-powerful and all-good God allow evil of the sort we don’t see? If the original problem of evil already pushed you into atheism, worries about Everettianism aren’t likely to make much difference. On the Read More ›

But there is so little evidence to go on. From Columbia math prof Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: Maybe this should have its own entry for This Week’s Hype, but I’ll just mention here that the June Scientific American has The Collider That Could Save Physics. It seems that SUSY [supersymmetry] is needed to “save physics”. Way back when it was LEP that was going to “save physics” by finding SUSY, then it was to be the LHC. This year’s LHC run should put the final nails in that coffin (data is now starting to be collected, see for instance here). Unfortunately the reaction of many SUSY partisans is not to follow the usual norms for how science is Read More ›

This time they are burning books in Portland. Read the last paragraph of this resolution adopted by the Portland School Board. Because the suppression of doubt or skepticism is the foundation of any good science education.  Right? As Robert Tracinski reports: Actually, the story is even worse than what conservative news sites have reported. It’s not just that Portland banished from its schools any active denial of catastrophic, man-made global warming; it’s that they banished any language that implies the smallest amount of doubt. Bill Bigelow, a former teacher now working for the activist group that pushed this resolution, explained its rationale in testimony to the school board: “Bigelow said PPS’ science textbooks are littered with words like ‘might,’ ‘may,’ and ‘could’ Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur at Huffington Post: The Royal Society science office says the suspense will soon be over. It will announce presenter names/topics for the November evolution paradigm shift conference within two weeks — democratically, by email to all those registered to attend the public meeting. What’s more, it has added to its original list of invitees. Zoologists perhaps at last conceding viruses belong in the tent? More politics than the UN, one guesses. However, grumblings about paradigm shift are coming not only from “the enemies,” i.e., the usual suspects (who are likely to send their disruptive “representatives” to the London gathering) — but from more measured, responsible voices like Indiana University biologist Michael Lynch. Lynch recently responded to my Read More ›

Say Brian Boutwell and J.C. Barnes at Nautilus: That’s right, the most compelling evidence for transgenerational epigenetics is in rodents, not humans. We are fans of animal research, but as Pinker noted, the strengths of it (fast reproductive cycles allowing for the study of numerous generations in a short window of time) may also curtail its applicability to humans in this particular case. Additionally, scientists can randomly manipulate a rodent pup’s exposure to different parenting/rearing strategies. But doing this with human babies would never fly with a university ethics committee. When you can’t do experiments, you have to be very careful about something called confounding. Confounding is a pernicious problem that can make one thing look like it’s causing something Read More ›

More goodness brought to us by naturalism From philosopher Stephen Cave at the Atlantic: The sciences have grown steadily bolder in their claim that all human behavior can be explained through the clockwork laws of cause and effect. This shift in perception is the continuation of an intellectual revolution that began about 150 years ago, when Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species. Shortly after Darwin put forth his theory of evolution, his cousin Sir Francis Galton began to draw out the implications: If we have evolved, then mental faculties like intelligence must be hereditary. But we use those faculties—which some people have to a greater degree than others—to make decisions. So our ability to choose our fate Read More ›

Only religion prevents us from seeing the Darwinian truth about evolution. Or at least that’s what one would think reading ScienceDaily: Generally seen as antithetical to one another, evolution and religion can hardly fit in a scientific discourse simultaneously. However, biologist Dr Aldemaro Romero Jr., Baruch College, USA, devotes his latest research article, now published in the open access Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO), to observing the influences a few major religions have had on evolutionists and their scientific thinking over the centuries. … “Since the advent of Modern Synthesis we have a pretty consistent set of evidence that evolution is not linear, that there is not such a thing as direction for evolutionary processes, and that nothing is predetermined Read More ›

Readers may recall that unusually thoughtful science writer John Horgan recently told “Skeptics” Scientific American to do something useful with their lives. (Bash Bigfoot less, pop science more.) The Skeptics, of course, protested that soft targets are fun. (The multiverse can be science even if unfalsifiable…) The exchange identified the issue clearly. The Skeptical science communicators are mainly looking for confirmation of their theories from science; Horgan wants them to report on actual science. In Nature (which owns Scientific American), Chris Woolston writes, Horgan wrote that for sceptics to really have an impact, they need to tackle the “dubious and even harmful claims promoted by major scientists and institutions”. For example, Horgan argues that sceptics should expose the harm that Read More ›

From Wesley J. Smith at First Things: Most people understand the word “death” to mean the end of biological life or, as Merriam-Webster defines it, “a permanent cessation of all vital functions.” But now an influential cadre of utilitarian bioethicists wants to redefine it to include a subjective and sociologically based meaning. Their purpose isn’t greater scientific accuracy. Rather, by making “death” malleable, they hope to open the door further to treating indisputably living human beings as if they were cadavers. Legally, human death is declared when medical testing discerns the irreversible cessation of one of two biological functions that must work for a human being to be considered an integrated functioning organism. The first is the cardio/pulmonary function, the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: What used to be dismissed by many as “junk DNA” is back with a vengeance as growing data points to the importance of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) — genome’s messages that do not code for proteins — in development and disease. But our progress in understanding these molecules has been slow because of the lack of technologies that allow the systematic mapping of their functions. Yes, that’s what they said. ncRNAs come in multiple flavours: there’s rRNA, tRNA, snRNA, snoRNA, piRNA, miRNA, and lncRNA, to name a few, where prefixes reflect the RNA’s place in the cell or some aspect of its function. But the truth is that no one really knows the extent to which these ncRNAs control Read More ›

Many of our interlocutors here often complain about the lengthy comments KF often posts which frame the necessity of a cohesive and coherent worldview when it comes to moral views and arguments. With others, their arguments often hinge around the insistence that either morals simply are not objective in nature, or that there is no way to tell. Even when the logic shows how subjective morality fails to provide a sound basis for behavior or argument, and fails to differentiate any moral view from another, their mantra seems to be a big “so what?” IOW, so what if their worldview is rationally inconsistent with their behavior? So what if ultimately subjective morality endorses any and all behavior as moral equivalents? Read More ›

From the BBC: It is clear the chimpanzees were aware something was wrong, and they gathered next to Thomas, lying on his back. What surprised the researchers most was the way the chimps sat quietly around their deceased friend for long periods. “Chimps never do that in other contexts,” says Dr van Leeuwen. “There is always something going on.” Usually, they will groom, play or eat with each other, vocalise, and, on occasion, be aggressive. But 22 of the chimps came up to look at Thomas, with nine gently touching him, with one, a female named Noel, then touching her own lips. The chimps didn’t inspect the body and then leave, which also surprised the primatologists, especially as the discovery Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers chart landscape of genetic, epigenetic regulation in plants New findings yield insights into how plants get their traits. Revealing a landscape of protein-binding zones on DNA, collectively dubbed the “cistrome,” shows how plants control where and when genes are expressed. Previous methods for mapping the cistrome in plant cells were difficult and slow, but the new approach, say authors, overcomes those hurdles to offer a sweeping view of this critical aspect of genetic regulation. … Lots of information in plant and animal cells is contained in “coding” stretches of DNA that have the instructions to make proteins, the physical workhorses of cells. But researchers are increasingly realizing that other sections of the genome have elements that control Read More ›