From Mark: The point I made – about the criminal enforcement of state ideology – has since been reinforced by the disgusting behavior of 20 (so far) attorneys-general from California to the US Virgin Islands ganging up to investigate and charge “climate deniers” for the crime of holding a different opinion and exercising their First Amendment right to express it. As I noted in my testimony, a group of lavishly enriched climate scientists led by Professor Jagadish Shukla of George Mason University recently urged the President to prosecute climate dissenters under RICO racketeering laws. In fact, the behavior of Shukla and his gang more closely resembles that of racketeers – as does the conspiracy of state attorneys-general. The freedom-of-information release Read More ›

It Takes Ganas: Jaime Escalante’s secret to inspired learning Great teachers are typically unknown beyond the immediate circle of their students, colleagues, and families. That was not the case with Jaime Escalante. Escalante taught calculus with outstanding success at Garfield High, in a tough Hispanic neighborhood of East Lost Angeles. Escalante’s success was portrayed in the 1988 film Stand and Deliver, for which Edward James Olmos, who played Escalante, received an Oscar nomination. At its height, Escalante’s program at Garfield saw 85 students pass the Advanced Placement calculus test, more than at any but a handful of high schools across the nation. Most people these days, if they remember Escalante, immediately think of Stand and Deliver. That film ended on Read More ›

Yes, we know. It’s complicated. Science writer John Horgan might have expected some pushback from his advice to Skeptics: Bash Bigfoot less, pop science more, and he got his wish (!) via Steven Novella at Neurologica blog: Horgan gives a very superficial analysis, in my opinion to the point of being wrong. He claims they [multiverse, string theory] are not falsifiable, therefore they are pseudoscientific, “Like astrology.” For those of you playing logical fallacy bingo, that is a false analogy. There are many problems with astrology that do not apply to string theory. Indeed. Astrology eventually became testable* and flunked. It’s not clear that the multiverse or the computer sim universe will ever become testable. The “non-falsifiable” criticism has been Read More ›

The purpose of today’s post is to ask Dr. Hunter thirteen questions regarding his views on human origins. I hope he will be gracious enough to respond. Without further ado, here they are. 1. Dr. Hunter, in your original article over at Darwin’s God, you put forward eleven arguments against the hypothesis that humans and chimps had a common ancestor, before going on to critique Professor S. Joshua Swamidass’s evidence for human evolution as “just another worthless argument,” which was “not about science,” but about metaphysics, and for that reason, “unfalsifiable.” Why did you subsequently revise your post, by deleting a key premise from your very first argument, and then deleting eight paragraphs which contained your sixth and seventh arguments? Read More ›

In my law practice I often represent charter school applicants appealing local districts’ denial of their charter applications to the Colorado State Board of Education.  Some years ago in one of these appeals a local district decided to support their case for denial by hiring an infamous advocacy firm masquerading as experts in education economics to produce a report demonstrating the terrible economic threat charter schools represent to school districts.  The firm produced the report and I proceeded to explode it by pointing out the tendentious assumptions upon which it was based. The district’s decision to use the firm backfired, because their obvious bad faith probably helped me win that appeal.  I was particularly pleased with one line from my Read More ›

From Dennis Horgan at Scientific American: Here’s an example involving two idols of Capital-S Skepticism: biologist Richard Dawkins and physicist Lawrence Krauss. Krauss recently wrote a book, A Universe from Nothing. He claims that physics is answering the old question, Why is there something rather than nothing? Krauss’s book doesn’t come close to fulfilling the promise of its title, but Dawkins loved it. He writes in the book’s afterword: “If On the Origin of Species was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see A Universe From Nothing as the equivalent from cosmology.” Just to be clear: Dawkins is comparing Lawrence Krauss to Charles Darwin. Why would Dawkins say something so foolish? Because he hates religion so much Read More ›

You’ve probably heard vaguely somewhere about oxytocin (the love drug). = Oxytocin explains why we care. Of course, that turned out not to be so years ago, We thought the hype was already dead but New Scientist seems to want to drive a stake through the heart: The “cuddle chemical”. The “moral molecule”. Oxytocin has quite a reputation – but much of what we thought about the so-called “love hormone” may be wrong. Oxytocin is made by the hypothalamus and acts on the brain, playing a role in bonding, sex and pregnancy. But findings that a sniff of the hormone is enough to make people trust each other more are being called into question after a string of studies failed to Read More ›

From HarperCollins, Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed (July 12) Throughout his distinguished and unconventional career, engineer-turned-molecular-biologist Douglas Axe has been asking the questions that much of the scientific community would rather silence. Now, he presents his conclusions in this brave and pioneering book. Axe argues that the key to understanding our origin is the “design intuition”—the innate belief held by all humans that tasks we would need knowledge to accomplish can only be accomplished by someone who has that knowledge. For the ingenious task of inventing life, this knower can only be God. Starting with the hallowed halls of academic science, Axe dismantles the widespread belief that Darwin’s theory of evolution is indisputably true, showing Read More ›

Or, we are warned, they will be “swamped by the ever-increasing volume of poor work.” Imagine, on the virtual heels of: Authors: There is a worrying amount of outright fraud in psychology (But, they say, it may be no more common than in other disciplines), we get this: From science policy analyst Daniel Sarewitz at Nature, Mainstream scientific leaders increasingly accept that large bodies of published research are unreliable. But what seems to have escaped general notice is a destructive feedback between the production of poor-quality science, the responsibility to cite previous work and the compulsion to publish. … More than 50 years ago, Price predicted that the scientific enterprise would soon have to go through a transition from exponential Read More ›

Athens, the first great democracy — the city state and naval power that in company with the great Greek land power Sparta led Greece in its successful defense against Persian aggression — foolishly and arrogantly grasped for empire and wealth; so it fell due to its hubris. By march of folly [I add, cf vid lectures here]: For, when Persia made its second major move against Greece, it was naval power at Salamis that broke the Persians’ ambitions. And Athens then led in forming the Delian League, which: >> . . .  founded in 477 BC, was an association of Greek city-states . . . under the leadership of Athens, whose purpose was to continue fighting the Persian Empire after Read More ›

If humans are just meat robots, can we be rational creatures? Tim Stratton argues the case that libertarian free will is required in order to consider ourselves in any way rational – that if our decisions are solely the result of physics and chemistry, then we cannot then trust them to be rational in any significant sense. Even if naturalism were true, its being true would undercut our ability to justify the belief that it was true. Read Article

We’ve heard so much about the problems of psychology as a discipline in science. And as our own Jack Cole points out, psychologists may simply be more inclined to self-report. But a reader sent this one in from Tom Farsides and Paul Sparks at Britain’s Psychologist, and it merits a mention anyway: Opinion: Buried in bullshit … There is a worrying amount of outright fraud in psychology, even if it may be no more common than in other disciplines. Consider the roll call of those who have in recent years had high-status peer-reviewed papers retracted because of confirmed or suspected fraud: Marc Hauser, Jens Förster, Dirk Smeesters, Karen Ruggiero, Lawrence Sanna, Michael LaCour and, a long way in front with Read More ›

Further to Will the shooting stars please rise? Rob Sheldon writes to say Just to set the record straight. The meteorite they showed in the article, was not a piece of iron, it was a “framboid” from an extinct comet made up of Fe3O4 “magnetite”. The reason it looks all lumpy, is that it is a ball made up of ball bearings, each one small enough to be spontaneously magnetized. These ball bearings are not random crystallization of iron, rather they are biominerals, made by living organisms, and far from equilibrium. The closest analog is a Fe3S4 mineral “goethite” found in deep gold mines in South Africa. We don’t know much about the organisms that make them–they look to be Read More ›

As Carl Woese explained in 2004: Read more

From The Scientist: Harvard Medical School’s George Church and his collaborators invited some 130 scientists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and government officials to Boston last week (May 10) to discuss the feasibility and implementation of a project to synthesize entire large genomes in vitro. … Church told STAT News that the original intention was to make the meeting open, but in anticipation of an imminent, high-profile publication on this project, he and his collaborators had to respect the journal’s embargo. However, Endy tweeted a photo of what appeared to be a message from the meeting organizers stating that they chose not to invite media “because we want everyone to speak freely and candidly without concerns about being misquoted or misinterpreted.” If genomes Read More ›