From Hilda Bastian at PLOS: Here’s an example of what this means for a body of studies. I looked at this meta-analysis on changing implicit bias when l was researching for a recent blog post. It sounds like a solid base from which to draw conclusions: 427 studies with 63,478 participants. But 84% of the participants are college students, 66% female, and 55% from the USA. They’re nearly all very short-term studies (95%), 85% had no measures of behavior in them, and 87% had no pre-test results. More. In short, they might as well have been just three studies by profs who know each other. See also: Peer review Keep up to date with Retraction Watch Follow UD News at Read More ›

From Economist: The two researchers therefore looked at samples of sea-floor sediment taken from a site on Blake Ridge in the north-western Atlantic Ocean. They knew from the work of others that some foram shells in this sediment have remained translucent while others have become opaque, permitting the two sorts from the same sedimentary layer to be compared and contrasted. The contrasts, they found, are huge. Radiocarbon dating suggests the opaque shells are a lot older than the translucent ones. In one sample, collected from a depth of 71-73cm below the sea floor, the translucent shells clocked in as being between 14,030 and 17,140 years old, while the opaque shells seemed to be aged between 26,120 and 32,580 years. Another Read More ›

One of our presenters at the AM-Nat conference, Rope Kojonen, recently published a paper based on his AM-Nat presentation with the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, titled “Methodological Naturalism and the Truth Seeking Objection.”
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From Doug Axe’s Undeniable: Atheists have a pronounced leaning toward scientism, which is the belief that science is the only reliable source of truth. It’s entirely understandable, then, that belief in God might look to them like wishful thinking – as though people of faith have let their hearts overpower their heads. . . . We fully acknowledge that emotion can get in the way of clear thinking, but since we see this as a very general condition of humanity, we would never offer it as a particular weakness of atheism, the way so many atheists offer it as a particular weakness of theism. (P. 7) Axe is director of the Biologic Institute. Note: Pot. Kettle. Scientism is the chief Read More ›

John Searle, who is currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, is one of the world’s most highly respected philosophers. In a recent nine-minute interview with Closer To Truth host Robert Lawrence Kuhn, Searle succinctly defined the problem of free will, in laypersons’ language. Although Searle finds it difficult (as a materialist) to see how human beings could possibly possess free will, he also realizes that it’s impossible for us not to believe that we have it. If it is an illusion, then it’s one we can never hope to escape from. At the same time, Searle is withering in his criticism of “compatibilist” philosophers, who assert that even if our actions are fully determined, Read More ›

From Richard Webb: Quantum physicists just can’t agree on how to handle the fundamental uncertainty that apparently underpins reality. We round up their best attempts so far … In 2011, 33 physicists and philosophers at a conference in Austria on “Quantum physics and the nature of reality” were asked to nominate their favourites, listed below. The percentages of the delegates backing the various options do not add up to 100 – in keeping with the spirit of quantum theory, the poll allowed multiple answers. Here’s an interesting, moderately sane one: The information interpretation – 8 votes, 24 per cent Information-theory interpretations stem from a growing realisation among physicists that the most basic currency of reality might be not stuff, but Read More ›

From Ethan Siegel: From everything we can observe, and from all the theoretical hints the Universe gives us about its topology, shape, curvature and origin, we fully expect that there’s more Universe out there — identical in properties to what we observe — beyond what we can see. It’s only due to the fact that the Universe has been around for a finite amount of time that we can only observe a specific part of it. This is the most simple definition of Multiverse that’s out there: the idea that there’s simply more, unobservable Universe out there beyond what we can see. That’s a very conservative definition of multiverse compared to most that one hears. And sure enough, soon: The Read More ›

Asks Adam Frank: Earlier this year, my colleague Woody Sullivan and I published a paper in the journal Astrobiology presenting new results that, I believe, throw new light on the ancient question. And, based on that work, last month I wrote an OpEd in The New York Times that ran with provocative title “Yes, There Were Aliens.” The Times piece found a large audience and generated strong responses running from agreement to dissent to folks telling me I really should look into UFOs (sorry, not my thing). Just what he’s got against the UFOs is not, under the circumstances, clear. But anyway, One of the principle objections raised to my piece was that the fact that just because 10-22 is Read More ›

In this next video from the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism (AM-Nat) conference, Rope Kojonen defends methodological naturalism by suggesting that the foundation for its objections is the belief that science is the only valid way of knowing.
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According to 270 scientists From Vox: Scientists often learn more from studies that fail. But failed studies can mean career death. So instead, they’re incentivized to generate positive results they can publish. And the phrase “publish or perish” hangs over nearly every decision. It’s a nagging whisper, like a Jedi’s path to the dark side. “Over time the most successful people will be those who can best exploit the system,” Paul Smaldino, a cognitive science professor at University of California Merced, says. To Smaldino, the selection pressures in science have favored less-than-ideal research: “As long as things like publication quantity, and publishing flashy results in fancy journals are incentivized, and people who can do that are rewarded … they’ll be Read More ›

I welcome Matspirit to these pages, because he gives us a never ending supply of materialist error to discuss.  In his latest he addresses the origin of life debate.  He says that all materialists have to do is make wildly implausible evidence-free assertions about OOL, and unless ID proponents can affirmatively disprove those wildly implausible evidence-free assertions, the materialists win the debate.  Gpuccio shoots this lunacy down: Matspirit: Prove that the DNA/RNA system we see today is the only one that ever existed. Prove that a simpler system didn’t exist long before and evolve the start of our present system. Gpuccio No. The system we see today is a fact, because we can observe it. It is the only system Read More ›

Readers may vaguely remember Francis Collins’* colleague at BioLogos, Karl Giberson. In an expected pan review, he tells us: Dogged by controversy since its conception, the project overcame many challenges. Tax incentives were controversial, given the organization’s view on LGBT hiring. Raising funds was a problem, solved partially by Ham’s high-profile debate with Bill Nye, who was an early visitor to the Ark Encounter. Scientists expressed concern about the promotion of pseudoscience. Biblical scholars objected to treating the myth of Noah’s flood as a historical event. Having overcome so many problems—which he views as the work of Satan—Ham now confidently states, “The Lord has worked mightily over the years to make this project a reality.” The Ark Encounter is based on Read More ›

gpuccio to materialist fideistic materialist dogmatist Matspirit: The only result of dogmatic anti-dogmatism is a new form of dogmatism.

From Sarah Lewin at Space.com: When life originates on a planet, whether Earth or a distant world, the newborn life-forms may have to overcome incredible odds to come into existence — and a new equation lays out exactly how overwhelming those odds may be. Well, it’s good that someone is admitting that there aren’t billions and billions of them out there. If we can’t factor in information, we can get precisely nowhere, though there may be some good luncheon talks in the meantime. “It’s not an answer; it’s a new tool for trying to think about the issues involved,” Ed Turner, an astronomer at Princeton University, told Space.com. Turner was not involved in the work, but the paper’s definition of Read More ›