Scooby-Doo and the Case of the Silly Skeptic (David Wood) In “Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island,” the gang encounters real zombies and ghosts for the first time. But Fred explains away the evidence by appealing to increasingly absurd naturalistic explanations. In the end, even Fred recognizes that his explanations simply can’t account for the facts. Atheists often call themselves “skeptics.” But when we consider the methodology they apply when questioning God’s existence, we find that the atheist’s methodology rules out all evidence for God’s existence even before considering what the evidence is. In this video, David Wood uses some clips from “Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island” and some clips from his recent debate with Dr. Michael Shermer to show why it’s becoming Read More ›

Supersymmetry predicts a partner particle for each particle in the Standard Model, to help explain why particles have mass – CERN From Economist: Strictly speaking, Susy can never be formally disproved. It can always be tweaked so that sparticles appear only at energies that are just out of reach of the best existing colliders. Yet the more such tweaks are applied, the more they erode the elegance for which the theory is admired. In light of the LHC’s failure to find evidence for Susy, more physicists are arguing that the field’s obsession with the theory is a waste of time and effort. Scientists at the LHC filter the data they record by looking first for particles predicted by favoured theories, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: At UMC Utrecht, a brain implant has been placed in a patient enabling her to operate a speech computer with her mind. The researchers and the patient worked intensively to get the settings right. She can now communicate at home with her family and caregivers via the implant. That a patient can use this technique at home is unique in the world. This research was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. … The patient operates the speech computer by moving her fingers in her mind. This changes the brain signal under the electrodes. That change is converted into a mouse click. On a screen in front of her she can see the alphabet, plus some additional Read More ›

From Emily Conover at Science News, reviewing philosopher James Owen Weatherall’s Void: The strange physics of nothing: In Void: The Strange Physics of Nothing, physicist and philosopher James Owen Weatherall explores how physicists’ beliefs about nothingness have changed over several revolutionary periods. The void, Weatherall argues, is physics distilled to its bare essence. If physicists can’t agree on the properties of empty space, they won’t be able to explain the physics of planets or particles either. Well, they haven’t so far. Under the modern view of quantum physics, various fields pervade all of space, and particles are simply excitations, or waves, in these fields. Even in a vacuum, experiments show, fluctuating fields produce a background of transient particles and antiparticles. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A new study suggests probable scientific misconduct in at least some of 33 bone health trials published in various medical journals. The study used statistical methods to detect scientific misconduct or research fraud and calls into question the validity of a body of research work led mainly by one researcher in Japan. The study is published in the November 9, 2016, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. … For the analysis of the 33 trials, 26 of which Sato was lead author, Bolland’s team conducted a rigorous review and found reported results that differed markedly from what could be expected statistically; further, the results were remarkably positive. The characteristics of the Read More ›

Thanks to johnnyb for alerting us to John Searle’s talk at Google in his last post.  Johnny said he had only listened to about 45 minutes in when he wrote his post.  Too bad, because the best part of the entire vid is the following colloquy between a questioner and Searle that begins at 58:25: The questioner posits the following: You seem to take it as an article of faith that we are conscious, that your dog is conscious, and that that consciousness comes from biological material, the likes of which we can’t really understand.  But – forgive me for saying this – that makes you sound like an intelligent design theorist, who says that because evolution and everything in Read More ›

  From Elizabeth Howell at Space.com: November’s full moon on Monday (Nov. 14) will be the biggest and brightest one since 1948, making it a great time to get outside and marvel at the lunar sight for stargazers around the world. But if it happens to be cloudy in your area, don’t despair. You can still watch the so-called “supermoon” online in several live webcasts, starting tonight (Nov. 13). More.

It’s all about fear, see? From Dan Ariely and Vlad Chituc at New Scientist: It’s explained by the fact that, in a famous 1950s experiment, baby rhesus monkeys preferred a soft cloth with no nourishment to a wire that dispensed milk. In nature, emotions typically align with self-interest: most mother monkeys provide both comfort and milk. Emotions are how evolution motivates us to do what we need to survive. A newborn triggers love, so we nurture; a rustle at night triggers fear, so we run. … Earlier this week, the US joined the likes of Russia in electing somebody who knows the power of fear very well. Although many forces brought us here, it’s notable that Trump pawned the nation’s Read More ›

A friend noted this book, Admirable Evasions How Psychology Undermines Morality (2015), by psychiatrist and essayist Theodore Dalrymple: In Admirable Evasions, Theodore Dalrymple explains why human self-understanding has not been bettered by the false promises of the different schools of psychological thought. Most psychological explanations of human behavior are not only ludicrously inadequate oversimplifications, argues Dalrymple, they are socially harmful in that they allow those who believe in them to evade personal responsibility for their actions and to put the blame on a multitude of scapegoats: on their childhood, their genes, their neurochemistry, even on evolutionary pressures. Dalrymple reveals how the fashionable schools of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, modern neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology all prevent the kind of honest self-examination that is Read More ›

BBC division. It’s hard to believe anyone writes this stuff in the face of overwhelming evidence of the fact. But ideology can blind people to obvious facts. In this case, that’s partly because the “humans are not special” message is a form of virtue signaling that parasitizes conservation issues and, fueled by sentimentality, can withstand the most obvious evidence. From David Robson at BBC: The guests lining up outside a Brisbane gallery were not your typical culture vultures; in fact, until recently they’d never seen a painting in their life. But with just a little training, they developed their own artistic taste, showing a clear preference for Picasso’s crystalline constructions or Monet’s dreamy soft focus as they wandered lazily through Read More ›

From Bruce Sterling, reviewing The Singularity from Journal of Consciousness Studies, at New Scientist: Creating superintellingence may be inevitable, unless we are already living in a simulation. A collection of AI essays grapples with this weighty issue … While the book is a tremendous flight over the craggy AI landscape, it settles no disputes and has little or nothing in the way of practical counsel. Kant, Hume and Descartes are major intellectual presences here, apparently because explosively proliferating future AI singularities are going to be plenty worried about these three dead European guys. (paywall) More. Introduction by editor Uziel Awret free here. More contents here. This all comes of not knowing or caring to know what information even is, or Read More ›

Sometimes, popular debates and commenters can put their fingers on a key issue, almost in passing. In this case, in addressing the cognitive dissonance issue triggering  many reactions to the rise of Donald Trump to US President-Elect (I confess, my own surprise* . . . ) Dilbert’s Scott Adams has dropped a real clanger of a wake-up call: Here is a money-shot clip from his current blog article, “The Cognitive Dissonance Cluster Bomb”: >>As I often tell you, we all live in our own movies inside our heads. Humans did not evolve with the capability to understand their reality because it was not important to survival. Any illusion that keeps us alive long enough to procreate is good enough. That’s Read More ›

Over at PhysOrg they have a story about how certain bacteria, when under stress conditions, shut themselves down and put themselves into a persistent state. They do it by modifying the chemicals involved in t-RNA. No, it’s not a “point mutation”—which is tauted as an icon of Darwinian evolution, but the utilization of an “alternate genetic code.” IOW, it’s regulated and ‘directed,’ and is ready-at-hand when needed. So, with this new information, the whole story of bacterial resistance now needs to be rethought. And, guess what, instead of pointing to “point mutations” (no pun intended), it points rather to “design.” Oh, those poor Darwinists/evolutionists. Another day; another bad day for Darwinism. From the press release: Dedon suspects that other families Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Chimpanzees often use tools to extract or consume food but which tools they choose for which purpose can differ depending on where they live. In 2010, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, initiated the ‘Pan African Programme: The Cultured Chimpanzee’ to characterize and understand the differences in chimpanzee behaviours in un- and poorly studied ape populations across Africa. This is how the researchers encountered a new behavioural variant: Algae fishing with long robust tools at a temporary research site in Bakoun, Guinea. … . “The PanAf project represents a new approach to studying chimpanzees and will provide many interesting insights into chimpanzee demography and social structure, genetics, behavior and culture,” says Hjalmar Read More ›

This one, at his blog: I don’t like to nitpick much any more, but their post is exceptionally misleading. The “latest” is not that Homo naledi just fell into the Dinaledi chamber. I never said that, so let me elaborate. … The bones did not just fall into the Dinaledi chamber. I feel quite confident in affirming the original hypothesis that complete Homo naledi bodies were intentionally placed in the Dinaledi chamber, and I expect future research will continue to support this hypothesis.More. For the record, we did not think Dr. Wood thought that the bones just fell in. But the paper he critiques (which posits that the bones were not placed in the cave intentionally) would seem to leave Read More ›