2016

At comment 60 in this thread about self-described atheistic materialists who want portray themselves as being moral yet having no basis by which to be moral in any objective sense, Seversky says in response: “However, it is a choice between able to be good in a way that actually means something and actually matters,…” to whom? That’s always the unspoken part of such a claim. Meaning only exists in the mind of the beholder and something or some one only matters to some one. Believers fell better if they believe that their lives have meaning and matter, which means they need a Creator to whom they matter. Notice that, according to Seversky, meaning is an entirely subective pheonomena. IOW, in Read More ›

From Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media: Real misogynists used to argue that women couldn’t understand things as well as men could. This patronizing view is both insulting and false, but now it has reemerged in a new way — so-called feminist professors arguing that science itself is misogynist because it deals in objective truth. That’s one of the daft arguments in “Are STEM Syllabi Gendered? A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis” by the University of North Dakota’s Laura Parson, published in The Qualitative Report at the beginning of this year. While Parson admits that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) syllabi do not have “overt references to gender,” their language “reflects institutionalized STEM teaching practices and views about knowledge that are Read More ›

Now and then, we’ve talked about the Voynich manuscript, a strange mediaeval work whose baffling code seems undecipherable. From Libby Plummer and Abigail Beall at Daily Mail: Many experts argue that the text contains similar features to natural languages, suggesting that it may be a code. However, Gordon Rugg, a computing expert at Keele University claims to have worked out a simple system that produces similar results in a new study. … The researcher was able to generate a series of words that follow a linguistic pattern, but are actually meaningless, using a rudimentary grid system based on Voynichese words. More. “Clones” of the book are to be made available for under $10k. The new theory is intriguing but will Read More ›

From Charles Seife at Scientific American: The deal was this: NPR, along with a select group of media outlets, would get a briefing about an upcoming announcement by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration a day before anyone else. But in exchange for the scoop, NPR would have to abandon its reportorial independence. The FDA would dictate whom NPR’s reporter could and couldn’t interview. The government wouldn’t budge on that, and the situation only accidentally came to light. But practically the eintre Who’s Who of big U.S. media science journalism showed up to cover the “story.” This kind of deal offered by the FDA—known as a close-hold embargo—is an increasingly important tool used by scientific and government agencies to control Read More ›

From British science writer Julie Rehmeyer at Stat News: How bad science misled chronic fatigue syndrome patients Under court order, the study’s authors for the first time released their raw data earlier this month. Patients and independent scientists collaborated to analyze it and posted their findings Wednesday on Virology Blog, a site hosted by Columbia microbiology professor Vincent Racaniello. The analysis shows that if you’re already getting standard medical care, your chances of being helped by the treatments are, at best, 10 percent. And your chances of recovery? Nearly nil. The new findings are the result of a five-year battle that chronic fatigue syndrome patients — me among them — have waged to review the actual data underlying that $8 Read More ›

As advanced by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, From. Adam Frank at NPR: To paraphrase the website Understanding Evolution, “fitness” is used to describe how good a particular organism is at getting its offspring into the next generation relative to the other organisms around it. When people study evolution using mathematics or computers, they imagine there are compact ways of describing what makes an organism fit for a particular environment. That’s what they mean by “fitness functions.” So imagine you have two kinds of creatures living in an environment. The first is tuned to respond directly to objective reality — the actual independent reality out there. The other creature has behavior only tuned to its, and the environment’s, fitness function. The Read More ›

From Moshe Averick, author of The Confused World of Modern Atheism, at Algemeiner: Atheists Still Waiting for the Origin-of-Life Messiah … In other words, despite the prodigious amounts of energy invested by people like Richard Dawkins in spreading propaganda to the contrary, Darwin provided exactly zero evidence to support an atheistic view of biology. Nothing has changed at all; the awe and wonder of the miraculous design and engineering that characterizes every single living creature on earth points as clearly to Divine creation in our day as it did in the period before Charles Darwin published his famous treatise. In their heart of hearts, non-believers like Richard Dawkins understand that the Origin of Life problem means that their so called Read More ›

So have fish entered the the Stone Age too? From Jonathan Balcombe at Nautilus:: Here’s an example of fish intelligence, courtesy of the frillfin goby, a small fish of intertidal zones of both eastern and western Atlantic shores. When the tide goes out, frillfins like to stay near shore, nestled in warm, isolated tide pools where they may find lots of tasty tidbits. But tide pools are not always safe havens from danger. Predators such as octopuses or herons may come foraging, and it pays to make a hasty exit. But where is a little fish to go? Frillfin gobies deploy an improbable maneuver: They leap to a neighboring pool. How do they do it without ending up on the rocks, Read More ›

Here’s a graph from the IPCC. I just happened upon it. Notice that, historically, global temperatures were, cyclically, about 4 degrees warmer than now. Just look at the repeated cycle! It’s been getting warmer for the last 15,000 years plus. AGW is just a farce. And the IPCC itself makes this point.

From ScienceDaily: A person’s DNA sequence can provide a lot of information about how genes are turned on and off, but new research out of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine suggests the 3-D structure DNA forms as it crams into cells may provide an additional layer of gene control. As long strands of DNA twist and fold, regions far away from each other suddenly find themselves in close proximity. The revolutionary study suggests interactions between distant regions may affect how genes are expressed in certain diseases. … According to Scacheri, “The big surprise was when we crunched the numbers and compared the risk associated with the amount of heritability that could be explained by the outside variants. By Read More ›

You’d think so, to listen to Lebanese American essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb at Medium.com: What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for. But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — Read More ›

Last night we noted that even New Scientist now seems to accept that it’s time to rethink how evolution works. The author of the New Scientist article is St. Andrews’ Kevin Laland, whose 2015 paper (with colleagues) is here (public access): Scientific activities take place within the structured sets of ideas and assumptions that define a field and its practices. The conceptual framework of evolutionary biology emerged with the Modern Synthesis in the early twentieth century and has since expanded into a highly successful research program to explore the processes of diversification and adaptation. Nonetheless, the ability of that framework satisfactorily to accommodate the rapid advances in developmental biology, genomics and ecology has been questioned. We review some of these Read More ›

But that is ridiculous. No, we don’t mean New Scientist-type ridiculous. We mean serious ridiculous. Stuff we can’t just ignore. New Scientists, get back to your script! You’re supposed to be explaining why Darwinism prevents a plague of disembodied space brains from taking over the world and why information is physical. Whatever happened to the days when we could raise money just by fronting all the nonsense you people put forward? It’s fundraising season! Look. We’ll even give the New Scientist employees a bonus if they can come up with another completely risible idea. But now look at how far they may have strayed beyond the selfish gene: From Kevin Laland, For more than 150 years it has been one Read More ›

From Amanda Doyle at Astrobiology Magazine: Scientists are attempting to put a date on the earliest lifeforms in the kingdom of Animalia, but without an actual cast of a body they’ve had to rely on the credibility of “trace” fossils to show signs of an animal’s presence in the form of footprints, scratches, feeding marks or burrows. Some scientists claim to have found trace fossils made by animals more than a billion years ago, raising controversy over whether animal life could have existed this early. There are also trace fossils from the Ediacaran Period and soft bodied animals were known to exist during this period, so understanding the tracks they made is important for studying the early animals. Giulio Mariotti, Read More ›

Stefaan Blanche and Peter C. Kjærgaard indulge fears at Scientific American: We have both had encounters with creationists. They come in all shades and represent all major denominations. They live in cities and in rural areas. Some are well educated, some belong to the establishment, others don’t. Some are well organized and well funded, others are not. Several are dedicated to a cause, many as missionaries with the role of spreading the word of divine creation as opposed to evolution; others keep to themselves. But despite their differences, they have something in common—they are all Europeans. A certain type of education prevents the average European intellectual from considering the possibility that such a disparate group may be united more by Read More ›