2016

Last time, it was climate change. From Smithsonian Mag: A new theory links their fate to a meat-heavy regimen While humans have barrel-shaped chests and narrow pelvises, Neanderthals had bell-shaped torsos with wide pelvises. The prevailing explanation has been that Neanderthals, often living in colder and drier environments than their human contemporaries, needed more energy and therefore more oxygen, so their torsos swelled to hold a bigger respiratory system. … Alas, though fat is easier to digest, it’s scarce in cold conditions, as prey animals themselves burn up their fat stores and grow lean. So Neanderthals must have eaten a great deal of protein, which is tough to metabolize and puts heavy demands on the liver and kidneys to remove toxic Read More ›

From an interesting 2013 paper: on peafowl courtship: Conspicuous, multicomponent ornamentation in male animals can be favored by female mate choice but we know little about the cognitive processes females use to evaluate these traits. Sexual selection may favor attention mechanisms allowing the choosing females to selectively and efficiently acquire relevant information from complex male display traits and, in turn, may favor male display traits that effectively capture and hold female attention. Using a miniaturized telemetric gaze-tracker, we show that peahens (Pavo cristatus) selectively attend to specific components of peacock courtship displays and virtually ignore other, highly conspicuous components. Females gazed at the lower train but largely ignored the head, crest and upper train. When the lower train was obscured, Read More ›

From Human Genesis: So that leaves intentional burial, not necessarily because burial makes perfect sense but because everything else makes much less sense. After all, it is really hard to imagine why Homo naledi would crawl so far underground to bury their dead. If they did access the cave, they must have been able to use fire well. They must have advanced beyond just making a fire to making functional torches or lamps. The fact that these bodies were deposited over time even suggests that there was a cultural transmission going on: Older Homo naledi must have taught the younger ones where to take dead bodies and how to get into the Dinaledi chamber. As mentioned above, the intentional burial Read More ›

Following up from the FTR on the lesson of the failure of democracy in Athens, I have found a powerful 26-lecture series by Rufus Fears . . . a man imbued with the spirit of history; one that will well and long repay the time invested to view it and to ponder and discuss it. Perhaps the most subtly powerful is this, No. 20, on the Trial of Socrates 399 BC (an indictment of Athens’ democracy — with sobering implications for our own): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ra9nA6F8tI Going back to the Peloponnesian war, 16, 17, 18 and 19 are collectively devastating and point sobering fingers to Alcibiades (nor does Nicias come off well) while showing up the Spartan Lysander as a stunning contrast Read More ›

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