Further to “Atheist cosmologist warns “deeply religious” people not to put their faith in “apparent” fine-tuning” (Nature), Columbia mathematician and string theory skeptic Peter Woit (of Not Even Wrong) offers a review at Wall Street Journal of the same book, A Big Bang in a Little Room: The Quest to Create New Universes by Zeeya Merali, “Searching for God at the Centre of the Big Bang,” in which h notes, … Mr. Guth was initially fascinated by the idea of baby universes getting produced and making up a multiverse, though he imagined these other universes would all have the same physics as ours. Ms. Merali relates that he quickly lost interest: Why care much about cosmological models producing not just Read More ›

From astrophysicist Brian Koberlein at Nautilus: New Evidence for the Strange Idea that the Universe Is a Hologram One of the great mysteries of modern cosmology is how our universe can be so thermally uniform—the vast cosmos is filled with the lingering heat of the Big Bang. Over time, it has cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero, but it can still be seen in the faint glow of microwave radiation, known as the cosmic microwave background. In any direction we look, the temperature of this cosmic background is basically the same, varying by only tiny amounts. But according to the standard “cold dark matter” model of cosmology, there wasn’t enough time for hotter and cooler regions of the Read More ›

In “Physics: A cosmos in the lab,” a review of A Big Bang in a Little Room: The Quest to Create New Universes by Zeeya Merali, cosmologist Andreas Albrecht writes at Nature, The question of cosmic origins, and the possibility that humans might create new universes, can connect with religious concerns. These form a substantial thread through A Big Bang in a Little Room that significantly reduced the book’s appeal to me. I am an atheist. I respect that many people are deeply religious (some are very close to me) and that religion can have a positive, even beautiful, role. And I know many religious people who do superb science. But I find most attempts to connect religious questions with Read More ›

The Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism in Biology conference is this Saturday February 25th. Since the conference is online, you can attend from anywhere in the world as long as you have an Internet connection.
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From Maria Gallucci at Mashable, on a March for Science event: On Sunday, thousands scientists and supporters gathered in Boston’s Copley Square to “stand up for science” under the Trump administration. … Many rally-goers were in Boston for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society. … Hari, the science educator, said he is organizing more than 260 satellite events to coincide with the main March for Science in Washington this spring. More. The satellite events are probably going to be the important ones. Curiously, I O’Leary for News happened to be talking to two political operatives recently, one mature and one pretty young. (I don’t usually run into Read More ›

A friend posts this quotation from Ayn Rand: Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Rand’s conclusion is correct.  And the reasoning by which she gets to that conclusion is also correct. So whence the title of this post you might ask. Good question.  The answer is that given her premises as a reductionist materialist, Rand is not permitted logically to make the argument that she has made, because a reductionist materialism, by definition, insists that “a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced Read More ›

From Brian Gallagher at Nautilus: Colbert, an idiosyncratic but sincere Catholic, was not really playing devil’s advocate when he challenged Gervais to an argument about the existence of God on his show. Gervais is outspoken about his disbelief and is fond of tweeting the reductio ad absurdum of various religious arguments, yet initially he seemed at a loss for how to deflect Colbert’s skepticism of the Big Bang. … Stephen Colbert: “You’re just believing Stephen Hawking, and that’s a matter of faith in his abilities. You don’t know it yourself—you’re just accepting that because someone told you.” Ricky Gervais: “Well but science is constantly being proved all the time,” Gervais said. “If we take something like any holy book and Read More ›

From Megan Gannon at LiveScience: Scrawled with the image of an aurochs (an extinct species of cattle) and dozens of small dots, the slab was created by the Aurignacians, the first Homo sapiens to arrive in Europe. Radiocarbon tests showed that the engraving dates back to about 38,000 years ago, according to a Jan. 24 report in the journal Quaternary International. … The discovery of the slab fits into the patterns researchers usually see in the earliest European art: There are broad shared features, with some regional quirks that stand out, White said in a statement. “This pattern fits well with social geography models that see art and personal ornamentation as markers of social identity at regional, group and individual Read More ›

Some time in the next few days. Apologies for past down time and any near-future upgrade-related down time. We will at that time be introducing our security tag, so that posts will begin with the code https, instead of just http Your patience and generosity are always appreciated. Follow UD News at Twitter!

There’s a new article posted at my blog. I know this one is old news now, but my blog wasn’t around in 2015 and didn’t see any coverage on it here or at ENV. I wanted to take note of Dembski’s decision, and some of the reaction to it. Everyone who has taken part in the intelligent design debate will know of William Dembski. For those who aren’t familiar, Dembski is the primary architect with regard to the theoretical underpinnings of ID. Since his involvement with the movement, he has published extensively in books, papers, and blogs, and has vigorously championed his ideas in many public lectures and debates.(1) Back in 2005, Dembski wrote a sarcastic blog post on Uncommon Descent, Read More ›

Further to Barry Arrington: Can science ground morality?, looking at James Davison Hunter’s and Paul Nedelisky’s  Where the New Science of Morality Goes Wrong: Indeed, some believe that we are at the start of a new age, when the power of science will dispel myths surrounding morality and moral difference and establish a truly rational foundation for ethical truth.1 If so, this age will be based on a new moral synthesis that derives from the conceptual architecture of three main schools of Enlightenment thinking on this matter. The first is the psychologized sentimentalism of David Hume: the idea that the basis of moral judgment lies in human psychology, which can be studied empirically, like any other aspect of the physical Read More ›

From physicist Carlo Rovelli, author of Reality Is Not What It Seems:  The Journey to Quantum Gravity, interviewed by Cody Delistraty, at Nautilus: You’ve said before that space and time don’t “really exist.” Why say that? We study in school that fixed space is like a table over which things happen and time just passes. We have this quantitative view from Newton. With Einstein we understand that this container is in fact an active thing in the universe. Space and time, as Einstein said, is like a big jellyfish in which we’re immersed. This theory has stood up. So we know that all this dynamical stuff is quantum. We need a quantum description of this jellyfish, but a quantum description Read More ›

Maybe this time it will matter. From Frank Harrell at Statistical Thinking: In my opinion, null hypothesis testing and p-values have done significant harm to science. The purpose of this note is to catalog the many problems caused by p-values. As readers post new problems in their comments, more will be incorporated into the list, so this is a work in progress. The American Statistical Association has done a great service by issuing its Statement on Statistical Significance and P-values. Now it’s time to act. To create the needed motivation to change, we need to fully describe the depth of the problem. We thought that Darwin’s reputation in pop science would be enough to frustrate any inquiry, but maybe not. Read More ›

From Philip Ball at BBC: Nobody understands what consciousness is or how it works. Nobody understands quantum mechanics either. Could that be more than coincidence? The problem is not that we don’t understand consciousness but that we don’t know how to understand it. And our rules may very well preclude us from finding out. Which is okay if we would prefer to ask questions rather than get answers. In other words, the mind could genuinely affect the outcomes of measurements. It does not, in this view, exactly determine “what is real”. But it might affect the chance that each of the possible actualities permitted by quantum mechanics is the one we do in fact observe, in a way that quantum Read More ›

From Colin Dickey at New Republic: By focusing on high-definition thrills, nature documentaries obscure more than they reveal. What is a lemming, exactly? Most of us, I’m guessing, could name few of its basic biological attributes. (It’s a rodent weighing one to four ounces and measuring three to six inches in length that lives in the Arctic.) The primary thing we think we know about lemmings—that they throw themselves off cliffs in inexplicable mass suicides—is actually false. This myth originally arose as a folk explanation for the wide variances in lemming populations from year to year, and was cemented by White Wilderness, a nature film produced by Walt Disney that won the Academy Award for best documentary in 1958. In Read More ›