There’s a Science Magazine article on research into hidden biases in the language that AI systems use. The authors write: Our work has implications for AI and machine learning because of the concern that these technologies may perpetuate cultural stereotypes (18). Our findings suggest that if we build an intelligent system that learns enough about the properties of language to be able to understand and produce it, in the process it will also acquire historical cultural associations, some of which can be objectionable The ID position on almost every, if not every, Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) program written with the hope of simulating evolution, drags into it certain information that is essential in that program arriving at any appearance of high Read More ›

All that follows is from a comment WJM posted that deserves its own post: KF said: “RVB8 is free to believe whatever he wants to believe…” To which RVB8 said: “True.” As a materialist, RVB8 should have said: “No, I believe whatever happenstance chemical interactions cause me to believe.” RVB8 then spends some time trying to purchase some separation between his belief and faith and the belief and faith of the religious, as if they are two different things and come from two entirely different foundations, when – as an atheistic materialist – RVB8 must assume that his views, faith, beliefs and knowledge, and that of a religious person, are exactly the same and come from exactly the same source: Read More ›

From our WJM: When one is asked to support the view that the most highly complex and sophisticated, precise, self-correcting, multi-level & interdependent software-controlled hardware machinery known to exist most likely did not come into existence by happenstance interactions of chemistry, you know that we are in an age of rampant, self-imposed, ignorant idiocy. Happenstance physical interactions are not up to the task of creating such sophisticated, information-driven nanotechnology. There is no rational contrary position. You simply cannot argue such willful idiocy out of its self-imposed state. Thankfully, such exchanges are useful for other onlookers with more reasonable perspectives.

From a prankster (“Viva da Nada”) at “CMM News”: … Bill Nye the science guy was not actually present for this broadcast. Bennetville, California, has been a ghost town since 1890. No liberals were harmed in the making of this film. More. Friends find it heavy-handed; I (O’Leary for News) would send the latter half back to rewrite.* But be glad if you live in a place where you can just decide for yourself. Thoughts? * Less bludgeon, more Onion, please! See also: Marchin’, marchin’ for Science (Hint: the problems are back at your desk, not out in the streets) Follow UD News at Twitter!

Spotted at about 600 million years ago. From ScienceDaily: One of the longest-running controversies in evolutionary biology has been, ‘What was the oldest branch of the animal family tree?’ Was it the sponges, as had long been thought, or was it the delicate marine predators called comb jellies? A powerful new method has been devised to settle contentious phylogenetic tree-of-life issues like this and it comes down squarely on the side of comb jellies. … For nearly a century, scientists organized the animal family tree based in large part on their judgement of the relative complexity of various organisms. Because of their comparative simplicity, sponges were considered to be the earliest members of the animal lineage. This paradigm began to Read More ›

From Evolution News & Views: Some stunning upsets in conventional thinking about evolution have hit the news in rapid succession, threatening Darwin’s famous tree icon. Under the rules of neo-Darwinism, mutations must be random, providing fodder for the blind processes of natural selection. But here’s a case where animals defy their own neo-Darwinism. More. Yes, octopuses edit their genomes: News from the University of Chicago’s Marine Biological Laboratory implies that cephalopods were wise to choose the RNA editing bargain. “Mutation is usually thought of as the currency of natural selection, and these animals are suppressing that to maintain recoding flexibility at the RNA level,” says biologist Joshua Rosenthal. The lab “identified tens of thousands of evolutionarily conserved RNA recoding sites Read More ›

From Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: Sabine Hossenfelder is on a tear this week, with two excellent and highly provocative pieces about research practice in theoretical physics, a topic on which she has become the field’s most perceptive critic. The first is in this month’s Nature Physics, entitled Science needs reason to be trusted. I’ll quote fairly extensively so that you get the gist of her argument: But we have a crisis of an entirely different sort: we produce a huge amount of new theories and yet none of them is ever empirically confirmed. Let’s call it the overproduction crisis. We use the approved methods of our field, see they don’t work, but don’t draw consequences. Like a fly Read More ›

Abstract: Why is drug resistance common and vaccine resistance rare? Drugs and vaccines both impose substantial pressure on pathogen populations to evolve resistance and indeed, drug resistance typically emerges soon after the introduction of a drug. But vaccine resistance has only rarely emerged. Using well-established principles of population genetics and evolutionary ecology, we argue that two key differences between vaccines and drugs explain why vaccines have so far proved more robust against evolution than drugs. First, vaccines tend to work prophylactically while drugs tend to work therapeutically. Second, vaccines tend to induce immune responses against multiple targets on a pathogen while drugs tend to target very few. Consequently, pathogen populations generate less variation for vaccine resistance than they do for Read More ›

. . . through a case in point: >>tjguyApril 12, 2017 at 2:28 am rvb8 @2 Thank god (heh:), the obvious has been consigned to the rubbish bin of understanding, and we now prefer evidence, experimentation, and the unobvious, to the vacuous, empty, ‘obvious’. What is the problem with this way of thinking? He just assumes this “obvious” thing too will be relegated to the dustbin of understanding. That is what he believes – which is great, but it is nothing more than opinion/belief/worldview deduction, etc. right now. It is just as possible that the Materialist view of OoL will be relegated to the dustbin of understanding. And get this! He thinks that since we were able to learn how Read More ›

Astrophysicist and neuroscientist Casper Hesp wrote a piece at BioLogos, reviewing physicist Peter Bussey’s Signposts to God. Hesp thinks that fine-tuning of the universe is not a good argument for theism. After all, despite massive evidence and the utter improbability of other approaches, we could find out some day that we are wrong. From Wayne Rossiter, at Shadow of Oz: Last week I posted on what I see as a growing (and concerning) trend among BioLogians: the gravitation towards full-on naturalism (even beyond cosmology). I also speculated that Bussey’s arguments had been badly misrepresented. I decide to ask Dr. Bussey directly about some of the Hesp’s claims. In a really splendid way Bussey has offered a response. I am cut-pasting Read More ›

From Michael Keas at Synthese: Essay Abstract: There are at least twelve major virtues of good theories: evidential accuracy, causal adequacy, explanatory depth, internal consistency, internal coherence, universal coherence, beauty, simplicity, unification, durability, fruitfulness, and applicability. These virtues are best classified into four classes: evidential, coherential, aesthetic, and diachronic. Each virtue class contains at least three virtues that sequentially follow a repeating pattern of progressive disclosure and expansion. Systematizing the theoretical virtues in this manner clarifies each virtue and suggests how they might have a coordinated and cumulative role in theory formation and evaluation across the disciplines—with allowance for discipline specific modification. An informal and flexible logic of theory choice is in the making here. Evidential accuracy (empirical fit), according Read More ›

The neurosurgeon is Michael Egnor. From David Snoke at Christian Scientific Society: Mike Egnor gave a talk full of brain science data in support of his position of Aristotelean dualism [at the Annual Meeting last weekend]. He contrasted his position with Cartesian dualism, which has two distinct substances, one which is fully material and deterministic, and another which is spiritual and in another realm, which somehow interfaces with the brain. He argued Cartesian dualism actually just leads to materialism, as the spiritual substance gets ignored. By contrast, his view of Aristotelean dualism posits eternal “forms” associated with every material thing. For humans, the essence of this form is what we would call the spirit. I don’t fully understand this view, Read More ›

In response to my last post, Sev gives us an astonishing double down: Yes, a microscopic living cell is immensely complex when you look at it closely but comparing one to a factory based on some similarities in the internal processes is an analogy not necessarily evidence of design. To judge the value of an analogy you should also consider the differences. For example, a human factory is vastly larger than a living cell. It’s also made of refined metals, plastics and glass which you don’t find in the cell. Judged by those attributes of known design, the cell is not designed. OK, lets consider the differences that you point out. 1.  Cells are smaller than factories.  Sev, you didn’t Read More ›

From Bill Dembski at the Best Schools: The White House paper on automation rightly draws our attention to the challenges society faces from the coming disruptions to the job market on account of AI, and machine learning in particular. A real and imminent threat exists here, in which the middle-class could get severely hurt. But this threat can be averted if we rise to the occasion, demanding more of ourselves and of our educational system, focusing on those areas where human intelligence has primacy. Simply put, we’re smarter than machines, and we need to play to our strengths where the superiority of human over machine intelligence is palpable. More. Dembski also talks about the self-driving car. I (O’Leary for News) Read More ›

Further to Luciano Floridi: Information has been the Cinderella of philosophy, reader Mario Lopez writes to mention, I gave a short review of William Dembski’s Being as Communion in Amazon where I warn the reader not to confuse his ideas with Floridi’s Informational Structural Realism. Here is a short quote to give you an idea of Floridi’s position: Informational realism (IR) is a version of SR. As a form of realism, it is committed to the existence of a mind-independent reality. Like ESR, it supports a first-order, minimal ontological commitment in favour of the structural properties of reality. Like OSR, it also supports a second-order, minimal ontological commitment in favour of objects understood informationally. For those of you not familiar Read More ›