2017

From Laura Geggel at LiveScience: Scientists ran a meta-analysis of 63 studies and found that religious people tend to be less intelligent than nonreligious people. The association was stronger among college students and the general public than for those younger than college age, they found. The association was also stronger for religious beliefs, rather than religious behavior, according to the meta-analysis, published in 2013 in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review. But why does this association exist? Dutton set out to find answer, thinking that perhaps it was because nonreligious people were more rational than their religious brethren, and thus better able to reason that there was no God, he wrote. But “more recently, I started to wonder if Read More ›

  Here re Controversy of the Ages: Why Christians Should Not Divide Over the Age of the Earth: Second, chapter 9 is worth the price of the whole book. Cabal notes that Christians need to have theological boundaries to protect the faith, but ought to draw them with charity and proper balance between inclusivity and restrictiveness. While he does have some criticisms for Reasons to Believe, the leading OEC organization, since they are committed to biblical inerrancy, he reserves his primary criticism for Answers in Genesis (AiG) and BioLogos. As for AiG, Cabal is concerned that they draw doctrinal lines to narrowly—including such things as a young earth, a flood-shaped geology, Neanderthals, and details about taxonomy in the definition of inerrancy. Read More ›

Someone gave the link, I think we need to watch a comparison of real vs fake papers on gender: I ask us to ponder: Where have we now reached, why? END

From Ashley Strickland at CNN: The oldest fossil remains of Homo sapiens, dating back to 300,000 years, have been found at a site in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco. This is 100,000 years older than previously discovered fossils of Homo sapiens that have been securely dated. The discovery was presented in a study in the journal Nature on Wednesday. This marks the first discovery of such fossils in north Africa, and widens the “cradle of mankind” to encompass all of Africa, the researchers said. Previous finds were in south or east Africa. The fossils, including a partial skull and a lower jaw, belong to five different individuals including three young adults, an adolescent and a child estimated to be 8 years old. Read More ›

The book Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Methodologies describes how science can be done apart from the assumptions of Naturalism, which are usually assumed by materialists to be part and parcel of science. The book is based on a conference attended by many people in the Intelligent Design community, including several who are regulars on this site.
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Oh wait, wait, stop wait, the correct word is “reshaping” the Tree of Life. It still smells like fresh lumber to us. From ScienceDaily: A new era in science has emerged without a clear path to portraying the impacts of microbes across the tree of life. What’s needed is an interdisciplinary approach to classifying life that incorporates the countless species that depend on each other for health and survival, such as the diverse bacteria that coexist with humans, corals, algae and plants, according to the researchers, whose paper is published online in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. “In our opinion, one should not classify the bacteria or fungi associated with a plant species in separate phylogenetic systems (trees Read More ›

From the Economist: Although, like all Gedankenexperimente, this latest one cannot be conducted with current experimental technologies, all of the assumptions behind it have been so tested in the past. It therefore obeys both quantum mechanics and the theory of general relativity. But one big question nags. If the Gedankenexperimente that led to relativity relied on a linearity of time that the theory itself is now helping call into question, can those original thought experiments themselves be relied on? More. Time mayn’t be in as big trouble as the Economist is, fronting this stuff. See also: How naturalism rots science from the head down

Of course not. Not that you would know from the headline: From Jon Cartwright at New Scientist: Believe it or not, this burst of cosmological inflation, followed by a slower, tamer expansion, is the most sensible way to explain how the universe looks today. But there’s something missing: what did the inflating? The answer could be everywhere, and right under our noses. When a long-sought particle finally appeared a few years back, it seemed to close a chapter in physics without giving any clue about what happens next. Read between the lines, though, as some theorists recently have, and you see that the famous Higgs boson – the particle that gives mass, or inertia, to all other particles – might Read More ›

“Conceptual penis” as a social construct at Skeptic Reading Room: The publication of our hoax reveals two problems. One relates to the business model of pay-to-publish, open-access journals. The other lies at the heart of academic fields like gender studies. … Our hoax was similar, of course, but it aimed to expose a more troubling bias. The most potent among the human susceptibilities to corruption by fashionable nonsense is the temptation to uncritically endorse morally fashionable nonsense. That is, we assumed we could publish outright nonsense provided it looked the part and portrayed a moralizing attitude that comported with the editors’ moral convictions. Like any impostor, ours had to dress the part, though we made our disguise as ridiculous and Read More ›

From Massimo Pigliucci at Footnotes to Plato: Intelligent Design proponents and assorted creationists, for instance, have often pointed to alleged instances of “irreducible complexity” in the living world: biological systems that are so intricate that they could not possibly have evolved. In dealing with such challenges, evolutionary biologists can suggest possible evolutionary pathways leading to a given complex biological structure. When they have done so, there is an extra BoP [burden of proof] on ID advocates to rule out all of the proposed natural explanations. Contrary to what believers think, the BoP is not on skeptics to demonstrate which one of the natural explanations is the correct one. Given the overwhelming evidence for the power of natural selection to produce Read More ›

Quora: “Roger Penrose says, “String theory is fashion, quantum physics is faith, and cosmic inflation is fantasy.” Is he right?” From Brett Harris on the road to reality guy, Roger Penrose: I am getting tired of pointing out that String Theory arose out of particle physicists attempting to quantise the linearised version of GR, normally used in make perturbations to Newton’s laws in the solar system. This produces a free spin-2 graviton at 0th-level, and then they attempt to use first order interactions to construct a full interacting quantum field theory of gravitons – in FLAT space – which has none of the full symmetries of GR, and it fails miserably by throwing up infinities at all orders. Not to Read More ›

Over at ENV, David Klinghoffer reports on an article in Live Science about research into why atheists disproportionately score higher on standard tests of intelligence.  The article states: [Researcher Edward] Dutton set out to find [the] answer, thinking that perhaps it was because nonreligious people were more rational than their religious brethren, and thus better able to reason that there was no God, he wrote. But “more recently, I started to wonder if I’d got it wrong, actually,” Dutton told Live Science. “I found evidence that intelligence is positively associated with certain kinds of bias.” For instance, a 2012 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed that college students often get logical answers wrong but don’t realize it. Read More ›

From Diana Yates at U Illinois: New research reveals that a species of giant elephant that lived 1.5 million to 100,000 years ago – ranging across Eurasia before it went extinct – is more closely related to today’s African forest elephant than the forest elephant is to its nearest living relative, the African savanna elephant. The study challenges a long-held assumption among paleontologists that the extinct giant, Palaeoloxodon antiquus, was most closely related to the Asian elephant. The findings, reported in the journal eLife, also add to the evidence that today’s African elephants belong to two distinct species, not one, as was once assumed. … “We’ve had really good genetic evidence since the year 2001 that forest and savanna elephants Read More ›

IBM Fellow Charles Bennett, (developed Reversible Computation and Quantum Teleportation), on how weird physical phenomena discovered in the early 20th century have taught us the true nature of information, and how to process it: 39:30 minute mark: “Entanglement is ubiquitous: Almost every interaction between two systems creates entanglement between them… Most systems in nature… interact so strongly with the environment as to become entangled with it almost immediately.”… 44:00 minute mark: “A classical communications channel is a quantum communication channel with an eavesdropper (maybe only the environment)… A classical computer is a quantum computer handicapped by having eavesdroppers on all its wires.” See also: Data basic: An introduction to information theory

Where are those people who said no one believes classical Darwinism any more? How be: Qiaoying Lu Pierrick Bourrat, Br J Philos Sci axw035. The Evolutionary Gene and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axw035 20 April 2017: Abstract: Advocates of an ‘extended evolutionary synthesis’ have claimed that standard evolutionary theory fails to accommodate epigenetic inheritance. The opponents of the extended synthesis argue that the evidence for epigenetic inheritance causing adaptive evolution in nature is insufficient. We suggest that the ambiguity surrounding the conception of the gene represents a background semantic issue in the debate. Starting from Haig’s gene-selectionist framework and Griffiths and Neumann-Held’s notion of the evolutionary gene, we define senses of ‘gene’, ‘environment’, and ‘phenotype’ in a way that makes Read More ›