2017

From Luciano Floridi at New Atlantis: Information is, in a way, the Cinderella in the history of philosophy. Any philosophy of knowledge, no matter whether ordinary (epistemology) or scientific (philosophy of science) requires an understanding of information — for instance in discussions of sensory perception and knowledge acquisition. There is no ethics without choices, responsibilities, and moral evaluations, all of which need a lot of relevant and reliable information and quite a good management of it. Logic was first a matter of the study of arguments, and then of mathematical proofs, but today it is also if not mainly a question of information extraction, transmission, and dynamics, and some branches of logic are really branches of information theory. Ontology, the Read More ›

A friend draws attention to an old paper, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics vs. Evolution” (The American Mathematical Monthly Volume 87 Number 2 February 1980) by R. W. Hamming: If you recall that modern science is only about 400 years old, and that there have been from 3 to 5 generations per century, then there have been at most 20 generations since Newton and Galileo. If you pick 4,000 years for the age of science, generally, then you get an upper bound of 200 generations. Considering the effects of evolution we are looking for via selection of small chance variations, it does not seem to me that evolution can explain more than a small part of the unreasonable effectiveness of Read More ›

Early human cannibalism is definitely in the news these days. It’s becoming clear that Stone Age people were not just animals and that even cannibalism was probably mostly about concepts like power and love and so forth. W are still looking for the mere brute in human form. From Malcolm Ritter at Yahoo: Neanderthals and prehistoric members of our own species occasionally practiced cannibalism and explaining that is a scientific challenge. Generally, it has been attributed to factors like starvation, violence between groups or ceremonial practices following a death. Now a new study suggests they were probably not hunting each other just for food. That’s because “we are not very nutritious, on a calorie level,” compared to large game animals, Read More ›

From Diana Kwon at The Scientist: While analyzing genetic material found in a wastewater treatment plant, scientists uncovered the genomes of four new species of related giant viruses. These newly discovered specimens, dubbed Klosneuviruses, challenge the notion that giant viruses evolved from a fourth domain of life, researchers wrote in a study published today (April 6) in Science. … Some scientists believe that rather than having a common ancestor, these giant viruses began as small viruses and gradually accumulated host genes over time. Analysis of the Klosneuvirus genome reveals evidence supporting the latter theory, according to the authors of the present study. More. These viruses have up to 1.57 million base pairs, with many genes encoded for components of translation Read More ›

From Hank Campbell at Science 2.0: Colony Collapse Disorder, the belief that honeybees, an important pollinator, are being killed off in droves, has been good for environmental fundraising but hasn’t had a scientific foundation. … Nonetheless, it has persisted for 10 years despite data showing that periodic die-offs in bees are as common, and therefore predictable, as solar cycles and California droughts. From the time that records of bees were formally kept, there were reports of mass die-offs without explanation, a thousand years before pesticides even existed. More. Indeed. There are even superstitions connected with the humanly unpredictable ways of bees, including sudden departures and mass die-offs. One problem is that extinction and serious declines feel like Armageddon and many Read More ›

From Philosophy of Science: Abstract: We have a conundrum. The physical basis of information is clearly a highly active research area. Yet the power of information theory comes precisely from separating it from the detailed problems of building physical systems to perform information processing tasks. Developments in quantum information over the last two decades seem to have undermined this separation, leading to suggestions that information is itself a physical entity and must be part of our physical theories, with resource-cost implications. We will consider a variety of ways in which physics seems to a affect computation, but will ultimately argue to the contrary: rejecting the claims that information is physical provides a better basis for understanding the fertile relationship between Read More ›

Further to Barry Arrington’s The Materialist “Extraordinary Claims” Double Standard: From geologist David Deming at Philosophia: Abstract In 1979 astronomer Carl Sagan popularized the aphorism “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (ECREE). But Sagan never defined the term “extraordinary.” Ambiguity in what constitutes “extraordinary” has led to misuse of the aphorism. ECREE is commonly invoked to discredit research dealing with scientific anomalies, and has even been rhetorically employed in attempts to raise doubts concerning mainstream scientific hypotheses that have substantive empirical support. The origin of ECREE lies in eighteenth-century Enlightenment criticisms of miracles. The most important of these was Hume’s essay On Miracles. Hume precisely defined an extraordinary claim as one that is directly contradicted by a massive amount of existing Read More ›

A review of Richard F. Harris Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions by Marcus Munafò at Nature: Harris introduces us to the growing field of metascience — the scientific study of science itself — and some of those working in it. These reproducibility firefighters are providing answers to such empirical questions, and identifying interventions. Robert Kaplan and Veronica Irvin at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) showed that when the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute required preregistration of primary outcomes (the main outcome against which success should be judged) in clinical trials, the proportion of studies reporting a benefit fell from 57% to 8%. That’s the good news. The bad news Read More ›

In a current thread on SJW invasions in engineering education,  in which yet another anti-ID commenter crosses over into troll territory, Charles does a very important worldviews and cultural agendas dissection. One, that is well worth headlining as *food for thought (as opposed to a point by point across-the-board endorsement): Charles, 51>>The point of the original post was that Engineering was being contaminated with Social Justice Warrior values & viewpoints. As any engineer knows, what makes engineering “Engineering” is the rigorous adherence to physical reality, analysis, and testing to design something that is reliably fit for purpose. As the author’s article at American Conservative elaborates, Prof. Riley’s SJW viewpoint is the antithesis of sound Engineering. kairosfocus summarized this point with Read More ›

Over at Design Disquisitions I have a new ‘Critic’s Corner’ post. This one focusses on the work related to ID and evolution by Elliott Sober, a prominent ID critic and philosopher of science. I’ve always seen Sober as a more sophisticated critic of ID. This will be a handy resource for finding pretty much everything that has been published in response to Sober’s attack on ID:   Critic’s Corner: Elliott Sober    

Here: On May 5-6, Discovery-Mackenzie will be inaugurated as a new research group of Mackenzie Presbyterian University, 930 Consolação Street, Higienópolis Campus in São Paulo – Brazil. On the Friday evening of May 5, at 6:00 pm, the Discovery-Mackenzie office will be inaugurated (free entry for subscribers). It will include a library, training room and workshops, reading room and offices. This event will be followed by an inauguration ceremony at 7:30 pm in the auditorium of the American School. At these events, a delegation of renowned fellows from Discovery Institute-USA (DI-USA) will be present, including the president of DI-USA, Steven J. Buri, and three of its top affiliated researchers: Michel Behe, Douglas Axe and Brian Miller. Biochemist Michel Behe is Read More ›

Materialist Carl Sagan is credited with the phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”  The dictum is known as the “Sagan Standard,” but it should be known as the “Extraordinary Claims Fallacy,” as explained very well in this article. Materialists often use the Sagan Standard as a cudgel against theistic claims.  For example, as pointed out in the article, they may assert that people do not ordinarily rise from the dead, and therefore the claim that Jesus rose from the dead must be supported by something more than ordinary evidence; it must be supported by some vaguely defined standard of evidence they call “extraordinary evidence.” My purpose here is not to debunk the Sagan Standard.  That has been done many times.  Read More ›

A more honest appraisal can be had from Douglas Allchin at Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science: Abstract: In standard characterizations, science is self-correcting. Scientists examine each other’s work skeptically, try to replicate important discoveries, and thereby expose latent errors. Thus, while science is tentative, it also seems to have a system for correcting whatever mistakes arise. It powerfully explains and justifies the authority of science. Self-correction thus often serves emblematically in promoting science as a superior form of knowledge. But errors can and do occur. Some errors remain uncorrected for long periods. I present five sets of historical observations that indicate a need to rethink the widespread mythos of self-correction. First, some errors persist for decades, wholly undetected. Second, Read More ›

Over at Evolution News & Views, David Klinghoffer predicts that the March for Science (April 22) will be a hell of a mess, and thinks maybe that’s okay: But judging from the coverage we’ve seen up till now, it looks like the march is set to be an exercise in self-congratulation and virtue signaling, political axe-grinding, a veiled grab by ideological partisans for power and funding. We venture to predict that most marchers won’t even be scientists but, instead, people looking to seize hold of the prestige of science for their own ends. There’s been much talk of diversity, as organizers have revised the diversity statement on their website multiple times, so that nobody — no possible sexuality, ethnicity, or Read More ›

Are they growing up over there? From Anil Ananthaswamy at New Scientist: But what is this information? Is it “ontological” – a real thing from which space, time and matter emerge, just as an atom emerges from fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks and gluons? Or is it “epistemic” – something that just represents our state of knowledge about reality? Here opinions are divided. Cosmologist Paul Davies argues in the book Information and the Nature of Reality that information “occupies the ontological basement”. In other words, it is not about something, it is itself something. Sean Carroll at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena disagrees. Even if all of reality emerges from information, he says, this information is Read More ›