Laura Spinney asks: End of days: Is Western civilisation on the brink of collapse?: History tells us all cultures have their sell-by date. Do political strife, crippling inequality and climate change mean the West’s time is now up Scientists, historians and politicians alike have begun to warn that Western culture is reaching a critical juncture. Cycles of inequality and resource use are heading for a tipping point that in many past civilisations precipitated political unrest, war and finally collapse. (paywall) More. Aw, Laura, lose the sandwich board! The collapse of Western civilization has been prophesied throughout the twentieth century. In fairness, now that arts faculties mainly teach victimhood and grievance instead of arts and letters, many educated people may not know that.* Read More ›

It has been often noted that Darwin is so important for Atheist-Materialists because it (supposedly) accounts for the appearance of design in living things without a designer.  It occurred to me that the multiverse is gaining headway in spite of the fact that it has not been (and in principle cannot be) tested empirically.  It (again, supposedly) accounts for the existence of the universe, including its finely tuned parameters for the existence of life, without a creator (accounting for why there is something instead of nothing) or a fine tuning designer. So there you have it — A-Mat designer substitutes at both the micro and macro levels.

Proven. From SETI’s Seth Shostak at NBC News: Simple math shows how many space aliens may be out there: It’s a lot more than you might imagine! We start with recent research showing that one in six stars hosts a planet hospitable to life. No, not one in a million. One in six. So let’s take that number and run with it. Next we have to make a few assumptions. In particular, if you were given a million Earth-size worlds, what fraction do you think would ever beget technically sophisticated inhabitants? Wait a minute. The NASA bulletin referenced does not use the term hospitable to life. It says The quest to determine if planets like Earth are rare or common Read More ›

It’s good when they come right out and say that. From Sean Carroll at Arxiv: Cosmological models that invoke a multiverse – a collection of unobservable regions of space where conditions are very different from the region around us – are controversial, on the grounds that unobservable phenomena shouldn’t play a crucial role in legitimate scientific theories. I argue that the way we evaluate multiverse models is precisely the same as the way we evaluate any other models, on the basis of abduction, Bayesian inference, and empirical success. There is no scientifically respectable way to do cosmology without taking into account different possibilities for what the universe might be like outside our horizon. Multiverse theories are utterly conventionally scientific, even Read More ›

Readers may remember that late last year, Canada’s governor-general got some attention for ridiculing Canadians who do not think that life is random process. The Prime Minister supported her, though her job is essentially to speak on behalf of the Queen, who apparently does not support such views: Can you believe that still today in learned society, in houses of government, unfortunately… we are still debating and still questioning whether life was a divine intervention or whether it was coming out of a natural process let alone, oh my goodness, a random process. From Christopher Graney at the Vatican Observatory Foundation Blog: Stuff happens? Apparently both my students and the governor have somehow been taught that randomness is just part Read More ›

Reader Terry Scambray published an op-ed recently in the Fresno Bee (January 19, 2018) and has given us permission to reprint his original text. Words are like knives; they become dull with use until eventually they can’t dissect and divide reality with any precision. And certainly there is no more overused and abused word than “fascism.” A Short Explanation Benito Mussolini, originally a communist, a revolutionary socialist, realized that the communist slogan, “Workers of the world unite” was a myth. For he understood that love of country, patriotism, had more appeal than “international socialism.” So he invented “national socialism,” calling it “fascism” which he defined as: “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” When WWI Read More ›

Nature does not make jumps. That old canon of natural history, as Darwin called it, goes back centuries and was heartily endorsed and adopted by evolutionary theory. Here are representative quotes from Origin, 1st edition, explaining important this doctrine was to Darwin:  Read more

In response to growing disquiet with the concept of a multiverse, voiced by theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel assures us at Forbes: In short, it’s the idea that our Universe, and all that’s contained within it, is just one small region of a larger existence that includes many similar, and possibly many different, Universes like our own. On the one hand, if our current theories of physics are true, the Multiverse absolutely must exist. But on the other hand, as Sabine Hossenfelder rightly points out, it’s unlikely to teach us anything useful. … Writing in NPR, Sabine Hossenfelder is right to criticize that approach, stating, “Just because a theory is falsifiable doesn’t mean it’s scientific.” But just because Read More ›

Bookmark this for the next airhead invasion of your local Great Ideas discussion group. Further to “Theoretical physicist: Multiverse not based on sound science reasoning,”more from Sabine Hossenfelder at BackRe(action): Eternal inflation is an extrapolation of inflation, which is an extrapolation of the concordance model, which is an extrapolation of the present-day universe back in time. Eternal inflation, like inflation, works by inventing a new field (the “inflaton”) that no one has ever seen because we are told it vanished long ago. Eternal inflation is a story about the quantum fluctuations of the now-vanished field and what these fluctuations did to gravity, which no one really knows, but that’s the game. There is little evidence for inflation, and zero evidence Read More ›

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) needs a new name, says spokesperson. From Calla Cofield at Space.com: At a recent meeting of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Astrobiology Science Strategy for the Search for Life in the Universe, held here at the University of California, Irvine, Tarter explained that the phrase “search for extraterrestrial intelligence” generates an incorrect perception of what scientists in this field are actually doing. A more appropriate title for the field, she said, would be “the search for technosignatures,” or signs of technology created by intelligent alien civilizations. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens] At this point, she verges on parody: Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Read More ›

One of the problems that keeps on cropping up here at UD and elsewhere is as captioned. Accordingly, I just noted to JDK et al in the “complaining” thread as follows: ___________ KF, 66: >>I should note on the subtly toxic principle that has been injected in such a way as to seem reasonable (especially to those who have been led to be ever-suspicious towards or at minimum forever apologetic over, our civilisation’s Judaeo-Christian heritage). Namely, so-called “methodological” naturalism. The first key trick in this, of course is that there is a grand suggestion that “methodological” removes the philosophical agenda involved in the naturalism. It does not. Instead, it subtly converts the effective meaning of “Science” into: the “best” evolutionary Read More ›

Not just to zap prey, apparently. From Ed Yong at the Atlantic: It’s a remote control. It’s a tracking device. It can deliver shocks of up to 600 volts. But then you did want to stay awake, didn’t you? You think the electric eel is shocking? You haven’t seen anything yet. In this episode of Animalism hosted by The Atlantic science writer Ed Yong, we investigate the subtle and sinister ways of the electric eel. More. See also: Bumblebees judge flowers via electric fields

From Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media, on a new book, Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design (J. B.Stump, ed), Opponents of intelligent design (ID) usually dismiss the theory as unscientific, an attempt at smuggling religion into science through a back door. They slam it as a “god of the gaps” argument — inserting God into questions where science has not yet found a persuasive answer. In a new book, former geophysicist and author Stephen C. Meyer, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, explained why intelligent design is not a “god of the gaps” argument, but a viable scientific theory. “The theory of intelligent design, unlike creationism, is not based upon the Bible,” Meyer wrote in Four Views Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A large international research team, led by Israel Hershkovitz from Tel Aviv University and including Rolf Quam from Binghamton University, State University of New York, has discovered the earliest modern human fossil ever found outside of Africa. The finding suggests that modern humans left the continent at least 50,000 years earlier than previously thought. “Misliya is an exciting discovery,” says Rolf Quam, Binghamton University anthropology professor and a coauthor of the study. “It provides the clearest evidence yet that our ancestors first migrated out of Africa much earlier than we previously believed. It also means that modern humans were potentially meeting and interacting during a longer period of time with other archaic human groups, providing more opportunity for Read More ›

Responding to “Theoretical physicist: Multiverse not based on sound science reasoning,” Edward Sisson offers some thoughts, from his training and experience as a lawyer: The “multiverse” proposal is just a way to escape the entire field of mathematical statistics. Yet our legal system relies on mathematical statistics in making one category of its most important decisions, profoundly affecting the lives of individuals: convictions of serious crimes using DNA statistics evidence to identify the one individual on planet earth who could have been present at the scene of a crime, by leaving DNA evidence. The DNA found at the crime scene is analyzed, and then a statistical analysis done, leading to the conclusion that there is a “one in X billion Read More ›