Monthly Archives: March 2018
Abandoning statistical significance in science
| March 31, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
From Blakeley B. McShane, David Gal, Andrew Gelman, Christian Robert, Jennifer L. Tackett (22 Sep 2017) at arXiv.org: Abandon Statistical Significance In science publishing and many areas of research, the status quo is a lexicographic decision rule in which any result is first required to have a p-value that surpasses the 0.05 threshold and only […]
Well, of course, animal behavior IS an argument against Darwinian gradualism
| March 31, 2018 | Posted by News under Cambrian explosion, Intelligent Design |
Remember Gunter Bechly, the paleontologist who got erased from Wikipedia *? At ENST, he says, Based on the Darwinian narrative, we should expect not only that morphological complexity increases gradually in the fossil record, but we should also expect the same for complex animal behavior. This is because according to Darwinists, “Evolution not only is […]
Darwinian fundamentalist Jerry Coyne responds to “Atheist Fairytales”
| March 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design |
U Chicago prof here: First of all, Weikart doesn’t recognize the irony of his implication that “See? Atheists believe in fairy tales. They’re just as bad as we are!” Well, he might respond that his Christianity is certainly not a fairy tale, because it’s not only based on empirical truths like Jesus Man being resurrected, […]
Biology majors recruited to face rearward promoting Darwin
| March 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
From Guillermo Paz-y-Miño C. and Avelina Espinosa at Evolution: Education and Outreach: The controversy around evolution, creationism, and intelligent design resides in a historical struggle between scientific knowledge and popular belief. Four hundred seventy-six students (biology majors n = 237, nonmajors n = 239) at a secular liberal arts private university in Northeastern United States […]
Did the universe never have a chance?
| March 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Fine tuning, Intelligent Design, Philosophy |
From C. D. McCoy: Abstract: Demarest asserts that we have good evidence for the existence and nature of an initial chance event for the universe. I claim that we have no such evidence and no knowledge of its supposed nature. Against relevant comparison classes her initial chance account is no better, and in some ways […]
Do atheists find meaning in life from inventing fairy tales?
| March 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Atheism, Culture, Naturalism |
From Richard Weikart at the Federalist: The 2018 study in question by David Speed, et al, “What Do You Mean, ‘What Does It All Mean?’ Atheism, Nonreligion, and Life Meaning,” used surveys to try to figure out if atheists find meaning in life or are nihilistic. This survey defined someone as nihilistic if he or […]
Is this a serious attempt to evaluate natural selection as something other than an ideology? At PNAS?
| March 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Natural selection |
From W. Ford Doolittle and S. Andrew Inkpen at PNAS: Many practicing biologists accept that nothing in their discipline makes sense except in the light of evolution, and that natural selection is evolution’s principal sense-maker. But what natural selection actually is (a force or a statistical outcome, for example) and the levels of the biological […]
Advice: Reserve now for major conference on theistic evolution
| March 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, theistic evolution |
Hey, springtime in Philadelphia. Can you get your institution to pay? 😉 From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News and Science Today: Update: The deadline to register for this event is Monday, April 2. We strongly advise registering now to reserve your place. As philosophy, theology, and sociology, theistic evolution is a fascinating and extremely influential phenomenon. […]
Coursera vid by “Darwinism is wrong” prof banned from YouTube
| March 28, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Darwinism, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design |
This vid. Here is a 6:57 pm EST live link from a different lecture making largely the same points. Download it if you can. Otherwise, Feel the Smug. You will be living with the tenured Smug the rest of your crappy lives.
Claim: The multiverse is a logical outcome of the existence of empty space
| March 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Fine tuning, Intelligent Design, Multiverse, Physics |
From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: The controversial idea that our universe is just a random bubble in an endless, frothing multiverse arises logically from nature’s most innocuous-seeming feature: empty space. Specifically, the seed of the multiverse hypothesis is the inexplicably tiny amount of energy infused in empty space — energy known as the vacuum energy, […]
In pursuit of the multiverse’s black hole to infinity
| March 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Multiverse, Physics |
From Philip Perry at BigThink: What’s inside a black hole? In most, there’s something called the singularity—an area of such density and intense gravitational force that not even light can escape. Don’t venture too close. Once you enter the event horizon—the outer rim—it’s all over for you. You’d be shredded to ribbons of atoms that’ll […]
“Burning” climate change dissenters
| March 28, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Climate change, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Science |
From Peter Rees at Quadrant: The Little Ice age was quite severe in Europe from 1550- 1700. After the prosperity and plenty of the medieval warm period, the LIA led to impoverishment, crop failure, starvation and a resurgence in witch burnings. Every misfortune was an excuse to accuse someone of being a witch working under […]
Researchers: Animals’ “agronomic revolution” earlier than thought
| March 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Cambrian explosion, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: In the history of life on Earth, a dramatic and revolutionary change in the nature of the sea floor occurred in the early Cambrian (541–485 million years ago): the “agronomic revolution.” This phenomenon was coupled with the diversification of marine animals that could burrow into seafloor sediments. Previously, the sea floor was covered […]
Does eternally inflating cosmology cause probabilities to fail?
| March 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Physics, Probability |
From John D. Norton: (2018) Eternal Inflation: When Probabilities Fail. [Preprint] In eternally inflating cosmology, infinitely many pocket universes are seeded. Attempts to show that universes like our observable universe are probable amongst them have failed, since no unique probability measure is recoverable. This lack of definite probabilities is taken to reveal a complete predictive […]
Genetic literacy project: Are humans genetically loaded for extinction?
| March 27, 2018 | Posted by News under extinction, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From Andrew Porterfield at the Genetic Literacy Project: idea called “genetic load” was developed in the 1930s by famed biologist J.B.S. Haldane, referring to any genome that had increasing numbers of deleterious mutations. The more mutations in a population, the more likely that members of that population couldn’t survive, ultimately threatening the fitness of that […]
A reminder from Crick, March 19, 1953
| March 27, 2018 | Posted by kairosfocus under Intelligent Design |
It seems we have largely forgotten the letter to his son: A reminder. END
Can science tell us who will become a mass shooter?
| March 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Psychology, Science |
From Bruce Bower at Science News: A dearth of research means the science of rampage shootings simply doesn’t exist… Nor does any published evidence support claims that being a bully or a victim of bullying, or watching violent video games and movies, leads to mass public shootings, Winegard contends. Bullying affects a disturbingly high proportion […]
Astronomer: The Star Wars we grew up with are over. The real universe is lonelier
| March 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Culture, Fine tuning, Intelligent Design |
Christopher Graney at the Vatican Observatory Foundation Blog offers some thoughtful comments on the relationship between the Star Wars we all grew up with and the actual universe we are learning about now: Star Wars: On the Wrong Side of History & Science – Episode One: Star Wars is set in a wonderfully imaginative universe […]
Reasoning in a post-truth world?
| March 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Mind, Naturalism |
If you can afford the Netherlands in June: Workshop Reasoning in a post-truth world: a look at dual-process models Utrecht, the Netherlands, 20-21 June 2018 Last november, the Guardian published an article[1] proclaiming that in order to make sense of our current predicament living in a post-truth world, we should take note of “two fundamental […]
Driving a stake through the heart of human exceptionalism
| March 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind |
From Denyse O’Leary (O’Leary for News) at MercatorNet: In the early 2000s, one brainwave was to reclassify humans and chimpanzees so as to appear in the same biological category. Chimpanzees would be classified with modern humans and extinct humans such as Neanderthals instead: The common chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes, would be reclassified as Homo troglodytes, just […]
