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 […]
Month: March 2018
Well, of course, animal behavior IS an argument against Darwinian gradualism
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”
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
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?
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?
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?
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
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
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
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
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
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
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?
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?
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 […]