It seems we have largely forgotten the letter to his son: A reminder. END
Month: March 2018
Can science tell us who will become a mass shooter?
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
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?
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
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 […]
Need the struggle to reconcile classical with quantum mechanics end in science’s assisted suicide?
From some thoughts on by Peter Woit at : Part of the problem with this good vs. evil story is that, as the book itself explains, it’s not at all clear what the “Copenhagen interpretation” actually is, other than a generic name for the point of view the generation of theorists such as Bohr, Heisenberg, […]
From Philip Cunningham: Copernican Principle, Agent Causality, and Jesus Christ as the “Theory of Everything”
Here. Paper. See also: Film night with Philip Cunningham: Atheists’ reasons for not believing in God are not scientific, and more…
Is there something about quantum theory that we are missing?
From Natalie Wolchover, reviewing Philip Ball’s Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum Physics Is Different at Nature: Along with the historic discoveries, Ball brings readers up to speed on today’s “quantum renaissance”. This active intellectual period is fuelled by quantum-computing research and the rise of quantum information theory, pioneered by researchers […]
Is “race” a dying concept?
From David Reich at New York Times: One hopes so. In 1942, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu published “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race,” an influential book that argued that race is a social concept with no genetic basis. A classic example often cited is the inconsistent definition of “black.” In the United States, […]
How Some Materialists are Blinded by Their Faith Commitments
Every once in a while we get one of those “aha moments” when everything comes together. Phillip Johnson helped me to one of those moments over 20 years ago when I read this passage from an article in First Things (when that journal still permitted dissenting voices to be heard): For scientific materialists the materialism […]
Early life experiences influence DNA in adult brain
From Salk News: “We are taught that our DNA is something stable and unchanging which makes us who we are, but in reality it’s much more dynamic,” says Rusty Gage, a professor in Salk’s Laboratory of Genetics. “It turns out there are genes in your cells that are capable of copying themselves and moving around, […]
Astrobiology Magazine: So intelligent design WAS necessary for life to get started
Well, they do not quite say it. But get this: From Charles Q. Choi at Astrobiology: Assuming that early life adapted to survive in a checkerboard of many different kinds of environments, “the complex ecological relationships between different species may have been a part of life on Earth since very near its beginning, and LUCA […]
Maverick theory: Cambrian animals remade the environment by generating oxygen
From Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta: For decades, researchers have commonly assumed that higher oxygen levels led to the sudden diversification of animal life 540 million years ago. But one iconoclast argues the opposite: that new animal behaviors raised oxygen levels and remade the environment. … n a paper published in the January issue of Geobiology, […]
The “difficult birth” of science’s assisted suicide, the multiverse
From Adam Becker at Scientific American: Quantum physics, Everett pointed out, didn’t really reduce to classical physics for large numbers of particles. According to quantum physics, even normal-sized objects like chairs could be located in two totally separate places at once—a Schrödinger’s-cat–like situation known as a “quantum superposition.” And, Everett continued, it wasn’t right to […]
Comparing human and chimp DNA, using a software analogy
From Walter Myers III at ENST: While much of the DNA code may be the same, the parts that are not the same have significant differences. The programs I described above, such as Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat, have different purposes, yet they all depend on the same OS that consists of tens of millions of […]