Last year the commentariat erupted in a frenzy of tut-tutting when it was revealed that Vice President Mike Pence has a personal rule never to eat alone with a woman other than his wife or attend events serving alcohol unless she is with him.  I thought about this story yesterday during a fruitful discussion I had with gpuccio about the limits of free will.  See comments 13-15 to this post. GP summed up his position as follows: I mean that we cannot really know what our real choices are, but that we always have choices.  I will try to be more clear. Your example of an addict is very good for that. We could think that the choice for an addict Read More ›

From NASA: The Twin Study propelled NASA into the genomics era of space travel. It was a ground-breaking study comparing what happened to astronaut Scott Kelly, in space, to his identical twin brother, Mark, who remained on Earth. The perfect nature versus nurture study was born. The Twins Study brought ten research teams from around the country together to accomplish one goal: discover what happens to the human body after spending one year in space. NASA has a grasp on what happens to the body after the standard-duration six-month missions aboard the International Space Station, but Scott Kelly’s one-year mission is a stepping stone to a three-year mission to Mars. More. So what did they find? Among other things, After Read More ›

Here’s my (O’Leary for News) review of James O’Keefe’s American Pravda: My Fight for Truth in the Era of Fake News (off-topic, unless you intend to rely on them in any way for communications): — Has North American journalism gone undercover? If traditional media were doing their job, few people would have heard of James O’Keefe. O’Keefe’s career as a provocateur started as a prank. On St. Patrick’s Day, 2005, he persuaded an unusually dense Rutgers administrator that persons of Irish descent might be offended by Lucky Charms cereal. She took the bait and removed the “offensive” boxes of cereal from the dining hall. … He was later propelled to fame by his exposure of community organizing group ACORN for Read More ›

From Adam Hargreaves at New Scientist, No doubt you have heard of dark matter, which is thought to make up over a quarter of the universe. We know it’s there; we just haven’t been able to detect it. Well, something similar is afoot in the genome. My colleagues and I have dubbed this elusive genetic matter “dark DNA”. And our investigations into the sand rat are starting to reveal its nature. The discovery of dark DNA is so recent that we are still trying to work out how widespread it is and whether it benefits those species that possess it. However, its very existence raises some fundamental questions about genetics and evolution. We may need to look again at how Read More ›

Critical Rationalist often says that morality is not about applying objective moral principles (which, according to him, do not exist) but about “solving concrete moral problems.”  Here is an example from a recent post: Moral knowledge is relevant in the context of solving concrete moral problems, as opposed to existing independent of them in some abstract sense.  That’s because moral problems are what we actually face and they have concrete impact on the outcome. The obvious problem with CR’s formulation is that the categories “moral knowledge” and “moral problem” cannot even exist if abstract moral principles do not exist, but that is the very proposition he denies. Suppose I decide I want to shoot CR in the head because – Read More ›

Sometimes materialists say things that are just so draw-droppingly stupid, I can’t look away.  Here is one such: the concept of free will is rubbish, but the concept of moral responsibility is not. Kantian Naturalist  

As I noted in my last post, sometimes it is necessary to rub materialists’ noses in the morally odious implications of their ethical views.  They really hate that, and when one does it, some materialists – grasping the monstrous implications of taking materialist premises to their conclusion – will flop around like a fish on the bank, trying desperately to hold onto their materialist premises while avoiding the conclusions to which those premises ineluctably lead. Over the last few days Bob O’H has given us an especially amusing demonstration of this.  Here are his various positions collected.  First, we get several standard materialist statements about how views on the Holocaust are entirely subjective: 1 I’m a moral subjectivist and I’m being Read More ›

Dear readers, We have just added the following to our “Frequently raised but weak arguments against Intelligent Design” in the “Resources” section linked on our home page: 41] What About the Canaanites? Whataboutism is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent’s position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument. A frequent example of whataboutism employed by materialists: ID Proponent: “The Holocaust was objectively evil. Therefore, objective moral standards exist.” Materialist: “What about God’s command to kill the Canaanites? If the Holocaust was evil, wasn’t that evil too?” Notice what the materialist did not do: He did not even address the ID proponent’s argument, far less refute it. Instead, Read More ›

Justin Stover writes at Chronicle Review: he reality is that the humanities have always been about courtoisie, a constellation of interests, tastes, and prejudices that marks one as a member of a particular class. That class does not have to be imagined solely in economic terms. Indeed, the humanities have sometimes done a good job of producing a class with some socioeconomic diversity. But it is a class nonetheless. Roman boys (of a certain social background) labored under the rod of the grammaticus because their parents wanted to initiate them into the community of Virgil readers — a community that spanned much of the vast Roman world, and which gave the bureaucratic class a certain cohesion it otherwise lacked. In Read More ›

Now there’s a psych research question for you. From Mike Klymkowsky at PLOS, more public handwringing about popular distrust of science: Is the popularization of science encouraging a growing disrespect for scientific expertise? So why do a large percentage of the public ignore the conclusions of disciplinary experts? I would argue that an important driver is the way that science is taught and popularized [3]. Beyond the obvious fact that a range of politicians and capitalists (in both the West and the East) actively distain expertise that does not support their ideological or pecuniary positions [4], I would claim that the way we teach science, often focussing on facts rather than processes, largely ignoring the historical progression by which knowledge Read More ›

From Christian Jarrett at British Psychological Society Research Digest: Best-selling introductory psychology books give a misleading view of intelligence A researcher in human intelligence at Utah Valley University has analysed the 29 best-selling introductory psychology textbooks in the US – some written by among the most eminent psychologists alive – and concluded that they present a highly misleading view of the science of intelligence (see full list of books below). Russell T Warne and his co-authors found that three-quarters of the books contain inaccuracies; that the books give disproportionate coverage to unsupported theories, such as Gardner’s “multiple intelligencies”; and nearly 80 per cent contain logical fallacies in their discussions of the topic.More. Article here. (public access) No surprise there. We Read More ›

How is arguing with a materialist like housebreaking a puppy? Materialist arguments about ethics are the rhetorical equivalent of piles of steaming dog poo. And they drop those piles all over the place. Dealing with the aftermath is very unpleasant. But if you are going to make any progress, it is necessary to rub their noses in it. And they don’t like that. People like Bob O’H living their comfortable little bourgeois lives, coasting on Christian moral capital built up over centuries, dabble in philosophy and make half-educated pronouncements about ethics. And they come up with gems like “it would be arrogant for me to say Himmler was necessarily wrong.” And a part of that moral capital is flushed down Read More ›

From Barbara J. King at NPR: Historical explanations can be found for why Neanderthals, early on, were portrayed in stereotyped terms: In 1911, a French anatomist, through a series of misconceptions (and preconceptions), mis-reconstructed a male Neanderthal skeleton from the site of La Chappelle aux Saints in France as shambling and stooped. This male looked downright dim. For decades, the image — now representing Neanderthals everywhere — stuck. Evidence amassed over the last century, though, indicates that Neanderthals are symbolic thinkers. As I have written here before, it’s a perfectly reasonable (if not 100 percent airtight) way of reading the evidence to conclude that Neanderthals carried out rituals in ways both symbolic and religious. When Neanderthal communities buried their dead Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur in a profile of and interview with computational biologist Lisa Manning at Oscillations: A half dozen or so years ago, Carl Woese and Nigel Goldenfeld characterized biology as the new condensed matter physics. More recently, Eugene Koonin advised “biology has to become the new condensed matter physics”. It’s an area of scientific research that is indeed ramping up, and not a moment too soon, after decades of puffery about a so-called selfish gene. But what exactly is meant by “the new condensed matter physics”? I decided to contact Syracuse University physicist Lisa Manning to help sort it all out in a conversation that follows. … The promo for your upcoming Simons Foundation lecture titled: “A Body Made Read More ›

From astrophysicist Brian Koberlein at Nautilus: The idea, from Caltech physicist Kimberly Boddy, and colleagues, is somewhat speculative, and it has an interesting catch. The argument that the true vacuum of the universe is stationary relies on a version of quantum theory known as the many-worlds formulation. In this view, the wave function of a quantum system doesn’t “collapse” when observed. Rather, different outcomes of the quantum system “decohere” and simply evolve along different paths. Where once the universe was a superposition of different possible outcomes, quantum decoherence creates two definite outcomes. Of course, if our minds are simply physical states within the cosmos, our minds are also split into two outcomes, each observing a particular result. In solving the Read More ›