For nearly 75 years the Holocaust has been used as an example of evil so clear as to be beyond reasonable dispute.  It was useful as a counter to arguments for moral nihilism such as we get on these pages so often, because very few people were willing to stand up and say, “I personally don’t agree with Holocausts, but of course that’s just my opinion; I can’t say a contrary opinion is necessarily wrong.” That is not the case anymore as the following exchange between me and Bob O’H demonstrates: Bob O’H: But doesn’t [Becky’s Lesson] actually support the materialists’ assertion? The story shows a situation where an act that the reader regards as grossly immoral is shown as Read More ›

From at ScienceDaily: Ancient microbes may have been producing oxygen through photosynthesis a billion years earlier than we thought, which means oxygen was available for living organisms very close to the origin of life on earth. In a new article in Heliyon, a researcher from Imperial College London studied the molecular machines responsible for photosynthesis and found the process may have evolved as long as 3.6 billion years ago. … One surprising finding was that the evolution of the photosystem was not linear. Photosystems are known to evolve very slowly — they have done so since cyanobacteria appeared at least 2.4 billion years ago. But when Dr. Cardona used that slow rate of evolution to calculate the origin of photosynthesis, Read More ›

From Jordana Cepelewicz at Quanta: All of viral evolution is murky: Different groups of viruses likely had very different origins. Some may have been degenerate “escapees” from cellular genomes, while others descended directly from the primordial soup. “Still others have recombined and exchanged genes so many times in the course of evolution that we will never know where they originally came from,” Fischer said. As examples of this diversity, giant viruses could help illuminate more about how viruses operate and evolve. But even their own origins and evolutionary path are unsettled. One side holds that the giant viruses evolved from smaller viruses over 2 billion years by adding genes, through processes such as horizontal gene transfer and gene duplication. The Read More ›

From Jasmin Fox Skelly at New Scientist: A 520-million-year-old fossil shows an ancient shrimp-like creature caring for its four offspring. It is the oldest ever example of a parent actively looking after its young after they hatch. More. (paywall) The arthropod may be the ancestor of insects and spiders (or maybe not). We have one “snapshot” and that’s from billions of lives. What it mainly shows is that, contrary to what we might expect, there seems to have been little evolution of animal psychology since then. See also: The cancer theory of the Cambrian explosion of life 541 million years ago

Whataboutism (also known as whataboutery) 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.  How did CR employ it here?  Let’s examine it step-by-step. For example, the vignette Becky’s Lesson is set in an alternate history in which the Nazis won World War II, conquered the world, and completed their Final Solution by completely eradicating all 13 million Jews.  In the story, the Nazis control all media and education.  They control society with an iron fist and have indoctrinated the society they control to celebrate The Final Solution as a great good, instead of an unspeakable evil.  The obvious purpose of Read More ›

 That’s promising. Imagine: Margaret Hamburg at AAAS isn’t wondering what’s wrong with the taxpaying world for doubting. She is wondering why we doubt. No, really. She writes at AAAS: “I would like to better understand the increasing skepticism about science,” she said. “It concerns and surprises me on many levels. I think it is important that we as the science community, led by AAAS, are getting out and learning, talking to people, trying to make sure that we are not a closed community, but one that is truly engaging the wider public.” Four observation from UD News: – Peer review, is absolutely and totally bust. Retraction Watch might help you get back on track with that stuff. – Also listen to Read More ›

The rather obvious point of my story Becky’s Lesson is that the typical A-Mat spewings about morality coming from societal consensus are irrational, because the “everyone thinks its OK” theory of morality can be used to justify all manner of evil.  I am always trying to get A-Mats to follow the logic of their argument to where it leads, and they almost always steadfastly refuse.  Because, by and large, A-Mats are Simpering Cowards. But in the spirit of giving the Devil his due, I must recognize and give credit to an A-Mat who does, finally, follow his logic out to the end.  RodW is one such.  In response to my story  he wrote, “Well if I lived in a world Read More ›

Ask Heather Heying. But first, get a load of this: From a quiet, historic U hamlet in Canada (one I have often enjoyed visiting), the SJWs emerge like an irruption of disease: Queens University in that hamlet (Kingston) puts the matter oh-so-politely: Of the roughly 150 people who attended the protest, most exercised peaceful demonstration. However, several individuals engaged in or incited the destruction of property. Several Kingston police officers arrived at the scene of the protest. Roughly 20 minutes into the lecture, protesters outside hit the stained glass windows and doors outside of Grant Hall. They also chanted “why are you hiding?” and “let us in.” One protester broke a stained glass window after they repeatedly hit it with their Read More ›

Barry Arrington noted night that Richard Dawkins is beginning to overcome the cannibalism taboo. Sure, whatever, as long as we are spared the details … A question looms, in light of this kind of thing: This view extends even to those who have died, which is why we treat the deceased in a respectful manner and why desecrating the dead is considered to be immoral and is against the law — even in war. Dawkins, of course, rejects the concept, considering it “speciesist,” e.g., discrimination against animals. He thinks we are just a collection of carbon molecules and certainly of no intrinsic value simply and merely because we are human. (For example, he has yearned for the creation of a human/chimp Read More ›

Here.

Here: Every day scientific discovery is held back as inquiring minds are boxed in by a history of academic reprisal when teaching or research runs afoul of current orthodoxies. More. The site, sponsored by Discovery Institute, won’t lack for stories. Most of us don’t have time to tell them all. And could we get one thing straight?: Science boffins want it that way. The boffins are the same people who obsess about what Florida parents want their kids to learn in school but turn a blind eye to the death penalty elsewhere for witchcraft. Was there something else you needed to know about the boffins? See also: Historic journal Nature is freaked out over American public school science classrooms – again.

Whatever that means. From Kerry Grens at the Scientist: The administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scott Pruitt, said that evolution, at least as it concerns the origins of humans, is a philosophical and not scientific matter, according to audio from a 2005 radio show unearthed by Politico. “There aren’t sufficient scientific facts to establish the theory of evolution,” Pruitt said. More. What exactly is the “theory of evolution”? Efforts to establish it seem to end either in tautologies like “survival of the fittest” or advertisements for atheism/Christian atheism, none of which are part of Pruitt’s remit anyhow. Apparently, Pruitt’s boss Donald Trump gets evolution wrong too: Human evolution has a public relations problem. That isn’t just because Read More ›

From Meghan Bartels at MSN: Hawking approaches the problem by offering a detailed analogy, comparing space-time to any other continuous, curved surface, like the surface of the Earth. “There is nothing south of the South Pole,” Hawking says. The same principle holds with the universe: “There was nothing around before the Big Bang.”More. “Nothing” is actually a big word. It can mean many different things while purporting to be one big Nothing. Fine print. Ken Francis replied to this line of thinking at New English Review: About seven years ago, during a talk on Hawking at a university, I raised my hand and criticised comments he made in his then latest book, The Grand Design, which he co-wrote with Star Read More ›

Here. Robert Griffiths, Otto Stern University Professor of Physics at Carnegie-Mellon University, Ph.D. Princeton University, member of the National Academy of Sciences, author of Consistent Quantum Theory. Erica Carlson, Professor of Physics, Purdue University, Ph.D. Cal Tech, Fellow of the American Physical Society. Erica is a well known author in condensed matter physics theory. Andrew Jordan, Professor of Physics, University of Rochester, Ph.D. UC Santa Barbara, Simons Fellow of Theoretical Physics. Andrew is a specialist specifically in foundations of quantum mechanics. David Snoke, Professor of Physics, University of Pittsburgh, Ph.D. U. Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Fellow of the American Physical Society. I run an experimental condensed matter physics lab on quantum effects in optics. Jeffrey Koperski, Professor of Philosophy, Saginaw Valley State Read More ›

From Erik Lief at ACSH: The researchers, from the well-known Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, discovered more than 750,000 nesting pairs of the Adélie penguin – or more than 1.5 million in all – on the Danger Islands archipelago, which consists of nine, small land masses spanning 35 kilometers on Antarctica’s northern tip, facing South America. “Our estimate is more than three times the abundance estimated by an earlier survey,” wrote the study’s authors, “largely because several colonies, not known to exist at the time, were missed entirely.” The paper, published online Friday in the journal Scientific Reports, adds that the population find on the Antarctic Peninsula was “more than the rest of AP region combined, and include the third and Read More ›