While we are talking about the Bible anyway… What would our ancestors have made of news of the dinosaurs? The dinosaurs made no impact on human life to which a religious teacher could point, then or now. The animals discussed in the Bible are known to the hearers; their habits are familiar and therefore useful as illustrations: Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest. So far as we know to this day, ants don’t have a “ruler” in the human sense; the queen lays the eggs that keep the colony going. They seem to Read More ›

It’s risky. The church splitter (fundamentalism) vs. the church closer (theistic evolution). William Lane Craig writes: Two challenges to this doctrine arise from modern science, one fairly old and the other very recent. … I am currently exploring the genetic evidence that is said to rule out an original pair of modern humans. In talking with genetic scientists, I’ve found that there is enormous confusion about this question today. Popularizers have misrepresented the arguments, thereby inviting misguided responses. The issues are very technical and difficult to understand. I’m just beginning to get my feet wet and don’t want to misrepresent the science. I want to know how firm the evidence is and what it would cost intellectually to maintain the Read More ›

Further to a recent call for evolutionary psychologists to study atheism, from Caroline McCarthy, a Silicon Valley veteran, at Vox, writes about receiving an invite to a tech entrepreneur event: “We are bringing together the sacred plant medicine ayahuasca with leaders at the world’s most innovative startups,” the email said. “Together we will go on a journey to deeply explore our individual and collective purpose.” They were not kidding. Half of tech workers identified as atheist or agnostic, according to a survey by the Lincoln Network, an organization dedicated to advancing principles of economic conservatism in the tech industry. That’s compared to just 7 percent of the US population who identify as atheist or agnostic (although an additional 16 percent Read More ›

From Joseph R. Miller at More than Cake: Fine Tuning has certainly advanced over the centuries, but still it is worth noting that one of the early and oft quoted critics was philosopher David Hume. However, his reasoning was fatally flawed and in a previous post I give four reasons to reject Hume’s criticism: First, Hume’s assumption that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is itself a non-scientific assertion. Second, Hume’s claim that science disproves a supernatural cause for nature is flawed in that he assumes the conclusion in the premise. Third, Hume’s argument against the testimony of those who have faith is rooted, at best, in prejudice and, at worst, outright racism—not reason. Fourth, Hume’s threshold for validating the teleological Read More ›

Or does he get a pass because he is pop culture squared? Or (hold your breath) does progressivism make people stupid as well as unpleasant? From Philip Ball at the Guardian: The row over racist remarks made by Einstein says more about the pedestals we put great scientists on than the man himself Was Albert Einstein racist? In pondering the disobliging remarks he made about Chinese and Japanese people in the private diaries he kept about his travels to east Asia in 1922-3, just published by Princeton University Press, it’s not a particularly helpful question. On the one hand, there’s the view that even this famously humane and broadminded scientist was inevitably a man of his time. Accordingly, we can’t Read More ›

ID proponents have many times noted that at BioLogos, both management figures and columnists have distorted and deformed the facts about ID theory and the Discovery Institute.  But perhaps even more damaging to the accurate public perception of ID are the comments which fill the BioLogos discussion boards.  The negative comments about ID coming from BioLogos readers are not only more numerous than those which appear in actual BioLogos articles, but also more unrestrained and extreme, and generally speaking (because the BioLogos boards are frequented overwhelmingly by people who are anti-ID), they go unchallenged.  I here discuss a recent case, from this BioLogos page: https://discourse.biologos.org/t/its-good-that-dr-gauger-is-keeping-busy-keeping-america-straight-on-intelligent-design/38775/6 I will focus on this passage from one “Ronald_Myers”: One thing Gauger does not address Read More ›

Further to Why we should trust “science,” whatever that is, from a long form article by Rebecca Trager at Chemistry World: Concerns about forensic science have lurked for some time. Major science advisory bodies in the US and UK had warned about deficiencies in the field that require action. In 2013, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (Nist) initiated a study, known as Mix13, which involved more than 100 crime labs analysing the same DNA mixtures in five mock cases. The complexity of the mixture increased in each case, and in the final case, which was the most complex, about 70% of those labs falsely included a DNA profile that was not actually in the mixture. Nist has Read More ›

From Haley Dunning at Imperial College of London: The vast majority of life on Earth uses visible red light in the process of photosynthesis, but the new type uses near-infrared light instead. It was detected in a wide range of cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) when they grow in near-infrared light, found in shaded conditions like bacterial mats in Yellowstone and in beach rock in Australia. As scientists have now discovered, it also occurs in a cupboard fitted with infrared LEDs in Imperial College London. … The standard, near-universal type of photosynthesis uses the green pigment, chlorophyll-a, both to collect light and use its energy to make useful biochemicals and oxygen. The way chlorophyll-a absorbs light means only the energy from red Read More ›

As if psychology were not troubled enough. Psychologist Cristine Legare argues at Nautilus: My high school biology teacher, Mr. Whittington, put a framed picture of a primate ancestor in the front of his classroom—a place of reverence. In a deeply religious and conservative community in rural America, this was a radical act. Evolution, among the most well-supported scientific theories in human history, was then, and still is, deliberately censored from biological science education. But Whittington taught evolution unapologetically, as “the single best idea anybody ever had,” as the philosopher Dan Dennett described it. Whittington saw me looking at the primate in wonder one day and said, “Cristine, look at its hands. Now look at your hands. This is what common Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research have captured the one cell that is capable of regenerating an entire organism. For over a century, scientists have witnessed the effects of this cellular marvel, which enables creatures such as the planarian flatworm to perform death-defying feats like regrowing a severed head. But until recently, they lacked the tools necessary to target and track this cell, so they could watch it in action and discover its secrets. … “This is the first time that an adult pluripotent stem cell has been isolated prospectively,” says Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, Ph.D., an investigator at the Stowers Institute and Howard Hughes Medical Institute and senior author of the study. “Our finding essentially says Read More ›

From a new paper by AI researcher Gary Marcus at ArXiv: Although deep learning has historical roots going back decades, neither the term “deep learning” nor the approach was popular just over five years ago, when the field was reignited by papers such as Krizhevsky, Sutskever and Hinton’s now classic (2012) deep network model of Imagenet. What has the field discovered in the five subsequent years? Against a background of considerable progress in areas such as speech recognition, image recognition, and game playing, and considerable enthusiasm in the popular press, I present ten concerns for deep learning, and suggest that deep learning must be supplemented by other techniques if we are to reach artificial general intelligence. From the Conclusion: As Read More ›

From Alex Berezow at American Council on Science and Health: Pro-GMO Professor Fired for Endorsing Glyphosate David Zaruk is an expert in European Union regulations and risk communication. He writes a blog, titled The Risk-Monger, which largely examines regulatory issues involving biotechnology, such as GMOs and glyphosate. For nearly a decade, he also was an adjunct professor of communications at Université Saint-Louis in Brussels, Belgium. As Dr. Zaruk writes in a lengthy blog post, he recently lost his job from the university. Why? According to Dr. Zaruk, it’s because he is avidly pro-biotechnology and another professor (at a different university!) didn’t like it. So, he pulled a few strings and got Dr. Zaruk fired. It should be noted that Olivier Read More ›

From Mara Johnson-Groh at Astronomy: Despite residing in it, it’s hard for us to know exactly how big the Milky Way is. But new research has found that our galaxy is bigger than previously thought. Using a large survey of stars instead of just models (as previous researchers did), astronomers have now determined the disk of our galaxy to be 200,000 light-years across — twice as large as was believed a decade ago. … With a process known as spectroscopy, researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and at the National Astronomical Observatories of Beijing studied the chemical composition of over 4,600 stars from two surveys, APOGEE and LAMOST, and mapped out which stars are part of the disk Read More ›

As we continue to explore the mathematical domain of abstract reality and objective truth, we come to first the Godel point (as summarised by Nesher): where, recall, the domain of facts starts with something like the surreal world of numbers: and then also, we come to the world of Mathematical Platonism/ Realism. So, let me continue by promoting a comment I just added to the objectivity of Mathematics thread: KF, 29 : >>Let’s see how IEP describes Mathematical Platonism (where, no, this is not equal to Plato’s theory of forms): Traditionally, mathematical platonism has referred to a collection of metaphysical accounts of mathematics, where a metaphysical account of mathematics is one that entails theses concerning the existence and fundamental nature Read More ›

The recent spate of celebrity suicides has me thinking about why people, even very rich and famous people, sometimes despair and give up.  Of course Nietzsche predicted that despair and nihilism would follow in the wake of the death of God, and he worked frenetically to find a solution.  Does his solution work?  We shall see. Nietzsche believed that Enlightenment rationalism and the philosophical materialism that followed in its wake had made belief in God untenable.  God is dead and we have murdered him he famously announced in The Madman: The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes.  “Whither is God?”  he cried; “I will tell you.  We have killed him — you and I.  All Read More ›