Monthly Archives: September 2018
What “territory” does Thomas Nagel find between materialism and theism?
| September 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism, Philosophy, theism |
Photographer and philosopher Laszlo Bencze has been rereading Thomas Nagel’s Mind & Cosmos (2012), and he writes to say, I’m finding Mind and Cosmos to be a very thought provoking book. In it Nagel sets himself the task of explaining the existence of mind (or consciousness) without resorting to either materialistic evolution or to theism. […]
Google is doomed because it doesn’t get information theory
| September 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Information, Intelligent Design, Mind |
That’s tech philosopher George Gilder’s view: Last month, World News Daily did a three-part interview with George Gilder on the publication of Life after Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy, which unpacks some of the book’s main ideas: Part One: “Reagan guru, predictor of iPhone foresees new web revolution” […]
Why proving the Riemann hypothesis matters
| September 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mathematics, Philosophy |
Prime numbers are the “building blocks for larger numbers”: The Riemann hypothesis is a statement about a mathematical curiosity known as the Riemann zeta function. That function is closely entwined with prime numbers — whole numbers that are evenly divisible only by 1 and themselves. Prime numbers are mysterious: They are scattered in an inscrutable […]
At Aeon: Do philosophy and math still need each other?
| September 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Mathematics, Philosophy |
One question is whether people are looking for logically certain answers any more: Whereas mathematics seeks precise and certain answers, obtaining them in real life is often intractable or outright impossible. In such circumstances, what we really want are algorithms that return reasonable approximations to the right answers in an efficient and reliable manner. Real-world […]
“Severe” manipulation of figures from lab that studied gene silencing technique
| September 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Plants, Science |
But the reason for the manipulation is unclear: A fresh investigation into publications from a French plant-biology laboratory has revealed “severe” and “intentional” manipulation of research figures. No one has yet been named as responsible for the misconduct, but the institute that led the investigation is expected to announce disciplinary measures by the end of September. […]
Another pop science great, the 100-calorie snack guy, fizzles
| September 29, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Media, Science |
Behaviorist Brian Wansink whose “bottomless bowl” theory of why people eat too much – and other creative but problematic ideas hatched at Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab has fallen from grace: His lab informed food companies implementing the 100-calorie snack packs you see in stores, for example, under the idea that these smaller portions would […]
The Scientist tries to come to grips with the Mortarboard Mob problem
| September 29, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Mathematics, Peer review |
We outlined the story of how a mortarboard mob hounded out of the journals a paper by a respected mathematician that had passed peer review for fear of “repercussions” (= the hell they themselves would go out and raise). The paper was about “greater variability in various traits among males than females of many species, […]
Heckler’s veto: Protesters disrupt climate science conference
| September 29, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Climate change, Culture, Global Warming, Intelligent Design |
In St. Louis earlier this month: What do you do if you’re a climate activist and a geoscientist speaks at a meeting near you offering scientific evidence against your point of view? Well, of course—you do what any rational person would do. You attend and listen carefully and weigh the arguments and consider whether you […]
Will social science morph into physics and economics, using Big Data?
| September 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Mind, Psychology |
Might that be the final resolution of the otherwise intractable scandal of social “science,” which is increasingly just political screeds? In 2014, Stephen Guy of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues described how people move to avoid hitting each other when interacting in large groups. “Human crowds,” they wrote, “bear a striking resemblance to […]
Could new galactic measurements “upend current theories” of physics?
| September 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
At Horizons EU we are told, “New efforts to figure out just how fast the universe has expanded since the Big Bang, a speed known as the Hubble constant, could upend current theories of physics , according to some scientists. If current theories were upended, who would know. Consider these stories from this month alone: […]
Acknowledged: Claims of well-established patterns in evolution may be “remarkable bias”
| September 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, Tree of life |
From ScienceDaily: How do the large-scale patterns we observe in evolution arise? A new paper in the journal Evolution by researchers at Uppsala University and University of Leeds argues that many of them are a type of statistical artefact caused by our unavoidably recent viewpoint looking back into the past. As a result, it might […]
Gunter Bechly: Dickinsonia is NOT likely an animal
| September 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Ediacaran, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Rather, he thinks, it is an unknown type of life form, which belonged to “an alien clade,” not certainly related to later life forms. Readers will recall that fats (sterols) were recently recovered from a 558 million-year-old fossil entity, Dickinsonia, which was previously uncertainly classified but is now classified as an animal as a result. […]
Researchers: Genome doubling is plant’s secret weapon for spreading widely
| September 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Genomics, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Many wild and cultivated plants arise through the combination of two different species. The genome of these so-called polyploid species often consists of a quadruple set of chromosomes — a double set for each parental species — and thus has about twice as many genes as the original species. About 50 years ago, […]
Black holes do not behave as string theorists say they should
| September 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design |
Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, explains, Three weeks ago, Steinhauer’s group reported results from a new experiment in which they have now measured the temperature of the fluid black hole: Observation of thermal Hawking radiation at the Hawking temperature in an analogue black hole Juan Ramón Muñoz de Nova, Katrine […]
Discover: Even the best dark matter theories “are crumbling”
| September 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Fine tuning, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Because the best theories have not identified dark matter after decades: Having been fooled once, scientists have to ask: Is dark matter the new ether? For decades, a few rogue scientists have stood hopefully at the edge of respectability, offering their theory called Modified Newtonian Dynamics, or MOND. Essentially, it says that physics doesn’t work […]
Researcher asks, Is pre-Darwinian evolution plausible?
| September 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
At Biology Direct: Abstract: This essay highlights critical aspects of the plausibility of pre-Darwinian evolution. It is based on a critical review of some better-known open, far-from-equilibrium system-based scenarios supposed to explain processes that took place before Darwinian evolution had emerged and that resulted in the origin of the first systems capable of Darwinian evolution. […]
Early sun’s rotation rate was just right for us, it turns out
| September 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Fine tuning, Intelligent Design |
A science writer explains, Our early Sun’s rate of rotation may be one reason we’re here to talk about it, astrobiologists now say. The key likely lies in the fact that between the first hundred million to the first billion years of its life, our G-dwarf star likely had a ‘Goldilocks’ rotation rate; neither too […]
Michael Egnor: Apes can be generous. Are they just like humans then?
| September 26, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Intelligent Design, Mind |
Reading the claims for ape generosity in The New York Times, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor offers a clarification: There is a fallacy about the human mind that regularly appears in research on animal behavior, and this fallacy is related to the pervasive misunderstanding about machine “intelligence.” It is a misunderstanding about the most basic characteristic of […]
Is the octopus a “second genesis of intelligence”?
| September 25, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Intelligent Design |
We know that the octopus is smart but the hardware “has little in common with the mammalian design”: While the octopus has a large central brain in its head, it also has a unique network of smaller ‘brains’ within each of its arms. It’s just what these creatures need to coordinate the mind-boggling complexity of […]
Jeffrey Shallit takes on Mike Egnor: Machines really CAN learn!
| September 25, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Mind |
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor tells us that computer engineer Jeffrey Shallit, known for attacking ID, has responded to his recent parable explaining why machines can’t learn. According to Shallit, a computer is not just a machine, but something quite special: Computer scientist Jeffrey Shallit takes issue with my parable (September 8, 2018) about “machine learning.” The […]
