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Kirk Durston: Backing up the particle physicist who says there is “baked in” bias in science

Story re Sabine Hosenfelder’s comments here. In response, Kirk Durston from P2C kindly writes to say, If anyone is interested in a list of references with links, backing up the serious problem that science is facing right now, I wrote a blog post a while back that has a “Further Reading” section at the bottom of it. It currently stands at 47 links, counting Sabine Hossenfelder’s latest blog post. Here is an example, From Should we have faith in science? Part II: peer-reviewed science papers Austin Hughes, in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focusing on the origin of adaptive phenotypes laments, ‘Thousands of papers are published every year claiming evidence of adaptive evolution on the basis of computational Read More ›

Contra stereotype, some sharks eat seagrass

Just when we thought we had these thing figured out. Intro of topic Sharks are infamous meat-eaters. The ocean’s buffet of fish, crabs, mussels, shrimp and krill fill the legendary predators’ stomachs and give them sustenance. Now researchers have discovered that one particular species, bonnethead sharks, also dine on seagrass to meet their nutritional needs. The discovery means bonnethead sharks are not carnivores but omnivores — a distinction that changes how the coastal swimmers influence the fragile ecosystems they call home. … That means these coastal sharks once thought to be solely meat-eaters are actually omnivorous and the only known shark species to eat plants. That distinction changes things for ecosystem managers since omnivorous fish are food web stabilizers. Roni Read More ›

Could AI understand the universe better than we do?

  Better than we ever could? Recently, we discussed well-known chemist and atheist proponent Peter Atkins’s claim that science, not philosophy, answers the Big Questions: One class consists of invented questions that are often based on unwarranted extrapolations of human experience. They typically include questions of purpose and worries about the annihilation of the self, such as Why are we here? and What are the attributes of the soul? They are not real questions, because they are not based on evidence. Thus, as there is no evidence for the Universe having a purpose, there is no point in trying to establish its purpose or to explore the consequences of that purported purpose. As there is no evidence for the existence of Read More ›

Evolutionary psychology explains why men pay on the first date. And don’t.

Explains everything and its opposite! Our philosopher and photographer friend Laszlo Bencze writes to apprise us of “the definitive explanation” of why men want to pay on a first date: “There is an evolutionary reason for this, says Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist and senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University Bloomington. ‘Women want to know if a man will spend his resources on her,’ she says. ‘For millions of years they needed a partner to provide for their young, and they keep looking for that signal.’” Elizabeth Bernstein, “Who Pays on a Date? That’s Still a Complicated Question” at Wall Street Journal Okay, but on the other hand, as Bencze observes, evolution could also explain the Read More ›

How My Five Year-Old is Like a Materialist

My five year-old granddaughter is brilliant.  But she shares a flaw with many other brilliant people.  She absolutely hates to say “I don’t know.”  And she sometimes just makes concepts up out of whole cloth in an attempt to disguise the fact that she does not know something. Example:  This evening LK brought home Chick-fil-A.  Instead of packets of ketchup, for some reason she got packets of something called “Polynesian Sauce”  that is red and gooey but slightly less viscous than ketchup. The following exchange ensued: Granddaughter:  Papa, this is not ketchup. Papa:  It’s not?  What is it? Granddaughter:  uh, hmmm, uh, it’s Fraxee. Fraxee?  Not bad for a word she made up on the spot to disguise her ignorance.  Read More ›

New DSM Diagnosis: Rapid Onset Gonad Retraction

Over at Evolution News David Klinghoffer summarizes Brown University’s craven abandonment of one of its professors under pressure from the transgender lobby. [Brown professor Dr. Lisa] Littman published her (peer-reviewed) study in PLOS One, “Rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults: A study of parental reports,” concluding that young people may pick up gender dysphoria socially, in part through circles of friends and social and other media. That’s not something you are supposed to say. PLOS One and Brown’s School of Public Health, where Littman teaches, caught blowback from activists, and Brown in particular collapsed under the pressure. They took down a news release from their website and replaced it with a “statement, community letter on gender dysphoria study.” All of which Read More ›

YouTube debate: If Darwin were to examine the evidence today

Using modern science. Would his conclusions be the same? Here:  The participants are Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson (yes) vs. Dr. Herman Mays (no) The topics are from Jeanson’s book, Replacing Darwin: The NEW Origin of Species “Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson holds a PhD in cell and developmental Biology from Harvard University. He serves as a research biologist, author, and speaker with Answers in Genesis and formerly conducted research with the Institute for Creation Research.” Herman Mays: “I have a PhD in evolutionary ecology from the University of Kentucky and studied the mating system of the Yellow-breasted chat (Icteria virens) for my thesis research. I’ve been a postdoctoral fellow, assistant professor and a museum curator in zoology at Cincinnati Museum Center. While at Read More ›

Particle physicist: Science is suffering from “baked in” bias

From Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, says science has a problem and we need to talk: For the past 15 years, I have worked in the foundations of physics, a field which has not seen progress for decades. What happened 40 years ago is that theorists in my discipline became convinced the laws of nature must be mathematically beautiful in specific ways. By these standards, which are still used today, a good theory should be simple, and have symmetries, and it should not have numbers that are much larger or smaller than one, the latter referred to as “naturalness.” Based on such arguments from beauty, they predicted that protons should be able to decay. Read More ›

New “fixed” bacterial Tree of Life looks like a cityscape

Seen from below: Professor Hugenholtz said the scientific community generally agrees that evolutionary relationships are the most natural way to classify organisms, but bacterial taxonomy is riddled with errors, due to historical difficulties. “This is mainly because microbial species have very few distinctive physical features, meaning that there are thousands of historically misclassified species,” he said. “It’s also compounded by the fact that we can’t yet grow the great majority of microorganisms in the laboratory, so have been unaware of them until quite recently.” Dr. Donovan Parks, the lead software developer on the project, is excited about the recent advancement of genome sequencing technology, and how it’s helping reconstruct the bacterial tree of life. … The research team then used Read More ›

New research: Human brains do not differ much from reptile brains

These findings don’t show that reptiles are secretly smart. They mainly deepen the mystery of the human mind, which traverses regions unknown to any of them without the brain being that much different. Read More ›

Times a-changin’ New Scientist now hails mind over matter

No, really. Here’s what they say in 2018 about the placebo effect (you start to get better when you think you are getting better): “OUR minds aren’t passive observers simply observing reality as it is; our minds actually change reality. The reality we experience tomorrow is partly the product of the mindsets we hold today.” That’s what Alia Crum told global movers and shakers at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It may sound like New Age nonsense, but Crum, who heads the Mind & Body lab at Stanford University in California, can back up her claims with hard evidence showing the mysterious influence the mind has over our health and well-being.David Robson, “How a positive mind really Read More ›

In the latest version: Cold climate helped to do in the Neanderthals

From ScienceDaily: A team of researchers from a number of European and American research institutions, including Northumbria University, Newcastle, have produced detailed new natural records from stalagmites that highlight changes in the European climate more than 40,000 years ago. They found several cold periods that coincide with the timings of a near complete absence of archaeological artefacts from the Neanderthals, suggesting the impact that changes in climate had on the long-term survival of Neanderthal man. … “For many years we have wondered what could have caused their demise. Were they pushed ‘over the edge’ by the arrival of modern humans, or were other factors involved? Our study suggests that climate change may have had an important role in the Neanderthal Read More ›

At Nature: No more excuses for non-reproducible methods

Modern technology means there is no good reason to have the problem, says a professional protocols developer: News last month brought a powerful reminder that access to detailed methods can be essential for getting experiments to work. In 2013, the US$1.6-million Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology set out to repeat key experiments from 50 high-profile cancer papers, and so assess the extent to which published results can be replicated. Instead, the project has decided to stop at 18 papers. One big reason for this was the difficulty of working out what exactly was done in the original experiments. Protocols — precise step-by-step recipes for repeating experiments — are missing from published research more often than not, and even the original researchers Read More ›

Eric Holloway: ID as a bridge between Francis Bacon and Thomas Aquinas

Eric Holloway, an electrical and computer engineer, offers some thoughts on how to prevent science from devolving into “scientism.” For an example of scientism, see Peter Atkins’s claim that science can answer all the Big Questions. Here’s John Mark Reynolds’s outline of the general problem: Sometimes a culture takes a right road, sometimes it passes the right way and ends up a bit lost. Western Europe had a chance at the start of seventeenth century to get a few things right, but by the eighteenth century most had taken a worse way: Enlightenment or reaction. Enlightenment lost the wisdom of the Middle Ages, creating the myth of a dark age, and the main enlightened nation, France, ended the seventeenth century Read More ›