Presumably, a fix of Darwinism goes down well in a complex world: Discover magazine tells readers why people believe in God. It’s simple: Evolution fooled us! But in fact the article is a perfect case study in how a sweeping story of “evolution” gets credit for just about anything. … That’s the story, says Alex. Evolution wired all that into us; but it messed up, too. It didn’t include a “stop” switch to tell us where not to use those tendencies. We see patterns that aren’t real, and we conclude falsely that someone must have put them there on purpose. Some things we learn by imitation aren’t so good after all. So for example we see patterns in weather, and Read More ›

From an interview with J. P. Moreland, author of Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology (2018): RC: How does science differ from scientism and why does it matter? JPM: Claims of science—water is H20, electro-magnetic fields behave in such and such a manner—what science is limited to. But scientism is a philosophical claim about science, not a claim of science. Scientism is a theory of the nature of knowledge (it can only be obtained through physics, chemistry and the other hard sciences) and limits of knowledge (based on the nature of knowledge, it is limited to the the hard sciences and absent from all other fields, e.g. religious claims or ethical assertions). These types of claims Read More ›

And Christianity too, says our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon. He explains: Proposition: Miracles are violations of natural law. 1. What is natural law; Who invented it? Who enforces it? Who interprets it? a) One argument is that natural law is merely inductive. The sun has risen daily for the past 5000 years of written history, therefore it is a law. But if it did not rise tomorrow, that would only be a 1/1,800,000 event. Are we saying that probabilities < 1:1,800,000 are always certain? Then certain rare forms of cancer should certainly never happen. b) Another argument is that “Nature” operates by laws that we discover. But what is “Nature”? How do we meet “Nature”? If it is inductive, Read More ›

Recently, we looked at the claim that diatoms (one-celled algae with glassy shells) demonstrate the ability to make choices. That seems hard to account for in the absence of a brain (though the researchers were convinced they saw it happen). Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon writes to clarify a point about the diatoms: The article was a bit misleading on the use of “sex,” suggesting that diatoms had to chose between food and sex. So here’s some info about diatom replication. The most common or normal way a diatom multiplies is by asexual binary division. Only the outside of a diatom is made of glass, or more precisely two pieces of glass like a pill box, or two petri Read More ›

This is one of those very rare times when the lottery bet has a positive mathematical expected value. Expected value is calculated as: (Amount possibly won * probability of winning) minus (Amount of bet * probability of losing). The probability of winning Mega Millions is 1 in 302,575,350. The next jackpot is $904 million (cash value of $1.6 billion annuity). The expected value is ($904,000,000 * 1/302,575,350) minus ($2.00 * .9999999999999999999) = $0.98. This means on average in the long run, for every $2.00 ticket you buy, you would expect to win $2.98 if the jackpot were always $904 million.  Of course, you still lose the whole $2.00 every time you lose, which is almost always.  Still, on average, over the Read More ›

… not only is the mind real but it is so real that nature doesn’t even matter. Barry Arrington wrote here recently, Elizabeth Warren says that a DNA report that shows she is between 1/1024th and 1/64th Colombian, Mexican or Peruvian absolutely scientifically proves her claim that she was a Cherokee Indian, so President Trump must pay up on his $1 million bet. But Elizabeth Warren is also a strong supporter of the trans-gender movement. So she also believes that a DNA report that shows a person has an XY chromosome is scientifically meaningless with respect to whether the person is a male and a DNA report that shows a person has an XX chromosome is scientifically meaningless with respect Read More ›

You read the title right. Recently, some astronomers thought they had spotted an “exomoon,” a moon orbiting an exoplanet. There are, of course, bound to be some. But now Gizmodo introduces us to the concept of the moonmoon, a submoon orbiting a moon. One research team is taking on the possibility: The team’s short analysis found that small submoons, perhaps 10 kilometers in radius, could only survive around large moons (such as the ones we see in our Solar System) far away from the host planet, according to the paper published on the arXiv preprint server. Moons that are too close to their host planets or too small might lose their submoons to tidal forces from the planet—shredding the submoon Read More ›

The Standard Model of physics holds that electrons should be almost perfectly round. As it happens, The electron gets its shape from the way that positive and negative charges are distributed inside the particle. The best theory for how particles behave, called the standard model of particle physics, holds that the electron should keep its rotund figure almost perfectly. But some theories suggest that an entourage of hypothetical subatomic particles outside the electron could create a slight separation between the positive and negative charges, giving the electron a pear shape. Now, the Advanced Cold Molecule Electron Electric Dipole Moment, or ACME, search, based at Harvard University, has probed the electron’s EDM with the most precision ever — and still found Read More ›

That might not be what we’d have expected to hear about the twentieth century novelist and philosopher but reader Eric Holloway sends us this item: I am not a student of the theory of evolution and, therefore, I am neither its supporter nor its opponent. But a certain hypothesis has haunted me for years; I want to stress that it is only hypothesis. There is an enormous breach of continuity between nature and man’s consciousness, in its distinctive characteristic: his conceptual faculty. It is as if, after aeons of physiological development, the evolutionary process altered its course, and the higher stages of development focused primarily on the consciousness of living species, not their bodies. But the development of a man’s Read More ›

They don’t usually write this way at Nature: Dandelion seeds fly using a method that researchers thought couldn’t work in the real world, according to a study1 published on 17 October in Nature. When some animals, aeroplanes or seeds fly, rings of circulating air called vortices form in contact with their wings or wing-like surfaces. These vortices can help to maintain the forces that lift the animal, machine or seed into the air. Researchers thought that an unattached vortex would be too unstable to persist in nature. Yet the light, puffy seeds of dandelions use vortices that materialize just above their surfaces and lift the seed into the air.Jeremy Rehm, “Dandelion seeds fly using ‘impossible’ method never before seen in Read More ›

Published in a Springer journal: Another University of Alberta professor published a piece in the Canadian Journal of Science, Math, Technology, and Education, saying that to simply teach students science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) is objectively bad, apparently because it cultivates, and I am listing this directly from the document: “[P]atriarchy, heteronormativity, white supremacy, Eurocentrism, (neo-)colonialism, ableism, classism, labor inequity, anthropocentrism, and/or others.”Keean Bexte, “University of Alberta prof calls for upheaval of science to benefit the “oppressed”” at Rebel Media Marc Higgins and colleagues’ paper (open access) is here. From the opening: It has been argued many times over the course of decades and across diverse paradigms that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education practices-as-usual (re)produce systems of Read More ›

Getting it right is important for the search for life on Mars: Found in 3.7-billion-year-old rocks in Greenland, the mounds strongly resemble cone-shaped microbial mats called stromatolites, researchers reported in 2016. But a new analysis of the shape, internal layers and chemistry of the structures suggests that the mounds weren’t shaped by microbes but by tectonic activity. The new work, led by astrobiologist Abigail Allwood of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., was published online October 17 in Nature. … The debate highlights how important it will be to understand as much as possible about the geologic setting of a future Mars landing site, if scientists hope to spy evidence that there was once life there. It’s hard enough Read More ›

Here’s a reasonable take on Warren’s DNA results: Using this data, the original analysis, which was prepared by a respected geneticist, determined that five segments of Sen. Warren’s DNA — totaling about 12.3 million bases (“letters”) — are of Native American ancestry. That might sound like a lot, but the human genome contains more than 3.2 billion bases, which means that only about 0.4% of Sen. Warren’s DNA sequence can be attributed to Native American ancestry. Thus, the vast, vast majority of her DNA is of European descent. Though her pedigree probably contains a Native American ancestor, he or she existed six to ten generations ago. If a generation is roughly 25 years, that means that Sen. Warren’s (possibly one Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Unicellular diatoms are able to adapt their behavior to different external stimuli based on an evaluation of their own needs. This was discovered by scientists of the Friedrich Schiller University and the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, together with partners from Belgium. The algae depend on nutrients in order to reproduce. However, they also need sexual mates which they find when they follow pheromone traces. In experiments, Seminavis robusta diatoms directed their orientation either towards nutrient sources or mating partners, depending on the degree of starvation and the need to mate. The tiny organisms demonstrated in fact a primitive form of behavioral biology. … “It is striking that even unicellular organisms that obviously lack Read More ›

Elizabeth Warren says that a DNA report that shows she is between 1/1024th and 1/64th Colombian, Mexican or Peruvian absolutely scientifically proves her claim that she was a Cherokee Indian, so President Trump must pay up on his $1 million bet. But Elizabeth Warren is also a strong supporter of the trans-gender movement.  So she also believes that a DNA report that shows a person has an XY chromosome is scientifically meaningless with respect to whether the person is a male and a  DNA report that shows a person has an XX chromosome is scientifically meaningless with respect to whether the person is a female. Insanity.