It’s usually just fake news*, as some thoughtful academics point out: There are many sciences, many religions. A scientific innovation problematic for one religious tradition may be irrelevant to another. One science may pose a threat to religious beliefs when other sciences do not. Arguing for an essential conflict between science and religion fails because, as the philosopher John Gray has written, terms such as “religion” and “atheism” have no essence. The sciences may sometimes provide answers to questions once asked within the faith traditions – but they also leave space for religious enquiry and commitment. How do we prioritise competing scientific research projects? With limited resources we must ask what is more important for humankind. But these are not Read More ›

At her blog, Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, offers a guest post spot to a fellow physicist: No current unified theory includes quantum mechanics fundamentally as part of its structure. But a truly unified theory must. And I believe the ultimate theory will be geometrically natural. Canonical quantum commutation relations are a Lie bracket, which can be part of a Lie group in a geometrically natural description. I fully expect this will lead to a beautiful quantum-unified theory – what I am currently working on. I never expected to find beauty in theoretical physics. I stumbled into it, and into E8 in particular, when looking for a naturally geometric description of fermions. But beauty Read More ›

Editor in chief of WORLD News Group Marvin Olasky interviews Biologic Institute’s interviews Ann Gauger, Olasky: I used to work at DuPont, the inventor in the 1930s of nylon—and 40 years later scientists found a bacterium with an enzyme dubbed nylonase that was able to digest nylon, which is a synthetic chemical not found in nature. Evolutionists use that as proof that new proteins can rapidly evolve, but you found a different story. Gauger: It wasn’t what we call a frameshift mutation, a DNA deletion or insertion that shifts the whole way a sequence is read. I discovered a whole body of literature by some Japanese workers who had found pre-existing protein folds. There was no new protein, no novel Read More ›

If you saw it up close? If you were to take a photo of a black hole, what you would see would be akin to a dark shadow in the middle of a glowing fog of light. Hence, we called this feature the shadow of a black hole . Interestingly, the shadow appears larger than you might expect by simply taking the diameter of the event horizon. The reason is simply, that the black hole acts as a giant lens, amplifying itself. Surrounding the shadow will be a thin ‘photon ring’ due to light circling the black hole almost forever. Further out, you would see more rings of light that arise from near the event horizon, but tend to be concentrated Read More ›

Quillette is one of the publications to which we sometimes direct your attention. It publishes figures who, in many cases, shouldn’t be particularly controversial but are. Along comes Politico to oblige us with an explanation: An Australian atheist feminist and psychology dropout, Claire Lehmann, founded it because she realized that magazines are more fun when people who have studied things seriously are allowed to say what they think: At times, it has drawn intense social media backlash, with contributors labeled everything from “clowns” to “cryptofascists” on Twitter. But fans of the site include pop psychologist Jordan Peterson, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, psychology professors Steven Pinker of Harvard and Jonathan Haidt of New York University, and columnists like David Brooks, Meghan Read More ›

Only five species of massive herbivores are left and some say humans killed off the others: Writing in the journal Science, Tyler Faith, from the Natural History Museum of Utah, and colleagues argue that long-term environmental change drove the extinctions. This mainly took the form of an expansion of grasslands, in response to falling atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO ) levels. “Despite decades of literature asserting that early hominins (human relatives) impacted ancient African faunas, there have been few attempts to actually test this scenario or to explore alternatives,” said Dr Faith. “Humans ‘off the hook’ for African mammal extinction” at BBC Now that Dr. Faith mentions it, the claim is more of an accusation than a hypothesis, and it is Read More ›

From a review of Universe in Creation: A New Understanding of the Big Bang and the Emergence of Life by astrophysicist Roy R. Gould: Whichever specific origin of life theory we turn to, the thesis that life is somehow programmed into the universe feels uncomfortable but also attractive. Uncomfortable, because it seems to carry a whiff of creationism: Is this just wishful thinking after all, intelligent design gussied up for the scientifically-minded? It is attractive, however, for the same reason. It means that life is the inevitable, invariant consequence of the laws of physics at work, giving life about as much meaning in the universe as an atheist could in good conscience ask for. What we want to be true Read More ›

In a day when first principles of reason are at a steep discount, it is unsurprising to see that inductive reasoning is doubted or dismissed in some quarters. And yet, there is still a huge cultural investment in science, which is generally understood to pivot on inductive reasoning. Where, as the Stanford Enc of Phil notes, in the modern sense, Induction ” includes all inferential processes that “expand knowledge in the face of uncertainty” (Holland et al. 1986: 1), including abductive inference.” That is, inductive reasoning is argument by more or less credible but not certain support, especially empirical support. How could it ever work? A: Surprise — NOT: by being an application of the principle of (stable) distinct identity. Read More ›

We are told that Earth and Mars are like two siblings who have grown apart: “There was a time when their resemblance was uncanny: Both were warm, wet and shrouded in thick atmospheres. But 3 or 4 billion years ago, these two worlds took different paths”: Long ago, Mars stopped changing, while Earth continued to evolve. Earth developed a kind of geological “conveyer belt” that Mars never had: tectonic plates. When they converge, they can push the crust into the planet. When they move apart, they enable new crust to emerge. This churning of material brings more than just rock to the surface. Some of life’s most vital ingredients are so-called volatiles, which include water, carbon dioxide and methane. Because Read More ›

Does the interaction between individual animal and microbes form something greater the sum of each, considered separately? Vital functions like digestion and immunity were long assumed to be under the purview of individual organisms, as capabilities developed and were refined through evolution by natural selection — the differential survival and reproduction of individuals. But if our bodies are less an autocracy of identical cells and more a coalition of multitudes, how can we explain their evolution? Some biologists are calling for a radical upgrade of evolutionary theory, arguing that prevailing ideas, developed from the study of bigger, more easily understood organisms, don’t fit nicely into this new world. Others contend that existing theory just needs to be applied more carefully. Read More ›

One of my main criticisms of methodological naturalism is that the word “naturalism” seems to not have any real content. It merely means “whatever the author wants to include in science” and non-naturalism means “whatever the author doesn’t want to include in science”. This paper by Halvorson is a case in point. One of the more frustrating parts of talking about methodological naturalism is coming up with a suitable definition of “naturalism”. I discuss this in-depth in this paper. Essentially, most definitions of naturalism are either extremely vague or extremely self-serving. For instance, “testability” is one definition that is often put forward. But, if supernaturalism is true, there is no reason that supernaturalism couldn’t at least in theory be testable. Read More ›

From Nature’s editors: “A move to classify people on the basis of anatomy or genetics” should be abandoned. According to a draft memo leaked to The New York Times, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposes to establish a legal definition of whether someone is male or female based solely and immutably on the genitals they are born with. Genetic testing, it says, could be used to resolve any ambiguity about external appearance. The move would make it easier for institutions receiving federal funds, such as universities and health programmes, to discriminate against people on the basis of their gender identity. The memo claims that processes for deciding the sex on a birth certificate will be “clear, grounded Read More ›

If you catch them at the right time. But can we give machines what the lizard has by nature? We sometimes assume that reptiles cannot be as smart as mammals because they are exothermic (cold-blooded) rather than endothermic (warm-blooded), and the brain is a high metabolic area. Here, though, we find some surprises. Reptiles lack some brain structures found in mammals but they can use what they’ve got for behavior that we would describe as intelligent: Crocodilians (alligators and crocodiles) have been reported to use sticks as decoys, play, and work in teams. Exothermy slows intelligence but does not absolutely prevent it: Anole lizards were found as capable as tits (birds) in a problem-solving test for a food reward. But the anoles, being exothermic, don’t need Read More ›

But they have quite different brains. The intelligence doesn’t seem to reside in the details of the mechanism Studying animals’ intelligence has taught us many things. But in some ways, it has deepened the mystery of intelligence. We might have thought that intelligence, in terms of individual learning ability, would gradually increase among animals, from invertebrates to vertebrates, from exothermic (cold-blooded) animals to endothermic (warm-blooded) animals, from reptiles to primates, culminating in man. In that case, intelligence would be associated with the increasingly complex brain structures that enable it. Research has demonstrated the opposite. “Crows Can Be as Smart as Apes” at Mind Matters See also: Even Lizards Can Be Smart If you catch them at the right time. But Read More ›

It’s becoming harder to ignore the stench: The drive recruited labs around the world to try to replicate the results of 28 classic and contemporary psychology experiments. Only half were reproduced successfully using a strict threshold for significance that was set at P < 0.0001 (the P value is a common test for judging the strength of scientific evidence). Brian Owens, “Replication failures in psychology not due to differences in study populations” at Nature So why did so many classic studies fail? The account in Nature doesn’t say but that won’t The Atlantic, stop people wondering: Despite the large sample sizes and the blessings of the original teams, the team failed to replicate half of the studies it focused on. It Read More ›