In another thread, Ed George insists that humans invented mathematics as a way to describe the behavior of phenomena, but that doesn’t mean mathematics is an intrinsic aspect of the universe, a part we discovered, not invented.  Here’s why that position is untenable. Mr. George is correct that humans invent languages – the language of mathematics included.  Languages are systems of symbols that represent things.  For example, the word “sphere” can be expressed with different symbols in different languages, but the symbols all refer to the same thing – in this case, the form of an object in the real world.  That we invented the symbols and language to describe a real thing doesn’t mean we invented the real thing Read More ›

One of our scouts has been following the way retired professor of Darwinian biology Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne is trying to confront the SJWs in science, where others are capitulating. The recent question has been whether sex is a real category in biology. (We explain here.) Anyway, Coyne decided to look more closely into the world of the marching Woke and he discovered that most seem to be cool with anti-Semitism, though some are not: I’ve published a fair number of pieces (see here) criticizing the leadership of the Women’s March (WM), including Tamika Mallory, Linda Sarsour, and Carmen Perez—three of the four co-chairs—for cozying up to Louis Farrakhan, a bigot, a misogynist, a racist, and a homophobe. There Read More ›

Earlier today, in A Man is a Woman, Winston, Barry Arrington asks us to imagine the reprogramming of people who think that words like “male” and “female” represent biological realities, which is somewhat like Winston’s mistake in imagining that 2 and 2 could make 4 even if the party needs them to make 5. In 1984 O’Brien tortured him out of that. Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry “Why Evolution Is True” Coyne is refusing to follow Nature down the primrose path of political correctness and is doubling down on what people used to be allowed to accept as biological fact: The shameful part of all this is that the scientific journal Nature, as well as three evolutionary biology/ecology societies, who should Read More ›

Everyone has heard of a “shoestring budget.”  But did you know that UD gets by on an “aglet budget”?  What is an aglet? you ask.  An aglet is that little plastic sheath at the end of a shoestring.  That’s right.  Our budget is so small that we only wish we could get by on a shoestring.  All of which is prelude to our annual holiday fundraising drive.  If you have benefited from our News Desk’s tireless chasing of the latest ID-related happenings, or KF’s in-depth analysis of the fundamentals, or gpuccio’s scientific insights, or any of our other UD features, please consider a donation to help fund our efforts.  The Donate button is there on the right of the homepage Read More ›

If you read the science news, you’ve probably been hearing about Little Foot alot: The first of a raft of papers about ‘Little Foot’ suggests that the fossil is a female who showed some of the earliest signs of human-like bipedal walking around 3.67 million years ago. She may also belong to a distinct species that most researchers haven’t previously recognized.Colin Barras, “‘Little Foot’ hominin emerges from stone after millions of years” at Nature Ninety percent of the skeleton found in South Africa is complete, compared to (possibly) fellow Australopithecus Lucy’s 40%. The papers will be published in a special edition of the Journal of Human Evolution. An early announcement described Little Foot as an Australopithecus prometheus, but as Barras Read More ›

Leftists frequently bash ID proponents and climate change hysteria skeptics as science “deniers.”  This is ironic, because these same leftists insist that a man can be a woman by simply wanting to be badly enough.  This would be amusing if they did not often employ the levers of political power to force compliance with their anti-reality delusions, as a school board in Virginia recently did when it fired a teacher for refusing to join in the lie that one of his male students is a female.  See here.  We are rapidly arriving at a time when Orwell’s famous “2+2=5 if the party says so” passage is becoming a terrifying reality, except instead instead of “2+2=5 if the party says so,” it Read More ›

How is “To be or not to be?” different from Bow wow wow!? Both animals and humans use signs. A sign points to something other than itself. For example, when you point with your finger at a tree, you are making a sign. You want people to look at the tree, not at your finger. A lion’s roar (to scare off an intruder) is also a sign. It’s a warning sign for the intruder, not just noise the animal happens to be making. A bird’s song to attract a mate or establish territory is a sign in the same way. So is a written or spoken word. Both animals and humans use signs. There are (for our purposes) two kinds Read More ›

We live as beings in a world full of other concrete entities, and to do science we must routinely rely on mathematics and so on numbers and other abstract objects. We observe how — as just one example — a fire demonstrates causality (and see that across time causality has been the subject of hot dispute). We note that across science, there are many “effects.” Such puts the logic of being and causality on the table for discussion as part 4 of this series [ cf. 1, 2, 3] — and yes, again, the question arises: why are these themes not a routine part of our education? The logic of being (ontology) speaks to possible vs impossible entities, contingent ones Read More ›

Two independent teams of astronomers recently looked into the matter: Astronomers have detected and measured the mass and/or orbital features of 3,869 planets in 2,887 planetary systems beyond the solar system. This ranks as a staggering rate of discovery, given that the first confirmed detection of a planet orbiting another hydrogen-fusion-burning star was as recent as 1995. What do the characteristics of these systems reveal about potential habitability for advanced life? … The presumption back in 1995 was that astronomers would find many exoplanetary systems where the probability of advanced life possibly existing in that system would be greater than zero. More than twenty-three years later, with a database of 2,888 planetary systems and 3,877 planets, only one planetary system Read More ›

That’s the surprising conclusion of a recent study that required rats who had had their ovaries or their uterus removed or both and then had to negotiate a water maze six weeks later: As compared with the other rats, animals who had only their uterus removed struggled more as the test became increasingly difficult. The scientists also observed differences in the hormone levels of these rats. Overall, the study suggests that signals from the uterus—and not the ovaries, which are better known for their hormone production—influence brain function. Carolyn Wilke, “Rat Study Points to Role of Uterus in Memory” at The Scientist Memory may be more complex than we think. Follow UD News at Twitter! See also: Food, sex, and Read More ›