From Daniel Engber at Slate: Ten years ago last fall, Washington Post science writer Shankar Vedantam published an alarming scoop: The truth was useless. … This supposed scientific fact jibed with an idea then in circulation. In those days of phantom Iraqi nukes, anti-vaxxer propaganda, and climate change denialism, reality itself appeared to be in danger. Stephen Colbert’s neologism, truthiness—voted word of the year in 2006—had summed up the growing sense of epistemic crisis. “Truth comes from the gut,” Colbert boasted to his audience. “Anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news at you.” … Ten years on, the same scientific notions have now been used to explain the rise of Donald Trump. The coronation Read More ›

According to SciTech Daily in a January 3, 2018 article, Tabby’s star, aka KIC 8462852, has had a mysterious brightening and dimming cycle.  (Such a cycle, of course raises the interesting thought of the erection of a Dyson Sphere or a similar megastructure.) As the article reports: >>A team of more than 200 researchers, including Penn State Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Assistant Professor Jason Wright and led by Louisiana State University’s Tabetha Boyajian, is one step closer to solving the mystery behind the “most mysterious star in the universe.” KIC 8462852, or “Tabby’s Star,” nicknamed after Boyajian, is otherwise an ordinary star, about 50 percent bigger and 1,000 degrees hotter than the Sun, and about than 1,000 light years Read More ›

Sometimes, a classic reference provides food for thought: >>Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769) Sir William Blackstone INTRODUCTION, SECTION 2 Of the Nature of Laws in General Law, in its most general and comprehensive sense, signifies a rule of action; and is applied indiscriminately to all kinds of action, whether animate or inanimate, rational or irrational. Thus we say, the laws of motion, of gravitation, of optics, or mechanics, as well as the laws of nature and of nations. And it is that rule of action, which is prescribed by some superior, and which the inferior is bound to obey. Thus when the supreme being formed the universe, and created matter out of nothing, he impressed certain principles upon Read More ›

From Toni Airaksinen at Campus Reform: In the postmodern tradition, Gillborn and his team also argue that racism can be reinforced through numbers because they are social constructs. “Numbers are social constructs and likely to embody the dominant (racist) assumptions that shape contemporary society,” they write. As a consequence, they assert that “in many cases, numbers speak for White racial interests.” Despite the purported danger of statistics being used to reinforce white privilege, they predict that if used properly, statistics can “expose and delegitimize the racist (and sexist, classist, hetero-normative, and ableist) assumptions, policies, and practices that are currently supported by the uncritical use of quantitative data.”More. In short, statistics can useful if manipulated (“properly used”). Post-modernism, welcome to science! Read More ›

From The Economist: Persistence in the face of adversity is a virtue, of course. And, as all this effort shows, physicists have been nothing if not persistent. Yet it is an uncomfortable fact that the relentless pursuit of ever bigger and better experiments in their field is driven as much by belief as by evidence. The core of this belief is that Nature’s rules should be mathematically elegant. So far, they have been, so it is not a belief without foundation. But the conviction that the truth must be mathematically elegant can easily lead to a false obverse: that what is mathematically elegant must be true. Hence the unwillingness to give up on GUTs and supersymmetry. New theories have been Read More ›

From Barbara J. King at NPR: The 26-year-old female, named Pasika, has been traveling alone with her baby for more than seven months in Rwanda’s Virunga mountains, ever since her social group fell apart at the death of its silverback leader. Her infant, Mashami, is now one year old. The post described Pasika’s behavior as a “heroic,” conscious choice, made because Pasika understands the risks of infanticide by gorilla males. She wants to protect her infant from these risks, in other words. In the world of animal-behavior science, this is pretty much an astonishing claim. More. Why is it an astonishing claim? Even a cat may move her kittens* if she suspects any such thing. Pasika had actually lost an Read More ›

From skeptical science journalist Alex Berezow at American Council on Science and Health: Consider Mark Jacobson, the climate scientist who is suing a prestigious journal for $10 million because it hurt his feelings. There is good reason to believe that the lawsuit will be dismissed, but not before lawyers have collected a nice fee for themselves. Jacobson’s attorneys and the journal’s attorneys can both make a lot of money arguing with each other, even if the suit never actually goes to trial. Routinely, lawyers are required to solve problems that they themselves created. If something like this were to occur in any other area of life, it would be called racketeering. Recently, RealClearScience wrote an article that covered a paper Read More ›

From Nature: Desert spiders are master engineers A spider living in the Sahara Desert excavates its burrow by hauling out bundles of sand fastened with silken cords, while another carries sand balls in a ‘basket’ of its own bristles. … A similar basket evolved independently in desert ants, the authors note.More. See also: Evolution appears to converge on goals—but in Darwinian terms, is that possible?

From ScienceDaily: They predate the Createous period, moths and butterflies existed earlier than the Cretaceous period, which began 145 million years ago. A team of scientists report on new evidence that primitive moths and butterflies existed during the Jurassic period, approximately 50 million years earlier than the first flowering plants, shedding new light on one of the most confounding cases of co-evolution. … The slides of rock samples drilled in the German countryside included some material that looked familiar to Strother, a Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences researcher at Boston College’s Weston Observatory, who studies the origin and early evolution of land plants. What he saw were features similar to those found in insect wings. The wrinkle was that Read More ›

From Andrew Jones at Evolution News & Science Today,: After many thousands of man-hours of research, and zillions of CPU-hours on borrowed computers, biochemist David Baker of the University of Washington claims we have basically nailed it. “There are subtleties going on in naturally occurring proteins that we still don’t understand,” Dr. Baker said. “But we’ve mostly solved the folding problem.” He thinks that natural proteins are not designed, and so we should be able to do better: “There’s a lot of things that nature has come up with just by randomly bumbling around,” he said. “As we understand more and more of the basic principles, we ought to be able to do far better.” Don’t be fooled. If it’s Read More ›

From sociologist Christian Smith at Chronicle Review: BS is undergraduate “core” curricula that are actually not core course systems but loose sets of distribution requirements, representing uneasy truces between turf-protecting divisions and departments intent on keeping their classes full, which students typically then come to view as impositions to “get out of the way.” BS is the grossly lopsided political ideology of the faculty of many disciplines, especially in the humanities and social sciences, creating a homogeneity of worldview to which those faculties are themselves oblivious, despite claiming to champion difference, diversity, and tolerance. … BS is the ascendant “culture of offense” that shuts down the open exchange of ideas and mutual accountability to reason and argument. It is university Read More ›

From Thomas P. Sheahen at American Thinker: We all learned in elementary school that “you can’t divide by zero.” But what happens when you divide by a number very close to zero, a small fraction? The quotient shoots way up to a very large value. … There are several indices being cited these days that get people’s attention because of the big numbers displayed. But the reality is that those particular big numbers come entirely from having very small denominators when calculating a ratio. Three prominent examples of this mathematical artifact are the feedback effect in global warming models, the “Global Warming Potential,” and the “Happy Planet Index.” Each of these is afflicted by the enormous distortion that results when Read More ›

From Sal Cordova at Creation-Evolution Headlines: Bill Basener and John Sanford recently provided a correction to Fisher’s equations in the FNSF-FTNS (12/22/17) that demonstrated real evolution proceeds toward destruction rather than construction of biological function. It basically flips Fisher’s theorem upside down. Concurrently, and equally comedic, something odd happened at the 37th memorial lecture on January 4, 2018 meant to honor the memory of the late R. A. Fisher. Joe Felsenstein (a National Academy of Science member) condemned Fisher’s work with faint praise. Basically, he criticized Fisher’s famous theorem but tried to do it in a nice way. (After all, this was a memorial lecture intended to honor Fisher’s accomplishments.) As with many eulogies, Felsenstein tried to put as much Read More ›

Further to “Evolutionary informatics has come a long way since a Baylor dean tried to shut down the lab,” Philip Cunningham writes to introduce a new vid, Darwinian Evolution vs. Mathematics, documentary support here. Question: Will post-modernism give Darwinism an extra lease on life, by making clear that mathematics is a tool of oppression anyway? If people feel that Darwinian evolution is culturally right, isn’t that better than good mathematical results? See also: Evolutionary informatics has come a long way since a Baylor dean tried to shut down the lab On Basener and Sanford’s paper falsifying Fisher’s Darwinism theorem: It will be no small thing to make reality matter again and Can science survive long in a post-modern world? It’s Read More ›

On the theory that it might reflect badly on Darwin (2007). The lab moved off campus and continued. Robert Marks II writes to offer updates on the Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics book (Robert J. Marks, William A. Dembski and Winston Ewert, 2017) Podcast: (AI) Robert Crowther “Why Artificial Intelligence Will Never Replace Humanity,” Interview with Robert J Marks, ID the Future, December 18, 2017. Podcast: (AI) Robert Crowther “The Dangers, Limits and Promise of Artificial Intelligence.” Interview with Robert J Marks, ID the Future, January 8, 2018. Book’s site: Evolutionary informatics weds the natural, engineering, and mathematical sciences. Evolutionary informatics studies how evolving systems incorporate, transform, and export information. The Evolutionary Informatics Laboratory explores the conceptual foundations, mathematical development, and Read More ›