“The mission of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry is to promote scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims. … some of the founding members of CSI include scientists, academics, and science writers such as Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Philip Klass, Paul Kurtz, Ray Hyman, James Randi, Martin Gardner, Sidney Hook, and others.” Those people should weep. Maybe. Read this: 8. With the current administration, how do you think science education, mainly evolution, will change? Americans are becoming more accepting of evolution. The people President Donald Trump has hired and the decisions being made (see for example Florida SB 989) will slow down this positive trend. Darwin said, “Ignorance begets confidence more often Read More ›

Over the years, I have noticed a tendency at UD and elsewhere to ignore and bury quite significant and substantial comments when discussion threads reflect interactions with those more concerned to make points rather than to have serious dialogue. Ironically, serious dialogue is what is necessary if a genuine consensus is ever to be built. In one of the current threads, HGP (welcome aboard) has made a substantial comment in reply to Seversky, apparently based on an earlier discussion.  He highlights some of the main challenges of cultural relativism in an outstanding comment. One that is well worth headlining. (And yes, headlining of exceptional comments is a way to recognise and encourage those who make thoughtful contributions to genuine dialogue.) Read More ›

From Neuroskeptic at Discover: In a new paper in the Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, Chris Drummond takes aim at the ‘reproducibility movement’ which has lately risen to prominence in science. … If we have multiple pieces of evidence for a hypothesis, but none of those pieces of evidence are reproducible, the hypothesis would have no support. Reproducibility of the primary evidence must be there first, before we can marshal the evidence to support our models. A model supported by lots of unreproducible evidence is a house built on sand. So I agree with Drummond that reproducibility, alone, is not sufficient to make strong science (I’m not sure if anyone thinks it is), but I stand by my Read More ›

From Evolution News & Views: Here we are in 2018, and we still don’t know who, when, or why ancient people left their marks in the Arabian desert in the form of large stone structures, some of them hundreds of meters long. But as we observed back in November, “All we know is that they were designed.” It’s a good example of intelligent design in action — the design science of archaeology. It’s one of many active areas of design-based research that clearly are propelling science forward. … What’s interesting is that there are very stunning natural structures in the same area: perfectly round volcanic craters that stand out vividly from their surroundings. So what’s the difference? We all know Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: To make the iconic, twisted double helix that accounts for the diversity of life, DNA rules specify that G always pairs with C, and A with T. But, when it’s all added up, the amount of G+C vs A+T content among species is not a simple fixed percentage or, standard one-to-one ratio. For example, within single-celled organisms, the amount of G+C content can vary from 72 percent in a bacteria like Streptomyces coelicolor while the protozoan parasite that causes malaria, Plasmondium falciparum, has as little as 20 percent. In single-celled eukaryotes, yeast contain 38 percent G+C content, plants like corn have 47 percent, and humans contain about 41 percent. The big question is, why? … Now that they’ve Read More ›

On Wednesday, January 3rd, there has been an announcement of two security flaws that affect Intel, AMD and ARM micro-chips, thus potentially affecting PC’s, telephones and a great many appliances alike. As a Yahoo News article reports: “Phones, PCs, everything are going to have some impact, but it’ll vary from product to product,” Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said in an interview with CNBC Wednesday afternoon. This is of course of direct interest to everyone, and it will be of more direct interest to many readers of UD, as many of us work with information technology. As well, it is illustrative of features of information and probability that will be of significant interest to design thinkers (and critics) as the case Read More ›

WJM often provides quite refreshing insights. Here, in the challenge of criticism thread, he responds to CR (and to Origenes), and in so doing, addresses Popper: WJM, 8: >> Popper’s answer is: We can hope to detect and eliminate error if we set up traditions of criticism—substantive criticism, directed at the content of ideas, not their sources, and directed at whether they solve the problems that they purport to solve. Who decides what a problem is? Who decides what constitutes an “error”? Who decides what form criticism should take? Who decides what it means for a criticism to be considered valid? Without self-evident truths to draw from, everything CR says is nothing but word salad that could be interpreted and Read More ›

UD serves as a forum in which many issues are debated and as a result form time to time, there are things that it is helpful to draw to wider attention by headling. Here, something from the objectivity and morality thread, as food for thought : KF, 302: >>CR: Every proposition is fallible because there are no infallible sources that we can defer to by which to prevent us from falling in error. Reason has its say first. Absurdly false and counter to facts in evidence. Just because we are fallible does not entail that in every case there is a residual uncertainty regarding the truth of propositions. A significant number of things are necessarily true, and a relevant subset Read More ›

From Richard Gunderman at The Conversation: Wells, one of the founders of science fiction, was a staunch believer in science’s potential. Orwell, on the other hand, cast a much more skeptical eye on science, pointing to its limitations as a guide to human affairs. … Wells’ enthusiasm for science had political implications. Having contemplated in his novels the self-destruction of mankind, Wells believed that humanity’s best hope lay in the creation of a single world government overseen by scientists and engineers. Human beings, he argued, need to set aside religion and nationalism and put their faith in the power of scientifically trained, rational experts. … Orwell was not bashful about criticizing the scientific and political views of his friend Wells. Read More ›

From Will Storr at the Guardian, on how the obviously false “self-esteem” bunkum in education received the status of “science”: In the 1980s, Californian politician John Vasconcellos set up a task force to promote high self-esteem as the answer to all social ills. But was his science based on a lie? The flawed yet infectious notion that, in order to thrive, people need to be treated with unconditional positivity first gained traction in the late 80s. Since then, the self-esteem movement has helped transform the way we raise our children – prioritising their feelings of self-worth, telling them they are special and amazing, and cocooning them from everyday consequences. One manifestation of this has been grade inflation. In 2012, the Read More ›

Past time, really. From ScienceDaily: Maybe the ‘Boring Billion’ wasn’t so boring, after all The world’s oldest algae fossils are a billion years old, according to a new analysis by earth scientists at McGill University. Based on this finding, the researchers also estimate that the basis for photosynthesis in today’s plants was set in place 1.25 billion years ago. … The new findings also add to recent evidence that an interval of Earth’s history often referred to as the Boring Billion may not have been so boring, after all. From 1.8 to 0.8 billion years ago, archaea, bacteria and a handful of complex organisms that have since gone extinct milled about the planet’s oceans, with little biological or environmental change Read More ›

Sometimes, a blog comment is so cogent that it desrerves headline billing. In the following case, Origenes brilliantly rises to that level in responding to frequent critic, CR. So, from the moral grounding thread: Origenes, 268:>>CR @ CR: My point was and has continues to be: how does a proposition obtain the status of being “already true” before reason has its say? No, that is not your point at all. Your “point” is that every proposition is fallible. According to you, it can never be settled whether a proposition is true or false — “no proposition is immune to criticism.” One problem with this is that certain propositions are obviously immune to criticism. Here you apply a little trick: by Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers were surprised when sauropterygians with very different lifestyles had evolved inner ears that were very similar to those of some modern animals. “Sauropterygians are completely extinct and have no living descendants,” said Dr James Neenan, lead author of the study. “So I was amazed to see that nearshore species with limbs that resemble those of terrestrial animals had ears similar to crocodylians, and that the fully-aquatic, flippered plesiosaurs had ears similar to sea turtles.” The similarities don’t end there. Some groups of plesiosaurs, the ‘pliosauromorphs’, evolved enormous heads and very short necks, a body shape that is shared by modern whales. Whales have the unusual feature of highly miniaturized inner ears (blue whales have a similar-sized inner Read More ›

But share only eight gut microbes with their closely related cousins, the ringtail lemurs. This is not a neat Darwinian picture. From ScienceDaily: “The bamboo lemur’s evolutionary tree diverged from that of both panda species 83 million years ago — that’s 18 million years before dinosaurs went extinct,” says Erin McKenney, a postdoctoral researcher at North Carolina State University and lead author of a paper on the study. “These species are also separated by thousands of miles and the Indian Ocean. Red pandas and giant pandas aren’t closely related either, with their most recent ancestor coming 47.5 million years ago. Lemurs are primates, red pandas are related to raccoons, and pandas are related to bears. “Yet all three species share Read More ›

No? Well, not according to a recent article in Nature: Abstract: Observations of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) provide valuable comparative data for understanding the significance of conspecific killing. Two kinds of hypothesis have been proposed. Lethal violence is sometimes concluded to be the result of adaptive strategies, such that killers ultimately gain fitness benefits by increasing their access to resources such as food or mates1,2,3,4,5. Alternatively, it could be a non-adaptive result of human impacts, such as habitat change or food provisioning6,7,8,9. To discriminate between these hypotheses we compiled information from 18 chimpanzee communities and 4 bonobo communities studied over five decades. Our data include 152 killings (n = 58 observed, 41 inferred, and 53 suspected killings) Read More ›