2018

In Fallacies physicists fall for Ed Feser demonstrates how scientism such as that frequently espoused by “Why Evolution is True” Jerry Coyne can be refuted by a bright child: Scientism is simply not a coherent position.  You cannot avoid having distinctively philosophical and extra-scientific theoretical commitments, because the very attempt to do so entails having distinctively philosophical and extra-scientific theoretical commitments.  And if you think that these commitments arerationally justifiable ones – and of course, anyone beholden to scientism thinks his view is paradigmatically rational – then you are implicitly admitting that there can be such a thing as a rationally justifiable thesis which is not a scientific thesis.  Which is, of course, what scientism denies.  Thus scientism is unavoidably self-defeating. Of course, this has been done Read More ›

Ken Francis, hat tipped below, writes to inform us of this vid featuring Frank Turek, of I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist fame, debating non-theist anthropologist Dennis Nørmark last year: Nørmark: In his role as a critic of literature, and formerly also of television, for both the newspaper, ‘Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten’, and from 2015 also, ‘Politiken’, he has to this day been an incisive critic of societal and political issues in a direct and unapologetic fashion. Turek remarks: Denis Normark fails to give a good argument as to why in his worldview if Stalin decided that the meaning of his life is to kill whoever gets in his way it would not be wrong. What do you think? Read More ›

From science writer Bruce Dorminey at Forbes: Time may be running out on the search for the cosmos’ exotic dark matter. Decades after the first searches for dark matter’s hypothetical exotic particle counterparts, researchers are mostly at a loss to explain why there still has been no direct detection. That is, one that could explain why such unseen, dark matter particles only appear to weakly interact with normal matter. … McGaugh says one huge problem is that while dark matter theory is ‘confirmable’ it is not ‘falsifiable’ as a scientific theory should be. “There is no clear way to know [that] what you’re looking for — but failing to find — doesn’t exist at all,” said McGaugh. “If you’re convinced Read More ›

From George Dvorsky at Gizmodo: Scientists working in Myanmar have uncovered a nearly 100-million-year-old baby snake encased in amber. Dating back to the Late Cretaceous, it’s the oldest known baby snake in the fossil record, and the first snake known to have lived in a forested environment. … The discovery of a baby snake fossilized in amber shows that early snakes had spread beyond swamps and sea shores, finding their way into forested environments. What’s more, these ancient snakes bore a startling resemblance to those living today—a classic case of evolution not having to fix something that ain’t broke. These findings were published today in Science Advances. More. “a classic case of evolution not having to fix something that ain’t Read More ›

From Sukanya Charuchandra at The Scientist: Two species of yeast, one of which is used in the biotechnology and food industries to make bioethanol and sourdough bread, while the other causes yeast infections, have been found to be one and the same, according to research published in PLOS Pathogens today (July 19). And, the researchers report, fungi from both settings are similarly resistant to antifungal drugs. The differences in the appearance of the sexual and asexual forms of the species and the underdeveloped nature of molecular methods were likely responsible for the varying names of the same organism. “It’s too common in fungi,” says Antonis Rokas, a comparative fungal genomics expert at Vanderbilt University who was not involved in this Read More ›

From Carlo Rovelli at Scientific American: Against Philosophy is the title of a chapter of a book by one of the great physicists of the last generation: Steven Weinberg.1 Weinberg argues eloquently that philosophy is more damaging than helpful for physics—it is often a straightjacket that physicists have to free themselves from. Stephen Hawking famously wrote that “philosophy is dead” because the big questions that used to be discussed by philosophers are now in the hands of physicists.2 Neil de Grasse Tyson publicly stated: “…we learn about the expanding universe, … we learn about quantum physics, each of which falls so far out of what you can deduce from your armchair that the whole community of philosophers … was rendered Read More ›

From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: Complex numbers, suitably paired, form 4-D “quaternions,” discovered in 1843 by the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, who on the spot ecstatically chiseled the formula into Dublin’s Broome Bridge. John Graves, a lawyer friend of Hamilton’s, subsequently showed that pairs of quaternions make octonions: numbers that define coordinates in an abstract 8-D space. Matemaical approaches to physics were left behind during the pursuit of answers from collides but, as Wolchover writes, no particles beyond the Standard (Big Bang) model have been found.” One rearcher, Cohl Fury, has since produced a number of results connecting the octonions to the Standard Model that experts are calling intriguing, curious, elegant and novel. “She has taken significant steps toward Read More ›

From Ben Shapiro at Daily Wire: You’ve undoubtedly seen those preening headlines from major outlets about how conservatives are more “authoritarian” by nature than Leftists. See, for example, here and here and here and here and here and here. But it turns out that this is nonsense. Such studies are generally vague and deliberately constructed to make it appear that conservatives are more “authoritarian” than Leftists. In reality, authoritarian personality types exist across the political spectrum. All you have to do is change the incentive structure in the questions, and you’ll suddenly find Leftists who hate freedom and conservatives who love it. Jesse Singal of New York Magazine has a long and worthwhile piece about the scientific flaws in the authoritarian modeling. … Confirmation bias has allowed too many members of the Left to ignore embarrassing Read More ›

From the BBC: Albert Einstein thought the three dimensions of space were linked to time – which serves as a fourth dimension. He called this system space-time, and it’s the model of the Universe that we use today. But Einstein also thought it was possible to fold space-time, creating a shortcut between two distant locations. This phenomenon is called a wormhole, and it can be visualised as a tunnel with two openings, each emerging at different points in space-time. Wormholes might exist naturally in the cosmos; indeed, scientists in Russia are trying to use radio telescopes to detect them. But using wormholes for time travel won’t be straightforward. Indeed not. Unless everything is absolutely determined, some wise person from the Read More ›

From Tobias Richter and Amaia Arranz-Otaegui at Sapiens: The Natufian, dated to 11,700–15,000 years ago, is often described as an important cultural precursor to the Neolithic era. During the Natufian, the world’s earliest stone houses, grinding tools, and sickle blades appear in large numbers in the Levant, suggesting that the hunter-gatherers here included plants, cereals amongst them, more frequently in their everyday diet. Natufian hunter-gatherers were also more sedentary than preceding Paleolithic societies, which may have pushed them onto a road of no return toward plant cultivation and agriculture. … When Arranz-Otaegui told her that it was from a 14,500-year-old hunter-gatherer site in Jordan, it was Carretero’s turn to be stunned. The site was thousands of years older than Çatalhöyük. Read More ›

From Mark Fischetti at Scientific American: Bipolar disorder, for example, was more similar to schizophrenia than to major depression even though clinicians may link bipolar disorder and depression, based on their symptoms. These insights could possibly reveal new treatments, says neurogeneticist Daniel Geschwind of the University of California, Los Angeles, one of the investigators. More. It’s becoming increasingly evident (see the stories below) that a great deal of what we need to know about a person (or any life form) is not in their genes. See also: At PLOS: “Genes – way weirder than you thought” Bale monkeys more closely related to sister species than same species in different locationsThe “biological species concept” is yet another textbook dead zone. Girl Read More ›

The one that was supposed to waste traditional philosophy? At Mind Matters Today, Back in 1992, philosopher of mind Jerry Fodor said, “…we’re all materialists for much the reason that Churchill gave for being a democrat: the alternatives seem even worse. The new research project [science of mind] is therefore to reconcile our materialism to the psychological facts: to explain how something that is material through and through could have whatever properties minds actually do have…. Thinking of philosophical materialism as a science must have seemed like a step forward at the time. Over twenty-five years later, there have been dozens of theories of consciousness jostling for the podium, most of them “worse than wrong,” even in the eyes of Read More ›

Wolf-Ekkehard Loennig, who worked for 25 years as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany, is now retired but still writes often on the topic of Darwinism and Intelligent Design. You can find links to his CV and many of his research publications here, and Beautiful Facts is his most recent writing, on orchids and evolution. On July 2 a German TV station ran a 42-minute interview with Dr. Loennig entitled Paleontology and Evolution, but the interview actually covers a wide range of topics related to the Darwinism/ID debate. For me, one of the most interesting segments begins at 23:48, where he recounts attempts to speed up evolution by bombarding plant chromosomes Read More ›

Did you know Mars is going backwards? For the past few weeks, and for several weeks to come, Mars is in its retrograde motion phase. If you chart its position each night against the background stars, you will see it pause, reverse direction, pause again, and then get going again in its normal direction. And did you further know that retrograde motion helped to cause a revolution? Two millennia ago, Aristotelian physics dictated that the Earth was at the center of the universe. Aristarchus’ heliocentric model, which put the Sun at the center, fell out of favor. But what Aristotle’s geocentrism failed to explain was retrograde motion. If the planets are revolving about the Earth, then why do they sometimes Read More ›

From Elizabeth Pennisi at Science: The evolutionary histories of some groups of organisms record repeated transitions from single-celled to multicellular forms, suggesting the hurdles could not have been so high. Genetic comparisons between simple multicellular organisms and their single-celled relatives have revealed that much of the molecular equipment needed for cells to band together and coordinate their activities may have been in place well before multicellularity evolved. And clever experiments have shown that in the test tube, single-celled life can evolve the beginnings of multicellularity in just a few hundred generations—an evolutionary instant. Evolutionary biologists still debate what drove simple aggregates of cells to become more and more complex, leading to the wondrous diversity of life today. But embarking on Read More ›