2018

From C. D. McCoy: Abstract: Demarest asserts that we have good evidence for the existence and nature of an initial chance event for the universe. I claim that we have no such evidence and no knowledge of its supposed nature. Against relevant comparison classes her initial chance account is no better, and in some ways worse, than its alternatives. More. Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista See also: (if you have the day off) Does the size of the universe sweep us toward atheism? Philosopher: If there is something rather than nothing, questions around God cannot be ignored Waghorn: “Firstly, that on the most plausible demarcation criterion for science, science is constitutionally unable to show theism to be a redundant hypothesis; the debate Read More ›

From Richard Weikart at the Federalist: The 2018 study in question by David Speed, et al, “What Do You Mean, ‘What Does It All Mean?’ Atheism, Nonreligion, and Life Meaning,” used surveys to try to figure out if atheists find meaning in life or are nihilistic. This survey defined someone as nihilistic if he or she upheld the position: “In my opinion, life does not serve any purpose.” This study found that atheists and non-religious people are not nihilistic, because they claimed that they did have a purpose in life. This is an interesting finding that seems to refute the oft-repeated charge (levied by religious folks) that atheists are nihilistic. However, there is a problem with this finding. The survey Read More ›

From W. Ford Doolittle and S. Andrew Inkpen at PNAS: Many practicing biologists accept that nothing in their discipline makes sense except in the light of evolution, and that natural selection is evolution’s principal sense-maker. But what natural selection actually is (a force or a statistical outcome, for example) and the levels of the biological hierarchy (genes, organisms, species, or even ecosystems) at which it operates directly are still actively disputed among philosophers and theoretical biologists. Most formulations of evolution by natural selection emphasize the differential reproduction of entities at one or the other of these levels. Some also recognize differential persistence, but in either case the focus is on lineages of material things: even species can be thought of Read More ›

Hey, springtime in Philadelphia. Can you get your institution to pay? 😉 From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News and Science Today: Update: The deadline to register for this event is Monday, April 2. We strongly advise registering now to reserve your place. As philosophy, theology, and sociology, theistic evolution is a fascinating and extremely influential phenomenon. Less so as science, since on that score it’s basically a rebranding of traditional evolution for a religious audience. Yet the rebranding effort itself carries many lessons with it. One of the remarkable things about theistic evolution is how resistant it is to counterarguments. Evolution News has spent weeks, concluding today, rebutting a book by prominent BioLogos author Dennis Venema, Adam and the Genome. Yet it would be entirely Read More ›

This vid. Here is a 6:57 pm EST live link from a different lecture making largely the same points. Download it if you can. Otherwise, Feel the Smug. You will be living with the tenured Smug the rest of your crappy lives.

From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: The controversial idea that our universe is just a random bubble in an endless, frothing multiverse arises logically from nature’s most innocuous-seeming feature: empty space. Specifically, the seed of the multiverse hypothesis is the inexplicably tiny amount of energy infused in empty space — energy known as the vacuum energy, dark energy or the cosmological constant. Each cubic meter of empty space contains only enough of this energy to light a lightbulb for 11-trillionths of a second. “The bone in our throat,” as the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg once put it, is that the vacuum ought to be at least a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times more energetic, because of all the matter and Read More ›

From Philip Perry at BigThink: What’s inside a black hole? In most, there’s something called the singularity—an area of such density and intense gravitational force that not even light can escape. Don’t venture too close. Once you enter the event horizon—the outer rim—it’s all over for you. You’d be shredded to ribbons of atoms that’ll be sucked down into its depths. But there may be one exception. Mathematicians have recently unveiled a scenario even more mind-blowing. If you stepped into a Reissner-Nordström-de Sitter black hole, the deterministic nature of the universe would break down, and your past and your future would no longer be connected. The past would simply slide away, while an infinite number of futures would open up Read More ›

From Peter Rees at Quadrant: The Little Ice age was quite severe in Europe from 1550- 1700. After the prosperity and plenty of the medieval warm period, the LIA led to impoverishment, crop failure, starvation and a resurgence in witch burnings. Every misfortune was an excuse to accuse someone of being a witch working under the direction of Satan. Many of these accusations were the result of some calamity caused by an extreme weather event. For example, in 1626 a hailstorm struck Germany and dropped a metre of hail. Two days later an Arctic front descended on Europe. Rivers froze, grapes on the vine ‘exploded’ and rye and barley crops were destroyed. Then came a severe frost the likes of Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: In the history of life on Earth, a dramatic and revolutionary change in the nature of the sea floor occurred in the early Cambrian (541–485 million years ago): the “agronomic revolution.” This phenomenon was coupled with the diversification of marine animals that could burrow into seafloor sediments. Previously, the sea floor was covered by hard microbial mats, and animals were limited to standing on, resting on, or moving horizontally along those mats. In the agronomic revolution, part of the so-called Cambrian Explosion of animal diversity and complexity, vertical burrowers began to churn up the underlying sediments, which softened and oxygenated the subsurface, created new ecological niches, and thus radically transformed the marine ecosystem into one more like that Read More ›

From John D. Norton: (2018) Eternal Inflation: When Probabilities Fail. [Preprint] In eternally inflating cosmology, infinitely many pocket universes are seeded. Attempts to show that universes like our observable universe are probable amongst them have failed, since no unique probability measure is recoverable. This lack of definite probabilities is taken to reveal a complete predictive failure. Inductive inference over the pocket universes, it would seem, is impossible. I argue that this conclusion of impossibility mistakes the nature of the problem. It confuses the case in which no inductive inference is possible, with another in which a weaker inductive logic applies. The alternative, applicable inductive logic is determined by background conditions and is the same, non-probabilistic logic as applies to an Read More ›

From Andrew Porterfield at the Genetic Literacy Project: idea called “genetic load” was developed in the 1930s by famed biologist J.B.S. Haldane, referring to any genome that had increasing numbers of deleterious mutations. The more mutations in a population, the more likely that members of that population couldn’t survive, ultimately threatening the fitness of that population. With enough mutations, a group couldn’t adapt as well to environments, and members would die off. Thus, there’s a limit to natural selection. Now, for some evolutionary biologists, the concept of genetic load has resurfaced as a genuine concern. … He doesn’t think it’s that big a concern. One problem is that modern sequencing has produced much more data, and shown us so many Read More ›

It seems we have largely forgotten the letter to his son: A reminder. END

From Bruce Bower at Science News: A dearth of research means the science of rampage shootings simply doesn’t exist… Nor does any published evidence support claims that being a bully or a victim of bullying, or watching violent video games and movies, leads to mass public shootings, Winegard contends. Bullying affects a disturbingly high proportion of youngsters and has been linked to later anxiety and depression (SN: 5/30/15, p. 12) but not to later violence. In laboratory studies, youngsters who play violent computer games or watch violent videos generally don’t become more aggressive or violent in experimental situations. Investigators have found that some school shooters, including the Newtown perpetrator, preferred playing nonviolent video games, Winegard says. … Still, a small Read More ›

Christopher Graney at the Vatican Observatory Foundation Blog offers some thoughtful comments on the relationship between the Star Wars we all grew up with and the actual universe we are learning about now: Star Wars: On the Wrong Side of History & Science – Episode One: Star Wars is set in a wonderfully imaginative universe that features a profusion of cool planets, cooler alien life forms, and the coolest space ships. But that universe, with Tatooine, Dagobah, Naboo, Jakku, Endor, and all their fantastic creatures and “people”—even the much-maligned Jar Jar Binks—is a well-worn idea, and an idea whose time has passed. Science and history are twin Dreadnoughts closing in on and crushing the Star Wars universe like the First Read More ›

If you can afford the Netherlands in June: Workshop Reasoning in a post-truth world: a look at dual-process models Utrecht, the Netherlands, 20-21 June 2018 Last november, the Guardian published an article[1] proclaiming that in order to make sense of our current predicament living in a post-truth world, we should take note of “two fundamental things about what it means to think and talk like a human”. Firstly, there is our vulnerability to all forms of bias and distortion. And secondly, there is our capacity to (at least sometimes) outsmart such bias and distortion by deliberate effort and reasoning. The aim of the workshop is to shed light on the interplay of both these features. Although we have gained important Read More ›