In the fallacy thread, Scuzzaman has raised the issue of the slippery slope argument, which he argues is not necessarily fallacious. Let’s pause for a vid (without necessarily endorsing all that is said, this is food for thought): Benjamin McLean here connects the issue to the principle of induction and so also to the post-Hume challenge to inductive reasoning. In short, a slippery slope argument is an inductive causal inference from present and past experiences, trends and dynamics to a possible future, inviting us to turn away before it is too late. As in: When we cast the argument in this form, we can then see some of the force in SM’s point: [SM, 77:] The OP [on fallacies] is Read More ›

The release of the Top Ten over hyped AI stories of 2019 has led the way for further promising ones, including this one, says engineer and philosopher Jonathan Bartlett: Was the machine cleverand sneaky or was it just programmed wrong? You decide. First, just to be clear, at Mind Matters we have nothing against AI. Quite the opposite, our writers include professors at the forefront of AI research. But we do have something against AI hype. Media seemingly can’t help portraying today’s high-tech world as a remake of I, Robot (2004), starring you and me. One result is that some members of the public may completely misunderstand what AI is and does.… TechCrunch published an article on December 31, 2018, Read More ›

Twenty years ago, astronomers couldn’t find enough satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. Now there seem to be too many. Some information seems to be missing. A possible solution is that many of these galaxies are dwarfs formed by dark matter: Most cosmologists believe that dark-matter particles are “cold,” meaning that they move slowly. Because of this, they can coalesce into numerous tiny halos, providing scores of places where dwarf galaxies can form. But “warm” or “hot” dark matter, which by definition moves faster, cannot coalesce so easily. In fact, hot particles wouldn’t be able to form mini-halos at all. So the sheer existence of these small galaxies is a sign that warm dark matter is likely not at play. Read More ›

What, the “single best idea anyone ever had” (philosopher Daniel Dennett on Darwin ) is now comparable to gravity? Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon would take issue with that. Yes, a psychologist seems to think Darwinian natural selection is indeed a force of nature like gravity: Natural selection, one of the fundamental processes of evolution, has something in common with gravity: A public relations problem. At one level of analysis, natural selection, like gravity, looks like a chump. When you’re looking up close at the tiny bits of stuff that go into making humans—the sequences of DNA that constitute the human genome—and how they came to be arranged in the manner that they are, natural selection doesn’t seem to have done Read More ›

When we deal with deeply polarised topics such as ID, we face the problem of well-grounded reasoning vs fallacies. A fallacy being a significantly persuasive but fundamentally misleading argument, often as an error of reasoning. (Cf. a classic collection here.) However, too often, fallacies are deliberately used by clever rhetors to mislead the unwary. Likewise we face the challenge of how much warrant is needed for an argument to be credible. All of these are logical challenges. Let us note IEP, as just linked: A fallacy is a kind of error in reasoning. The list of fallacies below contains 224 names of the most common fallacies, and it provides brief explanations and examples of each of them. Fallacies should not be Read More ›

Retired biologist Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution Is True, has begun to understand what it means to say that university campuses are no longer a home for ideas, but for grievances: Many universities, including public ones, have created “bias response teams,” in which speech considered hateful or offensive is reported to University authorities and dealt with promptly. The number of these teams is growing. While universities are perfectly free to recommend standards of civil discourse, public schools must adhere to the First Amendment and thus have no right to police speech unless it falls into the Amendment’s exceptions: speech that’s a clear and present danger, that is libelous, that creates a climate of harassment that impedes Read More ›

Like monarch butterflies. Apparently, the shimmering dragonfly migrates like the Monarch butterfly, taking three generations to loop across North America: At least three generations make up the annual migration of common green darner dragonflies. The first generation emerges in the southern United States, Mexico and the Caribbean starting around February and flies north. There, those insects lay eggs and die, giving rise to second generation that migrates south until late October. (Some in that second generation don’t fly south until the next year, after overwintering as nymphs.) A third generation, hatched in the south, overwinters there before laying eggs that will start the entire process over again. (from the chart) … An adult darner, regardless of where it was born, is Read More ›

You can’t ground a discussion in basic reality, says one commentator, “without somebody, sooner rather than later, confidently pronouncing something like “our universe is just one of many universes that are constantly evolving and forever changing.” He offers a response, courtesy Regis Nicoll: Everett imagined that each split created a parallel universe in which particles existed as mirror images of themselves. The result is that every possible state of a particle is realized somewhere. “Taking many-worlds to its logical conclusion, cosmology consultant Marcus Chown quipped, ‘Elvis didn’t die on that loo eating a burger but is still alive in an infinite number of places.’ “The problems with many-worlds are many, including where all of these parallel universes exist, how an Read More ›

Starting at the 38-minute mark: Steve Meyer is the author of Darwin’s Doubt See also: StTeve Meyer on the information enigma in evolution Follow UD News at Twitter! Hat tip: Philip Cunningham