Financial Times claims that there is a coming boom in honesty
Radical Constructivism, Naturalistic Scientism and Math Education — ideas have consequences
In the thread on Jonathan Bartlett and priorities for Math education, I raised two comments that I think it would be profitable to further reflect on. First, from 33 on how the US National Academy of Sciences tried to classify Mathematics as a “science”: https://services.math.duke.edu/undergraduate/Handbook96_97/node5.html The Nature of Mathematics (These paragraphs are reprinted with permission from Everybody Counts: A Report to the Nation on the Future of Mathematics Education. ©1989 by the National Academy of Sciences. Courtesy of the National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.) Mathematics reveals hidden patterns that help us understand the world around us. Now much more than arithmetic and geometry, mathematics today is a diverse discipline that deals with data, measurements, and observations from science; with inference, Read More ›
Accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and the science world: Fallout
Do genes that jump shake the tree of life?
Demand for a ban on teaching creationism in Welsh schools
Brit commentator Melanie Phillips weighs in on David Gelernter dumping Darwin
Did anyone predict this? Cloned cat looks nothing like the original
Some people hope we can just “evolve” inventions like self-driving cars
Jonathan Bartlett: Does evolution mean computers will take over?
Elon Musk sees technology as taking over the human world and we’d best consider our options. Ma points out that humans build computers but no computer has ever built a human: For Musk, technology is not a tool to promote humanity. Rather, technology will take humanity’s place of leadership in the world. Humans will have a choice to integrate with our technological masters or be left behind as a relic of evolutionary history, just one more living fossil roaming the landscape. It is interesting how the theory of evolution contributes to this idea of a technological singularity (an endpoint of human history as we know it). Ma, while impressed with technology, is more impressed with humans. He points out that Read More ›
The worm that was making those tracks 551–539 million years ago may be found
Lay Catholics questioning Darwinism?
For some years, it has not been the practice of many Catholics to question Darwinism. Most got sucked years ago into some muddle according to which the great theologian Thomas Aquinas didn’t supposedly think there could be such a thing as observable design in nature because that would make God a “tinkerer.” Some tinker. Anyway, it was interesting to see that, just recently, a California Catholic paper has started to smell the coffee at last and picked up on George Weigel’s article from First Things: The empirical evidence suggests that the notions of a purposeful Creator and a purposeful creation cannot be dismissed as mere pre-modern mythology. That may help a few Nones out of the materialist bogs in which Read More ›