Why wave goodbye? Because if this skull is a guide, the transition from not-really-Lucy to a-bit-like-Lucy to almost-Lucy to Hi, Lucy!! never really happened.
Month: September 2019
Financial Times claims that there is a coming boom in honesty
Given that political correctness is organized lying (usually for control and profit), a boom in political incorrectness is a 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 Read More…
Accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and the science world: Fallout
In the wake of Epstein’s apparent suicide in prison, his predilection for funding science organizations as a virtuous cover make for reading worthy of an airport potboiler. But from some of this, there may be something to be learned.
Do genes that jump shake the tree of life?
Yes,but what hope is there that textbooks could start teaching reality when even the right to question the Darwinian [sheet] is still a big controversy in many places? Could science writers like Jabr and others agree that it is time to make textbooks about evolution sound like the reality and not like the 1925 Monkey Trial revisited?
Demand for a ban on teaching creationism in Welsh schools
Tradejah! Let’s have a ban on teaching Darwinism too. Oh wait — is that what’s supposed to be introduced early and often, because the “Wales Humanists coordinator” and “Humanists UK” want it? Darwinism is an obvious intrusion of religion into the school system. A different religion from what many people follow, but still a religion. Otherwise, why would humanists care so much?
Brit commentator Melanie Phillips weighs in on David Gelernter dumping Darwin
For many intellectuals, it must seem like an agonizing, nasty divorce but Phillips would be well placed to take it in stride.
Did anyone predict this? Cloned cat looks nothing like the original
Take THAT! genetic determinism and blow it out your ear! The local animal welfare society has tons of live cats people can learn to like (or tolerate 😉 ).
Some people hope we can just “evolve” inventions like self-driving cars
The other day at the DeepMind blog, someone came up with an idea for improving Waymo’s self-driving cars: Evolution
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 Read More…
The worm that was making those tracks 551–539 million years ago may be found
The claim that the worm challenges the Cambrian explosion which followed this Ediacaran period is weird because we knew there were worms in the Ediacaran on account of the tracks (and comb jellies too) but the explosion of multi-faceted life in the Cambrian is a unique event in any case.
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, Read More…
Skeptics duped by fake prof
But look on the bright side. At least they care. In the social sciences, it’s the guy revealing flimflam who gets punished. But why, exactly, is a PhD so important? The Sokal hoax-ees all have PhDs, probably, and what good did that ever do?
Three scholars of “biodiversity and biology” suggest ditching the Darwinian descent of man graphic
If these biodiversity profs really need to muddy the history as much as this, maybe things are even worse than we knew. Stay tuned.
But how do frog dads know how to look after tadpoles?
It’s not enough to say that it benefits their offspring. What is the exact mechanism by which they learned to carry out this process? In this case, the researchers are honest enough not to just start emitting Darwinblather. They admit we don’t really know.