Unfocused claims of “racism” are a familiar Woke tactic for destroying careers and reputations and they are only beginning to hit Darwinians.
Year: 2021
Understanding the engineering of living systems requires acceptance of the design of life
After a while, expecting randomness to develop exquisite machinery within a fixed time frame becomes ridiculous. The big question is, how much more might we learn if we assume it isn’t random?
At Mind Matters News: New AI learns to simulate common sense
The GPT-3 program can get through grammatical issues on which others stumble, says Robert J. Marks. It is a simulation because the AI can perform the task but does not “understand” what the concepts mean: The classic test for AI common sense is resolution of Winograd schema. Winograd schema contain vague, ambiguous pronouns. Common sense Read More…
Will science media’s slow descent into the Woke crazy empower competition?
In a still-free society, Wokeness will create a space for a new popular science magazine. Lots of Woke-weary folk who value evidence over ideology would likely support it. That magazine should allow evidence-based criticism of Darwinian theory — which is treated with considerable skepticism anyway once you get outside the venue of the people who blew up SciAm with their Wokeness.
100 million years before the dinosaurs, the biggest known bug
A fluke discovery. And we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the remarkable stuff that’s out there.
When fossil hunters get it wrong or are stumped…
Well, if Dickinsonia doesn’t have bilateral symmetry, maybe “animal” is a flag of convenience? Call it an animal and close the file?
Michael Egnor at Mind Matters News: Political website’s Christmas gift to readers: promoting abortion
Egnor: I do a fair amount of prenatal counseling. While I always tell the families the truth about their baby’s prognosis, most of the patients I evaluate are essentially normal babies who have prenatal ultrasound/MRI findings that show minor brain variants that don’t impact their lives. Even for children with serious diagnoses, the outlook is often much better than the abortion-happy medical profession tells families in crisis.
Why is it claimed that the Neanderthals were “not fully human”?
In a Smithsonian Magazine yearender offering seven new things we are thought to have learned about human evolution in 2021, we read: Modern humans, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa and eventually made it to every corner of the world. That is not news. However, we are still understanding how and when the earliest human migrations Read More…
Why we shouldn’t “follow the science”
Graboyes: The history of medicine offers ample reasons to avoid smug certitude which, unfortunately, is abundant on social and traditional media. Science is always about likelihood and never about certainty, though word apparently hasn’t reached Twitter and TV news.
Jerry Coyne on the war on math, science, in New Zealand – and falling scores
Darwinian evolutionary biologist Coyne doesn’t dispute teaching Indigenous beliefs in a cultural class. But he may be at a major disadvantage because – if many years of his blogging are any guide – he wants science taught as a branch of naturalist atheism. Thus, the question arises, why shouldn’t we teach naturalist atheism too as an outcropping of Western culture?
At Mind Matters News: Are the brain cells in a dish that learned Pong conscious?
Eric Holloway: A couple other interesting results from the research. First, human-derived organoids always outperform mouse-derived organoids in terms of volley length. Second, even without negative feedback, when the paddle missed the pong ball, the organoids still learn to increase volley length.
“Darwin’s heir” E. O. Wilson remembered for ants; his sociobiology is sidelined
Had Wilson’s career begun fifty years later, it would have been quickly and fatally Woked.
At Mind Matters News: Does superdeterminism resolve dilemmas around free will?
Michael Egnor: If we lack free will, we have no justification whatsoever to even believe that we lack free will. In a timeless block however, the future exists simultaneously with the past and present — but that does not mean that the future determines the past and present.
A lot of people are getting right what Dawkins got wrong
The interesting thing is that the blind, pitiless indifference thing isn’t selling as well as it used to.
Could newly hatched pterosaurs fly?
The big mystery isn’t why early, easy escape would be an advantage but why birds and bats never found a way to do it. But we shall see.