David Tyler

Steven Pinker wants to challenge the claim that “The twentieth century was the bloodiest in history”. Those who advance this idea are said to be numbered among “the romantic, the religious, the nostalgic and the cynical”. The reason why they make the claim is “to impugn a range of ideas that flourished in that century, including science, reason, secularism, Darwinism and the ideal of progress”. However, according to Pinker, there is no substance to this “historical factoid” because historical records are better as we come closer to the present time, because it is a human trait to overestimate the frequency of wars (“vivid, memorable events”) and because we care more about violence today. Against all this, Pinker asserts that there Read More ›

With headlines like “Caveman from 2m years ago may be missing link“, the world’s media made a field day of some recent work on Australopithecus sediba. For those with a memory, it has all happened previously in 2010. The announcement was made in the journal Science that the evolutionary path “From Australopithecus to Homo” had been found. Consequently, the media trumpeted the significance of the bones to their readers (see here). You had to read carefully to realize that hype and science were being confused. Move on to the present and the newly reported research: the journal Science carried three News Focus stories and five scientific papers on the fossils. This was picked up by the popular science journals (New Read More ›

The essay stimulating this blog emerged from the Darwin Bicentennial year, when surveys of “educated lay people” in Switzerland revealed that only 20% had any clarity of thinking about Darwin’s theory of evolution. About half explained it in a circular way, another 20% implied some form of Lamarckism and the remaining 10% talked about evolution being a flow towards complexity. These responses evidence “poor understanding” and two major reasons are suggested to explain the observations. The first is “The theory of evolution is counterintuitive” and the second is “The theory of evolution opposes most people’s worldview”. The worldview issues are of considerable importance to the issues considered here. It is worth asking: what is a Darwinian worldview? and why do Read More ›

For many of us, an important characteristic of science is self-correction. We are proud of the way new findings catalyse re-evaluation and, if corrections are needed, the development of new knowledge. If you are like this, be prepared to be shocked when you read Jonathan Wells’ latest book. The concept of Junk DNA was widely held by evolutionary biologists during the 1990s, but only a few were prepared to expose the hypothesis to tests of its validity. Yet this is when publications started to accumulate that reported functionality in genetic material widely regarded as “nonsense”. Instead of alerting popularisers of science to be cautious, these writers treated the new data as unrepresentative exceptions. They pressed on with their claim that Read More ›

Starting in 1973, Herbert Terrace led an ambitious project to examine the capability of chimps to develop sign language. The chimp participant was born at the Institute for Primate Studies in Oklahoma and was taken from his mother after about a week and handed to Stephanie LaFarge who acted as a surrogate parent. The chimp was effectively adopted. In a recent piece in Nature, Terrace explains why he initiated the project: “After serving as a graduate assistant at Harvard University with behavioural psychologist B. F. Skinner, I heard that Allen and Beatrix Gardner at the University of Nevada, Reno, were teaching sign language to a chimpanzee named Washoe. But when I looked at their data, I wasn’t sure that the Read More ›

One of the few books of Stephen Jay Gould I never read was his Mismeasure of Man. I suppose it was a low priority – as I have never considered cranial capacity a measure of intelligence or state of advancement. This is partly because of an awareness that women tend to have smaller skulls than men and yet this has no bearing on their cognitive skills. I knew that Gould was taking Samuel George Morton to task because Morton had considered cranial capacity to be significant for ranking human races in some sort of hierarchical order. Gould considered that Morton provided a case study of someone who had “finangled” his data and his analysis to reach unwarranted conclusions. His 1978 Read More ›

The UK education scene is buzzing with the news that 14 professors are setting up a “New College of the Humanities” and are claiming to offer a “new model of higher education for the humanities in the UK” (here and here). The concept of education being privately-funded is not widely held with approval, and feelings against it can be very strong. Yet, we do have one privately-funded university (the University of Buckingham), which co-exists peacefully with those in the state system. With massive changes to the funding regime for universities, the team of academics, led by Professor A.C Grayling, has set out its business plan for a college that aims to compete at the highest level of UK higher education. Read More ›

Two interesting papers contribute significantly to our understanding of science education debates. The first, by Joachim Allgaier, considers newspaper accounts of a UK school (Emmanuel College) that was accused of teaching creationism in science classes. The goal of the study was to find out what sources journalists used, and how the sources of education journalists compares with the sources used by science journalists. The issue is important because of the potential for media accounts of issues like this to mould public opinion and shape responses. The two types of journalists can be distinguished in a broad-brush way: “Science journalists, for instance, visit scientific conferences, talks and presentations, read and follow scientific journals and receive ’embargoed’ press releases from scientific institutions Read More ›

Further to previous posts on the Synthese special issue, this blog considers another case of bully-boy behaviour masquerading as scholarship – the paper on demarcation by Robert T. Pennock. Those most opposed to intelligent design (ID) and creationism have typically maintained that a clear line can be drawn between science and non-science, and ID and creationism are declared to be outside the boundary of science. In this essay, Pennock choses to talk down to one of his peers in the world of philosophy. An example is as follows: “When we look empirically at what scientists and science educators themselves say science is, then we see immediately that they all ignore Laudan and clearly operate on the idea that there is Read More ›

When first reported, this hominin was given the name Zinjanthropus boisei. He was considered to be a human ancestor and was portrayed as an upright hairy apeman. Later, he was renamed Australopithecus boisei, but then was moved to a separate genus, receiving the name Paranthropus boisei. He still appears in some presentations of human ancestry. What makes him memorable are his magnificent teeth: “For decades, scientists thought that the large, heavy teeth the primates had were used in cracking open hard foods such as nuts. The common name for Paranthropus was “Nutcracker Man” for this very reason.” [. . .] [The take-home message:] Nutcracker Man is a notable example of how morphology was wrongly interpreted for decades and only recently Read More ›

Digital codes can be protected against failure. A variety of options have been explored by computer programmers because it is important to catch malfunctions early and alert the user to a problem. “In digital codes, the bits are usually packed into sets of eight bits called bytes. Normally, seven bits are used to record information and one bit – called the ‘parity bit’ – is used for mutation protection, usually denoted as error protection. The seven-bit string 1000001, for example, codes the letter A and 0110011 codes the number 3. If the number of 1’s in the seven-bit string is even, the parity bit is given the value 1, else the value 0. If one of the seven information bits Read More ›

We have been told for years that evolutionary biology is pure science and has no religious implications. Theistic evolutionists emphasise the concept of complementarity, pointing out that evolutionary theory seeks to explain how? questions whereas theism is concerned with why? questions. There appear to be many non-theists, including most organisations representing scientists, who say something very similar. These people have adopted the NOMA approach popularised by Stephen Jay Gould. For more on this, go here. However, you do not have to read far in the intelligent design literature (or in the creationist literature) to realise that this approach is controversial. These sources claim that all science has metaphysical presuppositions that are of a religious nature. There is a consistent message Read More ›

Predation in the Early Cambrian is demonstrated by the occurrence of borings or drill holes in shelly fauna. Confirmatory evidence has been adduced from gut content analyses, although these evidences could also be attributed to scavenging. However, predation involving shell breakage or crushing has been documented previously only from the late Ordovician. This situation has changed with the published research on Lower Cambrian lingulate brachiopods. “Here we present the first report of repaired damage to linguliform brachiopod shells caused by durophagous shell-crushing, which is exquisitely recorded from exceptionally preserved specimens in the early Cambrian Wulongqing Formation (Guanshan fauna), Kunming, China. The healed fractures on specimens with preserved thin pedicles unambiguously suggest failed predation attempts. Although they cannot be linked to Read More ›

Earth systems science is concerned with the relationships between the various components that comprise the Earth as a system, notably environmental and biosphere interactions. Over the years, a wide spectrum of views has been expressed by scholars. At one extreme, the environment is the dominant influence, driving evolution within the biosphere (which is interpreted as being largely moulded by environmental forces). As an example, many have considered that changes in seawater chemistry and atmospheric oxygen levels triggered the Cambrian Explosion. At the other extreme, the Earth’s environment can be perceived as the product of the biosphere. This is the position of Nicholas Butterfield, who has written a paradigm-shifting essay saying: “it is clear that animals figure disproportionately in the maintenance Read More ›

The last decade has witnessed three contenders for the title: earliest identifiable human ancestor. These are Ardipithecus, Orrorin and Sahelanthropus. All of them generated great excitement at the time of their discovery and, for many, they were evidence that the lineage of the human genus was being clarified. However, those willing to read research papers (rather than media reports) were more aware that the research community was not of one mind about the significance of these fossil remains. Recently, Wood and Harrison have contributed a major review paper that revisits these arguments and finds that the various claims for human ancestry are not rigorous. They offer alternative explanations for these three fossil hominines. “In their paper, Wood and Harrison caution Read More ›