News

This* paper suggests that geoscience education struggles with  quantitative vs. qualitative research methods:

Geoscience education and geocognition researchers are an interesting group. As geoscientists, we work in the world of natural processes, and we speak a language that quantifies and categorizes our observations in an orderly fashion. As education researchers, however, we enter a different world. Here, we often find ourselves confronted with problems and data that are difficult to measure, that resist experimentation, and that are quite often impossible to quantify. “Reality” may become fuzzy, multiplying from our expected single, objective version to something iterative and subjective. In these situations, we realize that our trusted tools of observation, experiment, and objectivity fail us, so we turn to the tools of qualitative inquiry to provide the insight that we seek. But here we hit some interesting, and often frustrating, hurdles.

First of all, it is an unfortunate fact that many of us have little or no formal training in qualitative research methods. Usually working in isolation, we enter an entirely new literature base; we engage with unfamiliar and, at times, uncomfortable ways of thinking and practicing. Each application of a new method or approach is, in a sense, a private re-invention of the wheel. The inevitable outcome of this private labor is that we tend to work in isolation—we are an archipelago, laboriously discussing in our publications the theory behind qualitative convention and justifying standard processes (“…is well established in the social and behavioral sciences…”). Having negotiated this challenging (but eminently rewarding!) process, we then find that our geoscientist peers are often highly skeptical of our methods, results, and interpretations. Sometimes skepticism becomes criticism without critique. The following comments, or variants of them, will be familiar to many geoscience education researchers:

• It’s all subjective!

• That’s not an interpretation! That’s just what you wanted to say! Read More ›

“OK; so if Darwin got it wrong, what do you guys think is the mechanism of evolution?” Short answer: we don’t know what the mechanism of evolution is. As far as we can make out, nobody knows exactly how phenotypes evolve. We think that, quite possibly, they evolve in lots of different ways; perhaps there are as many distinct kinds of causal routes to the fixation of phenotypes as there are different kinds of natural histories of the creatures whose phenotypes they are … – Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. 153 This does not sound like the beginnings of another modernist cult or religion.

In “Dark matter no-show at sensitive underground lab” (New Scientist, 14 April 2011), Celeste Biever reports that the WIMPs (yes, yes,) wimped out: It’s just like a wimp to be a no-show when summoned for interrogation. That seems to be the result of an experiment to detect the weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, thought to make up elusive dark matter that is thought to make up much of the mass of the universe. After 100 days of monitoring, a tub of cryogenically chilled liquid xenon deep in an Italian mountain has shown no trace of the particles it is designed to catch. The result doesn’t rule out the existence of WIMPs, but it does seem these particles are slipperier Read More ›

In Salvo 15 (Winter 2010), Richard W. Stevens offers “What Gandalf Systems Tell Us About Intelligent Design”: I first saw Gandalf in 1974. No, not the wizard of The Lord of the Rings. This Gandalf was the colorful box attached to a PDP 11-40 computer, its lights blinking almost rhythmically amid a tangle of wires in the slightly dusty lab office. It had a label in faux Olde English lettering with that whimsical brand name.What was this device named Gandalf? It was a modem, an electronic machine that translates information from one symbolic form to another. A modem is a device that mod ulates (encodes) and demodulates (decodes). Modems allow computers to communicate with one another over telephone lines, cable Read More ›

Bradley Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Broadview Press, 2009), asks, After much seeking, you finally reach the oracle. You’ve come equipped with a long list of questions, but when the Oracle sees you, she says: “Look, I’m busy, I only have time to answer one question. I know you’ve been thinking about intelligent design, and I’m glad you understand the doctrine now; Monton has given the right definition. I’ll give you two options. Do you want to know whether intelligent design in science, or do you want to know whether intelligent design is true?” (P. 75) Well?

It’s Sunday, and here’s UCLA law professor Daniel Lowenstein questioning Oxford Christian mathematician (and ID sympathizer) John Lennox and on grounds for faith (April 6, 2011). Here’s Lennox vs.Christopher Hitchens. Here he gets Richard Dawkins to admit that a serious case can be made for God. He had debated Dawkins before.

Holly Bailey tells us, courtesy Yahoo News, (Apr 11, 11:41) “Will President Obama and the House GOP ever agree? Science suggests no”: Using data from MRI scans, researchers at the University College London found that self-described liberals have a larger anterior cingulate cortex–a gray matter of the brain associated with understanding complexity. Meanwhile, self-described conservatives are more likely to have a larger amygdala, an almond-shaped area that is associated with fear and anxiety. “Previously, some psychological traits were known to be predictive of an individual’s political orientation,” lead researcher Ryota Kanai writes of the study in the latest issue of Current Biology. “Our study now links personality traits with specific brain structure.” A caution is offered: While the London study Read More ›

Here are some excerpts from Nancy Pearcey’s Saving Leonardo, and some articles, not for the faint of heart. For example, Secularism has crippled America’s ability to respond effectively to such threats, because it reduces morality to the subjective level—to personal feelings or ethnic tradition. These are things that cannot be rationally debated.Persuasion gives way to emotional manipulation and personal attacks. “Racist!” “Hater!” “Intolerant!” “Islamophobe!” The word tolerance once meant we all have the right to argue rationally for our deepest convictions in the public arena. Now it means those convictions are not even subject to rational debate. Canadian free speechers, alas, wrote the book on that.

From the “earlier than thought” files, galaxies
From ScienceDaily (Apr. 12, 2011):

Using the amplifying power of a cosmic gravitational lens, astronomers have discovered a distant galaxy whose stars were born unexpectedly early in cosmic history. This result sheds new light on the formation of the first galaxies, as well as on the early evolution of the Universe.Johan Richard, the lead author of a new study says: Read More ›

(Contest is now judged. Results are here.) First, here’s Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg: … There is also a less creditable reason for hostility to the idea of a multiverse, based on the fact that we will never be able to observe any subuniverses except our own. Livio and Rees, and Tegmark have given thorough discussions of various other ingredients of accepted theories that we will never be able to observe, without our being led to reject these theories. The test of a physical theory is not that everything in it should be observable and every prediction it makes should be testable, but rather that enough is observable and enough predictions are testable to give us confidence that the theory Read More ›

“It must be acknowledged that there is a big difference in the degree of confidence we can have in neo-Darwinism and in the multiverse. It is settled, as well as anything in science is ever settled, that the adaptations of living things on Earth have come into being through natural selection acting on random undirected inheritable variations. About the multiverse, it is appropriate to keep an open mind, and opinions among scientists differ widely. In the Austin airport on the way to this meeting I noticed for sale the October issue of a magazine called  Astronomy, having on the cover the headline “Why You Live in Multiple Universes.” Inside I found a report of a discussion at a conference at Stanford, Read More ›

Here Ann Gauger and Doug Axe respond to Todd C. Wood’s critique of their recent paper ruling out a proposed Darwinian pathway for enzymes:

he excuse for shrugging it off would, I expect, be that the transition we examined isn’t actually one that anyone thinks occurred in the history of life. That’s true, but it badly misses the point. As Ann and I made clear in the paper, our aim wasn’t to replicate a historical transition, but rather to identify what ought to be a relatively easy transition and find out how hard or easy it really is. We put it this way in the paper: Read More ›

Here Gwyneth Dickey Zakaib tells us that the gene that codes for colour in the Darwin textbook icon, the peppered moth, has been located (“The peppered moth’s dark genetic past revealed: Researchers find that a single ancestor is responsible for the ‘best example’ of natural selection.”).

The sacred story is recounted in a muted form, which is as much acknowledgement as Nature News (April 14, 2011) could accord to the considerable body of evidence that it is more aptly called the peppered myth: Read More ›

… as the God of the Gaps. Has anyone ever noted an ID theorist to use the term “gaps”, to support an argument for apparent design? Can anyone attest that Collins has ever read an actual ID theoretic work? See also here and here where Collins appears to have backed away from an earlier claim that so-called “junk DNA” proves that there is no design in life.

ID community reb Moshe Averick does not see the point of “Rabbis Without God (?!)”, as his punctuation would seem to suggest. (Algemeiner , April 14, 2011) He describes Rabbi Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard University, is a “humanist rabbi, ordained by the International Institute for Humanistic Judaism.” He graciously informs the interviewer that “he’s not out to poach souls [for atheism] from the nearby Hillel House, the Catholic Newman Center, or any of the other august religious institutions…on the campus of the country’s most prestigious university.” What he doesn’t tell us is the obvious reason why he’s not out to poach souls; as an atheist he does not believe in the existence of the soul. In the Read More ›