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Using modern science. Would his conclusions be the same? Here:  The participants are Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson (yes) vs. Dr. Herman Mays (no) The topics are from Jeanson’s book, Replacing Darwin: The NEW Origin of Species “Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson holds a PhD in cell and developmental Biology from Harvard University. He serves as a research biologist, author, and speaker with Answers in Genesis and formerly conducted research with the Institute for Creation Research.” Herman Mays: “I have a PhD in evolutionary ecology from the University of Kentucky and studied the mating system of the Yellow-breasted chat (Icteria virens) for my thesis research. I’ve been a postdoctoral fellow, assistant professor and a museum curator in zoology at Cincinnati Museum Center. While at Read More ›

From Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, says science has a problem and we need to talk: For the past 15 years, I have worked in the foundations of physics, a field which has not seen progress for decades. What happened 40 years ago is that theorists in my discipline became convinced the laws of nature must be mathematically beautiful in specific ways. By these standards, which are still used today, a good theory should be simple, and have symmetries, and it should not have numbers that are much larger or smaller than one, the latter referred to as “naturalness.” Based on such arguments from beauty, they predicted that protons should be able to decay. Read More ›

Seen from below: Professor Hugenholtz said the scientific community generally agrees that evolutionary relationships are the most natural way to classify organisms, but bacterial taxonomy is riddled with errors, due to historical difficulties. “This is mainly because microbial species have very few distinctive physical features, meaning that there are thousands of historically misclassified species,” he said. “It’s also compounded by the fact that we can’t yet grow the great majority of microorganisms in the laboratory, so have been unaware of them until quite recently.” Dr. Donovan Parks, the lead software developer on the project, is excited about the recent advancement of genome sequencing technology, and how it’s helping reconstruct the bacterial tree of life. … The research team then used Read More ›

From David Nguyen: Why Tumor Biologists Should Never See Randomness But Only Degrees of Disorder See also: What is Randomness? Part 1, with David Nguyen

No, really. Here’s what they say in 2018 about the placebo effect (you start to get better when you think you are getting better): “OUR minds aren’t passive observers simply observing reality as it is; our minds actually change reality. The reality we experience tomorrow is partly the product of the mindsets we hold today.” That’s what Alia Crum told global movers and shakers at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It may sound like New Age nonsense, but Crum, who heads the Mind & Body lab at Stanford University in California, can back up her claims with hard evidence showing the mysterious influence the mind has over our health and well-being.David Robson, “How a positive mind really Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A team of researchers from a number of European and American research institutions, including Northumbria University, Newcastle, have produced detailed new natural records from stalagmites that highlight changes in the European climate more than 40,000 years ago. They found several cold periods that coincide with the timings of a near complete absence of archaeological artefacts from the Neanderthals, suggesting the impact that changes in climate had on the long-term survival of Neanderthal man. … “For many years we have wondered what could have caused their demise. Were they pushed ‘over the edge’ by the arrival of modern humans, or were other factors involved? Our study suggests that climate change may have had an important role in the Neanderthal Read More ›

Modern technology means there is no good reason to have the problem, says a professional protocols developer: News last month brought a powerful reminder that access to detailed methods can be essential for getting experiments to work. In 2013, the US$1.6-million Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology set out to repeat key experiments from 50 high-profile cancer papers, and so assess the extent to which published results can be replicated. Instead, the project has decided to stop at 18 papers. One big reason for this was the difficulty of working out what exactly was done in the original experiments. Protocols — precise step-by-step recipes for repeating experiments — are missing from published research more often than not, and even the original researchers Read More ›

Eric Holloway, an electrical and computer engineer, offers some thoughts on how to prevent science from devolving into “scientism.” For an example of scientism, see Peter Atkins’s claim that science can answer all the Big Questions. Here’s John Mark Reynolds’s outline of the general problem: Sometimes a culture takes a right road, sometimes it passes the right way and ends up a bit lost. Western Europe had a chance at the start of seventeenth century to get a few things right, but by the eighteenth century most had taken a worse way: Enlightenment or reaction. Enlightenment lost the wisdom of the Middle Ages, creating the myth of a dark age, and the main enlightened nation, France, ended the seventeenth century Read More ›

Philip Cunningham writes, I just happened to check quantum physicist and philosopher Antoine Suarez‘s youtube channel. He loaded a new video a few months ago after being silent for a few years. Quantum nonlocal correlations come from outside space-time, they cannot be explained exclusively by material links. If the experimenter has free will, then there is free will behind the quantum phenomena. The physical reality requires an author with free will. The world is speakable because it is spoken. Quantum physics: Accessing the invisible through the visible More. Also by Suarez: What Does Quantum Physics Have to Do with Free Will? – By Antoine Suarez – July 22, 2013 Excerpt: What is more, recent experiments are bringing to light that Read More ›

But can the internet handle all the spite and unseemliness? Another risk is the ‘weaponization’ of reviewer reports. Opponents of certain types of research (for example, on genetically modified organisms, climate change and vaccines) could take critical remarks in peer reviews out of context or mischaracterize disagreements to undermine public trust in the paper, the field or science as a whole. Queries to eLife, The BMJ and EMBO Press about this problem revealed only one, mild example (see go.nature.com/2piygkb). But weaponization could be a greater concern for journals that publish work that is more likely to be politicized. One precaution would be to add a disclaimer explaining the peer-review process and its role in scientific discussion. Opening up materials and Read More ›

If you also think that data is a source of information, that is. And have to live in the real world. … a survey of 479 sociology professors found that only 4 per cent identified as conservative or libertarian, while 83 per cent identified as liberal or left-radical. In another survey — of psychologists this time — only 6 per cent identified as ‘conservative overall’. Just occasionally, though, a more balanced study does slip through the net — like the one just published by a team from Oxford University. The study by Nathan Cofnas et al — Does Activism in the Social Sciences Explain Conservatives’ Distrust of Scientists? — pours scorn on the idea that conservatives are any more anti-science Read More ›

  As if we didn’t know. But here’s a thought: Over the past few weeks, the stories of three high-profile scientists accused of bullying have emerged: geneticist Nazneen Rahman, psychologist Tania Singer and astrophysicist Guinevere Kauffmann. All the current accused are Top People (and all are women too, so put your red Handmaid dowdies back in the cupboard, girl… For once we are talking about something else.) Neuroskeptic puts the climate that conduces to bullying down to idealism, the promotion of persons unsuited to administration into those positions, and prestige. About prestige: In science, the senior figures have a lot of authority over their subordinates (especially at MPIs). But these senior figures also have enormous prestige – they are widely Read More ›