News

From David Klinghoffer at ENST: Cardiff University philosopher Orestis Palermos was at the center of a stir last week for a claim he made, in an online lecture, that evolutionary biology is as much of a pseudoscience as creationism, because it relies very heavily on ad hoc explanations for data after they have been discovered, rather than making bold universal predictions beforehand that hold up. Critics have been saying this for decades, and it’s encouraging to know that others can see it too. When this happens it is always entertaining to watch the consternation of our fundamentalist Darwinist friends. In response they have, of course, flexed their muscles to shut him up, or at least hide the intro video. It Read More ›

From John Ioannidis at the Journal of the American Medical Association: vPalues and accompanying methods of statistical significance testing are creating challenges in biomedical science and other disciplines. The vast majority (96%) of articles that report P values in the abstract, full text, or both include some values of .05 or less. However, many of the claims that these reports highlight are likely false. Recognizing the major importance of the statistical significance conundrum, the American Statistical Association (ASA) published3 a statement on P values in 2016. More. See also: P-values: Scientists slam proposal to raise threshold for statistically significant findings and Ioannidis again on misleading meta-analyses

From Ewen Callaway at Nature: A study analysing genome-wide data from 170 ancient Europeans, including 100 associated with Bell Beaker-style artefacts, suggested that the people who had built the barrow and buried their dead there had all but vanished by 2000 BC. The genetic ancestry of Neolithic Britons, according to the study, was almost entirely displaced. Yet somehow the new arrivals carried on with many of the Britons’ traditions. “That didn’t fit for me,” says Carlin, who has been struggling to reconcile his research with the DNA findings. More. Maybe the later Britons learned something from their predecessors? Or is that not an allowed assumption any more?

From the editors of Nature: Scholars are anxious because extremists are scrutinizing the results of ancient-DNA studies and trying to use them for similar misleading ends. Ancient DNA, for example, offers evidence of large migrations that coincide with cultural changes in the archaeological record, including the emergence of Corded Ware. Some archaeologists have expressed fears that the extremists will wrongly present such conclusions as backing for Kossinna’s theories. Another problem for archaeologists and historians relates to the potential for abuse of the results of ancient-DNA studies looking at more recent times, such as the Migration Period around the fall of the Roman Empire or the era covered by the Viking sagas. They worry that DNA studies of groups described as Read More ›

From Deborah Byrd at Space: Living earthly microbes inhabit virtually every nook and cranny of our world, including extremely harsh environments like Yellowstone’s hot springs, deep ocean hydrothermal vents and the toxic sludge of polluted areas. Earthly bacteria have also been identified, alive, as high in our atmosphere as 25 miles (40 km) up. Neighboring Venus is a hostile world. Heat trapped by its dense atmosphere makes it hot enough on its surface to melt lead. But a series of space probes – launched between 1962 and 1978 – showed that temperatures and pressures at comparable heights in Venus’ atmosphere (25 miles or 40 km up) don’t preclude the possibility of microbial life. Now an international team of researchers has Read More ›

Conservative sources often decry the fact that entertainment media do not re-evaluate their nihilistic direction despite faring poorly in terms of rating and numbers in recent years. But could we look at the matter from another angle? What if Hollywood has lost the power to change, even if stasis kills it? Today, the awardee ranting into the mike may sound more like your boring uncle at a family dinner than like your secret heartthrob. Which means that something has definitely changed. More.

So there is something to discuss. From Thomas Cortellesi at Quillette: Scientism is often ridiculed as an appeal to excessive reductionism that “restricts human inquiry.” This notion is predicated on a view of science as purely reductionist, a charge that betrays a deep misunderstanding of scientific practice. Science is a way of demonstrating the deep connections between the smallest of parts and the largest of systems. Contrary to how it is often portrayed, the scientific project is not strictly reductionist. Reductionism is the belief that understanding complex phenomena comes ultimately from breaking them down into their simplest parts. This approach is made by isolating variables, refining the precision and accuracy of observations, and extracting from them fundamental laws, which in Read More ›

We must getting somewhere when it is possible to talk about facts for once. From Ruth Kava at ACSH, talking about Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (1968): Dr. Ehrlich misjudged the promise of technology to increase food production yields. And here I’m speaking of the early efforts of Dr. Norman Borlaug, a founder of ACSH, which led to the so-called “Green Revolution”, providing new hybrids of corn and wheat that staved off starvation for millions. And now we have genetic engineering, technologies that can further improve yields of food crops and husbandry — but of course these weren’t really on the horizon in 1968. So concerned was he about the impending doom that Ehrlich even said he supported enforced birth control Read More ›

From Cornelius Hunter at Darwin’s God: Jerry Coyne’s website (Why Evolution Is True) has posed study questions for learning about evolution. Evolutionists have responded in the “Comment” section with answers to some of the questions (see here, here, and here). But when I posted a few relevant thoughts, they were quickly deleted after briefly appearing. That’s unfortunate because those facts can help readers to understand evolution. Here is what I posted:More. Maybe some of you smart boys can spell hellzapoppin. See also: Darwinian fundamentalist Jerry Coyne responds to“Atheist Fairytales”

  From David Berlinski reviewing Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari at Inference Review: Harari believes, are about to lose their social and economic usefulness as well as their souls.25 Robots are coming, and, if not robots, then all-powerful algorithms. Having replaced chess champions and quiz show contestants, they are shortly to replace truck drivers, travel agents, accountants, lawyers, and doctors. Whether they are about to replace historians is a question that Harari wisely declines to discuss. What makes their forthcoming domination inevitable, Harari believes, is the discovery that consciousness may be separated from intelligence. Computers are no more conscious today than they were in 1950, but they are very much more intelligent, and in the Read More ›

From Ethan Siegel at Forbes: We do have dark matter in our Solar System, and it ought to have real effects on every other particle of matter around it. If there’s any interaction cross-section between normal matter particles and dark matter particles, then direct detection experiments should have a chance to discover it right here on Earth. And even if there isn’t, the gravitational effects of the dark matter passing through the Solar System, both gravitationally captured and gravitationally free, should affect the orbits of the planets. But until our measurements become more and more precise, there simply isn’t enough of a gravitational effect to result in anything detectable. For the meantime, we have to look to the Universe beyond, Read More ›

From Blakeley B. McShane, David Gal, Andrew Gelman, Christian Robert, Jennifer L. Tackett (22 Sep 2017) at arXiv.org: Abandon Statistical Significance In science publishing and many areas of research, the status quo is a lexicographic decision rule in which any result is first required to have a p-value that surpasses the 0.05 threshold and only then is consideration–often scant–given to such factors as prior and related evidence, plausibility of mechanism, study design and data quality, real world costs and benefits, novelty of finding, and other factors that vary by research domain. There have been recent proposals to change the p-value threshold, but instead we recommend abandoning the null hypothesis significance testing paradigm entirely, leaving p-values as just one of many Read More ›

Remember Gunter Bechly, the paleontologist who got erased from Wikipedia *? At ENST, he says, Based on the Darwinian narrative, we should expect not only that morphological complexity increases gradually in the fossil record, but we should also expect the same for complex animal behavior. This is because according to Darwinists, “Evolution not only is a gradual process as a matter of fact, but…it has to be gradual if it is to do any explanatory work” (Dawkins 2009). Charles Darwin himself strictly insisted on gradualism and famously quoted the Latin phrase “natura non facit saltus” (“nature does not make jumps”) no fewer than six times in his Origin of Species. He realized that any kind of significant saltational change would Read More ›

U Chicago prof here: First of all, Weikart doesn’t recognize the irony of his implication that “See? Atheists believe in fairy tales. They’re just as bad as we are!” Well, he might respond that his Christianity is certainly not a fairy tale, because it’s not only based on empirical truths like Jesus Man being resurrected, but also gives us an objective morality and an objective purpose in our lives. But why is his Christianity true and Islam and Hinduism, which inspire different purposes, false? But step back and consider the question: what is that meaning and purpose? As we know, one can discern an infinite number of meanings and life-purposes from just the Bible alone, for its “objective” lessons are Read More ›

From Guillermo Paz-y-Miño C. and Avelina Espinosa at Evolution: Education and Outreach: The controversy around evolution, creationism, and intelligent design resides in a historical struggle between scientific knowledge and popular belief. Four hundred seventy-six students (biology majors n = 237, nonmajors n = 239) at a secular liberal arts private university in Northeastern United States responded to a five-question survey to assess their views about: (1) evolution, creationism, and intelligent design in the science class; (2) students’ attitudes toward evolution; (3) students’ position about the teaching of human evolution; (4) evolution in science exams; and (5) students’ willingness to discuss evolution openly. There were 60.6% of biology majors and 42% of nonmajors supported the exclusive teaching of evolution in the Read More ›