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 That’s promising. Imagine: Margaret Hamburg at AAAS isn’t wondering what’s wrong with the taxpaying world for doubting. She is wondering why we doubt. No, really. She writes at AAAS: “I would like to better understand the increasing skepticism about science,” she said. “It concerns and surprises me on many levels. I think it is important that we as the science community, led by AAAS, are getting out and learning, talking to people, trying to make sure that we are not a closed community, but one that is truly engaging the wider public.” Four observation from UD News: – Peer review, is absolutely and totally bust. Retraction Watch might help you get back on track with that stuff. – Also listen to Read More ›

Ask Heather Heying. But first, get a load of this: From a quiet, historic U hamlet in Canada (one I have often enjoyed visiting), the SJWs emerge like an irruption of disease: Queens University in that hamlet (Kingston) puts the matter oh-so-politely: Of the roughly 150 people who attended the protest, most exercised peaceful demonstration. However, several individuals engaged in or incited the destruction of property. Several Kingston police officers arrived at the scene of the protest. Roughly 20 minutes into the lecture, protesters outside hit the stained glass windows and doors outside of Grant Hall. They also chanted “why are you hiding?” and “let us in.” One protester broke a stained glass window after they repeatedly hit it with their Read More ›

Barry Arrington noted night that Richard Dawkins is beginning to overcome the cannibalism taboo. Sure, whatever, as long as we are spared the details … A question looms, in light of this kind of thing: This view extends even to those who have died, which is why we treat the deceased in a respectful manner and why desecrating the dead is considered to be immoral and is against the law — even in war. Dawkins, of course, rejects the concept, considering it “speciesist,” e.g., discrimination against animals. He thinks we are just a collection of carbon molecules and certainly of no intrinsic value simply and merely because we are human. (For example, he has yearned for the creation of a human/chimp Read More ›

Here: Every day scientific discovery is held back as inquiring minds are boxed in by a history of academic reprisal when teaching or research runs afoul of current orthodoxies. More. The site, sponsored by Discovery Institute, won’t lack for stories. Most of us don’t have time to tell them all. And could we get one thing straight?: Science boffins want it that way. The boffins are the same people who obsess about what Florida parents want their kids to learn in school but turn a blind eye to the death penalty elsewhere for witchcraft. Was there something else you needed to know about the boffins? See also: Historic journal Nature is freaked out over American public school science classrooms – again.

Whatever that means. From Kerry Grens at the Scientist: The administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scott Pruitt, said that evolution, at least as it concerns the origins of humans, is a philosophical and not scientific matter, according to audio from a 2005 radio show unearthed by Politico. “There aren’t sufficient scientific facts to establish the theory of evolution,” Pruitt said. More. What exactly is the “theory of evolution”? Efforts to establish it seem to end either in tautologies like “survival of the fittest” or advertisements for atheism/Christian atheism, none of which are part of Pruitt’s remit anyhow. Apparently, Pruitt’s boss Donald Trump gets evolution wrong too: Human evolution has a public relations problem. That isn’t just because Read More ›

From Meghan Bartels at MSN: Hawking approaches the problem by offering a detailed analogy, comparing space-time to any other continuous, curved surface, like the surface of the Earth. “There is nothing south of the South Pole,” Hawking says. The same principle holds with the universe: “There was nothing around before the Big Bang.”More. “Nothing” is actually a big word. It can mean many different things while purporting to be one big Nothing. Fine print. Ken Francis replied to this line of thinking at New English Review: About seven years ago, during a talk on Hawking at a university, I raised my hand and criticised comments he made in his then latest book, The Grand Design, which he co-wrote with Star Read More ›

Here. Robert Griffiths, Otto Stern University Professor of Physics at Carnegie-Mellon University, Ph.D. Princeton University, member of the National Academy of Sciences, author of Consistent Quantum Theory. Erica Carlson, Professor of Physics, Purdue University, Ph.D. Cal Tech, Fellow of the American Physical Society. Erica is a well known author in condensed matter physics theory. Andrew Jordan, Professor of Physics, University of Rochester, Ph.D. UC Santa Barbara, Simons Fellow of Theoretical Physics. Andrew is a specialist specifically in foundations of quantum mechanics. David Snoke, Professor of Physics, University of Pittsburgh, Ph.D. U. Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Fellow of the American Physical Society. I run an experimental condensed matter physics lab on quantum effects in optics. Jeffrey Koperski, Professor of Philosophy, Saginaw Valley State Read More ›

From Erik Lief at ACSH: The researchers, from the well-known Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, discovered more than 750,000 nesting pairs of the Adélie penguin – or more than 1.5 million in all – on the Danger Islands archipelago, which consists of nine, small land masses spanning 35 kilometers on Antarctica’s northern tip, facing South America. “Our estimate is more than three times the abundance estimated by an earlier survey,” wrote the study’s authors, “largely because several colonies, not known to exist at the time, were missed entirely.” The paper, published online Friday in the journal Scientific Reports, adds that the population find on the Antarctic Peninsula was “more than the rest of AP region combined, and include the third and Read More ›

Not how we are all apes but how bacteria can get the better of us? Jathink? From ScienceDaily: That may sound scarce; however, .” ..as only a small number of strains (<10%) were isolated from farm and urban environments, we were surprised to find one with mcr-1 on a transferable plasmid, which is a relatively high frequency of detection compared to the clinical strains,” the researchers wrote. (Plasmids are independent, mobile genetic elements that can be transmitted from one bacterium to another — sometimes across species, bestowing the traits they carry upon a new bacterial host — in this case, resistance to the last resort drug, colistin.) “Isolation of plasmid-mediated colistin resistance in S. flexneri from animal feces on a Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Visual imagery used in drawing regulates arm movements in manner similar to how hunters visualize the arc of a spear. Neanderthals had large brains and made complex tools but never demonstrated the ability to draw recognizable images, unlike early modern humans who created vivid renderings of animals and other figures on rocks and cave walls. That artistic gap may be due to differences in the way they hunted, suggests a University of California, Davis, expert on predator-prey relations and their impacts on the evolution of behavior. Neanderthals used thrusting spears to bring down tamer prey in Eurasia, while Homo sapiens, or modern humans, spent hundreds of thousands of years spear-hunting wary and dangerous game on the open grasslands Read More ›

From the editors of Nature: As part of a broader effort to improve reporting quality, Nature and the Nature journals introduced a reporting checklist for life-sciences papers in 2013. This asked authors to reveal some key details of experimental design. Last year, this checklist evolved into a broader reporting-summary document that is published alongside manuscripts to promote greater transparency. We have now developed two new versions of the reporting summary: one for the behavioural and social sciences, launching this week, and one for ecology, evolution and environment (EEE) research, to follow later this month. Authors will be prompted to use these documents to provide important details of study design, data collection and analysis before papers are sent out for review. More. Read More ›

From Alex Berezow at Foreign Policy Review: In early 2017, R&D Magazine forecast that China would spend nearly $430 billion on research and development by the end of the year, amounting to nearly 21 percent of the estimated global total — a contribution second only to that of the United States ($527 billion). That money, however, is not being put to good use. In 2010, Nature reported that “many of the country’s scientific journals are filled with incremental work, read by virtually no one and riddled with plagiarism.” A 1998 study found that Chinese scientists almost never reported negative results — a scientific impossibility.A 1998 study found that Chinese scientists almost never reported negative results — a scientific impossibility. Little Read More ›

From Michael Egnor at ENST, replying to one of the universe is “itself a mind” philosophers, Phillip Goff: Evil is not a problem, and in fact does not exist, if there is no God. And Goff errs in proposing that the universe is a Mind and that the Mind embodied in the universe is the ground of existence. The universe is not a Mind. It is a manifestation of a Mind, the creation of a Mind, but it has no mind itself. A mind is an aspect of a soul, and what characterizes a mind is its ability to hold the form of another substance in it without becoming that substance. For example, my mind can grasp the idea of Read More ›

Richard Weikart, UCal history prof, writes to note that he recently gave a talk at North Dakota State Univ. on “Darwinism and the Death of Humanity,” using material from his book, The Death of Humanity And the Case for Life: It’s still legal to offend people by talking about this stuff. See also: Weikart vs Darwin on the value of human life

From John Gray at New Statesman, reviewing Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Science, Reason, Humanism, and Progress: To think of this book as any kind of scholarly exercise is a category mistake. The purpose of Pinker’s laborious work is to reassure liberals that they are on “the right side of history”. He is an evangelist for science – or, to be more exact, an ideology of scientism. Along with reason, humanism and progress, science features as one of the core Enlightenment values that Pinker lists at the start of the book. But for him science is more than a bunch of methods that are useful in conjecturing how the world works: it provides the basis of ethics and Read More ›