News

From David Snokes at Christian Scientific Society: Kevin Birdwell gave a general overview of the issue of global warming and humans’ contribution to it. On the scientific side, one of his main points was that carbon dioxide is not the whole story; there are many other considerations, possibly the greatest of which is the warming due to urban “hot spots”—people’s experience of heat rises in recent years may be much more related to the effects of city density (which can raise local temperatures by 10 degrees or more) than to overall global warming (which has been about 1 degree in the last century). He held out hope that new technology could solve some of these issues of urbanization. His talk Read More ›

A Boltzmann brain is a disembodied space brain that should exist, if naturalist theories are all correct, but we have never seen one. From Rochester astrophysicist Brian Koberlein at Nautilus: Although it’s an interesting paradox, most astrophysicists don’t think Boltzmann brains are a real possibility. … But it turns out that, since the universe is expanding, these apparent fluctuations might not be coming from the vacuum. Instead, as the universe expands, the edge of the observable universe causes thermal fluctuations to appear, much like the event horizon of a black hole gives rise to Hawking radiation. This gives the appearance of vacuum fluctuations, from our point of view. The true vacuum of space and time isn’t fluctuating, so it cannot Read More ›

Norwegian philosopher Hedda Hassel Mørch conveniently sums up the problem at Nautilus: Monism holds that all of reality is made of the same kind of stuff. It comes in several varieties. The most common monistic view is physicalism (also known as materialism), the view that everything is made of physical stuff, which only has one aspect, the one revealed by physics. This is the predominant view among philosophers and scientists today. According to physicalism, a complete, purely physical description of reality leaves nothing out. But according to the hard problem of consciousness, any purely physical description of a conscious system such as the brain at least appears to leave something out: It could never fully capture what it is like Read More ›

Aimed, one guesses, at people who already have a religion or don’t think they need one. From a group of instructors at Wake Forest University: BioBook Basic Edition and its linked resources are available free to everyone. Click on the Table of Contents tab to browse topics. Registered users must log in here or in the upper right corner of the screen to access their instructor’s customized edition and course tools. You will find them listed in the main menu. More. A 40-part video lecture that accompanies the book will soon be available. Some are already available at YouTube. and Chapter 2. We better not tell the “Pants in Knot for Darwin” folk. They may end up wearing their pants Read More ›

Wayne Rossiter,, author of Shadow of Oz offers a response to Casper Hesp’s concern that we not take fine-tuning of our universe to be evidence for God: It’s odd to review a review, but a few things came up in Casper Hesp’s review of Signposts to God (by physicist Peter Bussey), and I felt they needed to be pointed out. First let me say that it is apparent that Hesp’s views are not that representative of BioLogos in general (which begs the question, why is he writing for them?). Namely, if his views are correct then both Francis Collins and Robin Collins, and a good many other BioLogians, are wrong. In fact, most Christians are wrong, because most of us Read More ›

From a review by Jonathan Rosen of two books about owls at the Wall Street Journal: As both books detail, the anthropomorphic effect of the facial disc [of the owl] is an accident of evolution that has sculpted owl faces into satellite dishes that direct sound waves to their ears. (paywall) Our philosopher friend Laszlo Bencze writes to say, Let’s see: accidents have sculpted. Really? Somehow I thought that sculpting—as opposed to eroding—require a sculptor. Furthermore the result of the accidents is “satellite dishes that direct sound waves to their ears.” My my. None of the accidents in my life have ever resulted in anything half so marvelous. I just get smashed bumpers and broken crockery. Just once I’d like Read More ›

In “BioLogos: One shouldn’t use fine-tuning as an argument for God’s existence, Wayne Rossiter was quoted as saying that he had predicted hat theistic evolutionists would go to war against fine-tuning. So, we naturally asked, where? Where’s your sealed, time-stamped, notarized envelope? Turns out, it’s in his book Shadow of Oz: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God, and he helpfully provided us with some quotations: After unwrapping the anthropic argument from ‘fine-tuning,’[Bruce] Glass [a theistic evolutionist] crosses the finish line with, ‘It should not go unnoted that there are plausible alternatives to the idea that our universe was specifically designed for the purpose of producing life. None of these alternatives, however, do anything to exclude the possibility of God as Read More ›

From Casper Hesp at BioLogos: I believe it is unwise to turn fine-tuning into an argument based on the gaps in our understanding, because the properties of the universe could become more amenable to scientific explanation in the future. Watchful readers will have noticed that the pitfalls discussed here have almost one-on-one equivalents in common arguments of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement. ID proponents have used arguments from probability, entropy, and gaps in our current understanding of nature to make inferences about the existence of a “designer.” More. Has the author any reason to expect that more discoveries will lead to fewer perceptions of fine-tuning? Has that been the pattern so far? If not, what is his basis for thinking it Read More ›

From Luciano Floridi at New Atlantis: Information is, in a way, the Cinderella in the history of philosophy. Any philosophy of knowledge, no matter whether ordinary (epistemology) or scientific (philosophy of science) requires an understanding of information — for instance in discussions of sensory perception and knowledge acquisition. There is no ethics without choices, responsibilities, and moral evaluations, all of which need a lot of relevant and reliable information and quite a good management of it. Logic was first a matter of the study of arguments, and then of mathematical proofs, but today it is also if not mainly a question of information extraction, transmission, and dynamics, and some branches of logic are really branches of information theory. Ontology, the Read More ›

A friend draws attention to an old paper, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics vs. Evolution” (The American Mathematical Monthly Volume 87 Number 2 February 1980) by R. W. Hamming: If you recall that modern science is only about 400 years old, and that there have been from 3 to 5 generations per century, then there have been at most 20 generations since Newton and Galileo. If you pick 4,000 years for the age of science, generally, then you get an upper bound of 200 generations. Considering the effects of evolution we are looking for via selection of small chance variations, it does not seem to me that evolution can explain more than a small part of the unreasonable effectiveness of Read More ›

Early human cannibalism is definitely in the news these days. It’s becoming clear that Stone Age people were not just animals and that even cannibalism was probably mostly about concepts like power and love and so forth. W are still looking for the mere brute in human form. From Malcolm Ritter at Yahoo: Neanderthals and prehistoric members of our own species occasionally practiced cannibalism and explaining that is a scientific challenge. Generally, it has been attributed to factors like starvation, violence between groups or ceremonial practices following a death. Now a new study suggests they were probably not hunting each other just for food. That’s because “we are not very nutritious, on a calorie level,” compared to large game animals, Read More ›

From Diana Kwon at The Scientist: While analyzing genetic material found in a wastewater treatment plant, scientists uncovered the genomes of four new species of related giant viruses. These newly discovered specimens, dubbed Klosneuviruses, challenge the notion that giant viruses evolved from a fourth domain of life, researchers wrote in a study published today (April 6) in Science. … Some scientists believe that rather than having a common ancestor, these giant viruses began as small viruses and gradually accumulated host genes over time. Analysis of the Klosneuvirus genome reveals evidence supporting the latter theory, according to the authors of the present study. More. These viruses have up to 1.57 million base pairs, with many genes encoded for components of translation Read More ›

From Hank Campbell at Science 2.0: Colony Collapse Disorder, the belief that honeybees, an important pollinator, are being killed off in droves, has been good for environmental fundraising but hasn’t had a scientific foundation. … Nonetheless, it has persisted for 10 years despite data showing that periodic die-offs in bees are as common, and therefore predictable, as solar cycles and California droughts. From the time that records of bees were formally kept, there were reports of mass die-offs without explanation, a thousand years before pesticides even existed. More. Indeed. There are even superstitions connected with the humanly unpredictable ways of bees, including sudden departures and mass die-offs. One problem is that extinction and serious declines feel like Armageddon and many Read More ›

From Philosophy of Science: Abstract: We have a conundrum. The physical basis of information is clearly a highly active research area. Yet the power of information theory comes precisely from separating it from the detailed problems of building physical systems to perform information processing tasks. Developments in quantum information over the last two decades seem to have undermined this separation, leading to suggestions that information is itself a physical entity and must be part of our physical theories, with resource-cost implications. We will consider a variety of ways in which physics seems to a affect computation, but will ultimately argue to the contrary: rejecting the claims that information is physical provides a better basis for understanding the fertile relationship between Read More ›

Further to Barry Arrington’s The Materialist “Extraordinary Claims” Double Standard: From geologist David Deming at Philosophia: Abstract In 1979 astronomer Carl Sagan popularized the aphorism “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (ECREE). But Sagan never defined the term “extraordinary.” Ambiguity in what constitutes “extraordinary” has led to misuse of the aphorism. ECREE is commonly invoked to discredit research dealing with scientific anomalies, and has even been rhetorically employed in attempts to raise doubts concerning mainstream scientific hypotheses that have substantive empirical support. The origin of ECREE lies in eighteenth-century Enlightenment criticisms of miracles. The most important of these was Hume’s essay On Miracles. Hume precisely defined an extraordinary claim as one that is directly contradicted by a massive amount of existing Read More ›