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Brexit: Celebrate the science writer as asshat!

If you’ve time on your hands. Here’s a classic: “Why bad ideas refuse to die” by science writer Steven Poole at the Guardian: And what happens when the world of ideas really does operate as a marketplace? It happens to be the case that many prominent climate sceptics have been secretly funded by oil companies. The idea that there is some scientific controversy over whether burning fossil fuels has contributed in large part to the present global warming (there isn’t) is an idea that has been literally bought and sold, and remains extraordinarily successful. That, of course, is just a particularly dramatic example of the way all western democracies have been captured by industry lobbying and party donations, in which Read More ›

Smithsonian asks, Do insects have consciousness?

Interesting question. From : While the human midbrain and the insect brain may even be evolutionarily related, an insect’s inner life is obviously more basic than our own. Accordingly, bugs feel something like hunger and pain, and “perhaps very simple analogs of anger,” but no grief or jealousy. “They plan, but don’t imagine,” Klein says. Even so, insects’ highly distilled sense of self is a potential gift to the far-out study of consciousness. Probing the insect brain could help quantify questions of what it means to think that vexed the likes of Aristotle and Descartes, and could even aid the development of sentient robots. More. A lot depends on what one thinks consciousness even is. Jealousy would likely be meaningless Read More ›

Real science doesn’t need data?

It’s unfalsifiable: So personal testimony will do. In a recent presentation to a bunch of political operatives, the Mann put his pseudo-scientific foot in his mouth. From the Washington Times: Leading climate doomsayer Michael Mann recently downplayed the importance of climate change science, telling Democrats that data and models “increasingly are unnecessary” because the impact is obvious. “Fundamentally, I’m a climate scientist and have spent much of my career with my head buried in climate-model output and observational climate data trying to tease out the signal of human-caused climate change,” Mr. Mann told the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee at a hearing. “What is disconcerting to me and so many of my colleagues is that these tools that we’ve spent years Read More ›

Freed from the fear of free will

From an obituary for William Provine (1942-2015), a naturalist atheist who hung out with ID types, by Anya Plutynski: Life may have no ultimate meaning, but I sure think it can have lots of proximate meaning. Free will is not hard to give up, because it’s a horribly destructive idea to our society. Free will is what we use as an excuse to treat people like pieces of crap when they do something wrong in our society. We say to the person, “you did something wrong out of your free will, and therefore we have the justification for revenge all over your behind.” We put people in prison, turning them into lousier individuals than they ever were. This horrible system Read More ›

Mazur: Zoologists hog Royal Society stage

In an attempt to frustrate rethinking evolution. From Suzan Mazur at Huffington Post: Six months after announcing the November 2016 Royal Society evolution meeting on this page and a half dozen or so stories later, over one-third of the seats for the event still remain vacant — and the tickets are free! But that’s easily explained, because the zoologists ultimately decided to “hog” the show. It didn’t have to be so. A lineup of speakers who truly represent the paradigm shift underway in evolution science would have quickly filled up the house. Instead, organizers went with essentially an evo-devo reunion on plasticity and niche construction — rehashed themes of Altenberg! from eight years ago minus most of the stars of Read More ›

Science denial? Weird thoughts from Slate

From Phil Plait at Slate: I was wrong. I underestimated just how thoroughly the GOP had salted the Earth. Philosophical party planks of climate change denial, anti-evolution, anti-intellectualism, intolerance, and more have made it such that Trump can literally say almost anything, and it hardly affects his popularity.More. Izzatso? Trump was the first candidate in modern history to exploit the fact that no one now cares what legacy media, including Slate, think. When I travel the Toronto-Ottawa rail corridor in Canada, almost everyone is using a handheld to reach whoever or whatever they want anywhere on the planet. That can’t be stuffed back into a bottle. Trump spent almost nothing on publicity, trusting that the full pack cry against him Read More ›

Flores hobbits lived alongside other people

Yeah. They were short. So? From The Scientist: New research suggests that Homo floresiensis—ancient hominins often called “hobbits”—lived closer in time to modern humans than previously thought. Researchers from the University of Wollongong in Australia have found evidence that modern humans were using fire on the Indonesian island of Flores as far back as 41,000 years ago, whereas the hobbits lived until roughly 50,000 years ago, the team reported today (June 30) in the Journal of Archaeological Science.More. Enough. Can we call off the Darwinian search for a lesser type (species) of human? Isn’t this getting, um, weird? See also: The Little Lady of Flores spoke from the grave. But said what, exactly? Follow UD News at Twitter!

Butter will NOT kill you

Neither will salt But for now, ScienceDaily: Butter consumption was only weakly associated with total mortality, not associated with cardiovascular disease, and slightly inversely associated (protective) with diabetes, according to a new epidemiological study which analyzed the association of butter consumption with chronic disease and all-cause mortality. This systematic review and meta-analysis, published in PLOS ONE, was led by Tufts scientists including Laura Pimpin, Ph.D., former postdoctoral fellow at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts in Boston, and senior author Dariush Mozaffarian, M.D., Dr.P.H., dean of the School. Paper. (public access) – Pimpin L, Wu JHY, Haskelberg H, Del Gobbo L, Mozaffarian D. Is Butter Back? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Butter Consumption and Risk Read More ›

Warning re open access publishing

From academic librarian Jeffrey Beall here: Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers This is a list of questionable, scholarly open-access publishers. We recommend that scholars read the available reviews, assessments and descriptions provided here, and then decide for themselves whether they want to submit articles, serve as editors or on editorial boards. The criteria for determining predatory publishers are here. We hope that tenure and promotion committees can also decide for themselves how importantly or not to rate articles published in these journals in the context of their own institutional standards and/or geocultural locus. We emphasize that journal publishers and journals change in their business and editorial practices over time. This list is kept up-to-date to the best Read More ›

Neil deGrasse Tyson backs … what? Evidence? No!

From Twitter: Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence — Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) June 29, 2016 But the whole point of the theory he espouses (the universe is a computer sim) is to escape the weight of the demand for evidence. See also the war on falsifiability and non-evidence-based science. People who need publicity to stay afloat can say what they like. We might have predicted Rationalia – but we were busy. It’s just more progressivism infesting science. See also: Neil deGrasse Tyson on why he thinks ID must be wrong Follow UD News at Twitter!

Hydrothermal vent models make life inevitable?

From Nathaniel Comfort at Nautilus: Hydrothermal vent models transform the origins of life from unlikely to near-inevitable.What most goes against our intuition is that complex structures can be better dissipaters of energy than simpler ones.11 Catalysts help you up an energy hill so that you can drop even further down on the other side. Casting our gaze across the entirety of biological evolution, each organism is such an energy hill. It forms only if it is thermodynamically favored—if by pumping energy uphill to create it, even more energy is released. A lizard, for example, requires more energy to make than a lizard’s-worth of E. coli, but it consumes more energy at a greater rate. A world that contains both lizards Read More ›

The Higgs particle as elephant in room

From Symmetry (Fermilab/SLAC): According to the Standard Model, the most common decay of the Higgs boson should be a transformation into a pair of bottom quarks. This should happen about 60 percent of the time. The strange thing is, scientists have yet to discover it happening (though they have seen evidence). According to Harvard researcher John Huth, a member of the ATLAS experiment, seeing the Higgs turning into bottom quarks is priority No. 1 for Higgs boson research. “It would behoove us to find the Higgs decaying to bottom quarks because this is the largest interaction,” Huth says, “and it darn well better be there.”More. Good thing no one is trying to stop anyone from doing or publishing research on Read More ›

Quote of the day on the Royal Society meet

From rhampton7: I’m willing to bet that all of the talks/papers will refer to processes that are material in origin. Not sure why ID proponents would be excited by this. See Royal Society announces guest list for Extended Synthesis meet. It must be difficult to miss the point to the extent that rhampton7 does. Darwinism has been a stupidifier of evolutionary biology for so long that almost everyone just wants to call 1 800 GOTJUNK, the way one would for a flea-bitten sofa. People may differ widely as to what type of sofa should replace it but almost everyone agrees on its fate. See also: What the fossils told us in their own words Follow UD News at Twitter!

People to watch for at Royal Society meet

From Third Way: Below, you will find a list of researchers and authors who have, in one way or another, expressed their concerns regarding natural selection’s scope and who believe that other mechanisms are essential for a comprehensive understanding of evolutionary processes. More. A lot of scientists are listed. In the context, the putdowns by Darwinists in previous years are, um, interesting: The Third Way of Evolution announced, but fails to cohere (2015), written by someone at Panda’s Thumb. Arrogance always sounds far more pronounced in retrospect. Will they try getting some US court to rule against the Royal Society or the Third Way? Note: The Third Way site was created by Raju Pookottil, profiled in The Paradigm Shifters, a Read More ›