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Note to self: Toss out dictionary Recently, we looked at the way Richard Dawkins made Darwinian evolution sound so easy that people who don’t want to do much thinking—but do want to feel up-to-date—embraced it. And it has been easy for them to persecute dissenters with a good conscience because, in fairness, most of them never had enough real grasp of the issues to understand why there could be any dissent. Or sufficient curiosity to wonder. A great package, if you like, for union science teachers, especially “aren’t I good?” girls. Much of that has to do with Dawkins’ skill with language, which is not at all the same thing as having correct information or great ideas. But it usually Read More ›

It was Henri Bergson’s fault, and the issue was time, says Jimena Canales at Nautilus: According to Einstein, philosophy had been used to explain the relation between psychology and physics. “The time of the philosopher, I believe, is a psychological and physical time at the same time,” he explained in Paris. But relativity, by focusing on very fast phenomena, had shown just how off-the-mark psychological perceptions of time really were. Psychological conceptions of time, Einstein insisted, were not only simply in error, they just did not correspond to anything concrete. “These are nothing more than mental constructs, logical entities.” Because of the enormous speed of light, humans had “instinctively” generalized their conception of simultaneity and mistakenly applied it to the Read More ›

Start your day with pasta: Further to Pastafarians not giving up their claim to be a religion, we hear lawyers seeking clients are asking: Do You Have To Accommodate An Employee Who Worships The Flying Spaghetti Monster? JD Supra: Employers are generally aware of their duty to accommodate an employee’s religious beliefs. Whether that means rearranging work schedules, permitting modifications to dress codes, permitting prayer breaks, or any number of other alterations, you know that the law requires you to be flexible when it comes to religion. But what if your employee claims he is a “Pastafarian” who worships the Flying Spaghetti Monster? A recent case from Nebraska might shed some light on your religious accommodation obligations. We didn’t say “asking Read More ›

Yes, even First Things. From software engineer William A. Wilson at First Things: If science was unprepared for the influx of careerists, it was even less prepared for the blossoming of the Cult of Science. The Cult is related to the phenomenon described as “scientism”; both have a tendency to treat the body of scientific knowledge as a holy book or an a-religious revelation that offers simple and decisive resolutions to deep questions. But it adds to this a pinch of glib frivolity and a dash of unembarrassed ignorance. Its rhetorical tics include a forced enthusiasm (a search on Twitter for the hashtag “#sciencedancing” speaks volumes) and a penchant for profanity. Here in Silicon Valley, one can scarcely go a Read More ›

Open access paper, too, from PLOS: A universal Tree of Life (TOL) has long been a goal of molecular phylogeneticists, but reticulation at the level of genes and possibly at the levels of cells and species renders any simple interpretation of such a TOL, especially as applied to prokaryotes, problematic. … So, even a tree of cellular lineages is not an unproblematic concept. Students of animals and plants have long accepted that incomplete lineage sorting, introgression, and full-species hybridization pose difficulties for the sorts of trees that Darwin might have had us draw. But it is microbes, with their promiscuous willingness to exchange genes between widely separated branches of any “tree,” that have most seriously jeopardized the neo-Darwinian synthesis, in Read More ›

A thought re Barry Arrington’s thread, MIT Atmospheric Physicist Explains What Everyone Should Know about Climate Alarmism: Maybe we are missing the real problem: In itself, global warming is just the latest a-crock-alypse by which green daycare moms compete in the middle class virtue stakes. And swindlers get rich. But what’s new there? We can be glad when the swindlers are not also murderers. They sometimes are. But readers, do consider the readiness with which Heat Doom morphs into a state religion, giving proponents the right to persecute dissenters. With so much money and power at stake, too. Cf Bill Nye open to jail time for climate change skeptics It’s most likely that the problem will be exported to other Read More ›

The dinosaurs, we are now told, were dying out before the asteroid hit. From Ed Yong at the Atlantic: Manabu Sakamoto from the University of Reading has shown that dinosaur species were going extinct faster than new ones were appearing, for at least 40 million years before the end of the Cretaceous. The dinosaur opera had already been going through a long diminuendo well before the asteroid ushered in its final coda. Many other researchers had looked at the fates of the dinosaurs before that infamous extinction event and suggested that they were already declining. But most of these studies had simply tabulated raw numbers of species from different blocks of time. This approach has problems: the rocks from certain Read More ›

Physicist Geoffrey West in an Suzan Mazur at Huffington Post: Suzan Mazur: Do zoologists own the evolution discussion? Geoffrey West: To a large extent the answer is yes they do own it, and they have to some extent cornered the market. They believe, perhaps rightly so, that they have all of the expertise. But clearly, other areas of biology, and also other sciences such as physics, chemistry and computer science should be an integral part of the conversation. The upcoming Royal Society meeting on evolution that you’ve been writing about, which has eminent biologists and philosophers represented, basically has almost no scientists from the hard sciences, which is where some of the important answers and insights are potentially going to Read More ›

Word is, in the “mystery function” fraction of the minimal cell Syn 3.0 genome—149 genes of the 473 essential set do not have any known associated functions, but they are demonstrably needed for Syn 3.0’s viability. That’s nearly a third of the essential hardware. From Geekwire: Because the functions of the genes are unknown, the researchers didn’t know they were needed until they were gone. That shows how far geneticists still have to go in understanding how life works. “We know about two-thirds of essential biology. We’re missing a third,” Venter said. Project leader Clyde Hutchison, a researcher at the J. Craig Venter Institute, said some of the genes appear to play a role in transporting small molecules around the Read More ›

But thrive better separately, says philosopher of science Eric Hochstein. From Stud Hist Philos Sci: Abstract There is a long-standing debate in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of science regarding how best to interpret the relationship between neuroscience and psychology. It has traditionally been argued that either the two domains will evolve and change over time until they converge on a single unified account of human behaviour, or else that they will continue to work in isolation given that they identify properties and states that exist autonomously from one another (due to the multiple-realizability of psychological states). In this paper, I argue that progress in psychology and neuroscience is contingent on the fact that both of these positions are false. Read More ›

For example, the emergence of segmentation in body plans in his 1988 article “The evolution of Evolvability”: I suspect that the first segmented animal was not a dramatically successful individual. It was a freak, with a double (or multiple) body where its parents had a single body. Its parentś single body plan was at least fairly well adapted to the specieś way of life; otherwise they would not have been parents. It is not, on the face of it, that a double body would have been better adapted. Quite the contrary. Nevertheless, it survived (we know it because its segmented descendants are still around) if only (this, of course, is conjecture) by the skin of its teeth. Even though I Read More ›

Riffing off Barry Arrington’s comment in Funny Shaped Rocks and the Design Inference, “It is amusing to watch some scientists insist on design inferences with respect to a relatively simple specification, while others refuse to countenance even the bare possibility of the same inference for a far more complex and intricate specification”: One thing that has always intrigued me is the way Why THEY Must Be Out There is supposed to be a question in science. There is no evidence that they are out there. The usual argument we hear is that it simply isn’t possible that we are alone. Well, excuse me, it is at least possible that we are alone. Each century They never call, They never write Read More ›

The claim was recently dismissed by a judge. From Atlas Obscura: Since its introduction in 2005, the mythology of Pastafarianism has grown to encompass pirates, an afterlife with a beer volcano, and more. There is, of course, a snazzy orientation video to welcome you into the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s noodly arms: Spaghetti, Wenches & Metaphysics: Episode 1—The FSM from Matt Tillman on Vimeo. In fact, Pastafarianism is an officially recognized religion in three countries—first in Poland, where it became an officially registered religious community in 2014 thanks to a legal technicality, then in the Netherlands this past January. And just this weekend, New Zealand recognized the first legally-binding Pastafarian wedding, officiated by “minestroni” Karen Martyn. The happy couple were wed Read More ›

By the rubes and the boobs and the bubbas, right? No, actually. From Charles Ornstein at Pacific Standard: A widely derided editorial, a controversial series of articles, and delayed corrections have prompted critics to question the direction of the New England Journal of Medicine. … In a widely derided editorial earlier this year, Dr. Jeffrey M. Drazen, the Journal’s editor-in-chief, and a deputy used the term “research parasites” to describe researchers who seek others’ data to analyze or replicate their studies, which many say is a crucial step in the scientific process. And last year, the Journal ran a controversial series saying concerns about conflicts of interest in medicine are oversimplified and overblown. More. The internet has, as so often, Read More ›

Closing our religion news coverage for the week: Ross Pomeroy asks at RealClearScience: We are perhaps the first generation of humans to truly possess a factually accurate understanding of our world and ourselves. In the past, this knowledge was only in the hands and minds of the few, but with the advent of the Internet, evidence and information have never been so widespread and accessible. Beliefs can be challenged with the click of a button. We no longer live in closed, insular environments where a single dogmatic worldview can dominate. As scientific evidence questions the tenets of religion, so too, does it provide a worldview to follow, one that’s infinitely more coherent. More. Huh? What with the multiverse and Help! Read More ›