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From Feser’s blog: Now, what Parsons actually said is that the trouble with New Atheist writers is “their logical lacunae and sophomoric mistakes” when addressing philosophical matters, and their tendency to “tar everything with the same brush” rather than distinguishing more sophisticated religious arguments and claims from cruder ones. “[D]efeating your opponents’ arguments,” says Parsons, “requires (a) taking their best arguments seriously, and (b) doing your philosophical homework.” The “Old Atheists” were more likely to do that than the “New Atheists.” Hence Parsons’ preference. He simply prefers to address what the best arguments of the other side actually say, rather than attacking straw men, begging the question, and committing other fallacies. What could Loftus possibly object to in that? The Read More ›

From Adam Waytz at Nautilus: Once we abandon the idea of universal empathy, it becomes clear that we need to build a quantitative moral calculus to help us choose when to extend our empathy. Empathy, by its very nature, seems unquantifiable, but behavioral scientists have developed techniques to turn people’s vague instincts into hard numbers. Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School has suggested that moral concepts like fairness and dignity can be assessed using a procedure he calls breakeven analysis. Do people feel that the benefits of a given course of action justify the costs? If so, the action is worth taking. For example, we may judge that invasive phone-hacking is moral if the cost of invasion of privacy is Read More ›

From Waynesburg University (Pennsylvania) biology prof Wayne Rossiter, author of In the Shadow of Oz, on new atheist neuroscientist Sam Harris’s Spirituality without Religion: There’s no “I” in “Me” (and no sense in Sam Harris) … As with nearly all of Harris’s work, the book can safely be discarded before exiting the first chapter. In Saganesque fashion (remember Cosmos, “the universe is all that is or was or ever will be”?), Harris gives us, “Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had.”(p 2) His main thesis is that the mystics of antiquity were right in denying even this. There is no self, and so there is no mind (quotes to this affect forthcoming). How does Read More ›

From Neuroscience News: The researchers found that people with more varied heart rates were able to reason in a wiser, less biased fashion about societal problems when they were instructed to reflect on a social issue from a third-person perspective. But, when the study’s participants were instructed to reason about the issue from a first-person perspective, no relationship between heart rate and wiser judgment emerged. “We already knew that people with greater variation in their heart rate show superior performance in the brain’s executive functioning such as working memory,” says Prof. Grossmann. “However, that does not necessarily mean these people are wiser – in fact, some people may use their cognitive skills to make unwise decisions. To channel their cognitive Read More ›

From Washington Post: For 3 billion years, life on Earth was only home to water-dwelling, single-celled organisms like bacteria. But suddenly, multicellular life ballooned, knocking over the first domino in an evolutionary cascade that would one day allow you — yes, you — to exist and think and even read stuff on the Internet. Scientists think that until 500 million years ago, life on Earth fell victim to high-energy blasts from the sun, which at the time contained a lot more of the cell-killing gamma, ultraviolet and x-rays than it does today. The atmosphere then was too thin to fully protect our single-celled ancestors, whose DNA would have been damaged by such powerful rays. That kept them from becoming more Read More ›

From Science: Moths from high light pollution areas were significantly less attracted to the light than those from the darker zones, the scientists report in today’s issue of Biology Letters. Overall, moths from the light-polluted populations had a 30% reduction in the flight-to-light behavior, indicating that this species is evolving, as predicted, to stay away from artificial lights. That change should increase these city moths’ reproductive success. But their success comes at a cost: To avoid the lights, the moths are likely flying less, say the scientists, so they aren’t pollinating as many flowers or feeding as many spiders and bats. More. Paper (paywall) Of course, they may not need to fly as far. The food sources won’t usually be Read More ›

From Evolution News & Views: There is considerable controversy over what structures in the brain restrict all human languages to the same deep structure. Some linguists reject an innate neurological organ devoted specifically to language. Conceiving that it is only the brain’s general abilities that are “pre-organized,” they envisage language as a learned skill based on a “functional language system” and design constraints, distributed across numerous cortical and subcortical structures. Yet however it is derived during development, there is no doubt that a unique deep structure underlies the languages of all members of our species. It is because of the same underlying deep structure that we can speak the language of the San Bushman or an Australian aborigine, and they Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Current prevailing hypotheses of how human ancestors became fire-dependent depict fire as an accident — a byproduct of another event rather than a standalone occurrence. One hypothesis, for example, explains fire as a result of rock pounding that created a spark and spread to a nearby bush. “The problem we’re trying to confront is that other hypotheses are unsatisfying. Fire use is so crucial to our biology, it seems unlikely that it wasn’t taken advantage of by our ancestors,” said Kristen Hawkes, distinguished professor of anthropology at the U and the paper’s senior author. “Everything is modified by fire; just take a look around at the books and furniture in this room. We’re surrounded by fire’s byproducts,” added Read More ›

From Nature News: Operators of Internet repositories that provide illicit free access to millions of research papers seem determined to keep up their services, despite being barred by an injunction. A New York district court ruled on 28 October that online services such as Sci-Hub and the Library Genesis Project (Libgen) violate US copyright law. The court ruled in favour of academic publisher Elsevier, which in June filed a complaint against the main operators of the sites for unlawfully accessing and distributing its copyrighted papers. Sci-Hub downloads articles by aping university IP addresses and stores them in a repository that now contains more than 46 million papers. More. One possible solution would be to make all serious public science research Read More ›

From Todd Wood: Beyond that, it was incredibly refreshing to hear the talks in this symposium. Hybridization has been a passing interest of mine for a long time (thanks to Frank Marsh), and long ago, I came to the conclusion that hybridization was not remotely rare (like I had been taught) and that the biological species concept didn’t really explain what we were seeing in the real world of hybridizing species. Sure enough, Rebecca Ackermann of the University of Cape Town said that the Biological Species Concept is basically dead. That was in the first talk of the day. In the second, Mike Arnold of the University of Georgia said that introgressive hybridization is the rule in eukaryotes, plants and Read More ›

From Ed Yong at the Atlantic: “This is humbling,” says Jonathan Eisen from the University of California, Davis, “because holy **#$@#!, we know virtually nothing right now about the biology of most of the tree of life.”More. Which makes the dogmatism of the Darwinians all the more curious. And who would ever have thought of calling it a tree anyway, but for past beliefs? See also: Tree of life morphs into … leaf? and Kirk Durston on the new tree of life Classic Darwinian fundamentalism: Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Heather Zeiger at GoodReads, a review of Richard Weikart’s The Death of Humanity: The second chapter considers man as an animal, which includes Darwin’s influence. Weikart does not demonize Darwin, but instead introduces the reader to several characters who used Darwin’s theory to justify their own agendas, including those that wanted to call people of other races “less evolved” and people with certain neurological and mental disabilities “atavistic.” This leads into the third chapter which addresses how biological determinism contributes to dehumanization and our culture of death. Importantly, the characters in this chapter assume that man lacks free will and is really a product of his genes. In making this assumption, they again reduce man to chemistry. Out of Read More ›

Readers will remember the “science guy”: From Reason: As a taxpayer and voter, the introduction of this extreme doubt about climate change is affecting my quality of life as a public citizen… So I can see where people are very concerned about this, and they’re pursuing criminal investigations as well as engaging in discussions like this….That there is a chilling effect on scientists who are in extreme doubt about climate change, I think that is good. Via Washington Times More. That sort of thing is big in Big Government now. For example, Breitbart London notes the lawfare approach: Now the Attorney General of the US Virgin Islands — some utter nonentity called Claude Earl Walker — has gone a step Read More ›

Further to Scientists, data, and diet, from ScienceDaily: Butter might not be a health food, but researchers unearthed more evidence that replacing it with vegetable oils does not decrease risk of heart disease … A research team led by scientists at the UNC School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health has unearthed more evidence that casts doubt on the traditional “heart healthy” practice of replacing butter and other saturated fats with corn oil and other vegetable oils high in linoleic acid. The findings, reported today in the British Medical Journal, suggest that using vegetable oils high in linoleic acid might be worse than using butter when it comes to preventing heart disease, though more research needs to be Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur at Huffington Post: Mae-Wan Ho, the Hong Kong-born evolution scientist and one of neo-Darwinism’s most effective critics, has died at age 74, I learned today. Ho was co-founder with her husband, physicist Peter Saunders, of the Institute of Science in Society, the UK organization focused on reclaiming science for the public good. She was also the author or co-author of a dozen books, one of her favorites, The Rainbow and the Worm. … Ho thought the Modern Synthesis did need to be completely replaced, however, “so that the universe of learning, of finding out about nature” could “open up properly.” She applauded the current work of Oxford University physiologist Denis Noble, principal organizer of the upcoming Royal Society Read More ›