News

Here’s a public access primer on psycho terms to lose. (In case you know someone who is going into debt for this stuff and must learn them in order to pass.) Maybe we are getting somewhere? Including: (1) A gene for. The news media is awash in reports of identifying “genes for” a myriad of phenotypes, including personality traits, mental illnesses, homosexuality, and political attitudes (Sapolsky, 1997). For example, in 2010, The Telegraph (2010) trumpeted the headline, “‘Liberal gene’ discovered by scientists.” Nevertheless, because genes code for proteins, there are no “genes for” phenotypes per se, including behavioral phenotypes (Falk, 2014). Moreover, genome-wide association studies of major psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, suggest that there are probably Read More ›

From evolutionary psychologist that Harvard “Our brains are shaped for fitness, not for truth”guy: here: A truly ethical bioethics should not bog down research in red tape, moratoria, or threats of prosecution based on nebulous but sweeping principles such as “dignity,” “sacredness,” or “social justice.” Nor should it thwart research that has likely benefits now or in the near future by sowing panic about speculative harms in the distant future. These include perverse analogies with nuclear weapons and Nazi atrocities, science-fiction dystopias like “Brave New World’’ and “Gattaca,’’ and freak-show scenarios like armies of cloned Hitlers, people selling their eyeballs on eBay, or warehouses of zombies to supply people with spare organs. Of course, individuals must be protected from identifiable Read More ›

But that’s a big improvement, says Retraction Watch: Here: One hundred forty-seven journals (74%) responded to a request for information. Of these, 95 (65%) had a retraction policy. Of journals with a retraction policy, 94% had a policy that allows the editors to retract articles without authors’ consent. Why it isn’t simple: Retracting scientific papers can pose ethical and legal challenges for journal editors and publishers [1, 2]. The easiest cases occur when the authors all agree that the paper should be retracted due to serious error or misconduct. In harder cases, the authors do not all agree that a paper should be retracted. For example, one author may oppose retraction, believing that a serious flaw identified in the paper Read More ›

The way Darwinism got on it. Including tax-funded textbooks in compulsory public schools and all the rest. At Evolution News & Views, Kirk Durston writes, Science is also advancing our understanding of just how fantastically improbable the origin of life is. Evolutionary biologist, Eugene Koonin, looking at the possibility that life arose through the popular “RNA-world” scenario, calculates that the probability of just RNA replication and translation is 1 chance in 10 with 1,017 zeros after it. Koonin’s solution is to propose an infinite multiverse. With an infinite number of possible universes, the emergence of life will becomes inevitable, no matter how improbable. So the multiverse has become atheism’s “god of the gaps” but some scientists point out that multiverse Read More ›

nucleus of comet Churi/ESA By Rosetta’s Philae: From ScienceDaily: Organic molecules never previously observed in comets, a relatively varied structure on the surface but a fairly homogeneous interior, organic compounds forming agglomerates rather than being dispersed in the ice: these are just some of first results provided by Philae on the surface of comet Churi. These in situ findings, which contain a wealth of completely new information, reveal several differences in comparison with previous observations of comets and current models. … Twenty-five minutes after Philae’s initial contact with the cometary nucleus, COSAC (Cometary Sampling and Composition experiment) carried out a first chemical analysis in sniffing mode, that is, by examining particles that passively enter the instrument. These particles probably came Read More ›

From a mag called Symmetry, a journal of particle physics: Human history has been a journey toward insignificance. Actually, it hasn’t. It has been a journey toward significance. Current nutters claim we are wrecking the planet. As we’ve gained more knowledge, we’ve had our planet downgraded from the center of the universe to a chunk of rock orbiting an average star in a galaxy that is one among billions. So can anyone point to a single life form off Earth? So it only makes sense that many physicists now believe that even our universe might be just a small piece of a greater whole. In fact, there may be infinitely many universes, bubbling into existence and growing exponentially. It’s a Read More ›

Camilla Paglia: Salon: You’re an atheist, and yet I don’t ever see you sneer at religion in the way that the very aggressive atheist class right now often will. What do you make of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and the religion critics who seem not to have respect for religions for faith? Paglia: I regard them as adolescents. I say in the introduction to my last book, “Glittering Images”, that “Sneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination.” It exposes a state of perpetual adolescence that has something to do with their parents– they’re still sneering at dad in some way. Richard Dawkins was the only high-profile atheist out there when I began publicly saying “I Read More ›

At MercatorNet Connecting: Banned words? How about better speech! Needed discussions can get shut down by claims that one is victimized by “hate speech” The Internet makes sins public In a way no previous medium easily could. Twitter is losing influence? It’s not who is saying it; it’s who listens. Will robots really take over? That depends. It depends on what people can do that machines can’t do. Math profs devastate social media “popularity” Various studies have shown that teenagers consistently overestimate the amount of alcohol and drugs their friends consume. Netflix and Amazon want our kids. Real bad. We may need to want them more. Follow UD News at Twitter!

Oh, wait. Read this first, re Theodore Dalrymple’s new  book: However, it’s also clear from the outset that the primary target of his scathing critique is not psychology but reductionism, the view that all aspects of human life and values can be exhaustively explained in terms of physical processes: No, seriously. Someone noticed. Contrarian Theodore Dalrymple, who investigated the mentality of the British underclass in Life at the Bottom, has frequently described psychology as a modern religion, or pseudo-religion. The medical establishment is the brave new priest class, while the anxious therapy patient replaces the penitent sinner. If so, then Dalrymple must be a heretic of the first order. … Moreover, deference to psychology has led to a culture of Read More ›

Was Al Seckel a con man who fronted Dawkins? We dunno. We love to begin the day here with a mug and a story. Well, This is sure a story: In postwar America, there emerged a loose coalition of groups fighting the influence of religion and supernatural thinking. The most famous freethought group is American Atheists, founded in 1963 by the notorious Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who was widely loathed for, among other efforts, her successful court challenge to Bible readings in public schools. (In 1995, she was killed and dismembered by a three-man crew that included one of her former employees; her body was identified by the serial number on her prosthetic hip.) But O’Hair’s hard-core atheism was just one Read More ›

Readers will remember Peter Woit, a most interesting mathematician at Columbia, who is not a creationist (Except insofar as the term no longer means anything except “shut UP about our tax/donor-funded nonsense!!”) Noting the continued promotion of multiverse theory, he reports, Symmetry, the FNAL/SLAC run online magazine funded by the DOE, today is running a piece of multiverse mania entitled Is this the only universe?. It’s a rather standard example of the pseudo-scientific hype that has flooded the popular scientific media for the last 10-15 years.Besides the usual anthropic argument for the size of the CC, the evidence for the multiverse is string theory: … The multiverse is  all ridiculous, of course and has nothing to do with serious science Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: For the first time, research has shown that, despite not having a nervous system, plants use signals normally associated with animals when they encounter stress. … “We’ve known for a long-time that the animal neurotransmitter GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) is produced by plants under stress, for example when they encounter drought, salinity, viruses, acidic soils or extreme temperatures,” says senior author Associate Professor Matthew Gilliham, ARC Future Fellow in the University’s School of Agriculture, Food and Wine. “But it was not known whether GABA was a signal in plants. We’ve discovered that plants bind GABA in a similar way to animals, resulting in electrical signals that ultimately regulate plant growth when a plant is exposed to a stressful environment.” Read More ›

Pions? There’s been a long-running question as to why most of the universe’s matter remains unaccounted for. According to Live Science, Now, a team of five physicists has proposed that dark matter might be a kind of invisible, intangible version of a pion, a particle that was originally discovered in the 1930s. A pion is a type of meson — a category of particles made up of quarks and antiquarks; neutral pions travel between protons and neutrons and bind them together into atomic nuclei. Most proposals about dark matter assume it is made up of particles that don’t interact with each other much — they pass through each other, only gently touching. The name for such particles is weakly interacting Read More ›

Says Cosmos Magazine here: National Geographic’s senior editor Christopher Sloan had seen a feathered dinosaur fossil or two. But the specimen he described in the magazine’s November 1999 issue, dubbed Archaeoraptor liaoningensis, took his breath away. … Archaeoraptor would later be dubbed “Piltdown chicken”. Cut n’ paste job. But even smart folks have been taken in. The problem of faked fossils in China is serious and growing. Rather than being excavated by palaeontologists on fossil digs, most of the region’s fossils are pulled from the ground by desperately poor farmers and then sold on to dealers and museums. More. Gotta have one? Don’t pay more than you would for some other souvenir. How about a stuffed gotta-have-one toy dressed as Read More ›

From New Scientist: Earlier this year, several dozen quiet radicals met in a boxy red building on the outskirts of Frankfurt, Germany, to plot just that. The stated aim of this Ernst Strüngmann Forum at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies was to create “a new synthesis for economics”. But the most zealous of the participants – an unlikely alliance of economists, anthropologists, ecologists and evolutionary biologists – really do want to overthrow the old regime. They hope their ideas will mark the beginning of a new movement to rework economics using tools from more successful scientific disciplines. More. Every time this stuff has been tried, millions starved. Maybe, with new methods, they will transform it to billions. Biologist Peter Read More ›