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From ScienceDaily: When children are unmotivated at school, new research suggests their genes may be part of the equation. A study of more than 13,000 twins from six countries found that 40 to 50 percent of the differences in children’s motivation to learn could be explained by their genetic inheritance from their parents. The results surprised study co-author Stephen Petrill, who thought before the study that the twins’ shared environment — such as the family and teachers that they had in common — would be a larger factor than genetics. Instead, genetics and nonshared environment factors had the largest effect on learning motivation, whereas the shared environment had negligible impact. Talk about unbelievable burble. It must have been a happy Read More ›

From New Scientist: Big money is being spent on initiatives like the European Union’s Human Brain Project. Will people hoping to learn about consciousness be disappointed? Absolutely. From what I hear, some of that project’s neuroscientists are disappointed because it isn’t nearly strong enough in asking cognitive questions. It is asking the basic, materialistic questions – such as which cells connect with what, or which chemicals are diffusing – but these basic questions aren’t the only important ones. More. See also: Why studies of the human mind go nowhere.

Here. John Gilmore talks with William Dembski American mathematician, philosopher, theologian and author on the subject of intelligent design, specifically the concept of specified complexity.

So says Jet Propulsion Lab: As NASA missions explore our solar system and search for new worlds, they are finding water in surprising places. Water is but one piece of our search for habitable planets and life beyond Earth, yet it links many seemingly unrelated worlds in surprising ways. “NASA science activities have provided a wave of amazing findings related to water in recent years that inspire us to continue investigating our origins and the fascinating possibilities for other worlds, and life, in the universe,” said Ellen Stofan, chief scientist for the agency. “In our lifetime, we may very well finally answer whether we are alone in the solar system and beyond.” The chemical elements in water, hydrogen and oxygen, Read More ›

… have a really hard time figuring out why anyone tries to be good? The current barf is The carriers of the evolutionary process are populations. Populations consist of reproducing individuals, such as cells, viruses, plants, animals, and people. Offspring inherit fundamental information from their parents. This information is encoded in genomes, if we focus on genetic evolution. Occasionally modifications arise. These new genetic variants are called “mutants.” Mutation generates new types, new molecular ideas. This constitutes the first half of the evolutionary process. The second half is “natural selection.” The mutations might affect reproductive rates. Some mutant genes spread faster in the population than others. Nature becomes a gigantic breeder selecting for advantageous traits. Survival of the fittest is Read More ›

Yeah. Here. You wouldn’t even think the concept still existed, if Darwin were right: The fact is that we don’t “make” anything of our compulsions, or use them to “realize the self”. We have no ability to “realize” our self; all we can do is rationalize what we do and re-brand it as “freedom” so people don’t get scared. So Eagleton’s simply engaging in nonsense when he says stuff like this: Freedom is not a question of being released from the forces that shape us, but a matter of what we make of them. The world, however, is now divided down the middle between off-the-wall libertarians who deny the reality of such forces, and full-blooded determinists such as the US Read More ›

Here. REMEMBER PLUTO? TINY lonely rock orbiting the sun at the edge of the solar system? And then, in 2006, researchers summarily defrocked the little world of its status as a planet. Poof! Gone. This kind of thing has happened before. Many decades ago, paleontologists similarly decided that there wasn’t enough evidence to support the existence of the beloved Brontosaurus. Instead, they said that the noble thunder lizard was just an Apatosaurus. Poof. But mourn the Brontosaurus no longer! A team of heroes may have rescued it from paleontological purgatory. By cross-referencing the digitized bones from hundreds of long-necked cousins, a team of European scientists now says that they’ve identified enough unique anatomical details to reinstate the Brontosaurus at the Read More ›

Otherwise, what does this ngram mean?

The Christian Scientific Society: The Truth, Wherever It Leads Details for the Annual Meeting, April 17-18 in Pittsburgh here: J.P. Moreland, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Talbot School of Theology, Biola University “The irrelevance of neuroscience for formulating and addressing the fundamental problems in philosophy/theology of mind.” In the first part of my talk, I will lay out the autonomy and authority theses in philosophy and identify the central questions in the four key areas of the mind/body problem. In the second section, I will show why neuroscience cannot even formulate, much less address these central questions. I will also clarify what it means to say that two or more theories are empirically equivalent and go on to argue that Read More ›

Newsweek tells us, “aliens are enormous, science suggests,” here: Aliens, if they exist, are likely huge. At least that’s the conclusion of a new paper by cosmologist Fergus Simpson, who has estimated that the average weight of intelligent extraterrestrials would be 650 pounds (300 kilograms) or more. ET would have paled in comparison to these interstellar behemoths. The argument relies on a mathematical model that assumes organisms on other planets obey the same laws of conservation of energy that we see here on Earth—namely, that larger animals need more resources and expend more energy, and thus are less abundant. There are many small ants, for example, but far fewer whales or elephants. Thus, throughout the universe, as is the case Read More ›

Here: I’m often asked what I do for a living. My answer, that I am a professor at the University of Kentucky, inevitably prompts a second question: “What do you teach?” Responding to such a question should be easy and invite polite conversation, but I usually brace for a negative reaction. At least half the time the person flinches with disapproval when I answer “evolution,” and often the conversation simply terminates once the “e-word” has been spoken. Occasionally, someone will retort: “But there is no evidence for evolution.” Or insist: “It’s just a theory, so why teach it?” At this point I should walk away, but the educator in me can’t. I generally take the bait, explaining that evolution is Read More ›

We thought that kind of thing only happened to us ID folk. We’re used to it. Any mediocrity can make his name in Tax-Funded Science attacking us. You pay, you enjoy. Or not. You pay anyway. But now this from Discover: A psychiatry journal, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (JNMD), has just published a remarkable attack on another journal, Frontiers in Psychology. Here’s the piece: it’s by the JNMD’s own Statistics Editor. In it, he writes that: To be perfectly candid, the reader needs to be informed that the journal that published the Lakens (2013) article, Frontiers in Psychology, is one of an increasing number of journals that charge exorbitant publication fees in exchange for free open access Read More ›

First, it isn’t about Nick Lane or his new book. It is more about the pop science culture in which this stuff originates: The Vital Question: Why is life the way it is? is a new book by Nick Lane that is due out on April 23rd. His question is not one for a static answer but rather one for a series of ever sharper explanations—explanations that apply at different resolutions to specific increments in the continuous chain of life, to the whole, and to generalizations of the process to other instances. For example, we might now boldly assert that an explanation for whether life evolved, or could have evolved, in the same way more than once on our own Read More ›

Not Even Wrong wonders, and he’s generally credible: There are rumors going around tonight that there’s been a hoax perpetrated on the arXiv, something like the Sokal hoax. This has to do with an hep-th posting entitled Riding Gravity Away from Doomsday, which has appeared under the name of a very prominent string theorist, Ashoke Sen, winner of the $3 million Milner Fundamental Physics Prize. What I’m hearing is that no one can believe that Sen could possibly have seriously written something this silly, so it must be some sort of hoax. Speculation is that the hoax could have been carried out to make the hep-th moderators look bad, by showing that they’ll agree to anything, no matter how absurd, Read More ›

From a review of Psychology gone wrong They show how study results can get distorted and changed in re-telling. Remember the Little Albert experiment? An infant was conditioned to develop a fear of white rats by exposing him simultaneously to a white rat and a loud noise. This confirmed a popular theory, so it was immediately accepted as evidence that early childhood experiences could create lasting phobias that would extend to similar objects (in this case, to anything white and furry). Most psychology textbooks have misrepresented the facts about that experiment. They get the child’s age wrong, say he was conditioned with a white rabbit, and make up other stimuli that he supposedly reacted to, like a puppy and a Read More ›