Category: Culture
New book: Darwin, unlike some of his followers, was an “evolutionary pluralist”
| September 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Science |
Now they tell us. But how did his followers get it so wrong? Or were they just funning us all these years? Re Revisiting the Origin of Species: The Other Darwins (Thierry Hoquet, CRC Press, August 13, 2018): Contemporary interest in Darwin rises from a general ideal of what Darwin’s books ought to contain: a […]
AAAS to introduce new policy for expelling members
| September 17, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Science |
The “Fellow Revocation Policy” was announced by president, Margaret A. Hamburg: The governing body of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, founded 1848, voted Saturday to enact a policy under which an elected AAAS Fellow’s lifetime honor can be revoked for proven scientific misconduct or serious breaches of professional ethics. The AAAS Council […]
If a conventional evolutionary psychology claim is true, masculinity is “in crisis”?
| September 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design |
We just tried to pull a Darwinian out of the way of the southbound freight called Progress when here it is rumbling back into town again: This week’s peer-reviewed portrayal of fragile masculinity comes to you from the journal Science Advances, which recently published a depressing new study about online dating. Researchers looked at nearly […]
Earliest known rock drawing at 73,000 years ago
| September 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind |
A type of crosshatch etched in ocher: The discovery “helps round out the argument that Homo sapiens [at Blombos Cave] behaved essentially like us before 70,000 years ago,” says archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood of the University of Bergen in Norway. His team noticed the ancient drawing while examining thousands of stone fragments and tools excavated in […]
Darwinian risks all, takes aim at gender theory
| September 12, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Darwinism, Evolutionary biology, Evolutionary psychology, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design |
Look, as Barry Arrington noted recently, you can’t even publish research today that suggests that some teen girls believe they are boys mainly because of teen groupthink even though such a conclusion must be obvious to anyone who has spent time with teens. Now, a Darwinian has blundered in front of the overloaded freight train of […]
Why do we think “social psychology” is science anyway?
| September 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Psychology, Science |
More clutter building up in the inbox about the unreproducible results from social sciences: From ScienceDaily: Today, in Nature Human Behavior, a collaborative team of five laboratories published the results of 21 high-powered replications of social science experiments originally published in Science and Nature, two of the most prestigious journals in science. They failed to replicate […]
How do emotional robots “care”?
| September 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Culture, Mind |
Well, they don’t, exactly, but here’s the deal: From Sapiens, a journal of Anthropology/Everything Human: Pepper is a white, semi-humanoid robot, about the size of a 6-year-old, made by Tokyo-based SoftBank Robotics. You may have seen him working in a bank or a hotel, or being interviewed by Neil deGrasse Tyson. According to the […]
Rob Sheldon comments on the “dirtiest fight in physics”
| September 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Culture, Naturalism, Physics, Science |
Recently, we noted the dirtiest fight in physics, over the nature of the universe. Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts: A great story on the level of confusion in the world of astronomy and particle physics. My own view is: they’re both wrong. Dark Matter WIMP proponents postulate an invisible particle that […]
Sam Harris vs. Jordan Peterson on whether an “objective” moral code is possible
| September 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind, Philosophy, Science |
We’ve written some things about Jordan Peterson and a fair bit about Sam Harris: Here’s an appraisal of their recent debate in Vancouver, moderated by Bret Weinstein : Peterson and Harris spent a large part of the first night discussing what they had in common. For example, both agreed that it was important to establish […]
Silenced! Selectivity too close to truth?
| September 9, 2018 | Posted by DLH under academic freedom, Culture, Education, Free Speech, Human evolution, Mathematics, Natural selection, Peer review, Popular culture, Probability, Science, Mathematics, Philosophy and (Natural) Theology, Society |
Should science pursue truth regardless of consequences? Or must we succumb to political correctness? Must selectivity of females always equal males? Consider: Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole – by Theodore P. Hill “In the highly controversial area of human intelligence, the ‘Greater Male Variability Hypothesis’ (GMVH) asserts that there are […]
The world naturalism prevents us from seeing
| September 9, 2018 | Posted by News under Big Bang, Culture, Fine tuning, Intelligent Design, Naturalism |
Biola physics prof John Bloom offers some thoughts: For example, since the 1930s we have a growing body of data which show that the universe is expanding in a way which implies that everything in it came from a single point and an enormous burst of energy. Thus, it convincingly looks like our universe had […]
Human Zoos documentary is now available at Amazon
| September 9, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design, science education |
America’s Forgotten History of Scientific Racism is now available on DVD: From IMDB: Human Zoos tells the story of how thousands of indigenous peoples were put on public display in America in the early decades of the twentieth century. Often touted as “missing links” between man and apes, these native peoples were harassed, demeaned, and […]
Mortarboard mob “disappears” respected mathematician
| September 8, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Peer review, Science |
He and Gunter Bechly should talk. Recently, Barry Arrington noted the story out of Brown University, where a paper got “disappeared” for making the point — that would seem so obvious to anyone who spends much time with teen girls as to hardly merit a paper — that sexual attitudes can be contagious. Ted Hill […]
Scientists hunt mysterious “fifth force” that would “change paradigm”
| September 7, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Culture, Intelligent Design, Science |
They are looking for dark photons: When positrons slam into the diamond wafer, they immediately merge with electrons and vanish in a faint burst of energy. Normally, the energy released is in the form of two particles of light called photons. But if a fifth force exists in nature, something different will happen. Instead of producing […]
Particle physicist: Science is suffering from “baked in” bias
| September 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Science |
From Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, says science has a problem and we need to talk: For the past 15 years, I have worked in the foundations of physics, a field which has not seen progress for decades. What happened 40 years ago is that theorists in my discipline […]
At Nature: No more excuses for non-reproducible methods
| September 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
Modern technology means there is no good reason to have the problem, says a professional protocols developer: News last month brought a powerful reminder that access to detailed methods can be essential for getting experiments to work. In 2013, the US$1.6-million Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology set out to repeat key experiments from 50 high-profile cancer […]
Eric Holloway: ID as a bridge between Francis Bacon and Thomas Aquinas
| September 2, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Science |
Eric Holloway, an electrical and computer engineer, offers some thoughts on how to prevent science from devolving into “scientism.” For an example of scientism, see Peter Atkins’s claim that science can answer all the Big Questions. Here’s John Mark Reynolds’s outline of the general problem: Sometimes a culture takes a right road, sometimes it passes […]
Yes, there IS an Old Earth Creation Museum!
| September 2, 2018 | Posted by News under Creationism, Culture, Intelligent Design, Just For Fun |
From the Babylon Bee, threatened by Facebook. It’s not just that our would-be minders think we are evil. They also think we are stupid. Do whatever you can to make that their biggest mistake.
Sam Harris, atheists, and charitable giving
| September 2, 2018 | Posted by News under Atheism, Culture, Intelligent Design, Naturalism |
Researcher: Across the board, in every category, accounting for every variable, no matter how you slice the pie, the single biggest factor behind charitable giving is . . . religious faith.
