Category: Culture
PBS’s American Experience: The Eugenics Crusade
| November 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Eugenics etc, Intelligent Design |
A friend writes to recommend it: American Experience: The Eugenics Crusade is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen and I have watched many hundreds of them. As the movie documents, it started with Darwin, then moved on to Galton who spent his life developing the science of eugenics, then the American eugenics […]
There will be cyborgs on Mars! says well-known astronomer
| November 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Culture, Intelligent Design, Media, Science |
From Sir Martin Rees at NBC: AI apocalypse is certainly in the air. Elon Musk, Henry Kissinger, and the late Stephen Hawking have all predicted an AI doomsday. Industry professionals’ doubt and disparagement don’t seem to register with the media in the same way. Rees, who is former president of the Royal Society, goes further, […]
Study: Neanderthals did not live more violently than other ancient peoples
| November 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From a study of over 200 skulls: Males suffered the bulk of harmful head knocks, whether they were Neandertals or ancient humans, the scientists report online November 14 in Nature. “Our results suggest that Neandertal lifestyles were not more dangerous than those of early modern Europeans,” Harvati says. Bruce Bower, “Skull damage suggests Neandertals led no […]
Atheist historian combats claim that the Church persecuted classical learning
| November 11, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Atheism, Culture, Education, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Religion, Science |
A historian draws our attention this post from late 2016, a reflection on the survival of classical learning during the Christian era, in response to “Skep,” an energetic atheist blogger: But the usual way that those who are forced to admit that there were, in fact, many medieval natural philosophers studying all kinds of proto-scientific […]
Historian: Human evolution theorists were attempting to be moral teachers
| November 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
Post World War II, scientists studying origins, sensed a moral mission to tell the story in order to encourage us to be better people. The close-knit hunter-gatherer clans that represented all humanity co-operated for survival and were chock full of moral lessons for us all. But was it true?: Readers and reviewers lumped Morris, Ardrey […]
Stress: Scientist to be sentenced for trying to poison labmate
| November 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
We run this story as a public service. Sometimes the pressure might get to you but it is almost never entirely that person’s fault and this is not the way to go about dealing with it: Graduate student Zijie Wang has pleaded guilty to poisoning a co-worker in the chemistry labs at Queen’s University in […]
Can culture explain why brains have become bigger?
| November 9, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind |
From ScienceDaily: Humans have extraordinarily large brains, which have tripled in size in the last few million years. Other animals also experienced a significant, though smaller, increase in brain size. These increases are puzzling, because brain tissue is energetically expensive: that is, a smaller brain is easier to maintain in terms of calories. Building on […]
Requests for actual statistics FRAUD not unusual, science writer finds
| November 7, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Science |
There may be an additional, more sinister explanation for the ongoing reproducibility crisis, he suggests: A stunning report published in the Annals of Internal Medicine concludes that researchers often make “inappropriate requests” to statisticians. And by “inappropriate,” the authors aren’t referring to accidental requests for incorrect statistical analyses; instead, they’re referring to requests for unscrupulous […]
Is SETI an “occult cult with money”?
| November 6, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design |
Much information is offered here: Astronomer Jill Tarter discusses the search for intelligent life (Phys.org). Jill Tarter, one of the queens of SETI, was given royal treatment in a Harvard interview. The interviewer could have asked some hard questions, but one never treats royalty that way. “For me, after millennia of asking priests and philosophers […]
If scientists get elected, will they confront the war on STEM education?
| November 5, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, science education |
Some scientists hope to influence society by running for office: On the verge of Election Day in the U.S. a political movement focused on getting scientists into public office is hoping that results at the polls will lead to more scenes like this one at state houses, city councils and school boards across the country, […]
Terror of Existence: Cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer loved, then loathed, Darwinism
| November 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design |
Last Sunday we noted a new book by psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple, and writer Ken Francis, The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd. They tackle the same topics in twin essays, as a Christian and an agnostic. Francis kindly sends us an excerpt from one of his essays featuring Jeffrey Dahmer (1960-1994), […]
Millennials are dumping religion for witchcraft, not science
| November 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Religion, Science |
It’s not a new story. We’ve covered it here, here, and here within the last year or so. People don’t seem to be ditching traditional religion for science as much as for witchcraft: Interest in spirituality has been booming in recent years while interest in religion plummets, especially among millennials. The majority of Americans now […]
Why do we think technological progress is inevitable?
| November 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Religion, Science, Science fiction |
A historian asks: Science Fiction Lacks Religiosity, But Why? Consider science fiction which, like all genres, has its own share of standard tropes and themes. One of the main themes in science fiction is the status of technology, and you’ll notice a frequent assumption that technology will constantly grow more and more sophisticated over time; […]
Internet freedom has declined significantly worldwide since 2017
| November 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design |
You take for granted that you can just choose to read Uncommon Descent. Or something else instead. Increasingly, governments would like you to read what they think is best: There has been a definite uptick in digital authoritarianism worldwide, according to Freedom House, which assessed 65 countries: Chinese officials have held sessions on controlling information […]
Once upon a time, MIT tried building a universal Moral Machine…
| November 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Culture, Ethics, Intelligent Design, Mind |
In an effort to program self-driving cars to make decisions in a crisis, MIT’s Moral Machine offered 2.3 million people worldwide a chance to crowdsource who to kill and who to spare in a road mishap… The project aimed at building righteous self-driving cars revealed stark differences in global values. People from China and Japan […]
Winston Ewert: Do technologies change cultures or were the changes inevitable anyway?
| November 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Mind |
Ewert, developer of the dependency graph model of relationships between life forms (as an alternative to the tree of life concept) offers some thoughts on whether technology is neutral: A number of examples can be put forward in defense of the thesis that technologies do change cultures. A commonly cited example is the printing press. […]
The failed search for an evolutionary morality
| October 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Ethics, Evolution, Evolutionary psychology, Intelligent Design, Mind |
Richard Weikart, author of The Death of Humanity And the Case for Life, reviews James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky’s new book, Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality There are many scientific problems with this project. Hunter and Nedelisky, however, only rarely point out the empirical difficulties. (They do […]
Larry Krauss cites physics to fight back against sex harassment charges
| October 28, 2018 | Posted by News under Atheism, Culture, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Readers will remember celebrity atheist physicist Larry Krauss. We first heard the story about the sexual harassment charges at Buzzfeed in February. Krauss announced his retirement last week but has also offered a lengthy rebuttal to the accusations. Among other things, he says the physics of some of the allegations doesn’t hold up: One piece of […]
Jonathan Bartlett: Self-driving vehicles are just around the corner, all right
| October 27, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Culture, Intelligent Design, Mind |
On the other side of a vast chasm… The code needed to detect and handle the flow between the situations increases polynomially with the number of driving situations we must address. That is, if we have 2 driving situations, there are 2 possible transitions to account for. If we have 3 driving situations, there are […]
