Culture

New Republic intern Eric Armstrong thinks that no U.S. party deserves the crown, at any rate: The time has come for Democrats to remove the beam from their own eyes, so to speak. Taking up the mantle of scientific liberalism—that is, adopting an evidence-based view of reality in pursuit of progressive policy—would serve both the strategic purposes of the Democratic Party in the menacing face of Trumpism, as well as the existential interests of humanity.* More. Oh, wait. No political party is likely to survive just taking an evidence-based view of matters. That’s supposed to be the role of science as such. You know what they say about party policy and strategy: It’s like sausage; if you are going to Read More ›

Well, that didn’t take long. They’re not stunned any more, they’re mad. Mad as stink. From Phillip Williamson at New Scientist: Ocean acidification is an inevitable consequence of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That’s a matter of fact. We don’t know exactly what will happen to complex marine ecosystems when faced with the additional stress of falling pH, but we do know those changes are happening and that they won’t be good news. UK journalist James Delingpole disagrees. In an article for The Spectator in April 2016, he took the sceptical position that all concerns over ocean acidification are unjustified “alarmism” and that the scientific study of this non-problem is a waste of money. He concluded that the only reason Read More ›

From Colin Barras at New Scientist: The team discovered that male and female baboons each produce four vowel-like sounds. Females produce one that males don’t, and vice versa, so in total there are five distinct vowels. They correspond to the second syllable in “roses”, and the vowel sounds in “you”, “thought”, “trap” and “ah”. … “We believe that one of the major advantages of our study is that we worked on real vocalisations, which were spontaneously produced by baboons in a social context,” says Fagot. But Philip Lieberman at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, is not convinced. He thinks the researchers have unwittingly processed the baboon calls in a way that accentuates the fundamental frequency of the call and Read More ›

From O’Leary for News at MercatorNet: Social media are no more dangerous than life generally. But they require different interpretation skills from what we need for face-to-face contact. So do books, telephone, radio, and TV. And the current angst isn’t a new phenomenon. It normally follows the introduction of new communications technologies. One example is the anxiety that resulted from printing, especially of Bibles. The anxiety was not baseless; widespread literacy was one driver of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. But would suppressing the printing press have been any help? Was controlling it much of a help? The seething anger already existed and would lead to wars in any event. Literacy helped many people understand their problems in terms of Read More ›

Traffic way down. Here: . . . unless people start reading them. Today virtually all the serious posts were animal- or science-related. Traffic is way down (about 60% of normal) which means people aren’t reading them. What do you want—clickbait? More. Of course, this could be a hack. In case not, let’s help Jerry. He brings us lots of traffic so it’s only fair. What clickbait could he offer? Readers, ideas? Is it just possible that lack of interest in defenses of classical Darwinism is related to growing interest in exciting new areas? Naw, that never happens in real life. See also: Darwinism: Replacement or extension? Quantum-like model of partially directed evolution? The thought seems information must already be present Read More ›

Not what we consider most interesting, not what got us the most hits, but stories that seem to signal a growing trend: 1. The Royal Society’s almost aborted efforts to free evolution studies from the stranglehold of Darwinism have been hope in the midst of stagnation. It is safer to be a non-Darwinian now that many are rethinking evolution. Also, much more interesting, as a recent books list shows. Note: The issue isn’t really whether Darwinism (or neo-Darwinism or whatever) will be disconfirmed. It has long functioned as a religion, or if you like, a metaphysic, as Darwinist historian Michael Ruse has often pointed out: Evolution after Darwin had set itself up to be something more than science. It was Read More ›

From Jeff Foust at Space.com: Ellen Stofan, NASA’s Chief Scientist, Departs Space Agency She served three years. In the NASA interview, Stofan cited a range of “fun challenges” she worked on while chief scientist, including helping develop NASA’s long-term strategy for human Mars exploration. That effort, she said, is a key part of a broader scientific theme of searching for evidence of life beyond Earth … Institutionally, she said one of the achievements she was most proud of as chief scientist was getting the agency to voluntarily request demographic information in grant proposals submitted by scientists. That information, she said, is important to understanding any biases in how the agency awards those grants. “Implicit or unconscious bias is all around Read More ›

To hear lobbyists and pop science mags tell it. Except, that is, for a lot of insiders over the years. A friend started making a list of books that doubt all or most of modern Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, the slightly elastic Extended Synthesis, and came up with a three-tiered, hardly exhaustive, shelf: St. George Mivart, On the Genesis of Species (1871) Charles Hodge, What Is Darwinism (1874) Samuel Butler, Evolution, Old and New (1879) Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907/tr. 1911) Svante Arrhenius Worlds in the Making (1908) Richard Goldschmidt, The Material Basis of Evolution (1940) Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage (1941) Lecomte du Nouy, Human Destiny (1947) Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959) Norman Macbeth, Read More ›

From Haroon Siddique at Guardian: The UK’s rocketing demand for high-protein products is being fuelled by consumers buying foods unlikely to deliver the benefits they are seeking, experts have said. Weetabix, Shreddies, Mars, Snickers and Batchelors Cup a Soup were among the brands that launched enhanced protein versions this year as the trend hit the mainstream. Most Brits, even athletic ones, get enough protein but supplements sales have rocketed upwards. Tom Sanders, professor emeritus of nutrition and dietetics at King’s College London, said people were being taken in by “nutri-babble”. “There’s been a lot of hype in gyms pushing high-protein shakes, there’s also a need to get rid of a waste product from the dairy industry, which is whey protein,” Read More ›

From Kevin Mooney at Daily Signal: Just before joining climate change activist and former Vice President Al Gore for a press conference in New York City, seven state-level attorneys general huddled with a representative of the Union of Concerned Scientists. The political activist, Peter Frumhoff, called for them and other elected officials to move decisively against major corporations and institutions for “denying” climate change. The seeds of that call to action in March were planted four years earlier at a gathering of environmental activists, trial lawyers, and academics across the country in San Diego. The Daily Signal found this and other revealing bits of information among material produced in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against Virginia’s Read More ›

Could have done without him, maybe. Part of a long form article on the “great man” theory in science, by Philip Ball at Nautilus: So I asked historian and philosopher of science James Lennox of the University of Pittsburgh, an expert on the history of Darwinian theory, who might have done the job in place of Darwin and Wallace. His answer was striking: The story might not have gone that way at all. “When you read through Darwin’s Species Notebooks and see the struggle he went through, and then you compare his first and second attempts to present it coherently (in 1842 and 1844) with the Origin, I think it is equally plausible that some very different theory of evolution Read More ›

From Julia Shaw at Scientific American: I’m a factual relativist. I abandoned the idea of facts and “the truth” some time last year. I wrote a whole science book, The Memory Illusion, almost never mentioning the terms fact and truth. Why? Because much like Santa Claus and unicorns, facts don’t actually exist. At least not in the way we commonly think of them. We think of a fact as an irrefutable truth. According to the Oxford dictionary, a fact is “a thing that is known or proved to be true.” And where does proof come from? Science? Well, let me tell you a secret about science; scientists don’t prove anything. What we do is collect evidence that supports or does Read More ›

Chosen by “Longread”‘s writer and editor friends, it’s a broad range. Readers will doubtless find one piece of candy and another piece of coal in the ol’ Christmas stocking. Here’s a snatch to get you started: The Case for Leaving City Rats Alone (Becca Cudmore, Nautilus) … (“The rat gut acts as a mixing bowl,” says the scientist overseeing the project.) When you exterminate rats, you scatter their families, pushing them into new turf where they fight with the neighbors, swapping blood and bacteria that might combine to create something new. So maybe, the argument goes, it’s better to leave rats where they are, keeping local germs … well, local. More. Every ecological decision has strength and weaknesses. It’s the balance that Read More ›

Hmmm. At ipetitions: A nationwide moratorium on the teaching of evolution in schools To Mike Pence, Vice-President of the United States of America: We the undersigned note that, when you were a member of the U.S House of Representatives, you spoke out on the subject of science education and for presenting students with all available information. Recently, we have seen the passage of academic freedom bills in Louisiana and Tennessee which have allowed for critical evaluation in the classroom and improved educational standards. However, whilst an important development, they were only enacted owing to the need to protect students from indoctrination. We object to the teaching of the very controversial theory of evolution as part of the K-12 science curriculum Read More ›

From commenter J-Mac at “Royal Society accused of breach of public trust re evolution conference”: For failing to make public comments on the recent meeting on rethinking evolution available: — The way I see it it’s a public humiliation and a great waste of taxpayers funds, nothing else. RS has claimed that there are new trends in evolution or as many of them put it; the trends were supposed to lead to the “Third Way” of explaining the complexity of life on earth other than creation or neo-darwinism. (I’m not even going to mention what would happen if RS meet had at least one piece of their agenda of the origins of life, because I would have any more terms Read More ›