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New Scientist frets over future backlash against science

By 2076. From Michael Brooks at New Scientist: Will we still love technology when robots have taken our jobs, or when insurance companies demand huge premiums because humans are the most dangerous drivers on the roads? Will people smash up self-driving taxis, just as Luddites attacked automated looms? In some small, angry pockets, the backlash is already in full swing. Former mathematician Ted Kaczynski, aka The Unabomber, has just published a book called The Anti-Tech Revolution. (paywall) More. It’s helpful that the Unabomber is an entirely average American (“Kaczynski killed three and injured 23 people over the course of an 18-year bombing campaign that often targeted universities and airlines.”) Like all the other rubes, boobs, bubbas, hicks, and hillbillies… Note Read More ›

Royal Society Meet: No “fisticuffs”; serious questions smothered instead

More meetings planned. Snatches from science writer Carl Zimmer at Quanta: While Noble was struggling to respond, Shuker went back to the paper on an iPad. And now he read the abstract in a booming voice. ‘Our results demonstrate that natural selection can rapidly rewire regulatory networks,’” Shuker said. He put down the iPad. “So it’s a perfect, beautiful example of rapid neo-Darwinian evolution,” he declared. Shuker distilled the feelings of a lot of skeptics I talked to at the conference. The high-flying rhetoric about a paradigm shift was, for the most part, unwarranted, they said. Nor were these skeptics limited to the peanut gallery. Several of them gave talks of their own. More. Goodness, the relief that must have Read More ›

Survey show the effects of Darwin’s corrosive idea: People are just animals

From Andre Mitchell at Christian Today: According to a report on PR News Wire, the Discovery Institute conducted a study on nearly 3,700 American adults, including self-identified agnostics and atheists, to assess if belief on evolutionary theory really has an effect on religious belief. … The respondents were specifically given a list of ideas related to science and nature, and were asked to identify which of these ideas “have made the existence of God less likely, more likely, or have had no impact on your belief in the existence of God.” Some 45 percent of the respondents agreed with the statement that “evolution shows that human beings are not fundamentally different from other animals.” Another 43 percent also believed that Read More ›

Darwin lobby and the US election: Further adventures in just not getting it

From Ann Reid, Executive Director, National Center for Science Education, at Huffington Post: Dear NCSE members and friends of science, I’m writing in a profound state of shock, as I’m sure you’ll understand. You are no doubt in the same state. For the National Center for Science Education, of course, the election of someone who thinks climate change is a hoax and whose running mate once denounced evolution from the floor of the House of Representatives, is frightening and deeply depressing. Okay. Next time, try reading something other than your own media releases or dying mainstream media about what is going on around you. Note: In another context, one might have told Reid to read mainstream media. But on these Read More ›

Cats as unintelligent design II: How Darwinism sneaks in with false explanations

Because it is the usual Darwinian just-so story that we have heard all our lives, we accept it without thinking. Further to: Cats as unintelligent design (The cat parasitizes the human mind; how unintelligent is that?), in the Atlantic story, Britt Peterson wrote “A passion arose for cats,” according to the log of a ship that landed in Samoa, “and they were obtained by all possible means.” Tucker takes an intriguing stab at accounting for that still-thriving passion. “Cats look uncannily like us,” she proposes, and locates their appeal not in their alien aura but in the spell their familiarity exerts and the protective fascination it elicits. “Even better, they look like our infants.” Given their baby-size bodies; large, front-facing Read More ›

Dan Rather on standing up for science

Dan Rather? Yes, at Scientific American: The political press treats science as a niche issue. But I would argue that it is central to America’s military and economic might, that it shapes the health and welfare of our citizenry, and that our governmental support of the pure pursuit of knowledge through basic research is one of the defining symbols of American excellence. Science bolsters our global stature by its institutionalized respect for the truth, its evidence-based decision-making, and its willingness to accept differing opinions when the facts dictate them. Wow. Like, wow. Dan Rather perpetrated one of the biggest scandals in the history of modern American journalism when he knowingly accepted documents that were probable fakes (Rathergate), damaging his network, Read More ›

Gloom or boom?: Prominent scientists on U.S. election

From Andrea Gawrylewski at Scientific American: Richard Dawkins, we are informed, wants all prominent scientists to move to New Zealand: The two largest nations in the English-speaking world have just suffered catastrophes at the hands of voters—in both cases the uneducated, anti-intellectual portion of voters. Science in both countries will be hit extremely hard: In the one case, by the xenophobically inspired severing of painstakingly built-up relationships with European partners; in the other case by the election of an unqualified, narcissistic, misogynistic sick joke as president. In neither case is the disaster going to be short-lived: in America because of the nonretirement rule of the Supreme Court; in Britain because Brexit is irreversible. No, we are not making this up Read More ›

Animal mind research: Replacing dogma that animals are machines with dogma that animals are fuzzy people

Equally false. From Rik Smits at the Scientist, commenting on ethologist Frans de Waal’s recent book, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?: The essential burden of science is to replace dogma, sentiment, and superstition with an as-far-as-we-now-know theory based on verifiable facts, all the while striving for objectivity. Yet, in his work, de Waal replaces one dogma—the Cartesian/behaviorist stance that animals are mere oblivious response machines—with another. Following “Charles Darwin’s well-known observation that the mental difference between humans and other animals is one of degree rather than kind,” de Waal notes that there is no fundamental difference between man and beast—not even mentally. The problem is not the idea, it is that de Waal posits this Read More ›

Rob Sheldon on science and the US election

Sheldon, our physics and physics colour commentator, responds based on his personal experiences to the news from Nature that many scientists “stunned” by the Trump win: There’s been a lot of hyperventilating by the intelligentsia about the consequences of a Republican sweep of House, Senate and Presidency. Many fear that Republicans in general, and Trump in particular are “anti-science” and will put America back in the stone age. For those of you new to American politics, I’d like to dispel that myth and throw some cold water on the hysteria. First, universities and research scientists are by no means neutral politically. I’ve lost 3 jobs at universities both public and private, in part for being a Republican. Sociologists who measure Read More ›

Nature: Scientists “stunned” by Trump win

Why? Doesn’t that speak poorly of the powers of the scientific method? From Jeff Tollefson, Lauren Morello& Sara Reardon at Nature: Republican businessman and reality-television star Donald Trump will be the United States’ next president. Although science played only a bit part in this year’s dramatic, hard-fought campaign, many researchers expressed fear and disbelief as Trump defeated former secretary of state Hillary Clinton on 8 November. “Trump will be the first anti-science president we have ever had,” says Michael Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society in Washington DC. “The consequences are going to be very, very severe.” Trump has questioned the science underlying climate change — at one point suggesting that it was a Chinese hoax Read More ›

Politics, science, and neutral language: Noam Chomsky edition

From Marek Kohn at New Scientist, in a review of Chris Knight’s Decoding Chomsky: Researchers have devised different ways to create firebreaks between values and data. According to anthropologist Chris Knight, Chomsky’s strategy was as radical as his politics – and he developed it in order to enable himself to sustain his left-wing political commitments. In his new book Decoding Chomsky, Knight (who mounts his own critique from a position on the radical left) argues that Chomsky needed to deny any connection between his science and his politics in order to practise both while based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an institution that was heavily funded by the US military. … This required detaching language from society altogether. Chomsky Read More ›

Royal Society evolution meeting cautioned against cheers and boos

From David Klinghoffer, Britside, at Evolution News & Views: Our biologist friend writes of yesterday’s session: Some opposing views were aired in the morning sessions, with polite but pointed disagreement between Drs. Sonia Sultan and Russell Lande on the subject of phenotypic plasticity. It is clear that opinion is divided in the room. Some applause for bolder statements was quickly quashed, the audience having been warned at the beginning that boos and cheers were not acceptable. More. We all know that science is best represented by unquestioning deference to dogma, even in the face of growing contradictions with reality. Right? He describes the meeting as tense. How about “tense but timid”? We’ve all been through that at some time in Read More ›

Darwinian Christian racism? Election years bring dangerous creatures from the shadows

Darwinian Christian racism? Election years bring dangerous creatures from the shadows From Denyse O’Leary (O’Leary for News) at MercatorNet: Just recently, one Russell Kirk (probably a pseudonym*) blind-copied me on a post to “oxfordchristia” to advise me that Many younger Bible-centered conservative Christians have declared war on Christian Cultural Marxism. At first I thought, well, if young Christians want to live, they had better learn the difference between friends and foes, between life and death. But then, What is human biodiversity? Many younger, high IQ Christians have become very interested in human biodiversity. Modern studies in population genetics are showing that there are many differences in human populations. For example, Europeans about 8,000 years ago developed genes lactose tolerance that Read More ›

LiveScience publishes stale dated origin of life theories from 2007 in 2016

LiveScience publishes stale dated origin of life theories from 2007 in 2016 It’s not their fault. No serious new developments in the intervening years. From Ker Than at LiveScience, a rehash of competing origin of life theories, concluding with: Trying to recreate an event that happened billions of years ago is a daunting task, but many scientists believe that, like the emergence of life itself, it is still possible. “The solution of a mystery of this magnitude is totally unpredictable,” said Freeman Dyson, a professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University in New Jersey. “It might happen next week or it might take a thousand years.” More. But then we learn, Editor’s Note: This article was first published in 2007. Read More ›

Fighting over wives: Darwinism fits human conflicts into mold, chops off what doesn’t fit

From Sal Perkins, describing indigenous Panamanian customs at MEL: I first heard about the fights at Mi Lucha from my fellow expats in Volcan. The legend they perpetuate is that these impromptu street-boxing matches between Ngäbe men are for each other’s wives. Specifically, the wife of the loser can go with the winner of the fight if she so chooses. It’s not obligatory, they swear, but she often does. It’s Darwinism in action, they argue: She chooses the winner because he’s proven to be a stronger mate who can likely provide for her better. “The great thing about living in Volcan is if you get tired of your wife, you can just go down to the bar and pick a Read More ›