Culture

A restaurant owner decided not to boil a rare golden lobster. From Kirschner’s Korner (“Let’s make the world a more humane place”): What do decisions like this tell us about the human race? Even though people will often teach children not to judge others based on their religion, appearance, sexual orientation, race, or other distinguishing factors, these rules don’t apply to animals. This thought process is known as speciesism. … Sending a yellow lobster to an aquarium while killing the rest isn’t praiseworthy except in a society that fails to grasp the concept that all animals matter equally. More. Here’s how to blow off most people who talk this way. Ask him what he thinks of this, Methods of abortion Read More ›

From Douglas Axe, author of Undeniable, at Evolution News & Views : Much of my book is devoted to developing an argument around everyday experience and common sense, a combination I refer to as common science. It seems to me that Darwin’s thinking is quite vulnerable to refutation by common science. After all, selection doesn’t really make anything. It merely chooses among things that have already been made. That’s what the word means. The only kind of selection that gives you clams or snails is the kind you do while ordering dinner at a French restaurant. [Critic] Sharma dismisses such thoughts as childish “pre-theoretical” thinking. One of my book’s themes is that we adults shy away from common-science deductions like Read More ›

The Kingdom of Speech Noel Rude (native American specialist) kindly writes to say, re Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech: — But maybe we should pause a moment and ask just what the beef is between Daniel Everett and Noam Chomsky [addressed by Wolfe in detail. – ed.] –as seen by actual linguists. I can tell you what it isn’t. Hardly any linguist would now challenge the fact that language is creative and that there is at present no materialist theory whatsoever to explain this–though of course this fact is seldom mentioned. Language, you see, divides between the physical medium (sound, symbols, words, grammar) and the nonphysical message. The big beef is not about the latter but the former. Chomsky Read More ›

The Kingdom of Speech From Dwight Garner at New York Times on Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech: Mr. Wolfe, now 85, shows no sign of mellowing. His new book, “The Kingdom of Speech,” is his boldest bit of dueling yet. It’s a whooping, joy-filled and hyperbolic raid on, of all things, the theory of evolution, which he finds to be less scientific certainty than “a messy guess – baggy, boggy, soggy and leaking all over the place,” to put it in the words he inserts into the mouths of past genetic theorists. … Scientists will be likely to shrug at Mr. Wolfe’s lucid if overexcited synthesis of other people’s ideas and respond this way: We’ll get there, in terms Read More ›

Responding to Barry Arrington’s comment that if The Atlantic thinks the multiverse is reaching its sell by date, surely the food waste dumpster looms, physicist Rob Sheldon comments, — That was a pretty ambiguous article, ending with a question. Because if the multiverse is a philosophy that is rotting culture, then we must dig down to its root, and ask “where did it come from?” I think, and we could probably ask 3 philosophers and get 4 opinions, that this multiverse concept is exactly what you expect from materialism. That is, the alternative to multiverse is NOT a determined, deterministic, Newtonian-Laplacian world. Nor is it a QM world of shadowy probabilities becoming realized by observation. Rather, the alternative to multiverse Read More ›

From Steven Novella at Neurologica blog, in response to science writer Katie L. Burke, who argues that the term is counterproductive: Burke concludes that, rather than labeling something pseudoscience, we should describe exactly what it is and how it fails. This is a false choice, however. We can do both. I completely agree that we should not substitute a label for an actual description or analysis of something. This is good advice in any intellectual arena. This is just not what good skeptics and science communicators do. We do give a detailed analysis of exactly why a claim is wrong, and exactly what brand of pseudoscience it is. Suggesting we don’t betrays an unfamiliarity with the vast majority of popular Read More ›

The Kingdom of Speech In “Piecing together a celebrity scientist,” Tom Bartlett writes re Tom Wolfe’s recent book, The Kingdom of Speech might seem an unlikely project for a white-suited literary legend who hung out with Ken Kesey back in the day and later wrote best-selling novels in the social-realist vein. But it actually fits nicely alongside two other books in the Wolfe ouevre: The Painted Word, and From Bauhaus to Our House, both extended essays that send up pretension in the worlds of art and architecture, respectively. My paperback copy of The Painted Word bears the following cover blurb: “Another Blast at the Phonies!” Wolfe is on the hunt for phonies here, too. In the first half of the Read More ›

From biologist Katie L. Burke at American Scientist: The word pseudoscience is also used to claim a certain value system: scientism, or valuing and trusting science exclusively. Relatively few people ascribe to scientism, even if they like science. Many if not most people, at least in the United States, value science and see it as an important decision-making tool. But most people—even many scientists—are religious or simply not doggedly empirical, and believe in truths other than those derived from science. In such views, science is a tool with limits, and outside those limits lie beliefs, ideas, and knowledge gathered through art, philosophy, intuition, metaphysics, or culture. When science-affiliated factions use a term that inherently implies that people are ignorant or Read More ›

From Steven Hayward at Powerline: … this article actually appears in the current issue of Evolutionary Psychological Science: Duration of Cunnilingus Predicts Estimated Ejaculate Volume in Humans: a Content Analysis of Pornography Abstract Humans perform copulatory behaviors that do not contribute directly to reproduction (e.g., cunnilingus, prolonged copulation). We conducted a content analysis of pornography to investigate whether such behaviors might contribute indirectly to reproduction by influencing ejaculate volume—an indicator of ejaculate quality. We coded 100 professional pornography scenes depicting the same male actor copulating with 100 different females, affording control for between-male differences in estimated ejaculate volume. … (public access) Hayward: A few observations. First, it sounds like a fancy excuse for a bunch of pervs to watch a lot Read More ›

Weren’t hard enough on Tom Wolfe, author of The Kingdom of Speech From Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution Is True: This weekend, National Public Radio (NPR) host Scott Simon interviewed renowned author Tom Wolfe about Wolfe’s new book The Kingdom of Speech. You can hear the five-minute interview here. I just now listened to it, but several exercised readers emailed me yesterday complaining about Wolfe’s criticisms of evolution—criticisms that weren’t called out by Simon. Oh dear. “Anti-science” strikes again. Jerry treats us to a long rant about the facts of “evolution” (as he understands them). But if interviewers like Simon derailed the discussion by stopping for demands for fidelity to same we would never get to hear what Wolfe has Read More ›

From Guardian: Jared Taylor was prominently featured in a Hillary Clinton campaign ad released ahead of her speech denouncing the “alt-right” in Reno on Thursday and “appreciates” the Democratic presidential nominee for “calling attention to the message I have for America”. … Asked to define what the diffuse alt-right stands for, Taylor said there were “areas of disagreement”, but that “the central element of the alt-right is the position it takes on race.” Now here is where it gets interesting: For Taylor, and other members of the alt-right, race is an inescapable biological fact, which has consequences. “The races are not equal and equivalent. If a nation changes demographically, its society will change,” he said. But where does this stuff Read More ›

From Douglas Axe’s Undeniable: Only a very few research scientists have the opportunity to work against that disjoined view by openly studying life as something clearly and cleverly designed. I am one, and I can count the others on my fingers. There are more who would like to have ths opportunity, as shown every now and then by a paper th at gets past the policing system of an establishment science journal. A recent example is a description oft the architecture of the human hand as being “the proper design by the Creator to perform a multitude of daily tasks in a comfortable way.” Infractions like this almost always bring out the whistle-blowers, which almost always brings reprimand. Everyone must Read More ›

From Richard P. Grant at Guardian: How many science communicators do you know who will take the time to listen to their audience? Who are willing to step outside their cosy little bubble and make an effort to reach people where they are, where they are confused and hurting; where they need? Atul Gawande says scientists should assert “the true facts of good science” and expose the “bad science tactics that are being used to mislead people”. But that’s only part of the story, and is closing the barn door too late. Because the charlatans have already recognised the need, and have built the communities that people crave. More. How convenient that the world is divided neatly between “charlatans” and Read More ›

US presidential candidate Mike Pence is— says Phil Plait at Slate— a creationist: Which is pretty much like being a witch, I guess. You know anyone picked by Trump to be his running mate almost certainly will have a problem with established science, of course, but it turns out Pence is also a young Earth creationist. And one with a lot of conviction about it, too. In 2002, while a congressman from Indiana, he gave a short speech on the floor of Congress denying evolution, and used quite a few misleading, if not outright false, claims. It’s a curious feature of US politics, as seen from Canada, that American media—in the face of serious present-day problems—continue raising a stink about Read More ›

From physicist Rob Sheldon: I think if you read the popular press, it would seem that we are making progress–we have to, because that’s what justifies all the spending, all the suppression, all the politics. But if you speak to the leading scientists of any field, if you read the peer-reviewed literature, if you attend the seminars, there is a deep depression falling over science. For progress is the goddess of materialism, the resplendent queen that shares the dais with the stern king, the one described by the end of Jacques Monod’s book “Chance and Necessity”: “Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. Neither his Read More ›