Culture

Remember, from last Saturday, “A lot of science writers are tweeting about duck sex now, so that’s a plus.” Now, from Digg: On balance, Neil deGrasse Tyson has done an immense amount of work raising the public’s awareness around science. But peel back the veneer of his good fight against anti-science and you’re left with something that isn’t exactly pro-science. Starting a feud with B.o.B. over why the Earth isn’t flat doesn’t promote science, nor does it “convert” non-believers. Endlessly tweeting about scientifically incorrect things in ‘Star Wars’ isn’t getting anyone to thumb through a research paper. More. Gosh, Digg’s Cool score is pretty high. So is Tyson going to join Dawkins on the C list of retro science stars? Read More ›

Pro ID Steve Meyer. No ID Larry Krauss. As noted here, and live streamed: Note: The University of Toronto has been fairly open-minded in hosting these types of events. One remembers – with some distress – a disgraceful scene at U Texas Amarillo (2013) where the admin totally caved to some nondescript Darwin troll displaying his asshat. But, come to think of it, Toronto is a world class city (Economist ranks it best place to live) and it is a long way from Amarillo. Maybe it should stay a long way away. Presser below: Lawrence M. Krauss, Stephen C. Meyer and Denis O. Lamoureaux discuss origins of the universe in public event News Release Thursday, March 17, 2016 FOR IMMEDIATE Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News and Views: Stump your Darwinist friends by asking them to explain, in evolutionarily adaptive terms, biological features like the precise pattern of the maple leaf or of an angiosperm flower. “That’s a fantastically serious challenge to Darwinism,” says Discovery Institute biologist Michael Denton in this brief but delightful video conversation — a “nightmarish scenario.” Why? Because Darwinism by definition must justify such features, including the taxa-defining novelties, as having been seized upon by natural selection because they were adaptive. I mean, that pattern specifically and not some other. It’s the specificity that’s the problem. More. Worse, Denton is too old to be denied a degree or fired. Note: Some friends will find the challenge Read More ›

At Quillette, Brian Boutwell defends the concept of “race”: Evolution, as it applies to the social sciences, would have also made the list some decades back. But pioneers like E.O. Wilson, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, David Buss, Margot Wilson, and Martin Daly (as well as a number of others) have absorbed many punches and blows for us younger generation of scholars. Their efforts produced a sizeable evidentiary base regarding the role that evolutionary processes have played (and continue to play) in sculpting human psychology. Debates still rage, and controversies still exist, but nowadays arguing that natural selection played some role in molding human psychology will no longer jeopardize your career. Huh? Far from thinking evolutionary psychology would jeopardize a career, Read More ›

It’s in the air. Talk of replacing Darwinism. See, for example: Don’t let zoologists hog the stage at the upcoming Royal Society rethink evolution meet. Long overdue for a serious discussion. That said, some cures really are worse than the disease. From Gatestone Institute, embedded in an article on the current bout of suppression of media in prospective EU member Turkey, Turkish law professor Ayse Isil Karakas, both a judge and elected Deputy Head of the ECHR, said that among all member states, Turkey has ranked number one in the field of violations of free speech. “619 lawsuits of freedom of expression were brought at the ECHR between 1959 and 2015,” she said. ” 258 of them — almost half Read More ›

From Rachel Feltman at the Washington Post: Neil deGrasse Tyson, science aficionado. With over 5 million Twitter followers and two television programs, NDT probably has a wider audience than any science communicator in the world. He’s a brilliant astrophysicist and a fantastic spokesperson for all things cerebral. Zounds. The planet just might make it through the catastrophe anyhow. It started with this tweet: From Feltman again: Miriam Kramer from Mashable chimed in with ducks, because duck sex is literally the most terrifying thing on the planet and pretty much the only argument it takes to disprove intelligent design. More. That would only be an argument against intelligent design if the system didn’t work well, but it does. Not that Kramer Read More ›

… at the Royal Society’s November meet on evolution. From Suzan Mazur interviews eminent ethologist Patrick Bateson at Huffington Post: Sir Patrick Bateson: Zoologists Should Not ‘Hog’ Upcoming Royal Society Evolution Meeting Suzan Mazur: When will the speakers for the November Royal Society event be announced? Patrick Bateson: Very shortly, I think. Suzan Mazur: Can you say what the subject of your talk will be? Patrick Bateson: I want to talk about a subject that has interested me for many years, namely how the organism plays an active role in the evolution of its descendants through its adaptability. When the challenge is one never previously experienced by the organism’s ancestors, the mechanisms generating the plasticity may be inherited but the Read More ›

Slowly making the public aware that a lot of those soapboxes are rotting. A bit at a time. From ScienceDaily, US National Institutes of Health wants us all to know this: Four ways inheritance is more complex than Mendel knew Today, we know that inheritance is far more complex than what Mendel saw in his pea plants. Our scientists who track progress in genetics research funded by NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences share some of the things researchers have learned about how traits are passed from one generation to the next. More. Listed are: 1. Some of our genes come only from Mom. 2. The environment may have the potential to trigger molecular changes that pass from generation to Read More ›

And literacy. From qz: Nine- and 10-year-old children in England who participated in a philosophy class once a week over the course of a year significantly boosted their math and literacy skills, with disadvantaged students showing the most significant gains, according to a large and well-designed study (pdf). More than 3,000 kids in 48 schools across England participated in weekly discussions about concepts such as truth, justice, friendship, and knowledge, with time carved out for silent reflection, question making, question airing, and building on one another’s thoughts and ideas. More. Unlike many edu-advocacy findings, this one makes sense. Philosophy teaches us to think in a systematic way. It’s hard to see how that wouldn’t help with math and literacy. But Read More ›

From Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, written by a couple of paleo types: Stop writing “scientists believe” This one is for journalists and other popularizers of science. I see a lot of people writing that “scientists believe” this or that, when talking about hadrons or hadrosaurs or other phenomena grounded in evidence. Pet peeve: believing is what people do in the absence of evidence, or despite evidence. Scientists often have to infer, estimate, and even speculate, but all of those activities are grounded in evidence and reason, not belief.1 Utter nonsense, and the author himself, Mike Taylor, adds in a footnote, in mouseprint type: I realize that I am grossly oversimplifying – evidence, reason, and belief can interact in Read More ›

From Not Even Wrong: It turns out the multiverse does exist, just off the A76, 25 miles north of Dumfries in Scotland. It’s called the Crawick Multiverse and is now open 10 am to 4 pm. Admission is 5 pounds, but parking is free. … The idea seems to be that the park is a modern take on Neolithic monuments such as Stonehenge, which paid tribute to the movements of the Solar System – but this time the focus is on the latest advances in physics, such as chaos theory and the idea of parallel universes. More. But wait! Stonehenge was actually useful, wasn’t it? Figures these days they’d be building a monument to flapdoodle. See also: The multiverse: Where Read More ›

… Johannes Kepler freelanced as an astrologer. From Wonders and Marvels, : There were a variety of specializations within the field of astrology, from the very respectable basics of using heavenly observations to make general predictions about the weather, finances, etc., to the more controversial practice of casting a chart based on the moment a question was posed and then providing an answer according to celestial aspects.[ii] And Catherine was hardly the only monarch employing astrology or astrologers in decision-making. The severe and devout Philip II of Spain consulted them, even upon the creation of his tomb. And who has not heard of John Dee in connection with England’s Elizabeth I? It was not until the opening years of the Read More ›

Brought to you by the team that uncovered the water crisis in Flint, Michgan: Citizens in Flint could smell, taste and see that their water was contaminated almost immediately following the switch. But when they tried to bring their concerns to public officials’ attention, they were ignored, dismissed and ridiculed. (pause for sneering at the anti-science rubes) We became involved in April 2015 when Lee Anne Walters, a Flint resident and mother of a lead-poisoned child, contacted Dr. Marc Edwards, our research adviser at Virginia Tech. After the city detected elevated lead in the Walters family’s water, and she was refused help by MDEQ, Mrs. Walters took her case to EPA Region 5 employee Miguel Del Toral, who collaborated with Read More ›

From Templeton: Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth who has spent decades bringing spiritual insight to the public conversation through mass media, popular lectures and more than two dozen books, has been awarded the 2016 Templeton Prize. … He also boldly defends the compatibility of religion and science, a response to those who consider them necessarily separate and distinct. “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean,” he wrote in his book, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning.More. Naturally, we wondered, so from our files, we found: Britain’s chief rabbi on the Brit riots: Restore civil Read More ›

From the New York Times: DNA Under the Scope, and a Forensic Tool Under a Cloud Marina Stajic worked for nearly three decades as director of the forensic toxicology lab at the medical examiner’s office in New York City. Last week Dr.. Stajic, 66, filed a lawsuit against the city, claiming she had been forced into retirement last year in part because of a disagreement with her superiors over the accuracy of certain DNA tests. There is more at stake here than Dr. Stajic’s retirement. The cutting-edge technique at the center of this legal dispute, called low copy number DNA analysis, has transformed not just police work, but also a range of scientific fields including cancer biology, in vitro fertilization, Read More ›