Culture

Matzke’s a long-time commenter here, on behalf of the Darwin lobby. His posts may now reflect a different time zone. UD News received this message from LinkedIn: Nicholas Matzke is now Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) Fellow at The Australian National University More here. On the one hand, we collect site visits, and he helps provide them. On the other hand, they better keep an eye on their library at U Down There. He may find Wrong Thoughts. See also: Nick Matzke – Book Burner? Follow UD News at Twitter!

Anyone who can watch this February 2015 vid (“Astroturf and manipulation of media messages”) by news veteran Sharyl Atkisson and still have any respect for Wikipedia had better start figuring out what kind of idiot they are. For their own protection. Know thyself, and all that. (Wikipedia is only part of the astroturf story, but it’s a pretty sizeable part. And to think we thought pages on ID were a special bad case.) In this eye-opening talk, veteran investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson shows how astroturf, or fake grassroots movements funded by political, corporate, or other special interests very effectively manipulate and distort media messages. Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative journalist based in Washington D.C. She is currently writing a book Read More ›

Earlier today, I asked, why do naturalists grudgingly use the word “design”? As it happens, the problem Kirschner and Gerhart acknowledged in 2005 has been discussed elsewhere in the literature. Here are some notes I made on the subject a while back: “Evolution” is spoken of as if it were an agent, which it is—precisely—not supposed to be. Stephen Jay Gould exulted that Darwinism was a “fist as a battering ram,” [1] punching out the lights of design in life forms. Well then, consider this from New Scientist (2010): The remarkable diversity of life on Earth stands as grand testimony to the creativity of evolution. Over the course of 500 million years, natural selection has fashioned wings for flight, fins Read More ›

Alternet to the rescue! (We didn’t know it was this bad, by the way): We Can Save Atheism From the New Atheists Like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris There must be another way for nonbelievers than to transform into toxic know-it-alls. … As a philosophical tendency, the New Atheists were popularisers rather than innovators, using advances in biology and neuroscience to illustrate pretty well-worn arguments against religion. Indeed, in some crucial ways, they represent an intellectual step backward from a left that had recognised atheism as necessary but scarcely sufficient. As early as 1842, Marx dismissed those who trumpeted their disbelief to children as “assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the Read More ›

From Salvo, a comparison: Our Dystopia, the worst of both worlds Orwell’s vs. Huxley’s dystopias (1984 vs. Brave New World) Unsettlingly, Orwell is gaining on Huxley “So who wins? Huxley retains a slight advantage in my view because a perpetual 1984 reign of terror may be less viable over time than a BNW technotopia where few would be sober enough to rebel. But the growth in size and scope of government in recent decades has narrowed Huxley’s lead, and that is sobering. The attitude to science is interesting. Both novelists foresee their dystopias as inevitable outcomes of post-Enlightenment thinking. But significantly, while the World State of BNW is a technotopia, its interest in science apart from technology is quite limited. Read More ›

Hard on the heels of the Atlantic noting the resistance to valid new ideas in science, we hear from Inside Science that : Scientific Consensus Is Almost Never Wrong – Almost The man who shifted the geology paradigm was Alfred Wegener and he was never mentioned in my Geology 101 class. How this happened was discussed at a meeting of the Geology Society of America in Baltimore earlier this month. … No one knows how it happened, but likely one day Wegener simply looked at a globe and noted that you could slide South America right up against Africa. The bulge in Brazil near the city of Natal, would fit snugly into the bight of Africa near Cameroon. There are Read More ›

From The Atlantic: The strangeness of the geology and fossil evidence behind the theory of continental drift helped drive a half-century of resistance to the idea. Siddhartha Mukherjee documented in his book The Emperor of All Maladies how a fixation on the cure for a misconceived disease inhibited recognition of the complexity of cancer for a generation. It took decades before physicists came to grips with experiments that showed that the speed of light was constant for every observer—and even then, only the very young Einstein took that observation seriously enough to produce his first relativity theory. In the long run, it’s true: Reality imposes a final and authoritative judgment on the rights and wrongs of any idea. In the Read More ›

Recently, we looked at open theology in connection with the work of one-tme BioLogian Karl Giberson. “The Secret Sympathy: New Atheism, Protestant Fundamentalism, and Evolution” by Liam Jerrold Fraser for an argument for similarlity, from the open theology perspective: Abstract: In spite of the apparent differences between the two, a number of commentators have suggested an underlying sympathy between new atheism and protestant fundamentalism (e.g. De Botton 2012; Vernon 2007; Flew 2007; Robertson 2010) While such comparisons are intriguing, it not always clear whether they should be taken seriously, as they are frequently asserted without sustained argument. This paper seeks to ameliorate this lack of clarity through a textual study of new atheist and protestant fundamentalist texts. This textual study Read More ›

We usually end our religion coverage with the new atheists, but I’m in a rush this morning, and this is easy, so … via Jerry Coyne’s blog, here: I reported earlier (see here and here), that the Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF), as well as two seemingly reputable philosophical societies (the Analysis Trust and the Aristotelian Society), are sponsoring a conference in Oxford next March on “The Metaphysics of the Trinity: New Directions“. … The philosopher and atheist Anthony Grayling, Master of the New College of the Humanities and a supernumerary fellow at Oxford, didn’t like this conference at all, and expressed his displeasure. More. Of course, the Trinity is a philosophical concept, whether a self-satisfied ignoramus chooses to understand Read More ›

In “Why Darwinism is failing,” I noted that genome mapping changed the way we look at evolution: We are now much closer to the world of mechanism, not theory—closer to Popular Mechanics than to Philosophical Quarterly. The “single greatest idea anyone ever had” gives way to descriptions of mechanisms few expected or predicted—each of which might account for some evolution, though most of the picture is still missing. Darwin’s defenders, apart from endless terminology quibbles, respond by insisting that natural selection acting on random mutation (Darwinism) can find room for all of it somehow. They seem not to have noticed that all useful theories are bounded. A theory that explains everything explains nothing. By contrast, no one claims that horizontal gene transfer Read More ›

Further to Barry Arrington’s post, “Zachriel goes into insane denial mode,” which has garnered so far 170 comments, and doubtless counting: The biggest problem for Darwin’s supporters (paleo, neo, extended, whatever) today has nothing to do with Uncommon Descent or with any design hypothesis. The problem is genome mapping. Blame people like Francis Collins and Craig Venter. Darwinian evolution was always a theory, by which Darwinism (natural selection acting on random mutation generates huge levels of information, not noise) . It was the single greatest idea anyone ever had, and could be believed without evidence because “Darwinism is the only known theory that is in principle capable of explaining certain aspects of life.” (p. 287, Blind Watchmaker, 1986) And it has Read More ›

And that is what is killing it. From Yahoo News: Women’s rights, the foundations of capitalism and the warping of space-time can all take a backseat to meticulous descriptions of long-beaked finches, at least if public opinion is any measure. “On the Origin of Species,” Charles Darwin’s famous tome on evolution, has been voted the most influential academic book in history, according to an online survey answered by the public. The biology bombshell edged out competitors such as “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare”; “On the Vindication of the Rights of Women,” by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; “The Wealth of Nations,” by Adam Smith; and even physics classics such as the theory of general relativity by Albert Einstein and “A Brief Read More ›

O’Leary for News’ night job: Portrait of a social media addict … … who is brutally honest about what it feels like. Down with the selfie! Let’s be groupies! Cell photos can help us maintain relationships over time and distance. Can the internet make loved ones “immortal”? Attitudes to death are becoming increasingly weird in both the actual and the digital world. Is the internet guilty of killing high culture? By making everything equally free and accessible, the internet shone a spotlight on what we do want. And that is our responsibility. The law struggles to make sense of the internet Meanwhile, we can expect some strange decisions. Amazon’s “Workplace Hell,” Part II Jeff Lockhart was not “killed on the Read More ›

M. Anthony Mills tells us at RealClearScience that “Science Is Neither ‘Settled’ Nor ‘Skeptical’”: The problem is that science is both dogmatic and skeptical—or rather, neither fully dogmatic nor fully skeptical—a bewildering characteristic that allows science to advance. But the disfiguring lenses of popular journalism and political debate transform this healthy tension into an untenable disjunction. On the one hand, we are told: “The science is settled!” Question not. On the other: “Science is never settled!” Question all. Depending on the issue, say, climate change or GMOs, politicians and pundits on the left or right will opportunistically appeal to one or the other. Around here, we’ve noticed a lot of instances of dogmatic and few of skeptical. At least, if Read More ›

Here: But how did Nature become such an essential institution? In Making “Nature,” Melinda Baldwin charts the rich history of this extraordinary publication from its foundation in 1869 to current debates about online publishing and open access. This pioneering study not only tells Nature’s story but also sheds light on much larger questions about the history of science publishing, changes in scientific communication, and shifting notions of “scientific community.” Nature, as Baldwin demonstrates, helped define what science is and what it means to be a scientist. “Changes in scientific communication” now include staying friends with the entire Twittersphere. See: Scientific American may be owned by Nature but it is now run by Twitter Follow UD News at Twitter!