Culture

Earth still in orbit, last we heard. Recently, I (O’Leary for News) have had skeptical things to say about D. S. Wilson’s Evolution Institute’s anticipated triumphal march for “evolutionary theory” throughout all disciplines in the21st century.* That said, I came across an interesting post on the site by science writer Dan Jones (The Philosopher In The Mirror) standing up to Jerry “Why Evolution Is True” Coyne. Coyne wishes to claim that religious belief in general leads to terrorism and that those who offer a more focused inquiry are stooges. In fact, it’s easy to show that Coyne is attacking a strawman. He would have you believe that radicalisation researchers are a bunch of “self-flagellating liberals” who ignore the role of Read More ›

Further to Jonathan Marks on why “evolutionary” “psychology” is neither (Marks: And finally, I can’t shake the feeling that the methodologies I have encountered in evolutionary psychology would not meet the standards of any other science.): Also from the Evolution Institute, Historians will look back upon the 21st century as a time when the theory of evolution, confined largely to the biological sciences during the 20th century, expanded to include all human-related knowledge. As we approach the 1/6th mark of the 21st century, this intellectual revolution is already in full swing. A sizeable community of scientists, scholars, journalists, and their readers has become fully comfortable with the statement “Nothing about X makes sense except in the light of evolution”, where X Read More ›

Over at The Best Schools, James Barham introduces an updated preface by Pierre van den Berghe, author of an older classsic on the ways academic life subverts honest enquiry: 1. Perhaps the most glaring change facing job-seeking PhD holders is a sharp deterioration in career opportunities and employment conditions. A glut of PhDs in many fields produced a shift from a seller’s to a buyer’s market. When AG appeared in 1970, US academia was approaching the end of its enormous expansion, becoming the juggernaut of world higher education. PhD production continued unabated, but job numbers stagnated or even contracted. Colleges and universities began to restrict tenure-track positions, and created a rapidly growing, semi-nomadic proletariat of instructors and lecturers on one-year, Read More ›

A classic in the state of pop science writing today, from Yahoo News: Un-intelligent Design: No Purpose for Vestigial Ear-Wiggling Reflex Around the human ear are tiny, weak muscles that once would have let evolutionary ancestors pivot their ears to and fro. Today, the muscles aren’t capable of moving much — but their reflex action still exists. These muscles are vestigial, meaning they’re remnants of evolution that once had a purpose but no longer do. However, humans may be able to repurpose these useless muscles for their own uses, according to Steven Hackley, a psychologist at the University of Missouri and author of a new review of research on the forgotten muscles in the journal Psychophysiology. For one, these muscles Read More ›

Philosopher and photographer Laszlo Bencze writes to say, The Wall Street Journal had an article today (28 Oct.) on a game called Compose Yourself created by a cellist named Philip Sheppard “who is passionate about showing people that they are fundamentally musical, and he wants to make learning about music, and composing in particular, more approcachable for children.” The game consists of 60 transparent overlays sized about 4” x 6” that contain short musical phrases of a few notes. These are to be laid side to side to create compositions. The cards can be inverted or flipped over so each one codes for four separate phrases. Each variation is numbered. So when a series of cards are laid down the Read More ›

Darwinians must technically say no, as life is not about anything and does not progress to any purpose. But here are some predictions offered by Michael Ruse, Joseph Graves, Briana Pobiner, Stephen Stearns, and Chris Stringer: The scientists we spoke to uniformly withheld from making specific predictions, but they were all agreed that evolution hasn’t stopped. “It’s definitely happening,” asserts Professor Graves, “but as human beings, we’re not in a lab setting. There are just too many complexities to make a scientifically meaningful prediction.” So evolution is happening, they say. They also say there is no way to know. Follow UD News at Twitter!

The last time we heard from evolutionary psychologist David Barash, he was fronting an anti-ID theory. You’d think he’d have enough trouble at home. In a world where social sciences are racing to the bottom, evolutionary psychology is leading the race. Look, there is a world of science out there, and if these guys would rather spin Tales from the Savannah, what are we supposed to do about it? Too bad if the Large Hadron Collider and the Pluto flyby got in their way. Now we learn from Barash at Aeon: Many scientific findings run counter to common sense and challenge our deepest assumptions about reality: the fact that even the most solid objects are composed at the subatomic level of mostly Read More ›

Nothing to do with the state of the evidence. Still, Ridley’s new evolution book maddens the reviewer: From a New Scientist review of science writer Matt Ridley’s new book, The Evolution of Everything: How a creationist instinct stops us seeing evolution everywhere FOR most of history, humans were instinctive creationists. Faced with the intricate perfection of an eye or a wing, they jumped to the conclusion that it was designed by an intelligent creator, aka God. Then along came Darwin and proved the obvious wrong. The appearance of design is an illusion; biological order arises by slow, undirected trial-and-error coupled with natural selection, aka evolution. Bu the evidence simply isn’t showing that Darwin’s mechanism Darwinism (natural selection acting on random Read More ›

(O’Leary for News’s regular night job) Edward Snowden: “When you collect everything, you understand nothing.” Mass spying on citizens “fundamentally changes the balance of power between the citizen and the state.” (On the eve of the new Snowden-themed Bond film, Spectre. ) Writing for the internet is like writing on water The internet may be forever; our pages are not. Is our e-mail private? No. What protects most of us is that our words are lost among the trillions no one is looking for. Does new media make us value democracy less? Maybe, and facing elections and upheavals around North America and Europe, it’s bad news. Whoa, Rosie! Twitter is not a family conference! We all have family problems, and let’s Read More ›

Jonathan McLatchie writes to mention that University of Toronto biochemist Larry Moran is hot on the trail again, this time in response to McLatchie’s vid (below) “Is ID a science?” I agree that many ID proponents try to use the science way of knowing to prove that creator gods must have built some complex molecular structures inside modern cells. They try to use evidence and they try to use rational thinking to arrive at logical conclusions. That qualifies as science, in my opinion, even though ID proponents fail to make their case. They don’t have the evidence and their logic is faulty. It’s science but it’s bad science. Lot’s of genuine scientists also publish bad science. Unclear what Dr. Moran Read More ›

Maybe. This vid on intelligent design vs creationism has brought up PZ Myers, as well as Larry Moran, Darwin’s tenure tag team. McLatchie keeps this up and we could organize a Darwin beauty pageant. O’Leary for News will serve coffee and iced cupcakes. Vid: One minute apologist: What is the difference between ID and creationism? See also: Vince Torley’s Larry Moran commits the genetic fallacy Follow UD News at Twitter!

For two hours. Maybe they should all go to relationships counselling twice a week. Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

From New York mag: In a new paper, “Humans As Superorganisms,” Peter Kramer and Paola Bressan of the University of Padua describe a typical human body as a teeming mass of what they call “selfish entities.” Picture a tree warped by fungus, wrapped with vines, dotted at the base with mushrooms and flowers, and marked, midway up, by what the tree thought the whole time was just a knot but turns out to be a parasitic twin. This is the human superorganism — not the tree, not the tangled mess of things doing battle with it, but the whole chunk of forest — and Kramer and Bressan would like to place it at the very center of the way we Read More ›

Here. A reader writes to draw our attention to the Third Way of evolution: The vast majority of people believe that there are only two alternative ways to explain the origins of biological diversity. One way is Creationism that depends upon intervention by a divine Creator. That is clearly unscientific because it brings an arbitrary supernatural force into the evolution process. The commonly accepted alternative is Neo-Darwinism, which is clearly naturalistic science but ignores much contemporary molecular evidence and invokes a set of unsupported assumptions about the accidental nature of hereditary variation. Neo-Darwinism ignores important rapid evolutionary processes such as symbiogenesis, horizontal DNA transfer, action of mobile DNA and epigenetic modifications. Moreover, some Neo-Darwinists have elevated Natural Selection into a Read More ›

Did we miss this? Johns Hopkins history of medicine prof Nathaniel Comfort offers, in Nature, a decidedly dismissive review of the second volume of Richard Dawkins’ autobiography, Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science: A curious stasis underlies Dawkins’s thought. His biomorphs are grounded in 1970s assumptions. Back then, with rare exceptions, each gene specified a protein and each protein was specified by a gene. The genome was a linear text — a parts list or computer program for making an organism —insulated from the environment, with the coding regions interspersed with “junk”. Today’s genome is much more than a script: it is a dynamic, three-dimensional structure, highly responsive to its environment and almost fractally modular. Genes may Read More ›