Culture

“Are we all travelling “incognito“, my latest at MercatorNet June 21, 2011), looks at Baylor College of Medicine neuroscientist David Eagleman’s book Incognito, focusing on his proposed neuroscience fix for criminal law:

“Those who break the social contracts need to be warehoused, but in this case the future is of more importance than the past.”

“Warehoused”? How, exactly, is that a reform? We are also told that a criminal’s “actions are sufficient evidence of a brain abnormality, even if we don’t know (and maybe will never know) the details.” Yes, but one may as well say that a criminal’s “actions are sufficient evidence of infestation by Square Circle Disease, even if we don’t know (and maybe will never know) the details.”

More. Also:

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Darrel Ray thinks that atheists have better sex lives, citing his study to prove it:

But devoutly religious people rated their sex lives far lower than atheists. They also admitted to strong feelings of guilt afterwards.

Strict religions such as Mormons ranked highest on the scale of sexual guilt. Their average score was 8.19 out of 10. They were followed closely behind by Jehovah’s Witness, Pentecostal, Seventh Day Adventist, and Baptist.

Catholics rated their levels of sexual guilt at 6.34 while Lutherans came slightly lower at 5.88 . In contrast, atheists and agnostics ranked at 4.71 and 4.81 respectively.

It’s quite true that devoutly religious people feel bad if they do something they think is bad. Some sources are more unsettled by people who aren’t like that.

Ray is best known as the discoverer of the God virus.

On the other hand, Read More ›

You can tell how much the notion of the multiverse pervades popular culture when a media release for the latest woo-woo train advises, Patricia McLaine’s Cosmic Conspiracy explores the common humanity that we all share as members of the Universe or Multiverse, which intricately connects us all. It is a result of the intense emotion generated within the “Mass Mind” that psychics, “regardless of the level of awareness or education” are far more in tune with—picking up negative patterns then positive ones—in predicting future world events.When asked by journalist Hal Jacques to make world predictions for The Star in January of 1977, … Twenty-five years ago, who knew the term “multiverse” so well? File with: What the Bleep Do We Read More ›

In “Scientists put out call for respect” (Sydney Morning Herald, June 20, 2011), Phillip Coorey reports,

Australia’s scientific community will launch a campaign tonight aimed at redressing what it says is the damage to science which is being caused by climate change denial. Read More ›

Here, we’ve written a fair bit about peer review, but so have lots of sources. Here’s E. Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance (climate Armageddon skeptics),

It now arises that the failures occur not just in climate science but across the board, as the article “Classical Peer Review: An Empty Gun” (published in a peer-reviewed journal!), summarized and commented on here, reveals. Writes Richard Smith in his study of peer review published in Breast Cancer Review:… almost no scientists know anything about the evidence on peer review. It is a process that is central to science – deciding which grant proposals will be funded, which papers will be published, who will be promoted, and who will receive a Nobel prize. We might thus expect that scientists, people who are trained to believe nothing until presented with evidence, would want to know all the evidence available on this important process. Yet not only do scientists know little about the evidence on peer review but most continue to believe in peer review, thinking it essential for the progress of science. Ironically, a faith based rather than an evidence based process lies at the heart of science.

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Steve Fuller, reviewing Conor Cunningham’s Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Eerdmans, 2011) for Times Higher (24 March 2011), comments,

Let me start by conceding the central, most controversial thesis argued in this book: that neo-creationism and ultra-Darwinism are opposing offshoots of the same modernist root. Both read the Bible literally and take nature itself to possess a crackable code. Neither wishes science and theology to exist in separate spheres. To be sure, William Dembski and Richard Dawkins, say, differ radically on what should happen once the two are brought together: one infers natural theology, the other atheistic naturalism. These are the terms on which the ongoing “Darwin wars” are fought.My disagreement starts with the suggestion in the subtitle that Read More ›

In his new book, The Science of Evil, developmental psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen thinkshe has the mysteryof evil worked out, or so Katherine Bouton explains, in “Book sees evil as zero empathy: Baron-Cohen’s study could stir controversy” (Halifax Chronicle-Herald, June 18, 2011):

“My main goal is to understand human cruelty, replacing the unscientific term ‘evil’ with the scientific term ‘empathy,’ ” he writes at the beginning of the book, which might be seen as expanding on the views on empathy expressed in his 1997 book, Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind (Bradford). Evil, he notes, has heretofore been defined in religious terms (with the concept differing in the major world religions), as a psychiatric condition (psychopathology) or, as he puts it, in “frustratingly circular” terms: “He did x because he is truly evil”).[ … ]

“What leads an individual’s Empathizing Mechanism to be set at different levels?” Baron-Cohen asks. “The most immediate answer is that it depends on the functioning of a special circuit in the brain, the empathy circuit” …

Must be somewhere near the charity neurons but far from the God circuit, right?

Baron-Cohen reckons without my friend Five Feet of Fury, who took his test and found it flawed: Read More ›

in an “everything on the table….let the students decide” approach, says HuffPost. Could she possibly be channelling her own base? Michele Bachmann expressed skepticism of evolution at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, Friday. “I support intelligent design,” Bachmann told reporters following her speech at the conference, CNN reports. “What I support is putting all science on the table and then letting students decide. I don’t think it’s a good idea for government to come down on one side of scientific issue or another, when there is reasonable doubt on both sides.” “I would prefer that students have the ability to learn all aspects of an issue,” Bachmann said. And that’s why I believe the federal government should not be Read More ›

In the beginning was Darwin, and he created Science. Incluyding, to hear devotee Jerry Coyne tell it, he created biogeogaphy. This naturally irritates science historian Michael Flannery, who knows the facts: It should be stated at the outset that what Coyne really means by “evolution” in his title is Darwinism. That cleared up, Coyne predictably goes to the man himself: “he [Darwin] realized that evolution was necessary to explain not just the origins and forms of plants and animals but also their distribution across the globe. These distributions raise a lot of questions . . . .” (p. 95) Darwin, he goes on to say, pondered these questions and devoted two chapters to the subject in Origin (chapters XI and Read More ›

Specifically, the “genes” that make someone a bad driver or unfaithful spouse do not exist. Geneticist Steve Jones points out that we are just not finding the genes headline writers need.

2011 being the centenary of the death of Darwin’s cousin eugenicist Francis Galton (one consequence of Darwinism as a public religion is the innumerable saints’ days), British geneticist Steve Jones tackles the unlovely subject of “The man who drew up the ‘ugly map’ of Britain”* (BBC News , 16 June 2011), offering some interesting comments, especially on the role of popular media in creating an impression of genetic determinism which he says, folks, just ain’t there:

We know of more than 50 different genes associated with height.

That has not percolated into the public mind, as the Google search for “scientists find the gene for” shows. The three letter word for – the gene FOR something – is the most dangerous word in genetics. As Galton did not realise and as headline writers still do not, it is almost entirely ambiguous.

Yet far more people read headlines about the gay gene, the fat gene, and the “vote conservative” gene than read genetics papers.  Read More ›

One of the most common objections to design thought is the idea that it is about the improper injection of the alien  supernatural into the world of science. (That is itself based on a strawman misrepresentation of design thought, as was addressed here a few days ago.)

However, there is an underlying root, a common distortion of the origins of modern science, which Nancy Pearcey rebutted in a  2005 sleeper article as headlined, that deserves a UD post of its own.

Let’s clip the article:

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Recently, kairosfocus posted some thoughts on quoting materialists saying what they actually think when they talk to each other or what they assume are sympathetic audiences (“quote mining”), a practice they very much dislike. After all, when kairosfocus quotes them to people for whose ears the frank admissions were not intended, he is necessarily quoting them “out of context.” That the materialists mean it and that the rest of us might be best off to know that they mean it is beside the point, of course.

He has also asked why the Darwin vs. design debate has become so poisonous and polarized. A critical factor is the easy money tied up in Darwinism – well-paid lecture room mediocrities fronting unsubstantiated ideas to a captive audience until retirement.

Darwinists may not think they’re well-paid but if viewpoint productivity mattered, Read More ›

At Evolution News & Views today, our JonathanM describes (June 16, 2011) an encounter with a true blue dyed-in-the-wool slam dunk total believing Darwinist (the Aristotle of Morris, Minnesota, US): Colliding With The Pharyngula: My Encounter With PZ MyersMyers did mention the questions at the beginning of his lecture (describing yours truly as a “flaming moron”). He did not, however, despite promising to do so, provide satisfactory rebuttals to the questions at all during the course of his presentation (though he did attempt a response to one of the ten questions). During the course of the Q&A, I raised a question concerning the lack of congruence between homology and developmental pathways, citing several papers to substantiate my claims (which I Read More ›

In an effort to discredit a group hosting climate change skeptics, along with the skeptics themselves, the The Guardian‘s Leo Haig, an environment blogger charges,

That these characters are meeting up once again to thrash out these issues is no great revelation or surprise. After all, they wear their agenda with pride and promulgate it in the media and on the internet week in week out.What is more surprising, perhaps, is that some of them are happy to accept the invitation of an organisation that has promoted intelligent design and seems to tread a very fine line indeed between fighting “Islamic fascism” and outright Islamophobia. Are these speakers happy – or even aware – of the company they will be keeping this weekend? Is it fair to assume they did their homework on this group before accepting their invitation to be flown to LA to participate in the event? (10 June 2011)

Promoted intelligent design? Maybe so, if you consider that one of the current topics is Read More ›

Does ” Oxbridge-on-Thames” provide a test of the social power of new atheism?

Here, we noted that AC Graying was beginning to take heat, alongside Richard Dawkins, for refusing to debate American Christian apologist William Lane Craig, as other new atheists have done. He’s in the news again, as the organizer of a private, very expensive private New College of the Humanities (18,000 quid a year), where Richard Dawkins will have a key role: Read More ›