Culture

Robin Lloyd explains in “Woman science bloggers discuss pros and cons of online exposure” (Jan 18, 2011),

Blogging and other Web activities have allowed members of many marginalized communities to open previously locked media doors. But women still rely more on back channels and ask for less help than men do in the digital realm. This tendency and other issues of concern for women bloggers were discussed Sunday at the ScienceOnline2011 conference in Durham, N.C., primarily in a session called “Perils of blogging as a woman under a real name.”

Huh?

Experiences varied among attendees on whether blogging under a real name did indeed present perils. Miriam Goldstein (@oystersgarter), a doctoral student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and blogger at Deep-Sea News says she has never had a negative experience. But stories surfaced regarding inappropriate comments by male readers. And one attendee voiced concerns about being emailed by a reader who said he was near her campus and about to stop by her office. Christie Wilcox (@NerdyChristie), a doctoral student at the University of Hawaii-Manoa who blogs at Observations of Nerd, said she only received nasty comments when she blogged on the science of make-up—and the anger came from women. Tribalism takes many forms.

Well, if you have dealt with minor Darwinists, as I have, and are not one of their companions, you get to hear how some of them talk about women. But God or nature or the guardian angel of marriages – or somebody or other anyway – invented a back browser button and a delete key.

I guess the big time Darwinists approve of all that stuff. I’ve never heard of them telling those dudes to smarten up, or slide their keesters to the low class boozehole down the road. I once had a problem with a guy who professed support for ID who behaved like that, but I heard vaguely that he had his can kicked six ways to Sunday over it. Nothing to do with me.

Actually, we had a problem with Darwinmouth here in Canada, but Read More ›

Recently, historian of medicine Michael Flannery, author of World of Life, remarked on the lack of informational value of “99% of biological community disagrees with ID”: Cotton Mather (1663-1728), the New England divine, actually proposed a germ theory of medicine when 99.9% of the medical community disagreed with him. Conversely, Georg Ernst Stahl (1660-1734) proposed a “phlogiston” theory to explain combustion (burning) and rusting that nearly every scientist of the day (including Joseph Priestly [1733-1804]), hailed. More recently, when Joseph Goldberger (1874-1929) suggested that pellagra was a nutritional deficiency disease he was dismissed because the Thompson-McFadden Commission had “proven” pellagra to be infectious. History is replete with such examples. In fact, I would suggest that history indicates that consensus per Read More ›

No more smidgeons of evidence puffed up and blazoned everywhere, then retakes and this-time-it’s-trues, all in the gloriouscause of lighting a shining path to the future – endless worship at Darwin’s shrine! This Tiktaalik story, for example, mainly shows how much hasty-wrong-conclusion evolutionary science is simply a Darwin cult (too bad the cult practises human sacrifice too). Skinny: “Missing link “Tiktaalik wass actually Johnny come lately, the new kid in town. So where are the fish that turned into tetrapods? According to Nature, they must exist in the “‘ghost range’ — that is, a period of time during which members of the groups should have been present but for which no body fossils have yet been found.” Shubin’s arguments that Read More ›

It’s so hard to keep up with the way ID concepts zip around popular culture now. Doesn’t matter what people think of them, it seems they do. So load up on something a friend noticed: There was a TV programme in the UK over Christmas called ‘Unintelligent Design’. It was nothing to do with ID – in fact, it was a documentary about a situation comedy! – but it’s encouraging that the makers clearly assumed that most viewers would be familiar with the term. As I said, logging another find, I can remember googling “intelligent design” a decade ago and coming up with the Web sites of firms selling non-walloping window blinds. Now I am practically drowning in relevant info. Read More ›

Computational physicist Vlatko Vedral reviews Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregersen’s new collection of essays at physicsworld.com in “An inordinate fondness for bits” (Jan 11, 2011). In Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press 2010), he says,

Each article explores the hypothesis that information is at the root of everything. And I mean everything – from atoms to, perhaps, a deity.

Well, that last’ll get attention.

Hmmm. Are the contributors trying to mock the intelligent design guys, but they lost the plot somewhere? Well,

The collection starts with historical essays by philosopher of science Ernan McMullin and philosopher-theologian Philip Clayton, who write about materialism (the worldview that states that the only thing that really exists is matter and that all other phenomena are just interactions between different pieces of matter) and its receding hold on philosophy. The stage being set, Davies and fellow physicist Seth Lloyd then present a physics perspective on information. Davies is without a doubt one of the best popular-science writers in the world, and his article demonstrates why. In it, he explains why, in light of modern physics discoveries, materialism is not the most viable philosophy. Lloyd then expands on this idea by introducing the notion that the universe is a giant information-processing device. This is a view that has emerged from my own field of research – quantum computation – and Lloyd is one of its most prominent advocates.

Hold that thought. Materialism is “not the most viable philosophy”?

Well, why did Baptist U Baylor shut down Dembski and Gordon’s Polanyi Center in 2002 for sponsoring a conference where lots of learned folk said substantially the same thing? Why was it big time heresy among … the Baptists when atheist Vedral is okay with it?

Alas, theo-weirdness soon kicks in:
Read More ›

What happens when pop science usurps reason in the public sphere? Not always what you would expect. Here’s a great example, courtesy Jewish Canadian civil rights lawyer and publisher Ezra Levant: “Liberal Senator thinks spanking is the cause of all violence” (January 4, 2011)

“I’m not even kidding,” he begins.

Ez, no fear you’d be kidding. A fellow Norther, I accept that any lunacy may phosphoresce suddenly from our unelected Senate (a gravy heaven for past-their-sell-date partisans).

And, like, what hoo-hoo this time?

So she wants to make it a crime to spank your kids. That’s right: get a criminal record for it. And mandatory, government parenting classes.

Read her nutty speech here. My favourite part is when she cites an animal biologist to say no animals are naturally violent – it’s taught.

As if carnivores in nature would naturally negotiate with their dinner-to-be, as opposed to hunting them.

Wowza, Ez. Wonder what other animal biologists will say – never mind fans of Taylor Mitchell (folk singer killed by coyote attack). What restrains a wild animal from gratuitous violence is the need to fill the belly quickly and move on.

Now, what about Christians, Ez? Where we come in?

He goes on:
Read More ›

On a recent list of the 25 most influential atheists, three key cosmologists come up.

# 5 Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking is one of the world’s great theoretical physicists. His trade-press book A Brief History of Time took the world by storm in the late 1980s. In it he raised the prospect of a self-creating universe, which he has since developed at length. The theme he keeps pounding is the extraneousness of the God hypothesis.

Wrote a bit about him. With his new take on a God-free M-theory, he is now mainly famous for staying famous. But that’s still pretty famous. Read More ›

The opening of  the current version of the Wikipedia article, “Evolution as theory and fact,” (with links and references removed) reads: The statement “evolution is both a theory and a fact” is often seen in biological literature. Evolution is a “theory” in the scientific sense of the term “theory”; it is an established scientific model that explains observations and makes predictions through mechanisms such as natural selection. When scientists say “evolution is a fact”, they are using one of two meanings of the word “fact”. One meaning is empirical: evolution can be observed through changes in allele frequencies or traits of a population over successive generations. Another way “fact” is used is to refer to a certain kind of theory, Read More ›

In “Mind in the Mirror,” Raymond Tallis reflects on V.S. Ramachandran’s The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human, “Neuroscience can explain many brain functions, but not the mystery of consciousness”:

The subtitle of V.S. Ramachandran’s latest book prompts a question: Why should “A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human” be of particular interest? The answer is obvious if you believe, as so many do, that humans are essentially their brains. When a brain scientist speaks, we should pay attention, for “What makes us human” then boils down to what makes our brains special, compared with those of other highly evolved creatures.

RaymondTallis

Dr. Ramachandran and many others, including prominent philosophers like Daniel Dennett and Patricia and Paul Churchland, promise that neuroscience will help us understand not only the mechanism of brain functions (such as those that coordinate movement or underpin speech) but also key features of human consciousness. As of yet, though, we have no neural explanation of even the most basic properties of consciousness, such as the unity of self, how it is rooted in an explicit past and explicit future, how experience is owned and referred to a self, and how we are, or feel that we are, voluntary agents. Neuroscience, in short, has no way of accommodating everyday first-person being.

No, and neuroscience is often invoked to explain things it doesn’t:

Here, as elsewhere, the intellectual audit trail connecting the neuroscience to the things he claims to explain is fragile. For a start, mirror neurons have been observed not just in monkeys and humans but also in swamp sparrows, enabling them to learn to sing the songs they hear. They are admirable birds, but their cultural achievements are modest. Moreover, the existence in humans of a distinct mirror neuron system with properties such as “mind-reading” is still contested. At any rate, the claim that mirror neurons are a “specialized circuitry for social cognition” in humans is a death-defying leap beyond the humble “Monkey see, Monkey do” function they were first observed to have.

Tallis describes himself, at his own site, as a humanist. Read More ›

Bit of both. Neuroskeptic offers:

In the spirit of the 9 Circles of Scientific Hell, and inspired by the evidence showing that scientific peer reviewers agree only slightly more often than they would by chance, here’s a handy tool for randomly generating your review.

How’s this one:

4. Cite Me, Me, Me!: The problem with this paper is that it doesn’t reference the right previous work… yours. Unless the authors change it to cite everything you’ve written in the past 10 years, they can get lost. If they do, the paper will be immediately accepted – to reject it would harm your citation count.

Some readers may wish to try it on their work in progress or on this week’s grocery flyer.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

More peer review stories: Read More ›

Cosmologist Paul Davies suggested, in a recent essay (“Is Anybody Out There?” Wall Street Journal (April 10, 2010), another way of finding space aliens: Another physical object with enormous longevity is DNA. Our bodies contain some genes that have remained little changed in 100 million years. An alien expedition to Earth might have used biotechnology to assist with mineral processing, agriculture or environmental projects. If they modified the genomes of some terrestrial organisms for this purpose, or created their own micro-organisms from scratch, the legacy of this tampering might endure to this day, hidden in the biological record. Which leads to an even more radical proposal. Life on Earth stores genetic information in DNA. A lot of DNA seems to Read More ›

Benedict Carey reports,

One of psychology’s most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events.The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. Advance copies of the paper, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and have generated a mixture of amusement and scorn.

– “Journal’s Paper on ESP Expected to Prompt Outrage”, New York Times (January 5, 2011)

We hear, of course, the familiar “craziness, pure craziness. I can’t believe a major journal is …”

ESP may be the victim of a sort of materialism in science that has long since functioned more as a stopper on science than a filter. Briefly, there have been many honest studies that confirm the existence of some sort of entanglement, as Mario Beauregard and I discuss in some detail in The Spiritual Brain.

ESP is a psi phenomenon, the apparent ability of some humans and perhaps animals, to consistently score above chance in controlled studies of mental influences on events. It is seen in such phenomena as extrasensory perception and psychokinesis, and is a low-level effect, to be sure, but efforts to disconfirm it have failed.

It isn’t popular.

These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one’s ideas so as to fit these new facts in.—Artificial intelligence pioneer A. M. Turing, quoted in A. M. Turing, excerpt from “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59, no. 236 (1950), reprinted in Hofstadter and Dennett, Mind’s I, p. 66.

And it seems nothing much has changed since Turing’s (1912-1954) day.

Carey mentions an argument against study of the psi effect which was once offered against Newton’s laws of gravity: No mechanism is proposed. That’s not a very good argument when there is persistent evidence for a small effect. We still don’t have a definitive mechanism for gravity, but Newton’s laws proved outstandingly useful in subsequent decades and were accepted on that basis, mechanism or no.

Lets hope that study wins out over furore and posturing.

See also: Read More ›

It’s amazing what one can learn about the heroes of materialist science from their friends. In “Leftist Artists and Their Totalitarian Friends” ( c2c Journal: Canada’s Journal of Ideas , January 4, 2011) commentator Michael Coren quotes friends of the early twentieth century Darwin popularizer, sci-fi novelist H. G. Wells: In describing his fellow socialist and some-time friend, George Bernard Shaw wrote of Wells, “Multiply the total by ten; square the result. Raise it again to the millionth power and square it again; and you will still fall short of the truth about Wells – yet the worse he behaved the more he was indulged; and the more he was indulged the worse he behaved.” [ … ] At heart, Read More ›

Writer and philosopher Roger Scruton hasn’t much use for the lit crit fad known as “literary Darwinism”, popularized by the Denis Dutton. At Big Questions Online, he asks, “Only Adapt: Can science explain art, music and literature?” (December 9, 2010).

My sense is that a respectable science would not try, and the evolutionary psychology he quite properly deflates is not a science anyway, it is an artifact of a materialist culture and fully understandable as such. Scruton notes,

Over the last two decades, however, Darwinism has invaded the field of the humanities, in a way that Darwin himself would scarcely have predicted. Doubt and hesitation have given way to certainty, interpretation has been subsumed into explanation, and the whole realm of aesthetic experience and literary judgement has been brought to heel as an “adaptation,” a part of human biology which exists because of the benefit that it confers on our genes. No need now to puzzle over the meaning of music or the nature of beauty in art. The meaning of art and music reside in what they do for our genes. Once we see that these features of the human condition are “adaptations,” acquired perhaps many thousands of years ago, during the time of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we will be able to explain them. We will know what art and music essentially are by discovering what they do.


[ … ]


… the whole “adaptation” approach to human phenomena is topsy-turvy. It involves a mechanical application, case by case, of the theory of natural selection, as supplemented by modern genetics. It tells us that, if a trait is widespread across our species, then it has been “selected for.” But this means only that the trait is not maladaptive, that it is not something that would disappear under evolutionary pressure. And that is a trivial observation. Everything that exists could be said to be not dysfunctional. That tells us nothing about how the thing in question came to exist. Read More ›

Animal cell, Wikimedia Commons In (surprisingly) the New Scientist, Brian J. Ford observes, “The secrets of intelligence lie within a single cell” (April 25, 2010). For me, the brain is not a supercomputer in which the neurons are transistors; rather it is as if each individual neuron is itself a computer, and the brain a vast community of microscopic computers. But even this model is probably too simplistic since the neuron processes data flexibly and on disparate levels, and is therefore far superior to any digital system. If I am right, the human brain may be a trillion times more capable than we imagine, and “artificial intelligence” a grandiose misnomer. I think it is time to acknowledge fully that living cells Read More ›