Culture

A group of communications profs says it has the opposite of its intended effect: National Geographic’s March 2015 cover story provided a thoughtful discussion around the question of “Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?” The actual cover, however, simply said “The War on Science.” That article never actually uses the term “war on science” but claiming the existence of a such a conflict has become quite common. There are books to tell readers “who’s waging it,” “why it matters,” and “what we can do about it” and many opinion articles and editorials in reputable publications describing its battles. … … our new research suggests that Americans may see scientists’ choice to accuse conservatives of waging a “war on science” Read More ›

The release of the Top Ten over hyped AI stories of 2019 has led the way for further promising ones, including this one, says engineer and philosopher Jonathan Bartlett: Was the machine cleverand sneaky or was it just programmed wrong? You decide. First, just to be clear, at Mind Matters we have nothing against AI. Quite the opposite, our writers include professors at the forefront of AI research. But we do have something against AI hype. Media seemingly can’t help portraying today’s high-tech world as a remake of I, Robot (2004), starring you and me. One result is that some members of the public may completely misunderstand what AI is and does.… TechCrunch published an article on December 31, 2018, Read More ›

What, the “single best idea anyone ever had” (philosopher Daniel Dennett on Darwin ) is now comparable to gravity? Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon would take issue with that. Yes, a psychologist seems to think Darwinian natural selection is indeed a force of nature like gravity: Natural selection, one of the fundamental processes of evolution, has something in common with gravity: A public relations problem. At one level of analysis, natural selection, like gravity, looks like a chump. When you’re looking up close at the tiny bits of stuff that go into making humans—the sequences of DNA that constitute the human genome—and how they came to be arranged in the manner that they are, natural selection doesn’t seem to have done Read More ›

You can’t ground a discussion in basic reality, says one commentator, “without somebody, sooner rather than later, confidently pronouncing something like “our universe is just one of many universes that are constantly evolving and forever changing.” He offers a response, courtesy Regis Nicoll: Everett imagined that each split created a parallel universe in which particles existed as mirror images of themselves. The result is that every possible state of a particle is realized somewhere. “Taking many-worlds to its logical conclusion, cosmology consultant Marcus Chown quipped, ‘Elvis didn’t die on that loo eating a burger but is still alive in an infinite number of places.’ “The problems with many-worlds are many, including where all of these parallel universes exist, how an Read More ›

Starting at the 38-minute mark: Steve Meyer is the author of Darwin’s Doubt See also: StTeve Meyer on the information enigma in evolution Follow UD News at Twitter! Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

Says Karsten Pultz, author of Exit Evolution: Recently, I wrote a piece for UD describing how a Danish Christian newspaper, Kristeligt Dagblad, is obviously biased in favour of evolution whenever it covers the creation vs. Evolution issue. In the article “Something Is Rotten In The State Of Denmark” I aired my frustration over the fact that I, as an ID proponent, was deprived the opportunity to respond to allegations about me promoting creationism, featured in the newspaper. I had submitted an article to the newspaper where I thoroughly explained how ID differs from creationism, and how the labelling of ID as creationism done by evolutionists, is a strategic distraction executed in order to avoid addressing the huge amount ofproblems in Read More ›