Culture

A historian draws our attention this post from late 2016, a reflection on the survival of classical learning during the Christian era, in response to “Skep,” an energetic atheist blogger: But the usual way that those who are forced to admit that there were, in fact, many medieval natural philosophers studying all kinds of proto-scientific ideas, and doing so in the tradition of the Greeks and Romans and their Islamic successors, deal with this awkward fact is to claim that these poor scholars were cowed by the terrible restrictions of the Church and tightly constrained in what they could explore. Which, right on cue, “Skep” proceeds to do: “The fact is there weren’t a lot of scientists around for the Read More ›

Post World War II, scientists studying origins, sensed a moral mission to tell the story in order to encourage us to be better people. The close-knit hunter-gatherer clans that represented all humanity co-operated for survival and were chock full of moral lessons for us all. But was it true?: Readers and reviewers lumped Morris, Ardrey and Lorenz together as promoting a powerful new vision of humans as animals. (To be fair, each author saw different moral systems and imperatives emerging from their research, but these nuances mattered less to readers than their shared zoomorphic vision.) The view of humans as specialised animals carried implications for who among the scientists could truly judge what it meant to be human. If our Read More ›

We run this story as a public service. Sometimes the pressure might get to you but it is almost never entirely that person’s fault and this is not the way to go about dealing with it: Graduate student Zijie Wang has pleaded guilty to poisoning a co-worker in the chemistry labs at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. He had been dosing his co-worker’s food with N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA), used to induce cancer in rats, which initially made the victim vomit and gave him diarrhoea. The victim – who survived and testified in court on 2 November – subsequently installed a camera on his desk, and recorded Wang pipetting a substance into his food. Wang is due to be sentenced on 11 Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Humans have extraordinarily large brains, which have tripled in size in the last few million years. Other animals also experienced a significant, though smaller, increase in brain size. These increases are puzzling, because brain tissue is energetically expensive: that is, a smaller brain is easier to maintain in terms of calories. Building on existing research on learning, Muthukrishna and colleagues analytically and computationally modeled the predictions of the cultural brain hypothesis and found that this theory not only explains these increases in brain size, but a variety of other relationships with group size, learning strategies, knowledge and life history. The theory relies on the idea that brains expand to store and manage more information. Brains expand in response Read More ›

There may be an additional, more sinister explanation for the ongoing reproducibility crisis, he suggests: A stunning report published in the Annals of Internal Medicine concludes that researchers often make “inappropriate requests” to statisticians. And by “inappropriate,” the authors aren’t referring to accidental requests for incorrect statistical analyses; instead, they’re referring to requests for unscrupulous data manipulation or even fraud. The authors surveyed 522 consulting biostatisticians and received sufficient responses from 390. Then, they constructed a table (shown below) that ranks requests by level of inappropriateness. For instance, at the very top is “falsify the statistical significance to support a desired result,” which is outright fraud. At the bottom is “do not show plot because it did not show as Read More ›

Much information is offered here: Astronomer Jill Tarter discusses the search for intelligent life (Phys.org). Jill Tarter, one of the queens of SETI, was given royal treatment in a Harvard interview. The interviewer could have asked some hard questions, but one never treats royalty that way. “For me, after millennia of asking priests and philosophers what we should believe, I just thought it was very exciting that right then in the middle of the 20th century we were beginning to have some tools—telescopes and computers—that allowed scientists and engineers to try to figure out what is, and not have to take somebody’s belief system. I thought that was really important and I got hooked.” Without realizing, she was being treated Read More ›

Some scientists hope to influence society by running for office: On the verge of Election Day in the U.S. a political movement focused on getting scientists into public office is hoping that results at the polls will lead to more scenes like this one at state houses, city councils and school boards across the country, not just at a federal level. At least 70 scientist–candidates launched bids for office at the state and local level this election cycle, most of them first-time campaigners and part of a record wave of scientists bucking a long-established penchant to avoid the political arena. Organizers hope this will become a deep bench of up-and-coming policy makers with science and technology backgrounds who might contest Read More ›

Researchers tried modeling intergroup anxiety but look what the public heard about the results, instead of the facts: In fact, nearly every claim about the paper seems to misunderstand how computer models work generally and how they worked in this paper in particular. First, there is nothing particularly “religious” about the criteria used in the model. In computer models, you can name the pieces of the model however you wish. The authors of the software simply happened to assign religious names to the components of the model. There was hardly anything religious about it apart from that. According to the BBC article, the study shows that “The most risky situations are when the difference in the size of two different Read More ›

Last Sunday we noted a new book by psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple, and writer Ken Francis, The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd. They tackle the same topics in twin essays, as a Christian and an agnostic. Francis kindly sends us an excerpt from one of his essays featuring Jeffrey Dahmer (1960-1994), murderer and cannibal: One of the worst terrors of existence is the fear of being murdered or badly tortured. We read endless stories of homicide, both fact and fictional, and the ones that spook us most are those carried out by the psychopath. The Moors Murders in the UK during the 1960s were perhaps the most disturbing story of the slaying of innocent children by Read More ›

It’s not a new story. We’ve covered it here, here, and here within the last year or so. People don’t seem to be ditching traditional religion for science as much as for witchcraft: Interest in spirituality has been booming in recent years while interest in religion plummets, especially among millennials. The majority of Americans now believe it is not necessary to believe in God to have good morals, a study from Pew Research Center found. The percentage of people between the ages of 18 and 29 who “never doubt existence of God” fell from 81% in 2007 to 67% in 2012. Meanwhile, more than half of young adults in the U.S. believe astrology is a science. compared to less than Read More ›

A historian asks: Science Fiction Lacks Religiosity, But Why? Consider science fiction which, like all genres, has its own share of standard tropes and themes. One of the main themes in science fiction is the status of technology, and you’ll notice a frequent assumption that technology will constantly grow more and more sophisticated over time; more precisely, the assumption is about a certain idea of progression… When people encounter alien cultures in science fiction, they’re usually on some sort of a spectrum of more or less technologically––and, therefore, intellectually––sophisticated. It’s very common, in these situations, that more primitive cultures have “religion” while more advanced cultures have dispensed with it. There’s no inherent reason that intellectual sophistication and religion should be Read More ›

You take for granted that you can just choose to read Uncommon Descent. Or something else instead. Increasingly, governments would like you to read what they think is best: There has been a definite uptick in digital authoritarianism worldwide, according to Freedom House, which assessed 65 countries: Chinese officials have held sessions on controlling information with 36 of the 65 countries assessed, and provided telecom and surveillance equipment to a number of foreign governments, Freedom House said. … The report found 17 governments approved or proposed laws restricting online media in the name of fighting “fake news,” while 18 countries increased surveillance or weakened encryption protection to more closely monitor their citizenry. According to the researchers, internet freedom declined in Read More ›

In an effort to program self-driving cars to make decisions in a crisis, MIT’s Moral Machine offered 2.3 million people worldwide a chance to crowdsource who to kill and who to spare in a road mishap… The project aimed at building righteous self-driving cars revealed stark differences in global values. People from China and Japan were more likely to spare the old than the young. But in Western cultures, numbers matter more: The results showed that participants from individualistic cultures, like the UK and US, placed a stronger emphasis on sparing more lives given all the other choices—perhaps, in the authors’ views, because of the greater emphasis on the value of each individual. Karen Hao, “Should a self-driving car kill Read More ›

Ewert, developer of the dependency graph model of relationships between life forms (as an alternative to the tree of life concept) offers some thoughts on whether technology is neutral: A number of examples can be put forward in defense of the thesis that technologies do change cultures. A commonly cited example is the printing press. When invented in Europe, the printing press caused the widespread availability of books and learning, sparking the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the early modern age. Another example is the clock, which was originally developed by monks for the purpose of punctually following the canonical hours of their liturgy. But this technology eventually led to factory workers following regimented working hours and produced modern capitalism. In contrast, Read More ›

Richard Weikart, author of The Death of Humanity And the Case for Life, reviews James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky’s new book, Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality There are many scientific problems with this project. Hunter and Nedelisky, however, only rarely point out the empirical difficulties. (They do point out the problems with Paul Zak’s claims about a “moral molecule.”) This is likely for the sake of argument. However, their critique would have been stronger if they had asked more questions about the scientific evidence. Instead, for the most part they accept the descriptive claims. However, they still point out a glaring problem. Many of these “moral scientists” overreach by making prescriptive claims. Read More ›