Culture

From ScienceDaily: Together with their sister group the Neanderthals, Denisovans are the closest extinct relatives of currently living humans. “We knew from previous studies that Neanderthals and Denisovans must have occasionally had children together,” says Viviane Slon, researcher at the MPI-EVA and one of three first authors of the study. “But I never thought we would be so lucky as to find an actual offspring of the two groups.” Well, it’s lucky for sure, but it’s the sort of thing we might expect to exist. We just want our team, institution, or country to get the credit. Analyses of the genome also revealed that the Denisovan father had at least one Neanderthal ancestor further back in his family tree. “So Read More ›

A story here yesterday noted the recent attempt at Exeter U to resurrect the idea that the varying prevalence of light and dark moths is a dramatic demonstration of evolution in action. Like its many predecessors, it demonstrates nothing except what we might expect: The more visible moth will be spotted and eaten sooner. But it’s the understory that matters: Schoolchildren are asked to believe that, by the same power of natural selection, cows become whales over time. Not only is the implicit claim not demonstrated by the data from nature; it isn’t even implied by the data from nature. The variable population distribution mechanism already existed in the moths’ genes, perhaps for millions of years, and did not change Read More ›

This time at the University of Exeter: Scientists have revisited – and confirmed – one of the most famous textbook examples of evolution in action. They showed that differences in the survival of pale and dark forms of the peppered moth (Biston betularia) are explained by how well camouflaged the moths are to birds in clean and polluted woodland. “Industrial melanism” – the prevalence of darker varieties of animals in polluted areas – and the peppered moth provided a crucial early example supporting Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, and has been a battleground between evolutionary biologists and creationists for decades. The battle was over the claim that differing prevalence of the light and dark varieties is evidence of Read More ›

At Current Biology: Teleological thinking — the attribution of purpose and a final cause to natural events and entities — has long been identified as a cognitive hindrance to the acceptance of evolution, yet its association to beliefs other than creationism has not been investigated. Here, we show that conspiracism — the proneness to explain socio-historical events in terms of secret and malevolent conspiracies — is also associated to a teleological bias. Across three correlational studies (N > 2000), we found robust evidence of a teleological link between conspiracism and creationism, which was partly independent from religion, politics, age, education, agency detection, analytical thinking and perception of randomness. As a resilient ‘default’ component of early cognition, teleological thinking is thus Read More ›

In 2011, “de-roomed” computer scientists developed a way to open up access to journal papers: After being kicked out of a hotel conference room where they had participated in a three-day open-science workshop and hackathon, a group of computer scientists simply moved to an adjacent hallway. There, Heather Piwowar, Jason Priem and Cristhian Parra worked all night on software to help academics to illustrate how much of their work was freely available on the Internet. They realized how much time had passed only when they noticed hotel staff starting to prepare for breakfast.Holly Else, “How Unpaywall is transforming open science” at Nature One way open access may change science publishing is that people who are knowledgeable about a topic but Read More ›

And that is your mistake. A look at how social justice warriors have penetrated the soft underbelly of engineering: Engineering education has been infiltrated by a “phalanx of social justice warriors” who are steadily corrupting the field, according to a Michigan State University professor. “They have sought out the soft underbelly of engineering, where phrases such as ‘diversity’ and ‘different perspectives’ and ‘racial gaps’ and ‘unfairness’ and ‘unequal outcomes’ make up the daily vocabulary,” asserts Mechanical Engineering professor Indrek Wichman in an essay published Wednesday by the James G. Martin Center. “They have sought out the soft underbelly of engineering…” “Instead of calculating engine horsepower or microchip power/size ratios or aerodynamic lift and drag, the engineering educationists focus on group Read More ›

Further to kairosfocus’s thoughts yesterday on the digital empire suppressing the free flow of ideas: Buzzfeed reported August 7 that “YouTube Is Fighting Back Against Climate Misinformation.” As of July 9, “YouTube is now adding fact checks to videos that question climate change … as a part of its ongoing effort to combat the rampant misinformation and conspiratorial fodder on its platform.” … YouTube’s decision might be defensible if it were evenhanded. If, on all videos addressing climate change, from any perspective, YouTube placed a notice that climate change is the subject of vigorous ongoing debate and that equally qualified scientists hold a variety of views on the magnitude, causes, and consequences of human-induced climate change and on the best Read More ›

It’s a good thing that we don’t need bridges and buildings to be stable: Professional engineers are expressing befuddlement over unsubstantiated scholarly accusations that the field’s licensure exam is biased against women. Women are 11.6% less likely to pass. The agency that administers the exam—the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES)—also pushed back against the suggestion that the exam may be biased against women. NCEES Director of Exams Tim Miller told Campus Reform that it seems highly unlikely that the exam itself is biased against women, insofar as NCEES has been reviewing the test specifically for gender bias for nearly two decades. “Since the early 2000s, the exam items have been reviewed annually to make them gender-neutral Read More ›

Making nonsense meaningful: In such a large and diverse city, it is no surprise that the Craft is fairly accessible, if you know where to look. Nearly 80 covens and pagan organizations operate in the New York Metropolitan area, according to the pagan networking site The Witches’ Voice. Exact numbers of witches in the city are hard to come by, as there are many solitary practitioners, but coven and community leaders estimate that as many as 10,000 witches live and practice in New York. Nationally, about 734,000 Americans identify as pagan or Wiccan, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center survey. Nancy Guzman, a board member of New York City Pagan Pride, which stages an annual Pagan Pride Day festival Read More ›

While discussing cultural conflicts generally, foreign policy analyst Michael Dran mentioned something that intrigued one of our readers: The most important is the divide between Protestant modernists and fundamentalists, which developed in the early part of the twentieth century. It is my contention that the modernist-fundamentalist controversy did not come and go in the course of the twentieth century. It was an earthquake along a tectonic fault that continues to divide our world today. He cites the Scopes Trial, evoking a variety of culture myths about what happened at Dayton in 1925 that convinced dim and ignorant elitists that Darwin must be right about everything. Clearly, the Scopes trial was about more than the teaching of evolution. The conflict pitted Read More ›

Recently, we noted the peculiar state of affairs by which atheists, who appear to dominate Top Science, have disproportionately progressive views and yet seem oblivious to the current progressive war on science. Here are two more shots at math: Rochelle Gutiérrez Title: Mathematx: Towards a way of Being The relationship between humans, mathematics, and the planet has been one steeped too long in domination and destruction. What are appropriate responses to reverse such a relationship? How do we do work now (inside and outside of schools) that will reverberate and touch the lives of future generations? Drawing upon Indigenous worldviews to reconceptualize what mathematics is and how it is practiced, I argue for a movement against objects, truths, and knowledge Read More ›

People will take ownership of their own data, cutting out the giant “middle man.” George Gilder is an early sympathizer of intelligent design and taken his lumps for that. It wasn’t how the media wanted to perceive a tech sector guru. His most recent book, Life after Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy, offers a more hopeful view of the world after AI, based on the creativity of uniquely individual human beings. Gilder thinks that the enormous tech companies will be replaced by flattened hierarchies in which people take ownership of their own data, cutting out the giant “middle man.” He calls the successor era he envisions the “cryptocosm,” referring to the private encryption Read More ›

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor doesn’t mince words: I despise Darwinism. It is, in my view, an utterly worthless scientific concept promulgated by a third-rate barnacle collector and hypochondriac to justify functional, if not explicit, atheism. Richard Dawkins got it right: Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. A low bar, admittedly, but “natural selection” satisfied, and still satisfies, many. Even bright Christians, regrettably. Darwin still has some cache among design advocates — the usual trope is that he provided evidence for common descent and explained microevolution. In this I differ from some of my friends and colleagues sympathetic to ID/Thomism. Darwin’s “theory” is completely worthless to science, a degradation of philosophy, and lethal to culture. As Jerry Fodor Read More ›

 From Denyse O’Leary at MercatorNet: In June, I wrote a piece here at MercatorNet, “A shambolic atheist community faces some tough choices,” reflecting on the discontent of some members of that community. It attracted a good many comments and at least one riposte shortly afterward. The riposte garnered 114 comments too. Clearly, the piece struck a nerve. That said, fewer readers than I had expected took up the issue that seemed most significant to me: “‘Eiynah’ fears that the [atheist] movement is going ‘right wing.’” I don’t think the atheist movement is going right-wing so much as that some prominent atheists are re-evaluating their relationship with progressivism. It’s about time too. Considering how many atheists see science as a worthy Read More ›

And starts to come to terms with the difference that makes: If the revelation that humans are probably alone in our universe stands, and as that revelation sinks into our collective psyche, it could effect a second, weirder Copernican revolution in culture. To begin with, it’s really hard to square humanity’s status as perhaps the only intelligent species in all of time and space with the idea that we are insignificant. To the contrary, the everyday breath of the least of us contains meaning in so concentrated a form that a cup’s worth of it could be doled out to a dozen star systems, transforming the arid matter into a garden of significance. There’s been a lot of talk in Read More ›