Culture

In order to prepare ourselves for the upcoming solar eclipse on Monday, August 21, David Coppedge posted a YouTube video showing the Great Baja Eclipse of 1991 and people’s reactions to it.

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Announcing from on high that it is Against Discrimination, Nature tells us: Science cannot and should not be used to justify prejudice.  No indeed. But is there any general wish that it did? Then, Difference between groups may therefore provide sound scientific evidence. But it’s also a blunt instrument of pseudoscience, and one used to justify actions and policies that condense claimed group differences into tools of prejudice and discrimination against individuals — witness last weekend’s violence by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the controversy over a Google employee’s memo on biological differences in the tastes and abilities of the sexes. A nice touch that, to equate hapless engineer Damore’s ejection from the Goolag with white supremacist violence. The two Read More ›

Like we said, plenty of time for Darwinians to beat their iron rice bowls into hatchets. From zoologist Jules Howard at Guardian,: Some still attack Darwin and evolution – How can science fight back?  I can save you the effort of reading AN Wilson’s “exposé” on Darwin, which did the rounds over the weekend, characterising the famous scientist as a fraud, a thief, a liar, a racist and a rouser of nazism. Instead, head over to Netflix and watch the creationist made-for-TV movie A Matter of Faith, which covers many of the same arguments – and also includes a final scene in which a fictional evolutionary biologist, standing alone in his study, holds a rubber chicken in his hands and Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary (O’Leary for News) at MercatorNet: When I use the term fake news, I do not mean deliberate sabotage of news sites by, for example, Russia’s troll house. Or opposition research marketed as news. Or false information that merits retraction and results in dismissals as at CNN recently. Nor material that is outed by traditional media sources themselves as fake news. Consider, for example, the BBC’s displeasure at the glut of fake anti-Trump stories (“Many people on the left right now are feeling overwhelmed and fearful and unsure of what’s going to happen next”), many of which have also been debunked by Snopes as“patterns of falsehoods.” At some level, the people creating the news have to know that Read More ›

Trigger warning!: Donald Trump mentioned. 😉 From Nicholas Staropoli at Epigenetics Literacy Project: This week’s features: A professor’s troubling politicization of epigenetics in Gizmodo, Men’s Health quotes me on male fertility but mistakes correlation for causation. Plus see what’s trending on the Epigenetics Literacy Project. On a larger scale, the amount of stress that Americans are going through now, because of Trump—there is going to be an evolutionary consequence. Peter Ward Professor, Department of Biology, University of Washington More. Although Ward’s appointment is in biology at U Washington, as Staropoli notes, his main publications have been in astronomy and paleontology. One of Ward’s better-known works is Rare Earth (2000), on why Earth is especially habitable (now free at the link as Read More ›

From Heather Heying, weighing in on the Google foray into post-modern truth, which smacked an unwary engineer upside head, at Quillette: Should We “Stop Equating ‘Science’ With Truth”? Damore’s heresy turns on innate differences between men and women that have never been noticed by anyone in the history of human life on the planet except him. So, of course, the entire obsolescent traditional media melted down in shock. Heying: Evolutionary biology has been through this, over and over and over again. There are straw men. No, the co-option of science by those with a political agenda does not put the lie to the science that was co-opted. Social Darwinism is not Darwinism. You can put that one to rest. There Read More ›

From Evan Allgood at New York Mag: A few years ago, psychological scientist Kurt Gray came across the final statements of 500 Texas inmates executed between 1982 and 2013. (The state’s Department of Criminal Justice posts them online.) As he read these inmates’ surprisingly sanguine last words, Gray wondered if their positivity was a fluke or part of a broader psychological trend. So he conducted a study at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, which compared the words of death row inmates and terminally ill patients to those simply imagining they were close to death. This research —published this summer in Psychological Science — suggests that while it’s natural to fear death in the abstract, the closer one actually Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Daniel Whitmire, a retired astrophysicist who teaches mathematics at the University of Arkansas, once thought the cosmic silence indicated we as a species lagged far behind. “I taught astronomy for 37 years,” said Whitmire. “I used to tell my students that by statistics, we have to be the dumbest guys in the galaxy. After all we have only been technological for about 100 years while other civilizations could be more technologically advanced than us by millions or billions of years.” Recently, however, he’s changed his mind. By applying a statistical concept called the principle of mediocrity — the idea that in the absence of any evidence to the contrary we should consider ourselves typical, rather than atypical — Read More ›

Or don’t they? From Phys.org: A unusual social study has revealed that atheists are more easily suspected of vile deeds than Christians, Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists—strikingly, even by fellow atheists, researchers said Monday. This suggests that in an increasingly secular world, many—including some atheists—still hold the view that people will do bad things unless they fear punishment from all-seeing gods. The results of the study “show that across the world, religious belief is intuitively viewed as a necessary safeguard against the temptations of grossly immoral conduct,” an international team wrote in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. And it revealed that “atheists are broadly perceived as potentially morally depraved and dangerous.” The study measured the attitudes of more than 3,000 people Read More ›

From Andy Greenberg at Wired: In new research they plan to present at the USENIX Security conference on Thursday, a group of researchers from the University of Washington has shown for the first time that it’s possible to encode malicious software into physical strands of DNA, so that when a gene sequencer analyzes it the resulting data becomes a program that corrupts gene-sequencing software and takes control of the underlying computer. While that attack is far from practical for any real spy or criminal, it’s one the researchers argue could become more likely over time, as DNA sequencing becomes more commonplace, powerful, and performed by third-party services on sensitive computer systems. And, perhaps more to the point for the cybersecurity Read More ›

From Allum Bohkari at Breitbart Tech, interviewing an anonymous Google serf, “Emmett”: “Emmett”: I remember Peter Goett entirely unironically posting a reply to a list with over 10,000 Googlers: “congratulations on your white penis.” To my understanding, had someone posted “black vagina”, that person would have been summarily fired. Also to my understanding, Goett appears to have received no punishment. … 1. Every day, rank-and-file (nominally low-status, but informally very high-status) SJWs post SJW / Marxist propaganda that irritates non-SJW folks who just want to do their job. 2. Everyone who dares question any of these propaganda posts, no matter how politely, is chastised publicly by the SJWs, and then (I hope it’s clear) written up on some secret lists. Read More ›

From Columbia mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong on some recent developments in theoretical physics: …it seems that the field is moving ever forward in a post-modern direction I can’t follow. Tonight the arXiv has something new from Susskind about this, where he argues that one should go beyond “ER=EPR”, to “GR=QM”. While the 2013 paper had very few equations, this one has none at all, and is actually written in the form not of a scientific paper, but of a letter to fellow “Qubitzers”. On some sort of spectrum of precision of statements, with Bourbaki near one end, this paper is way at the other end. More. Post-moderns are indeed marchin’, marchin’ and they are deadly serious about Read More ›

Lots of people are now saying that the king is a fink*. A friend kindly offers some useful update links on the subject: Neuroscientist Debra Soh defends Damore. No surprise, she is also not a fan of the marchin’, marchin’ pussyhats for science and has warned about the danger of fad post-modern concepts like intersectionality invading science and just plain stompin’ down hard on fact. Updated: Breitbart News’ interview series, Rebels of Google, has revealed an atmosphere of profound fear at the company, in which employees who challenge Google’s hyper-progressive narratives face bullying and ostracization from co-workers, and frequently find themselves added to blacklists aimed at destroying peoples’ careers both inside and outside Google. Our last interviewee even described an Read More ›

The one who got drowned in diversicrat social media politics. The story provides good illustration of the way in which traditional media today are not up to the job of newsgathering in a non-gatekeeper digital age and should not be trusted. From Bre Davis at the Federalist: Here Are All The Media Outlets Blatantly Lying About The Google Memo E.g.: 3.Time Magazine: The magazine that’s been slowly dying for nearly a decade published a writeup of the ordeal, calling the memo a “tirade” in their headline: “Google Has Fired the Employee Who Wrote an Anti-Diversity Tirade, Report Says”. To anyone who’s actually read the memo, it’s clear a “tirade” is the least accurate way to describe it. It’s calm, it’s rational, Read More ›

From Paul Braterman at The Conversation, we learn stuff like: Evolution, Pence argues, is a theory, theories are uncertain, therefore evolution is uncertain. But evolution is a theory only in the scientific sense of the word. And in the words of the National Academy of Sciences, “The formal scientific definition of theory is quite different from the everyday meaning of the word. It refers to a comprehensive explanation of some aspect of nature that is supported by a vast body of evidence.” Attaching this label to evolution is an indicator of strength, not weakness. Actually, string theory and multiverse theories are elaborate theories too; there is just no evidence for them. It simply isn’t the case, as Braterman claims, that Read More ›