Culture

Well, what happens when human complexity foils electoral predictions? From Denyse O’Leary (O’Leary for News) at Salvo: The Pew polling group admits it was stumped by last November’s U.S. presidential election. The results “came as a surprise to nearly everyone who had been following the national and state election polling.” Most pollsters put Hillary Clinton’s chances of defeating Donald Trump at 70 to 99 percent. Few will care if fashion critics call the hemlines wrong this season. But election pollsters consider their work both important and scientific: “Polling is an art, but it’s largely a scientific endeavor,” says Michael Link, president and chief executive of the Abt SRBI polling firm in New York City and former president of the American Read More ›

Which 15 computer whizzes have now been putting back together at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. From Constance Gustke at New York Times: A chronic reorganizer, Darwin arranged his notes according to topics that interested him at the time. One page, for example, might be observations made about bees visiting flowers in 1840, originally placed in a portfolio on the behavior of bees. Perhaps 10 years later, he tore or cut that page, moving some of the observations into a portfolio on the pollination of flowers. By reassembling the original pages, researchers hope to understand fully the long arc of Darwin’s research and the gradual maturation of his thinking. Before the manuscripts project began 10 years ago, Read More ›

I would hardly trust anyone but Suzan Mazur, author of Public Evolution Summit, to get to the bottom of this one, at Huffington Post: A Chat w/ NASA-funded Italian Jesuit Andrea Vicini Andrea Vicini was one of two dozen religious scholars who between 2015 and 2017 shared nearly $3M awarded jointly by NASA and the John Templeton Foundation (administered by the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton) to investigate how the religious community would respond to the discovery of life in outer space. As I’ve already reported, informants at NASA tell me we will not find life anywhere else in the solar system. So why blow 5% of the NASA Astrobiology Institute budget on such a project? I spoke recently by Read More ›

In a review of Void: The Strange Physics of Nothing by James Owen Weatherall, Steven Poole writes at Spectator (UK): In an action-packed epilogue, the author describes how the contested field of string theory posits a bogglingly large number of possible kinds of nothingness, and impresses upon the reader how much of physics still depends on intuition and battling ‘interpretations’. The book is not an exhaustive typology of scientific nothings: not directly addressed, for example, is the nothingness that supposedly obtained before the Big Bang. But to regret this is just to emphasise the success of this stylishly written and admirably concise book, at the end of which you will be inclined to agree, along with the author and Freddie Read More ›

From Aatif Sulleyman at Independent: “Since civilisation began, aggression has been useful inasmuch as it has definite survival advantages,” he told The Times. “It is hard-wired into our genes by Darwinian evolution. Now, however, technology has advanced at such a pace that this aggression may destroy us all by nuclear or biological war. We need to control this inherited instinct by our logic and reason.” He suggests that “some form of world government” could be ideal for the job, but would itself create more problems. “But that might become a tyranny,” he added. “All this may sound a bit doom-laden but I am an optimist. I think the human race will rise to meet these challenges.” More. We didn’t realize Read More ›

At New York Times: Almost all people believe that it is a crime to kill an innocent human, but not to kill an innocent tapeworm. And almost all people regard tapeworms as incapable of innocence in any case — not because they are always guilty, but because the distinction between innocent and guilty does not apply to them. They are the wrong kind of thing. We, however, are the right kind of thing. So what kind is that? Do any other beings, animal or otherwise, belong to it? And what follows? These questions lie at the center of philosophical inquiry today, as they have since the ancient Greeks. In a thousand ways we distinguish people from the rest of nature, Read More ›

To him it’s all  real simple: It happens because some people reject expert information when it goes against their personal values … For its part, the American public is in the grip of a sullen, almost paranoid, narcissism about science and experts. This is not a function of education; the anti-vaccine movement, for example, is actually concentrated among parents with more education than their poorer counterparts. Indeed, ignorance has become hip, with some Americans now wearing their rejection of expert advice as a badge of cultural sophistication. (Consider the number of otherwise intelligent people who advocate consuming raw milk, for example, against the advice of a horrified medical community.) Instead, the public rejection of science is an extension of our Read More ›

From 2015, but curiously relevant, at his blog Scientia Salon: The Harris-Chomsky exchange, in my mind, summarizes a lot of what I find unpleasant about SAM (skeptic and atheist movements): a community who worships celebrities who are often intellectual dilettantes, or at the very least have a tendency to talk about things of which they manifestly know very little; an ugly undertone of in-your-face confrontation and I’m-smarter-than-you-because-I-agree-with [insert your favorite New Atheist or equivalent]; loud proclamations about following reason and evidence wherever they may lead, accompanied by a degree of groupthink and unwillingness to change one’s mind that is trumped only by religious fundamentalists; and, lately, a willingness to engage in public shaming and other vicious social networking practices any Read More ›

Debate rages about whether scientists should get political. This story crossed the desk, and it might be food for thought: From Ian Goodwin and Yuri Trusov at the Conversation: By the late 1920s, as director of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Vavilov soon amassed the largest seed collection on the planet. He worked hard, he enjoyed himself, and drove other eager young scientists to work just as hard to make more food for the people of the Soviet Union. However, things did not go well for Vavilov politically. How did this visionary geneticist, who aimed to find the means for food security, end up starving to death in a Soviet gulag in 1943? nter the villain, Trofim Lysenko, Read More ›

No, really. See this: PLEASE read https://t.co/vEUBmgqcwL Terrifying. Sinister social-media bots read minds & manipulate votes. Explains mystery of Trump & Brexit — Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) February 27, 2017 Dawkins now appears to be channelling persons who cannot handle the new non-gatekeeper world of online media, who think it must all be a big plot involving fake news, the alt right, the Russians, and all things that scare them.     Memo From: UD News To: UD News Robotics Dawkinsbot II Special Project Re: Retooling needed for Dawkinsbot II – urgent Our revamped Dawkinsbot has been performing fabulously to date.* But AI experts are warning that our introduction of a ramped-up politics algorithm could endanger the entire mechanism. We have Read More ›

From Douglas Axe, author of Undeniable, at The Stream: Hidden Figures — the true story of three brilliant African-American women who proved themselves in a 1960s NASA culture dominated by white men — is sure to inspire. The film is filled with emotive lessons, most powerfully a vindication of the hope that those who persevere honorably for a just cause will not be disappointed. Another lesson, more pragmatic, occurred to me as the drama unfolded. Having migrated in my own career from the measurable-fact culture of engineering to the more descriptive culture of biology, I felt a tinge of nostalgia as I watched a roomful of nerds with their calculators and chalk boards working together to find the answer to Read More ›

Locally, we refer to people who review books without reading them as noviewers. Mostly, they want to encourage others to follow their example and not read the book either. The usual low-tech technique for spotting noviewers in the review stream is that they engage with the text only via canned talking points at best. They show little interest in the ideas as such. But how to prove that? From Dave Lee at BBC we learn, So imagine my delight today when, via the excellent Nieman Lab, I read about Norwegian broadcaster NRK. The tech section of its site, NRKBeta, is trying a simple experiment. You can’t leave a comment unless you’ve read the story. How will they know? There’s a test! Read More ›

For years I have closely followed both the evolution debate and the global warming debate.*  There are some important differences between the two debates, which may be the subject of a subsequent post.  However, the number of similarities is striking.  Enough so that for some time I have seriously considered writing a book detailing the parallels.  I believe it would be highly instructive for many– particularly for those who accept the party line of one of the theories but not the other – to recognize the many similarities between the two debates. Given the realities of other time commitments, however, I suspect my nascent efforts will never make it to publication before catastrophic global warming either fades with a whimper or Read More ›

From Joy Pullmann at Federalist: College science classes are hostile to women and minorities because they use the scientific method, which assumes people can find reliable truths about the natural world through careful and sustained experimentation, concludes a recent dissertation by a doctoral candidate at the University of North Dakota. Laura Parson, a student in the university’s education department, reviewed eight science class syllabi at a “Midwest public university” and said she discovered in them a hidden hostility to women and minorities: … Instead of promoting the idea that knowledge is constructed by the student and dynamic, subject to change as it would in a more feminist view of knowledge, the syllabi reinforce the larger male-dominant view of knowledge as Read More ›

An unexpectedly level-headed discussion from Tom Mahony at RealClearScience: Ironically, true believers often moralize about the importance of facts and insist they’re the only ones who are “reality based.” However, in practice, they confuse facts with assumptions, beliefs, conjecture, and opinion. If you take an incorrect assumption, assume it as fact, and extrapolate from that assumption, even if the logic of the extrapolation is sound, the whole idea is wrong because the foundational assumption is wrong. Garbage in, garbage out. Yet, since true believers mistake their incorrect assumption for fact, and tout their impeccable extrapolation, you’re the kook. This is what passes for logic in the true-believer community. True believers haunt any subject: science, religion, health, history, economics, politics. The Read More ›