Roger Kimball discusses Weinstein’s idea of “a breakdown in the basic logic of civilization.”
Education
Astonishing duplicity continues around Haeckel’s embryos
So stuff that isn’t true provides an “excellent foundation” and “compelling proof of the theory of common descent?”Wow. What a way to make people who never doubted common descent before start to do so…After all, one can only assume that an accurate presentation would not have supported the theory.
What Bill Nye is doing now
It’s not clear why people who behave this way expect their causes to be taken seriously. UD News’ take on Bill Nye is that he was a schoolroom celeb but didn’t really age into a science guru for adults
Educating oneself away from science denial: Two true stories
Our Danish friend Karsten Pultz, author of Exit Evolution, read the dramatic story of the flight from fundamentalism and responded by publishing his own account of how he escaped science denial. It is a somewhat different story
Talk about a perfect storm! Social science needs evolutionary theory?
One doesn’t mean to be unkind. But we hardly need “evolution” to know that giving a bully a task that builds self-esteem will distract him from bullying.
Atheist historian combats claim that the Church persecuted classical learning
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 Read More…
Science writer: Academia is in meltdown
And, he says, there is no nice way to put it: A new survey by Gallup shows that only 48% of U.S. adults have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in academia, down from 57% in 2015. And it’s not just due to partisanship; confidence has fallen among people of all political persuasions. Read More…
Should atheism be included in religious education?
That’s being suggested in Britain: Humanists UK welcomed the recommendation that humanist beliefs and values be taught. In general, the commission’s conclusions were a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to save the academically serious teaching of religious and non-religious worldviews in our schools”, said Andrew Copson. But the Catholic Education Service said the report was “not so much Read More…
It’s amazing how much the public believes about neuroscience that is just myth
But maybe it doesn’t matter. For example, as British Psychological Society’s Research Digest’s editor, Christian Jarrett, tells it, Educational neuromyths include the idea that we learn more effectively when taught via our preferred “learning style”, such as auditory or visual or kinesthetic … the claim that we use only 10 per cent of our brains; Read More…
Silenced! Selectivity too close to truth?
Should science pursue truth regardless of consequences? Or must we succumb to political correctness? Must selectivity of females always equal males? Consider: Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole – by Theodore P. Hill “In the highly controversial area of human intelligence, the ‘Greater Male Variability Hypothesis’ (GMVH) asserts that there are Read More…
Professor: Maths should be a movement against “objects, truths, and knowledge”
Same ”Mathematx” prof, same bilge, more publicity, but no action: A U.S. professor who teaches future public school teachers will “argue for a movement against objects, truths, and knowledge” in a keynote to the Mathematics Education and Society conference this coming January, says her talk description. “The relationship between humans, mathematics, and the planet has Read More…
Bernays (father of PR) on Propaganda, 1928
Let us soberly ponder, reading between the lines: Food for thought. END PS: By way of sharpest contrast:
GUN, UD News, Wikipedia and the sources credibility question
It has been said that 99% of practical arguments rely on authorities, i.e. sources. We can start with dictionaries, parents, teachers, officials, records and serious writings, or even the news and punditry we all follow. (And yes, this paragraph is a case in point, here, C S Lewis making a general point; which I amplified.) Read More…
Cosmologist Sean Carroll introduces user-friendly videos explaining naturalism
From multiverse cosmologist Sean Carroll we learn that eighty videos are about to hit YouTube: Some of you might be familiar with the Moving Naturalism Forward workshop I organized way back in 2012. For two and a half days, an interdisciplinary group of naturalists (in the sense of “not believing in the supernatural”) sat around Read More…
Surely the flight from intellectual curiosity relates to flat Earth beliefs among Millennials
From Jeremiah Poff at The College Fix: Two veteran academics who have diagnosed different plagues in modern higher education have little optimism for young people entering college for the foreseeable future, judging by their presentations to a conference this past weekend at Franciscan University of Steubenville, a conservative Catholic institution. College students have no passions Read More…