Intelligent Design

Every new idea, good or bad, has had its establishment detractors who want Something To Be Done about the hateful people who make them uncomfortable. Joe Miller and guests talk about science and free speech at More Than Cake: In the tradition of natural law theorists such as John Stuart Mill, Free Speech is considered one of the most fundamental of human rights, yet this right is attacked today as a vestige of racist white Western civilization that oppresses minorities and gender-equality warriors. Today the guys look at attacks on free speech happening on our college campuses and argue from a Christian worldview why protecting this right matters to all of us regardless of political affiliation. It makes as much Read More ›

In this 2018 video, quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger explains the essence of quantum physics for a general audience: The skinny, courtesy Philip Cunningham: 40 sec: Every object has to be in a definite place is not true anymore… The thought that a particle can be at two places at the same time is (also) not good language. The good language it that there are situations where it is completely undefined where the particle is. (and it is not just us (we ourselves) that don’t know where the particle is, the particle itself does not know where it is). This “nonexistence” is an objective feature of reality… 5:10 min:… superposition is not limited to small systems… 7:35 min:… I have given Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The birder and biologist was Tom Smith, who has spent his career studying finches — specifically, black-bellied seedcrackers (Pyrenestes ostrinus) — in Cameroon and in his lab at the University of California-Los Angeles. He and his colleagues have spent years investigating why some of these finches have small beaks while others have large beaks. Much of their original work identified differences in the hardness of the seeds they eat, a story quite similar to that of Darwin’s finches. Smith, who is a professor at UCLA as well as the founding director of the Center for Tropical Research, established a breeding colony of these finches to understand the inheritance of beak size. The result was startlingly and elegantly simple: Read More ›

That’s a common problem when we ask great figures their opinion about things they haven’t studied. From a review of Stephen Hawking’s (1942–2018) last book (or the last book that could be put together plausibly under his name), Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Because of the likelihood of a nuclear confrontation or an environmental catastrophe, we should work out how to leave the planet and colonise space, Hawking reckons. “Spreading out,” he says, “may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves.” He concedes that move will involve abandoning the flora and fauna of Earth, but Hawking seems to believe that humans deserve more of a future than other species. Leaving all other life to fend for itself is Read More ›

Yes, if you mean “dumb AI,” and there ain’t no “smart AI”: Quantity is definitely a solved problem. STM, the “voice of scholarly publishing” estimated in 2015 that roughly 2.5 million science papers are published each year. Some are, admittedly, in predatory or fake journals. But over 2800 journals are assumed to be genuine. From all this, we can deduce that most scientists have not read most of the literature in their field, though they probably read immediately relevant or ground-breaking findings. But the question has arisen whether, in some cases, scientists have even read papers in which they are listed as authors. A report in Nature (September 2018) revealed that “Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days” Read More ›

Is it only selective attention that causes us to see order in the universe? There is another, more interesting, explanation for the structure of the laws of nature. Rather than saying that the universe is very structured, say that the universe is mostly chaotic and for the most part lacks structure. The reason why we see the structure we do is that scientists act like a sieve and focus only on those phenomena that have structure and are predictable. They do not take into account all phenomena; rather, they select those phenomena they can deal with. Some people say that science studies all physical phenomena. This is simply not true. Who will win the next presidential election and move into Read More ›

We humans must have originated in some kind of a cement mixer, to judge from recent reports. Making stone tools (Oldowan technology) is believed to have started in East Africa 2.6 million years ago and spread from there. But archaeologists recently found stone tools and butchered animals on a high plateau in Algeria: The newly discovered limestone and flint tools are about 2.4 million years old — almost the same age as the oldest known such tools, which were found in Gona, Ethiopia, and are 2.6 million years old. The discovery means that hominins were present in the Mediterranean fringe of North Africa around 600,000 years earlier than previously thought. Aisling Irwin, “Algeria fossils cast doubt on East Africa as sole Read More ›

 A philosopher claims that neuroscience has proven thoughts do not exist. Eric Holloway looks at the neuroscience and examines the claim: There is a problem with this sort of reasoning. One could make the same argument about computer code, as follows: There is no code. It’s all just assembly language. Or, there is no assembly, it’s all just machine code. Or, there is no machine code, there are just voltage levels on transistors. One could continue following this chain of reasoning to the point where the transistors don’t exist. It’s just a bunch of electrons doing their thing. Of course, the electrons don’t really exist either. They’re just a bunch of quarks and leptons. In which case, the program your computer requires Read More ›

No, they haven’t all come to their senses and seen that of course the frame of reality we live in is designed. Like Larry Krauss and Francisco Ayala, astronomer and science popularizer Tyson has been #MeToo’d: Dr. Katelyn N. Allers, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Bucknell University, told me that she was “felt up” by Tyson at an after-party following a meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in 2009. AAS didn’t have a mechanism for reporting sexual harassment at the time, but Dr. Allers says she probably would report the incident if it had happened today … David G. McAfee, “Two More Women Accuse Neil deGrasse Tyson of Sexual Misconduct” at Patheos Readers will remember Tyson from Read More ›

Robert J. Marks is one of the authors of Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, with design theorist William Dembski and Winston Ewert. There’s little danger, he thinks, in computers ruling us but considerable danger that we can use them to magnify the impact of our errors. More. Here’s the podcast. See also: Human consciousness may not be computable One model of consciousness would mean that conscious computers are a physical impossibility. (Robert Marks)

Artificial intelligence crashes are historically common: First, what caused previous AI winters? There was one straightforward reason: The technology did not work. Expert systems weren’t experts. Language translators failed to translate. Even Watson, after winning Jeopardy, failed to provide useful answers in the real-world context of medicine. When technology fails, winters come. Nearly all of AI’s recent gains have been realized due to massive increases in data and computing power that enable old algorithms to suddenly become useful. For example, researchers first conceived neural networks—the core idea powering much machine learning and AI’s notable advances—in the late 1950s. The worries of an impending winter arise because we’re approaching the limits of what massive data combined with hordes of computers can Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh and Kent studied details of Palaeolithic and Neolithic art featuring animal symbols at sites in Turkey, Spain, France and Germany. They found all the sites used the same method of date-keeping based on sophisticated astronomy, even though the art was separated in time by tens of thousands of years. Researchers clarified earlier findings from a study of stone carvings at one of these sites — Gobekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey — which is interpreted as a memorial to a devastating comet strike around 11,000 BC. This strike was thought to have initiated a mini ice-age known as the Younger Dryas period. They also decoded what is probably the best known ancient artwork Read More ›

At her blog, Oscillations, Suzan Mazur offers suggestions for panelists and explains why more public input is needed in this area, which is ramping up in the United States: NSF says it cares about the “social and ethical dimensions of such research.” So who gets to say what synthetic cell research meets society’s approval? I think creating a responsible US citizens panel is urgent. … As of now, the NSF plan is to “educate” the American people about synthetic cell development after selections are quietly made by insiders who we don’t know. This approach cannot remain unchallenged. Suzan Mazur, “America Needs a Citizens Panel on Ethics & Synthetic Cell Development” at Oscillations She notes that Germany is taking a more proactive Read More ›

Researchers knew that jumping spider (Toxeus magnus) young didn’t leave the nest for twenty-one days and adults were not observed to bring back food for them. So they checked it out: They looked more closely and noticed that the mother was secreting a liquid from its upper abdomen onto the surface of the nest, which the spiderlings ate. After a week, the spiderlings sucked the milk directly from the mother. Even though they were able to leave the nest and feed themselves after 20 days, they continued suckling the milk for another 18 days. If these were humans, they’d be featured on a cable TV program. Once the spiderlings matured, the mother attacked the males that returned while females were Read More ›

Confession: Some of us never took evolutionary psychology (a discipline whose subject died a very long time ago but allegedly lives on in all of us) seriously enough to wonder if it could actually create controversies in psychology. Apparently so: In terms of the political bias among social psychologists, Buss and von Hippel found that 95 per cent were mostly liberal and left-wing in their views (also, among the US respondents, only 4 had voted Republican in the prior Presidential election while 305 had voted Democrat). Quizzing the social psychologists on their views of evolutionary theory, Buss and von Hippel found that they overwhelmingly accepted the principles of Darwinian evolution and also that it applied to humans, but when it came Read More ›