Intelligent Design

From filmmaker Paul Ratner: Ranking the world’s greatest contemporary scientists may be a no-win proposition, with inevitable questions about how to evaluate one’s contribution over another. How does a discovery in one field measure up to a discovery in a different one? And what about Richard Dawkins, where is he on this list? All reasonable questions, but ultimately we need to start the discussion somewhere. So here’s a debatable list of top ten scientists from around the world who have made a great impact on our life (but not in order of the magnitude of their achievements because that just might be an unscientific exercise):More. Spoiler: Richard Dawkins is not on the list. So far as one can see. Did Read More ›

He puts it down to genetic predisposition, need for control, and identifying with a group. From Andy Tix at Psychology Today: Genetics, control, and groups. Like every other behavior psychologists have studied, religious behavior is influenced by an interaction between nature and nurture, in other words. Still, there’s a lot we don’t understand. One tentative answer generates five additional questions. Mystery remains and, I suspect, always will.More. His approach, well-meaning and friendly, is just the sort of schlock that discredits psychology. The problem is, he is throwing around terms and concepts from studies that are rarely worth the space they take up on a hard drive. Once you get past: Mother Theresa was religious and so were Torquemada and Pat Read More ›

A longish essay at First Things by Mary Eberstadt addresses a number of issues around secularism, and this one is up our street in particular: This brings us to another feature of the new secularist faith: its lack of transparency. For decades, scholarship has established Sanger’s moral roots in eugenics, her faith in the inferiority of certain other people, her cynical use of African-American ministers to evangelize the black population about birth control in the hope of bringing their numbers down, and related beliefs out of odor today. Yet in a moment when Confederate statues are targets in the name of scrubbing racism from the public square, Margaret Sanger remains immune from moral revisionism. Why? Because she is the equivalent Read More ›

Ed Driscoll offers Party gossip, with links, at Instapundit: —“Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program,” the New York Times today: It’s no secret that the Hillary Clinton campaign chairman is a UFO buff, but the recent WikiLeaks dump of Mr. Podesta’s hacked account sheds new light on how deeply interested he is in extraterrestrial conspiracy theories. “Leaked Podesta emails encourage UFO buffs seeking declassification in a Clinton administration,” the Washington Times, October 16, 2016 He adds, Speaking of “spiritual people,” maybe the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn can use her Ouija board to make contact with the aliens. The truth is out there! More. A growing source of unproductive conflict in western culture: “Science” is becoming merely Read More ›

Because it pays. From physicist Sabine Hossenfelder at BackReaction: To the end of producing popular papers, the best tactic is to work on what already is popular, and to write papers that allow others to quickly produce further papers on the same topic. This means it is much preferable to work on hypotheses that are vague or difficult to falsify, and stick to topics that stay inside academia. The ideal situation is an eternal debate with no outcome other than piles of papers. You see this problem in many areas of science. It’s origin of the reproducibility crisis in psychology and the life sciences. It’s the reason why bad scientific practices – like p-value hacking – prevail even though they Read More ›

Much of their tale features politics and sex. But in terms of science as such, from Jef Akst at The Scientist, for example: Last month, 19 editorial board members of Scientific Reports resigned from the journal over a 2016 study that was allegedly plagiarized but that the journal refused to retract. Lots more. Keep up to date with Retraction Watch instead.The Scientist only does this “serious science sins” stuff once a year and Jef Akst’s article feels like he wants to talk about politics and sex instead.   (It’s actually kind of lame. I can listen to Trump bashing and perp hunting anywhere these days. I wish The Scientist would stick to science misconduct where researchers have more of an inside track. Read More ›

Despite the recent NASA announcement, which kind of fizzled. From ScienceDaily: Researchers led by space physicist Chuanfei Dong of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University have recently raised doubts about water on — and thus potential habitability of — frequently cited exoplanets that orbit red dwarfs, the most common stars in the Milky Way. In two papers in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the scientists develop models showing that the stellar wind — the constant outpouring of charged particles that sweep out into space — could severely deplete the atmosphere of such planets over hundreds of millions of years, rendering them unable to host surface-based life as we know it. “Traditional definition and Read More ›

It’s a tougher question than at first appears. Just because a fossil human is found with a bashed-in skull doesn’t strictly prove violence or lethality of weapons. So, following in the footsteps of the once-proud maxim of journalism, “If your mother says she loves you check it out,” some researchers wanted to know if Stone Age clubs (in this case, 5500 BC) can really kill. From Megan Gannon at LiveScience: Archaeologists have found ample evidence of violence in Western and Central Europe during the Neolithic period, through burials of people who had skull fractures—some healed, some were fatal —from an intentional blow to the head. But it was often unclear where these injuries came from. … So, Dyer and her Read More ›

From philosopher Laura Ruggles at Aeon: What does it even mean to say that a mallow can learn and remember the location of the sunrise? The idea that plants can behave intelligently, let alone learn or form memories, was a fringe notion until quite recently. Memories are thought to be so fundamentally cognitive that some theorists argue that they’re a necessary and sufficient marker of whether an organism can do the most basic kinds of thinking. Surely memory requires a brain, and plants lack even the rudimentary nervous systems of bugs and worms. However, over the past decade or so this view has been forcefully challenged. The mallow isn’t an anomaly. Plants are not simply organic, passive automata. We now Read More ›

Last year it was… oh, never mind. From Harriet Hall at Science-Based Medicine, a review of Frederick Crews’s Freud: The Making of an Illusion: He treated pampered, rich socialites. His attitude towards them was cynical; they provided a steady source of income by not being cured, and in one case he rushed back to see a patient in the fear that he might get well in his absence. He had little sympathy for his patients; he actively despised most people, especially those of the lower social orders. He was a misogynist who believed women were biologically inferior. He treated his wife abominably. Few of his ideas were original. He plagiarized. He borrowed ideas from rivals but then backdated them and Read More ›

A friend draws our attention to this piece by Brian Miller at Evolution News & Views: Intelligent Design and the Advancement of Science DNA was expected to be the primary source of causality behind the operation and development of life. Such beliefs have previously raised concerns from leading scientists and mathematicians. For instance, physicist Walter Elsasser argued that the unfathomable complexity of the chemical and physically processes in life was “transcomputational” — beyond the realm of any theoretical means of computation. Moreover, the development of the embryo is not solely directed by DNA. Instead, it requires new “biotonic” principles. As a result, life cannot be reduced to chemistry and physics. An unbridgeable gap separates life from non-life. Similarly, mathematician René Read More ›

A mere desire to support the notion that we are nothing special. At 1:00 pm ET, December 14 (yesterday), we were told by NASA: NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EST Thursday, Dec. 14, to announce the latest discovery made by its planet-hunting Kepler space telescope. The discovery was made by researchers using machine learning from Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence, and demonstrates new ways of analyzing Kepler data. More. We finally caught up with our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon, and he is astounded at why this eighth Kepler planet is supposed to be a big deal: That’s it??? A inside-Mercury-orbiting rock that is over 800 degrees hot? And the Google AI angle was just Read More ›

“This puts a stake in the heart of the idea of an ancestor with a central nerve cord,” says Greg Wray, an evolutionary developmental biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. “That opens up a lot of questions we don’t have answers to — like, if central nerve cords evolved independently in different lineages, why do they have so many similarities?” Nature, 2017 It is generally assumed that bilaterians nerve cords evolve from a single Ancestral Nerve Cord but from Amy Maxmen at Nature: Tiny sea creatures upend notion of how animals’ nervous systems evolved: Sweeping study of sea creatures suggests wild deviations over evolutionary time. A study of some of the world’s most obscure marine life suggests that the Read More ›

Dr E. Selensky occasionally requests that UD posts an article on his behalf. What follows is his latest: ______________ Arguably, the RNA world model is excessively complex: it operates too complex structures and involves too complex interactions. The origin of life, some researchers believe, must have been simpler.In an attempt to close the gap between chemistry and life by naturalistic means a new model has been proposed recently, yet another one of many, that seeks to explain the rise of RNAs. This model is called template-assisted ligation. It has been proposed by Alexey Tkachenko and Sergei Maslov at American Institute of Physics. They hope it can help shed light on what could have preceded the RNA world.The crux of the Read More ›

From James Tour at Inference Review: Life requires carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids, and proteins. What is the chemistry behind their origin? Biologists seem to think that there are well-understood prebiotic molecular mechanisms for their synthesis. They have been grossly misinformed. And no wonder: few biologists have ever synthesized a complex molecule ab initio. If they need a molecule, they purchase molecular synthesis kits, which are, of course, designed by synthetic chemists, and which feature simplistic protocols.More. He doesn’t literally mean that “everyone is lying” but rather that the problem is so much bigger and deeper than it is often portrayed that typical science media claims are not reliable. See also: Chemist James Tour calls out Jeremy England’s origin of life Read More ›