Intelligent Design

Further to: Slate has discovered why you shouldn’t use Wikipedia as a source (In other breaking news, pigs don’t really fly faster than light), we now read, once again, a story like: The sad tales of the Wikipedia gang war regarding WUWT This illustrates the most basic problem with the reliability of Wikipedia in any entry where human opinion is involved. There are roving gangs (and sometimes individuals who appear gang-like due to their output level, such as disgraced Wikipedia editor William Connolley, who will no doubt wail about this note, and then proceed to post the usual denigrating things on his “Stoat, taking science by the throat” blog) and individuals who act as gatekeepers of their own vision of “truth”, Read More ›

“ … reportage that is mostly aimed at insulting Republicans and Christians.” But isn’t that what a pop science page would typically understand science reporting to be?  Oh yes, there are also a-crock-alypses to cover. Sorry, forgot. Here: Now, for some reason, Slate’s science page has partially abandoned its strong tradition of in-depth analysis to promote an angry, opinion-driven reportage that is mostly aimed at insulting Republicans and Christians. … This is counterproductive. Science journalism that forsakes its primary mission of science communication to engage in partisan culture wars does a grotesque disservice to the scientific endeavor and is doomed to fail. Just ask ScienceBlogs, which has become a shell of its former self … Yuh. I often send ScienceBlogs Read More ›

If they’re honest. Following on Darwin’s Predictions: A New Website Surveys Evolution’s Main Predictions Here: The predictions examined in this paper were selected according to several criteria. They cover a wide spectrum of evolutionary theory and are fundamental to the theory, reflecting major tenets of evolutionary thought. They were widely held by the consensus rather than reflecting one viewpoint of several competing viewpoints. Each prediction was a natural and fundamental expectation of the theory of evolution, and constituted mainstream evolutionary science. Furthermore, the selected predictions are not vague but rather are specific and can be objectively evaluated. They have been tested and evaluated and the outcome is not controversial or in question. And finally the predictions have implications for evolution’s capacity Read More ›

Ever wonder what the scientific evidence says about evolutionary theory? Have doubts about evolutionist’s claim that the data unequivocally support evolution, making if a fact beyond all reasonable doubt? Well have a look for yourself at the newDarwinsPredictions site and see how the objective science compares with evolution’s predictions.  Read more

Maybe. It even penetrated as far as the New York Times: Retractions can be good things, since even scientists often fail to acknowledge their mistakes, preferring instead to allow erroneous findings simply to wither away in the back alleys of unreproducible literature. But they don’t surprise those of us who are familiar with how science works; we’re surprised only that retractions aren’t even more frequent. … Every day, on average, a scientific paper is retracted because of misconduct. Two percent of scientists admit to tinkering with their data in some kind of improper way. That number might appear small, but remember: Researchers publish some 2 million articles a year, often with taxpayer funding. In each of the last few years, Read More ›

Drat, just when I (O’Leary for News) complained that the new atheists had given up threatening each other with legal action, raising cain about genome mapper Francis Collins, or starting hoo-haws in elevators, this item turned up in the In Bin: Jerry Coyne in The Scientist : But while science and religion both claim to discern what’s true, only science has a system for weeding out what’s false. In the end, that is the irreconcilable conflict between them. Science is not just a profession or a body of facts, but, more important, a set of cognitive and practical tools designed to understand brute reality while overcoming the human desire to believe what we like or what we find emotionally satisfying. Read More ›

Here. In this way, the researchers looked back at selection events that occurred up to 500,000 years ago, revealing the evolutionary forces that shaped the dawn of modern humans, thought to be around 200,000 years ago. Most previous methods for uncovering such changes reach back only about 30,000 years, says Stephen Schaffner, a computational biologist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The analytical approach that Tang’s team used is promising, he adds. “It’s treating all kinds of selection in a uniform framework, and it’s also treating different eras of selection in a more or less uniform way.” But Schaffner says that further research is needed to confirm that the method is broadly applicable. Still, even the most powerful genomic-analysis Read More ›

In a comparatively nonsense-free book review, we read, Schrödinger and Einstein both spent far longer on the hunt for a unification of quantum physics and relativity than they had on the breakthroughs for which they are known. This quixotic quest forms the major part of Halpern’s book, and it makes for a tragic tale. instein revised and rejigged his work, to the increasing ennui of his peers and the increasing adulation of the world. Schrödinger, never as famous, overstepped the mark, trying so hard to be taken seriously that he offended Einstein with public pronouncements about the superiority of his own work. For three years, Einstein didn’t return Schrödinger’s letters. Their fellow physicists became more bewildered and irritated by the Read More ›

Irish Voters Do the Right Thing. Church Was On the Wrong Side, As Usual Referring to this article. There is no “the” right thing under materialism and moral subjectivism.  There is no “the” wrong side.  Had Irish voters elected to round up and execute all gays and lesbians, under materialism and moral subjectivism that too would have been a right thing.  Had they elected to lobotomize them, that too would have been a right thing, made right by that which legitimizes as right any subjective moral or ethical good under materialism: the individual, or the group, or the community, or the society, or the culture consider a thing to be good or right. That headline corrected for logical consistency under Read More ›

Recently, there has been a lively exchange of views on the subject of animal rationality and animal immortality between Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart and Thomist philosopher Edward Feser. A fair-minded reader would have to conclude that Feser has gotten the better of Hart in this exchange. (For a handy summary of the arguments put forward on both sides, I would warmly recommend Professor Feser’s latest article; his earlier articles can be found here, here and here. Hart’s articles in First Things can be found here and here.) Nevertheless, I have strong reservations about some of Feser’s arguments. In a nutshell: Feser seems to want to place a period where the available evidence – from both science and philosophy Read More ›

Noted by Barry Arrington here. Whitewash duly reported in the New Yorker is In retrospect, Green wishes he had asked for the raw data earlier. And yet, in collaborations in which data is collected at only one institution, it’s not uncommon for the collecting site to anonymize and code it before sharing it. The anonymized data Green did see looked plausible and convincing. “He analyzed it, I analyzed it—I have the most ornate set of graphs and charts and every possible detail analyzed five different ways,” Green said. Ultimately, though, the system takes for granted that no one would be so brazen as to create the actual raw data themselves. The author burbles on, as expected, about the nature of Read More ›

Readers may remember Suzan Mazur’s interview with a senior NASA scientist: senior NASA origin of life scientist: In a couple of e-mails to me in January 2013, Andrew Pohorille, the senior-most scientist at NASA working in the origin of life field, objected to my story, “The RNA World’s Last Hurrah?”, “The RNA World’s Last Hurrah?”, in which I interviewed Paul Davies’ collaborator at Arizona State University, physicist Sara Walker. … Hey, we got you hooked? Then how be this, a followup: Pohorille is now even less enthused about the RNA world since Princeton and said there were also fewer scientists currently pursuing that line of research. He also thinks the answer to origin of life is not about a thermodynamic Read More ›

Well, here is one: Crap about “Intentional change” = stuff government will probably try to make us do, if it gets votes:  The Evolution Institute says it uses evolutionary science to solve real-world problems. Currently, there is no mechanism for applying current theory and research to public policy formulation. We aim to provide the mechanism. Working with our large network of advisors, we can: Identify and assemble the evolutionary expertise for virtually any topic relevant to human welfare. Organize workshops, coordinate the writing of position papers, and provide advisors. Assist in the implementation of the policies that we formulate. Does that include SWAT teams? Curiously, it took a Canadian to publicize how many semi-useless bureaucrats in the United States have SWAT Read More ›

Alternatively, when do we finally get to the end of the Darwin stupid? Humans are supposed to have an “evolutionary” fear of snakes. In large numbers, snakes can seem disgusting. But snakes are rarely present in large numbers. See the vid below for an explanation of a very rare exception to this rule* in Canada. In my own background (News), the Fat Broad ruled, and venomous snakes can be an endangered species. So I’d never heard that humans were “naturally” afraid of snakes until I encountered the writings of tenured evolutionary psychologists proclaiming their apes’r’us truth to the masses. In real off-campus life, where News grew up, we were always far more worried about rabid mammals. (Look, if you simply can’t Read More ›

Following up on a story UD News reported earlier, Retraction Watch reports: In what can only be described as a remarkable and swift series of events, one of the authors of a much-ballyhooed Science paper claiming that short conversations could change people’s minds on same-sex marriage is retracting it following revelations that the data were faked by his co-author. If one digs further into the story it will quickly become apparent that the data backing the paper were facially absurd.  Where was the much ballyhooed peer review process?   *The phrase “advocacy science” should, of course, be an oxymoron.  Sadly, it is not.