Media

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: The science story itself is fascinating and to all appearances solid. Human remains dating to some 3,700 year ago from ancient Canaanites yielded DNA revealing a startling overlap with modern-day Lebanese. The latter thus appear to harbor descendants of the long-ago population (“Continuity and Admixture in the Last Five Millennia of Levantine History from Ancient Canaanite and Present-Day Lebanese Genome Sequences,” American Journal of Human Genetics). He quotes a dozen instances of deadweights claiming that the find “disproves the Bible’s suggestion” that the Canaanites were wiped out. Only one problem: The Bible is detailed and unambiguous in relating that the Canaanites survived Joshua’s invasion. So it’s no wonder they have living descendants. Read More ›

For the last year or so I have been accumulating quite a number of YouTube playlists. Recently I’ve been trying to get it a little more organised and cleaned up, so I thought I would point readers to it as a resource. At the moment I have just under 40 individual playlists. I have created playlists for the key individuals in the ID debate (pro and anti-ID) and also have playlists for different issues that come up (e.g. Irreducible complexity, methodological naturalism etc). There’s also one covering the Dover trial, and any lectures and debates on the subject. For any other videos that don’t readily fit into other categories, I have a playlist of miscellaneous videos: ID YouTube Playlists I’ll Read More ›

From an editorial in Nature: There has been much gnashing of teeth in the science-journalism community this week, with the release of an infographic that claims to rate the best and worst sites for scientific news. According to the American Council on Science and Health, which helped to prepare the ranking, the field is in a shoddy state. “If journalism as a whole is bad (and it is),” says the council, “science journalism is even worse. Not only is it susceptible to the same sorts of biases that afflict regular journalism, but it is uniquely vulnerable to outrageous sensationalism”. News aggregator RealClearScience, which also worked on the analysis, goes further: “Much of science reporting is a morass of ideologically driven Read More ›

From Alex Hern at the Guardian: Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is launching a new online publication which will aim to fight fake news by pairing professional journalists with an army of volunteer community contributors. Wikitribune plans to pay for the reporters by raising money from a crowdfunding campaign. Wales intends to cover general issues, such as US and UK politics, through to specialist science and technology. Those who donate will become supporters, who in turn will have a say in which subjects and story threads the site focuses on. And Wales intends that the community of readers will fact-check and subedit published articles.More. The process described is elsewhere called propaganda. Translation: Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at MercatorNet: Mick Hume’s analysis converges closely with traditionalist/conservative streams of thought, especially in criticising claims that fake news determined election outcomes such as Brexit and Trump. The underlying assumption of many pundits is that the public cannot be trusted to make reasonable judgments in the face of fake news, and that a government/corporate crackdown is therefore in order. The problem is, from time immemorial, we have been inundated by fake news in the form of hype, rumour mills, tabloids, cost-free predictions, trendspotting claims, and many other artifacts of the human imagination. If democracy works at all, it works despite the constant and inevitable presence of all these factors all the time. Many predate the printing press Read More ›

From Sally Adee at New Scientist: For people like Cerf and many American companies, who view online speech through the lens of the US First Amendment, Germany’s approach may look like a heavy-handed suppression of the right of free expression. However, it may be a necessary first step in re-establishing a shared moral reality. In the age of bots, misinformation, and anonymity, free speech itself may be used to enact a kind of censorship. … There are many good reasons to be wary of outsourcing the policing of moral beliefs to private corporations, even if they are only tasked with implementing a country’s national laws, as would be the case with the draft German proposal. But we should focus on Read More ›

Vs. tailoring science news while claiming to be a neutral arbiter. From Jon Entine at Genetic Literacy Project, on the New York Times’ Oscar-worthy protestations that it presents “the truth: Whether a journalist presents a story in good faith but wrongly can be a matter of healthy debate. But increasingly, a more troubling ethical line is being crossed: some writers choose to arrange facts, or even invent them, in ways that grey out nuances to advance a storyline arrived at before independent reporting even commences. … Two recent Times articles on the swirling farm controversy about bee health and food—one two years ago and another last week—raise serious questions about whether the paper’s editors are still wearing ideological blinders on Read More ›

From Heather Zeiger at MercatorNet: Politics is not the only place to look for ‘fake news” Jason Young, the US Food and Drug Administration’s acting assistant commissioner for media affairs, made sure before leaving that the agency will no longer use “close-hold embargoes.” This is a practice under which reporters are given advance access to news on the condition that they not seek outside perspective until the embargo is lifted. The revelation that the FDA had been spinning the news created a minor scandal late last year. The FDA was outed in articles in Scientific American and the New York Times for going against their own stated policy of not allowing close-hold embargoes. The Association of Health Care Journalists worked Read More ›

From Alex Berezow at American Council on Science and Health, including, 5) The article is sensationalized; i.e., it draws huge, sweeping conclusions from a single study. (This is particularly common in stories on scary chemicals and miracle vegetables.) … 9) The article is about evolutionary psychology. More. The “huge, sweeping conclusions” problem is especially scandalous in fields like nutrition, which is already a mess. And, as noted elsewhere, evolutionary psychology does not explain puzzling human behavior. It offers Darwinian explanations for conventional behavior, with no insight that exceeds the results of applying common sense. Evo psych is big in pop science media precisely because it’s so easy. Just call your town Bedrock, build a story about it on some recent evo Read More ›

From Tom Bethell’s Darwin’s House of Cards: A Journalist’s Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates: “The science of neo-Darwinism was poor all along, and supported by very few facts. I have become ever more convinced that, although Darwinism has been promoted as science, its unstated role has been to prop up a philosophy—the philosophy of materialism—and atheism along with it.” (Page 20) “The scientific evidence for evolution is not only weaker than is generally supposed, but as new discoveries have been made since 1959, the reasons for accepting the theory have diminished rather than increased.” Page 45 “Darwinian evolution can be seen as a way of looking at the history of life through the distorting lens of Progress. Given enough time, Read More ›

As a sort of inoculation? From Natasha Lomas at Tech Crunch: Research conducted by social psychologists at Cambridge University in the UK, and Yale and George Mason in the US, offers a potential strategy for mitigating the spread of misinformation online — involving the use of pro-active warnings designed to contextualize and pre-expose web users to related but fake information in order to debunk factual distortion in advance. The researchers found that combining facts about climate change with a small dose of misinformation — in the form of a warning about potential distortion — helped study participants resist the influence of the false information. More. [link now fixed] Sounds like the usual motivated rubbish, actually. (That is: Give us JOBS Read More ›

From Peter Dockrill at Science Alert: NASA just announced that any published research funded by the space agency will now be available at no cost, launching a new public web portal that anybody can access. The free online archive comes in response to a new NASA policy, which requires that any NASA-funded research articles in peer-reviewed journals be publicly accessible within one year of publication. More. Some of us think that all publicly funded science should be free, and friends say there is a move in that direction, for a variety of reasons, including transparency: It also follows a growing general trend towards more openness in science research and academia more broadly. With frustration stemming over the commercial control wielded Read More ›

Suzan Mazur notes at Huffington Post that the semiotics journal Sign Systems Studies (University of Tartu Press) published an article on the recent Royal Society conference on new trends in evolution. In the opening pages of his article, Kull decides to cite the July 2008 Altenberg conference as one of those pivotal events, a meeting of scientists called to determine whether or not an extended evolutionary synthesis was needed. I was barred from attending Altenberg for getting out in front of the story. Kull then proceeds to mention branding of Altenberg as the “Woodstock of Evolution,” because it created a sensation and put the meeting on the map, gave it life. That branding took place in a newsbreaking story of Read More ›

From Maria Gallucci at Mashable: Separately, environmental and climate groups are planning a People’s Climate March in April to protest Trump’s plans to scrap former President Barack Obama’s climate policies and advance construction of controversial oil pipelines. Both climate activists and scientists said they were bolstered by the Women’s Marches, which drew millions of women and men around the world, from Washington down to Antarctica. Next to signs promoting women’s reproductive rights and dismissing Trump’s past xenophobic and misogynistic statements, many demonstrators carried posters urging participants to “Stand Up for Science” or declaring that “Climate Change is Real” — a fact that Trump said he doesn’t fully accept. More. Gee, that’ll help. When people have spent a lifetime immersed in Read More ›

Well, that didn’t take long. They’re not stunned any more, they’re mad. Mad as stink. From Phillip Williamson at New Scientist: Ocean acidification is an inevitable consequence of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That’s a matter of fact. We don’t know exactly what will happen to complex marine ecosystems when faced with the additional stress of falling pH, but we do know those changes are happening and that they won’t be good news. UK journalist James Delingpole disagrees. In an article for The Spectator in April 2016, he took the sceptical position that all concerns over ocean acidification are unjustified “alarmism” and that the scientific study of this non-problem is a waste of money. He concluded that the only reason Read More ›