Ridley discusses several other scare claims that did not survive scrutiny and notes that the best estimate is that insect species are dying out at rates simliar to mammals and birds (1 to 5 per cent per century): “A problem, but not Armageddon.”
Media
Would you know if a robot was writing the news about ID? How?
It’s not that robots are really thinking up new things so much as that so much of what passes for news coverage doesn’t require much thought.
How did Stephen Hawking get to be “world’s smartest scientist”?
Top People need a multiverse. The rewards go to those who can conjure one. Hawking did his best within the boundaries of science and is to be commended for going no further. We have heard and will hear plenty from those who show no such qualms.
Human Zoos documentary discussed on Chicago TV
Airing Human Zoos: America’s Forgotten History of Scientific Racism is noteworthy in itself. For various reasons. legacy media have never been willing to take the legacy of explicitly Darwinian racism seriously, much as they feature disconnected and useless rants about racism.
Is academia to blame for pop science hype?
There are indeed remarkable breakthroughs happening out there but, as the study showed, the relationship between hope and hype is often not as advertised.
Inference Review did NOT set out to make a fool of cosmologist Adam Becker
It’s not a job that needs doing, the editors say.
Jay Richards: That Robot Is Not Self-Aware
The way the media cover AI, you’d swear they had invented being hopelessly naïve: Chances are, you’ve already seen this headline or one of many like it: “Robot that thinks for itself from scratch brings forward rise the self-aware machines” It’s from a story first published inThe Telegraph (UK), then by Yahoo News and MSN, […]
Maybe the Darwinists can’t afford to be quite as unhinged any more?
Remembering science writer Richard Milton: “it was deeply disappointing to find myself being described by a prominent academic, Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins, as “loony,” “stupid,” and “in need of psychiatric help” in response to purely scientific reporting. “
Science fiction writer is not a Darwin fan
Vox Day (actually Theodore Beale, a science fiction writer and video game designer) has been critiquing Darwinian evolution (which he calls TENS – Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection) of late: Here, he talks about recent findings that bird beaks don’t necessarily change to adapt to environmental conditions (as was thought to be the case […]
Darwinian Jerry Coyne muses on hashtag hate
These are deeply sick media. They no longer care about getting stuff right. I read recently about a thousand journalists losing their jobs and I wonder, how much worse is that than a thousand bartenders losing their jobs? Will society really be worse off?
“Rube-Bait”: Kevin Williamson vs. David Klinghoffer: Round 2
Recently, we covered Evolution News and Science Today editor David Klinghoffer’s response to a sneer by Kevin Williamson against ID at National Review (where Klinghoffer used to work, incidentally). Klinghoffer cited a number of respectable thinkers who have held Darwinism in little esteem—which led to our publishing a separate and different long list of such […]
Respectable people who doubt Darwin – a long list
Why then do media rush to cover any doubt about Darwin as some kind of a descent into a panic of ignorance? Because they are struggling for survival themselves in a linked world that may not need them as much any more The longer they behave this way, the more of a certainty that is. Under the circumstances the panic, hence the nonsense, may increase.
We’re NOT easily fooled by fake news
And the science paper that claimed so has been retracted. A team from the Shanghai Institute of Technology sought to study whether accuracy made any difference to whether a post goes viral on social media. They cited a concern about “the digital misinformation that threatens our democracy”: “The paper found that even though individuals may […]
Real Intelligence Can Never Be Matched by the Artificial
Scary predictions are a thriving business but that does not make them a road map to the future.
Did interstellar object Oumuamua normalize space aliens as science in 2018?
At least media feel freer to treat the topic that way: The turning point came in November, when Avi Loeb, the head of the astronomy department at Harvard University, co-wrote a paper saying that Oumuamua is so unusual that scientists should consider the possibility that it’s not a far-out comet or asteroid, as his colleagues assumed, […]