Media

At least, if you credit a National Academy of Sciences study on the subject: Iyengar and Massey (hereafter I & M) are convinced, in any event, that the revolution in media over the last three decades means that the world is sinking into abject falsehood. In the 1970s, as they relate, media were controlled by a few players: “really only a handful of newspapers, magazines, and television broadcasts.” National and international news was dominated by wire services like Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI): In addition to the small number of sources, broadcast news was regulated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which required broadcasters to reserve a small share of airtime to cover matters of public interest; Read More ›

Karsten Pultz reports from Denmark on efforts to suppress the idea of design in nature that are coming from the Danish church. Mr. Pultz is also the author of “Why I have a problem with theistic evolution,”: Intelligent design being suppressed in academia is old news. But in Denmark even a Christian newspaper participates in biased coverage in favour of evolution. Recently, Mads Jakobsen, a priest and theologian in the Danish state church, was reprimanded by his bishop, Marianne Christiansen because he had written critically about Darwin’s theory in his parish magazine. The theologian had mainly identified the moral problems which arise when trying to combine survival of the fittest with Christian beliefs, but he seems also to have admitted Read More ›

Should we believe them when they tell us that the drinking four cups of coffee daily lowers our risk of death people with spouses live longer? A statistician and a physician team up to explain why not: A subtler manifestation of dishonesty in research is what amounts to statistical cheating. Here is how it works… If you try to answer one question – by asking about levels of coffee consumption, for example, to test whether drinking certain amounts a day are associated with more or less cancer; or whether being married is associated with increased longevity — and test the results with appropriate statistical methods, there is a 5% chance of getting a (nominally) statistically significant result purely by chance Read More ›

In recent years, a number of theoretical physicists have raised concerns about stagnation and cool-sounding programs that produce little but TED talks. Now one replies, pointing out that if we leave the wild world of string theory out of the picture, theoretical physicists work with experimentalists more than ever before: In one example, theorists teamed with experimentalists to probe quantum correlations spread across space and time. In another example, theorists posited a mechanism by which superconducting qubits interact with a hot environment. Other illustrations from the past five years include discrete time crystals, many–body scars, magic-angle materials, and quantum chaos. These collaborations even offer hope for steering quantum gravity with experiments. Certain quantum-gravity systems share properties with certain many-particle quantum Read More ›

Quillette is one of the publications to which we sometimes direct your attention. It publishes figures who, in many cases, shouldn’t be particularly controversial but are. Along comes Politico to oblige us with an explanation: An Australian atheist feminist and psychology dropout, Claire Lehmann, founded it because she realized that magazines are more fun when people who have studied things seriously are allowed to say what they think: At times, it has drawn intense social media backlash, with contributors labeled everything from “clowns” to “cryptofascists” on Twitter. But fans of the site include pop psychologist Jordan Peterson, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, psychology professors Steven Pinker of Harvard and Jonathan Haidt of New York University, and columnists like David Brooks, Meghan Read More ›

From Sir Martin Rees at NBC: AI apocalypse is certainly in the air. Elon Musk, Henry Kissinger, and the late Stephen Hawking have all predicted an AI doomsday. Industry professionals’ doubt and disparagement don’t seem to register with the media in the same way. Rees, who is former president of the Royal Society, goes further, however. He also predicts in his book that “a physics experiment could swallow up the entire universe.” When he received the Templeton Prize in 2011, he was noted for speculating that we could be living in a giant computer simulation. In 2017, he suggested that our universe may be lost in an “unbounded cosmic archipelago,” a multiverse where “we could all have avatars.” As for Read More ›

Get a load of this: More recently, scientists have pointed out that if one tweaks many of the dimensionless physical constants — numbers like pi that are independent of units and simply exist as fundamental ideas — none of the cosmos we see would exist. One of these numbers is omega, the density parameter, which pits gravity’s pull against the expanding push of dark energy. If gravity were stronger, the universe would have long since ceased expanding, and would have collapsed back down in a reverse Big Bang, often called the “Big Crunch.” If dark energy were stronger, then the universe would race away from itself so that no matter would stick together and stars, planets, and people could never Read More ›

Presumably, a fix of Darwinism goes down well in a complex world: Discover magazine tells readers why people believe in God. It’s simple: Evolution fooled us! But in fact the article is a perfect case study in how a sweeping story of “evolution” gets credit for just about anything. … That’s the story, says Alex. Evolution wired all that into us; but it messed up, too. It didn’t include a “stop” switch to tell us where not to use those tendencies. We see patterns that aren’t real, and we conclude falsely that someone must have put them there on purpose. Some things we learn by imitation aren’t so good after all. So for example we see patterns in weather, and Read More ›

I (O’Leary for News) just discovered this fact because, acting on a tip, I was trying to find out whether mine was one of the millions of recently hacked accounts. I haven’t found that out yet but here is a list of posts Facebook removed from various groups’ Facebook pages as spam: Sociologist Steve Fuller: How ID Foxes Can Beat the Darwinian Lions Fuller clearly finds the ID foxes more interesting and sympathetic figures than the Darwinian lions: “The lion rules by focused shows of force, as opposed to the fox’s diverse displays of cunning.” [We removed this post because it looks like spam and doesn’t follow our Community Standards. CLOSED] [From Evolution News, removed from Sanctuary, ID Consistent with the Read More ›

Behaviorist Brian Wansink whose “bottomless bowl” theory of why people eat too much – and other creative but problematic ideas hatched at Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab has fallen from grace: His lab informed food companies implementing the 100-calorie snack packs you see in stores, for example, under the idea that these smaller portions would get people to eat less. He led the national committee on dietary guidelines and worked to improve the food ecosystems in public schools, the U.S. Army, and Google, among others. On Thursday, Cornell’s provost, Michael Kotlikoff, issued a statement (touted by a university press release) that said a faculty committee had investigated Wansink and found that he had “committed academic misconduct in his research and Read More ›

Recently, we reported on one of those Darwinian morality tales, according to which homo erectus died out because he was lazy, compared to the rest of us. Ann Gauger, pointed out that the broader picture (timelines, for example) does not suggest that Homo erectus was lazy. And now we learn, “The inference that laziness typifies Homo erectus and that such a failing might have hastened their extinction is moronic,” says Neil Roach, a biological anthropologist at Harvard University. “This is a solid study with interesting results that do contribute significantly to our field, and unfortunately, the press release does exactly the opposite.” Roach makes his point emphatically, and with good reason—there’s a lot of evidence pointing to H. erectus as Read More ›

ID is a proposition that, first, it is reasonable to inquire scientifically as to whether certain features of the world of life and/or the physical cosmos can or do show observable signs of design. To which, the answer has long since been given, e.g. by the well known OoL researcher Orgel in a significant 1973 book: >>living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals are usually taken as the prototypes of simple well-specified structures, because they consist of a very large number of identical molecules packed together in a uniform way. Lumps of granite or random mixtures of polymers are examples of structures that are complex but not specified. The crystals fail to qualify as living because they lack Read More ›

Last year, David Klinghoffer offered some thoughts on fake news about controversies in evolution in popular media that bear repeating: The supposedly objective investigative news site ProPublica hit all of them — codes, creationism, Kitzmiller v. Dover — in a recent article, going after then-Education Secretary nominee Betsy DeVos, who had mentioned “critical thinking” in her appointment hearing. When a colleague and I challenged their reporting, focusing on a distortion of our education policy that could be verified by published documents on our website, an editor brushed us off, claiming it came down to a “matter of opinion and debate, not fact.” I’ve documented my correspondence with the editor, which I found very revealing. I might have let it drop Read More ›

Further to kairosfocus’s thoughts yesterday on the digital empire suppressing the free flow of ideas: Buzzfeed reported August 7 that “YouTube Is Fighting Back Against Climate Misinformation.” As of July 9, “YouTube is now adding fact checks to videos that question climate change … as a part of its ongoing effort to combat the rampant misinformation and conspiratorial fodder on its platform.” … YouTube’s decision might be defensible if it were evenhanded. If, on all videos addressing climate change, from any perspective, YouTube placed a notice that climate change is the subject of vigorous ongoing debate and that equally qualified scientists hold a variety of views on the magnitude, causes, and consequences of human-induced climate change and on the best Read More ›

New Scientist, where it is known that all things come of evolution and we make nothing ourselves, does not know whether we “evolved” domestic violence: Why is domestic violence so horrifyingly common around the world? According to a study out today, men who are violent towards their partners have more children in societies without birth control. This implies that evolution favours domestic violence – but can that really be true? Yes. No. Maybe. It is true that allowing Political Correctness to rule your thoughts and not believing that you have free will can lead to conniptions. The researchers studied the Tsimane people of Bolivia, who have a pre-industrial culture with no access to contraception. Shockingly, 85 per cent of women Read More ›