Naturalism

From Alex Berezow at ACSH: Do you see yourself as a worthless cockroach contributing to the collapse of human civilization? Probably not, but Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich thinks precisely that about you. Fifty years ago, he published arguably the worst book ever written, The Population Bomb, which declared that human overpopulation would cause mass starvation. Instead, the Green Revolution (led in part by ACSH co-founder Norman Borlaug) caused global food production to explode, and the world population more than doubled from 3.5 billion in 1968 to 7.6 billion today. … Now, at the age of 85, Dr. Ehrlich still hasn’t let reality change his mind. In fact, he’s doubled down on his apocalyptic prognostications. In an interview with The Guardian, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Highly mobile eyebrows that can be used to express a wide range of subtle emotions may have played a crucial role in human survival, new research from the University of York suggests. Like the antlers on a stag, a pronounced brow ridge was a permanent signal of dominance and aggression in our early ancestors, which modern humans traded in for a smooth forehead with more visible, hairy eyebrows capable of a greater range of movement. Mobile eyebrows gave us the communication skills to establish large, social networks; in particular to express more nuanced emotions such as recognition and sympathy, allowing for greater understanding and cooperation between people. The study contributes to a long-running academic debate about why other Read More ›

Conservative sources often decry the fact that entertainment media do not re-evaluate their nihilistic direction despite faring poorly in terms of rating and numbers in recent years. But could we look at the matter from another angle? What if Hollywood has lost the power to change, even if stasis kills it? Today, the awardee ranting into the mike may sound more like your boring uncle at a family dinner than like your secret heartthrob. Which means that something has definitely changed. More.

So there is something to discuss. From Thomas Cortellesi at Quillette: Scientism is often ridiculed as an appeal to excessive reductionism that “restricts human inquiry.” This notion is predicated on a view of science as purely reductionist, a charge that betrays a deep misunderstanding of scientific practice. Science is a way of demonstrating the deep connections between the smallest of parts and the largest of systems. Contrary to how it is often portrayed, the scientific project is not strictly reductionist. Reductionism is the belief that understanding complex phenomena comes ultimately from breaking them down into their simplest parts. This approach is made by isolating variables, refining the precision and accuracy of observations, and extracting from them fundamental laws, which in Read More ›

We must getting somewhere when it is possible to talk about facts for once. From Ruth Kava at ACSH, talking about Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (1968): Dr. Ehrlich misjudged the promise of technology to increase food production yields. And here I’m speaking of the early efforts of Dr. Norman Borlaug, a founder of ACSH, which led to the so-called “Green Revolution”, providing new hybrids of corn and wheat that staved off starvation for millions. And now we have genetic engineering, technologies that can further improve yields of food crops and husbandry — but of course these weren’t really on the horizon in 1968. So concerned was he about the impending doom that Ehrlich even said he supported enforced birth control Read More ›

From Richard Weikart at the Federalist: The 2018 study in question by David Speed, et al, “What Do You Mean, ‘What Does It All Mean?’ Atheism, Nonreligion, and Life Meaning,” used surveys to try to figure out if atheists find meaning in life or are nihilistic. This survey defined someone as nihilistic if he or she upheld the position: “In my opinion, life does not serve any purpose.” This study found that atheists and non-religious people are not nihilistic, because they claimed that they did have a purpose in life. This is an interesting finding that seems to refute the oft-repeated charge (levied by religious folks) that atheists are nihilistic. However, there is a problem with this finding. The survey Read More ›

If you can afford the Netherlands in June: Workshop Reasoning in a post-truth world: a look at dual-process models Utrecht, the Netherlands, 20-21 June 2018 Last november, the Guardian published an article[1] proclaiming that in order to make sense of our current predicament living in a post-truth world, we should take note of “two fundamental things about what it means to think and talk like a human”. Firstly, there is our vulnerability to all forms of bias and distortion. And secondly, there is our capacity to (at least sometimes) outsmart such bias and distortion by deliberate effort and reasoning. The aim of the workshop is to shed light on the interplay of both these features. Although we have gained important Read More ›

From Harriet Hall, in a review of Daniel Dennett’s book, Bacteria to Bach and Back, at CSICOP: Consciousness is not a nonphysical phenomenon. It is an evolved user-illusion, “a system of virtual machines that evolved, genetically and memetically, to play very special roles in the ‘cognitive niche’ our ancestors have constructed over the millennia.” There can be competence without comprehension, and comprehension is expensive, so nature uses the “need to know” principle. Most animals don’t need to know. Are there degrees of consciousness? Where might we draw a line? We draw a line for moral reasons and try to prevent animals from suffering, but what is suffering? We euthanize dogs when we think they are conscious of suffering, but do Read More ›

From Erica Klarreich at Quanta: In January, Ziegler traveled to San Diego for the Joint Mathematics Meetings, where he received (on his and Aigner’s behalf) the 2018 Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition. “The density of elegant ideas per page [in the book] is extraordinarily high,” the prize citation reads. The 2014 book is Proofs from the Book (that is, a book of God’s alleged proofs, the most beautiful ones). Here’s the interview with Günter Ziegler (his co-author of Martin Aigner) at Quanta, with a sort of assist from Paul Erdős (1913-1996) Quanta: You’ve said that you and Martin Aigner have a similar sense of which proofs are worthy of inclusion in THE BOOK. What goes into your aesthetic? Ziegler: We’ve Read More ›

From Sabine Hossenfelder at Back(Re)Action: Yesterday, the media buzzed with the revelation that Stephen Hawking had completed a paper two weeks before his death. This paper supposedly contains some breathtaking insight. About the multiverse (parallel universes). The paper is based on an old idea by Stephen Hawking and Jim Hartle called the “no-boundary” proposal. In the paper, the authors employ a new method to do calculations that were not previously possible. Specifically, they calculate which type of universes a multiverse would contain if this theory was correct. The main conclusion seems to be that our universe is compatible with the idea, and also that this particular multiverse which they deal with is not as large as the usual multiverse one Read More ›

From Daniel Fanelli at PNAS: Ultimately, the debate over the existence of a reproducibility crisis should have been closed by recent large-scale assessments of reproducibility. Their results, however, are either reassuring or inconclusive. A “Many labs” project reported that 10 of 13 studies taken from the psychological literature had been consistently replicated multiple times across different settings (21), whereas an analysis in experimental economics suggested that, of 18 studies, at least 11 had been successfully replicated (22). The largest reproducibility initiative to date suggested that in psychological science, reproducibility was below 50% (23). This latter estimate, however, is likely to be too pessimistic for at least two reasons. First because, once again, such a low level of reproducibility was not Read More ›

From Alex Berezow at ACSH: Their first coordinated campaign against Mr. Neidenbach targeted his Facebook page. Facebook capitulated, temporarily blocking his page and banning Mr. Neidenbach – for the “crime” of promoting biotechnology. His page was soon reinstated, but their success only served to embolden the activists. Their most recent tactic is to try to get Mr. Neidenbach fired from his school, so they have accused him of stealing from his students and mocking people with intellectual disabilities. Of course, neither of these are true, but that hardly matters. As a “public figure” – a middle school teacher with a blog – people can say whatever they want about him with no consequence. That’s why Medium blogger Ena Valikov is Read More ›

Kalam cosmological argument: The cosmological argument is less a particular argument than an argument type. It uses a general pattern of argumentation (logos) that makes an inference from particular alleged facts about the universe (cosmos) to the existence of a unique being, generally identified with or referred to as God. Among these initial facts are that particular beings or events in the universe are causally dependent or contingent, that the universe (as the totality of contingent things) is contingent in that it could have been other than it is, that the Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact possibly has an explanation, or that the universe came into being. From these facts philosophers infer deductively, inductively, or abductively by inference to the best Read More ›

From Daniel Cossins at New Scientist: An almost religious devotion to beauty remains commonplace among theorists of fundamental physics, even if the standards of attractiveness have changed over time. One vision of elegance in particular has surged to the fore: the principle of naturalness. Broadly speaking, it is the belief that the laws of nature ought to be sublime, inevitable and self-contained, as opposed to makeshift and arbitrary. But what if they aren’t? That’s the disquieting possibility being entertained by a growing band of physicists in the aftermath of what should have been the breakthrough discovery of the decade, the snaring of the Higgs boson in 2012. The discovery of the Higgs, at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Read More ›

Ask Heather Heying. But first, get a load of this: From a quiet, historic U hamlet in Canada (one I have often enjoyed visiting), the SJWs emerge like an irruption of disease: Queens University in that hamlet (Kingston) puts the matter oh-so-politely: Of the roughly 150 people who attended the protest, most exercised peaceful demonstration. However, several individuals engaged in or incited the destruction of property. Several Kingston police officers arrived at the scene of the protest. Roughly 20 minutes into the lecture, protesters outside hit the stained glass windows and doors outside of Grant Hall. They also chanted “why are you hiding?” and “let us in.” One protester broke a stained glass window after they repeatedly hit it with their Read More ›