Naturalism

From ScienceDaily: Whales and dolphins (Cetaceans) live in tightly-knit social groups, have complex relationships, talk to each other and even have regional dialects — much like human societies. A major new study, published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution (Monday 16th October), has linked the complexity of Cetacean culture and behaviour to the size of their brains. Rich yes, “human-like” no. But the authors know they won’t be challenged by peers wondering where the dolphin universities are. Things get interesting here: Dr Kieran Fox, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, added: “Cetaceans have many complex social behaviours that are similar to humans and other primates. They, however, have different brain structures from us, leading some researchers to argue that whales and Read More ›

  From Denyse O’Leary at Evolution News & Views: Naturalists (who say nature is all there is) have recently sought to jimmy the rules around evidence to accommodate their strong belief that a multiverse really exists. Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel offers a glimpse of the future they propose, in a piece at Forbes titled “The multiverse is inevitable and we’re living in it”: “What is the Multiverse, then? It may go well beyond physics, and be the first physically motivated “metaphysics” we’ve ever encountered. For the first time, we’re understanding the limits of what our Universe can teach us. There is information we need, but that we’ll never obtain, in order to elevate this into the realm of testable science. Until Read More ›

Jeremy England. From John Ellis at PJ Media: In his new novel Origin, Brown includes a character named Jeremy England who is a physics professor. This fictional character based on the real-life Jeremy England has “identified the underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life.” Furthermore, according to the book, Professor England has disproven all other theories of creation, including the Biblical account recorded in Genesis. The real Jeremy England scoffs at Dan Brown’s fictional creation that hijacks England’s actual research. England takes umbrage at Brown’s use of his name and research to suggest that the Book of Genesis has been refuted. England points out that his namesake in Dan Brown’s book offers no real science to interact Read More ›

From Sam Kriss at Atlantic: Among philosophers, biologists, and cognitive scientists, this nightmare is an exciting new field of study, known as embodied or extended cognition: broadly, the theory that what we think of as brain processes can take place outside of the brain. In some cases, this isn’t a particularly radical idea. The octopus, for instance, has a bizarre and miraculous mind, sometimes inside its brain, sometimes extending beyond it in sucker-tipped trails. Neurons are spread throughout its body; the creature has more of them in its arms than in its brain itself. It’s possible that each arm might be, to some extent, an independently thinking creature, all of which are collapsed into an octopean superconsciousness in times of Read More ›

Here. From the paper: “Contrary to what many people believe, “Methodological naturalism is certainly NOT a ‘ground rule’ of science today”. Paper. See also: Why the “Naturalism” Part of “Methodological Naturalism” is Both Misleading and Unnecessary (Barry Arrington)

From astrophysicist Ethan Siegel at Forbes: The multiverse is inevitable and we’re living in it What is the Multiverse, then? It may go well beyond physics, and be the first physically motivated “metaphysics” we’ve ever encountered. For the first time, we’re understanding the limits of what our Universe can teach us. There is information we need, but that we’ll never obtain, in order to elevate this into the realm of testable science. Until then, we can predict, but neither verify nor refute, the fact that our Universe is just one small part of a far grander realm: the Multiverse. More. In other words, the multiverse is to be accepted as science, even though it may never be testable, thus never Read More ›

Further to “Nineteen new “species” of gecko? Or 19 new fundraising opportunities…?,” now and then we see people confronting the problem. From Rebecca Heismann at Living Bird, What’s in a Name? How Genome Mapping Can Make It Harder to Tell Species Apart The biological species concept remains the most widely accepted standard among ornithologists for classification decisions at the species level. But in the last five years, yet another revolution has rocked the world of avian classification. Gone are the days when ornithologists would labor for months to sequence just a few individual genes on their way to building an evolutionary tree. Today’s “high-throughput” or “next-generation” genome sequencing means a student in an evolutionary biology laboratory today can assemble an entire Read More ›

From software engineer William A. Wilson at First Things: My friends who work in scientific fields were aghast when they saw that the organizers of a planned “March for Science” had tweeted that “colonization, racism, immigration, native rights, sexism, ableism, queer-, trans-, intersex-phobia, & econ justice are scientific issues [black power emoji][rainbow emoji].” Who can blame them for their horror? The impartial search for truth is having enough problems these days, what with the discovery that many prominent scientific results, over a broad swath of fields, are non-replicable and likely false. … In fact, the purported objectivity of scientific inquiry is a damaging myth, and the illiberal instincts of the Marchers for Science represent a corrective, though not a cure. Read More ›

We’ve been hearing a lot about that. From Rodney Brooks, former director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT , in “The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions” at Technology Review, featuring the fourth sin: When people hear that machine learning is making great strides in some new domain, they tend to use as a mental model the way in which a person would learn that new domain. However, machine learning is very brittle, and it requires lots of preparation by human researchers or engineers, special-purpose coding, special-purpose sets of training data, and a custom learning structure for each new problem domain. Today’s machine learning is not at all the sponge-like learning that humans engage in, making Read More ›

From lit prof Tim Parks and AI philosopher Riccardo Manzotti at New York Review of Books: Manzotti: One of the comedies of modern thinking is that we treat objects that exist relative to the tools of scientists as more real, more correct, somehow, than other objects. In the case you mention, there are four objects: the air, and three others in relation to it—your body, the thermometer, and my body. The thermometer meets the air and says seventy-two degrees. A digit. Your body meets the air and registers cold. My body meets the air and registers warm. All three “measurements” are valid and real. Seventy-two degrees, cold, and warm. You can’t choose to be warm because someone tells you a Read More ›

In the view of physicist Ethan Siegel at Forbes, the doomed ideas are proton decay, modified gravity, supersymmetry, Technicolor, and WIMP-based dark matter. Supersymmetry is, of course, Cool, so it is immortal, irrespective of evidence. But Siegel cautions, While there are many elegant reasons to favor supersymmetry, the fact is that these particles should exist at approximately the same masses as the highest-mass Standard Model particles. With the advent of the LHC, we have determined that if these particles exist, they are many times heavier than the Standard Model particles, so much so that they would no longer solve the mass-difference problem. As a theory to explain this hierarchy problem, supersymmetry is completely dead. More. Of course, it might be Read More ›

J. Scott Turner’s recent Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It makes the case that life is not comprehensible without the concept of purpose and that Darwinism’s failure to explain is an “impending crisis.” Michael Ruse, author of many books on the triumph of Darwinism, tells us at Big Questions Online: The answer is natural selection. So here we have the reason why final-cause talk is permissible and necessary. Thanks to the processes of evolution, organisms appear design-like, even though they are ultimately the result of random variations plus natural selection. In order to make sense of this fact, we often think and talk in terms of ends or purposes, although these Read More ›

… without taking purpose into account, which he addresses through Biology’s Second Law, homeostasis. From J. Scott Turner in Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It: away. And the uncomfortable question is this: what if phenomena like intentionality, purpose, and design are not illusions, but are quite real—are in fact the central attributes of life? How can we have a coherent theory of life that tries to shunt these phenomena to the side? And if we don’t have a coherent theory of life, how can we have a coherent theory of evolution? This is the hard nut that has to be cracked, and this leads me to the other theme I Read More ›

Here. Paper. See also: Carlo Rovelli: Theories of everything ill-conceived but we can learn to understand quantum mechanics

From Sarah Jones at New Republic: The bots, our children, do not behave. They have taken over the internet—bots account for more than half of internet traffic—and interfered with our elections. But instead of being unnerved by the bot’s growing power, Anthony Levandowski would like to make one God. The Silicon Valley engineer, who has been accused by Waymo, Google’s self-driving car company, of trying to steal trade secrets and give them to Uber, in 2015 “founded a religious organization called Way of the Future,” Wired reported last week. “Its purpose, according to previously unreported state filings, is nothing less than to ‘develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.’” Nobody but Levandowski knows if he Read More ›