Naturalism

Why? Could that be because the teachers are really teaching a religion rather than a discipline and many people are not convinced by that religion? From Amanda Glaze at Evolution Institute: There has long been a discussion in the scientific and science education communities about the dismal state of evolution acceptance in the United States2. For those not aware, the United States presently ranks second to last in terms of acceptance of evolution among all other first tier nations worldwide3. In fact, the only nation that has lower acceptance rates is Turkey, a country where the national education governing body has, just this year, presented new national standards for education that are noticeably missing their previous coverage of evolution4. In Read More ›

From Allum Bohkari at Breitbart Tech, interviewing an anonymous Google serf, “Emmett”: “Emmett”: I remember Peter Goett entirely unironically posting a reply to a list with over 10,000 Googlers: “congratulations on your white penis.” To my understanding, had someone posted “black vagina”, that person would have been summarily fired. Also to my understanding, Goett appears to have received no punishment. … 1. Every day, rank-and-file (nominally low-status, but informally very high-status) SJWs post SJW / Marxist propaganda that irritates non-SJW folks who just want to do their job. 2. Everyone who dares question any of these propaganda posts, no matter how politely, is chastised publicly by the SJWs, and then (I hope it’s clear) written up on some secret lists. Read More ›

No, we did not make this total confusion up. From Olivia Goldhill, discussing Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, andthe Deep Origins of Consciousness at Quartz: Octopus research shows that consciousness isn’t what makes humans special There’s some uncertainty about which precise ancestor was most recently shared by octopuses and humans, but, Godfrey-Smith says, “It was probably an animal about the size of a leech or flatworm with neurons numbering perhaps in the thousands, but not more than that.” This means that octopuses have very little in common with humans, evolution-wise. They have developed eyes, limbs, and brains via a completely separate route, with very different ancestors, from humans. And they seem to have come by their impressive Read More ›

From Columbia mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong on some recent developments in theoretical physics: …it seems that the field is moving ever forward in a post-modern direction I can’t follow. Tonight the arXiv has something new from Susskind about this, where he argues that one should go beyond “ER=EPR”, to “GR=QM”. While the 2013 paper had very few equations, this one has none at all, and is actually written in the form not of a scientific paper, but of a letter to fellow “Qubitzers”. On some sort of spectrum of precision of statements, with Bourbaki near one end, this paper is way at the other end. More. Post-moderns are indeed marchin’, marchin’ and they are deadly serious about Read More ›

From cosmologist George Ellis at Inference Review: THEORETICAL PHYSICS AND cosmology find themselves in a strange place. Scientific theories have since the seventeenth century been held tight by an experimental leash. In the last twenty years or so, both string theory and theories of the multiverse have slipped the leash. Their owners argue that this is no time to bring these subjects to heel. It is this that is strange. … If the multiverse is scientifically problematic, it is always open to philosophers to rescue the multiverse by expanding the margins of science. A theory, so the argument runs, need not be confirmed by empirical evidence. Richard Dawid has argued as much in a paper entitled “The Significance of Non-Empirical Read More ›

Our all-time most-read post here at Uncommon Descent was about renowned chemist James Tour: A world-famous chemist tells the truth: there’s no scientist alive today who understands macroevolution (visited 363,901 times, 66 visits today, 484 responses). At Inference Review, he writes, Cellular and organelle bilayers, which were once thought of as simple vesicles, are anything but. They are highly functional gatekeepers. By virtue of their glycans, lipid bilayers become enormous banks of stored, readable, and re-writable information. The sonication of a few random lipids, polysaccharides, and proteins in a lab will not yield cellular lipid bilayer membranes. Mes frères, mes semblables, with these complexities in mind, how can we build the microsystem of a simple cell? Would we be able Read More ›

The one who got drowned in diversicrat social media politics. The story provides good illustration of the way in which traditional media today are not up to the job of newsgathering in a non-gatekeeper digital age and should not be trusted. From Bre Davis at the Federalist: Here Are All The Media Outlets Blatantly Lying About The Google Memo E.g.: 3.Time Magazine: The magazine that’s been slowly dying for nearly a decade published a writeup of the ordeal, calling the memo a “tirade” in their headline: “Google Has Fired the Employee Who Wrote an Anti-Diversity Tirade, Report Says”. To anyone who’s actually read the memo, it’s clear a “tirade” is the least accurate way to describe it. It’s calm, it’s rational, Read More ›

From Paul Braterman at The Conversation, we learn stuff like: Evolution, Pence argues, is a theory, theories are uncertain, therefore evolution is uncertain. But evolution is a theory only in the scientific sense of the word. And in the words of the National Academy of Sciences, “The formal scientific definition of theory is quite different from the everyday meaning of the word. It refers to a comprehensive explanation of some aspect of nature that is supported by a vast body of evidence.” Attaching this label to evolution is an indicator of strength, not weakness. Actually, string theory and multiverse theories are elaborate theories too; there is just no evidence for them. It simply isn’t the case, as Braterman claims, that Read More ›

In a coherent system, that would be a dilemma. As progressives turn and rend each other with increasing ferocity—as a break from attacking others— we learn that the engineer who was fired from Google for authoring the anti-diversity memo was relying on the principles of evolutionary psychology. From Nitasha Tiku at Wired: The 10-page missive was posted on an internal discussion board and went viral inside, and outside, the company Friday and Saturday. The document cited purported principles of evolutionary psychology to argue that women make up only 20 percent of Google’s technical staff because they are more interested in people rather than ideas, which the author considers an obstacle to being a good engineer. The author, James Damore, said Read More ›

From neurosurgeon Michael Egnor at Evolution News & Views: Materialists struggle with purpose in nature, because their ideology rules out natural purposes, and yet purpose is obvious everywhere in nature. How can materialists reconcile their ideology with quite contradictory facts? They talk gibberish. The current buzzword is entropy, which allegedly prevents purpose. … While entropy is a kind of physical disorder, it is, from a metaphysical perspective, a very clear kind of order in natural change: a consistent tendency for the net order of material things to decrease with change. As a consistent tendency, entropy is teleological. Teleology pervades nature: even disorganization in nature is teleological. Entropy isn’t a refutation of Aristotelian teleology. It’s a strikingly clear manifestation of it. Read More ›

Accidentally, through Darwinian evolution. But it’s hard to explain. Michael E. Price takes issue with Joseph P. Carter (the universe does not care about purpose) at Psychology Today: He offers to explain how natural selection can create purpose (a position denied by most of its devotees): Smolin founded his theory on the idea that our universe exists as just one in a vast population of replicating universes: a multiverse (this idea is becoming increasingly conventional and non-controversial among physicists). In a multiverse, Smolin reasoned, universe designs that were better at self-replication would achieve greater representation. And if black holes were the mechanism of self-replication, he reasoned further, then selection would favor universes that contained more black holes. From this perspective, Read More ›

From Joseph P.Carter at the New York Times: Entropy is antagonistic to intrinsic purpose. It’s about disorder. Aristotle’s world and pretty much the dominant understanding of the physical universe until the Copernican Revolution is all about inherent order and permanence. But the universe as we understand it tells us nothing about the goal or meaning of existence, let alone our own. In the grand scheme of things, you and I are enormously insignificant. But not entirely insignificant. For starters, we are important to each other. Meaning begins and ends with how we talk about our own lives, such as our myths and stories. Sean Carroll, a prominent cosmologist and theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, makes this case Read More ›

From Clay Routledge at New York Times: Furthermore, evidence suggests that the religious mind persists even when we lose faith in traditional religious beliefs and institutions. Consider that roughly 30 percent of Americans report they have felt in contact with someone who has died. Nearly 20 percent believe they have been in the presence of a ghost. About one-third of Americans believe that ghosts exist and can interact with and harm humans; around two-thirds hold supernatural or paranormal beliefs of some kind, including beliefs in reincarnation, spiritual energy and psychic powers. These numbers are much higher than they were in previous decades, when more people reported being highly religious. People who do not frequently attend church are twice as likely Read More ›

From Charlie Martin at PJ Media: Hawking is certainly the most famous theoretical physicist since Albert Einstein, and rightly so, as he’s been very creative, developed theoretical ideas that have turned out to explain real physical observations — as well a a lot which haven’t been physically verified — and has done so while setting an apparent world record for the longest-surviving Lou Gehrig’s disease patient. This means that anything Hawking says about any scientific topic is news. On the other hand, that doesn’t make it right, especially as he strays beyond the edges of his own field. Recently, he has been doomsaying about artificial intelligence as well as carbon dioxide and evil alien intelligences. Re the latter (2010): Even Read More ›

And thrives anyway. From Denyse O’Leary (O’Leary for News) at Evolution News & Views: Two features of our universe puzzle cosmologists: One is the horizon problem: The universe looks the same in all directions and the cosmic microwave background radiation is about the same temperature everywhere. As String Theory for Dummies puts it, “This really shouldn’t be the case, if you think about it more carefully.” Assuming that current measurements are correct, the radiation must have exceeded the speed of light if it really communicated in this way, but that is forbidden by the standard Big Bang model of the universe. Then there is the “flatness problem”: “The matter density and expansion rate of the universe appear to be nearly Read More ›