Naturalism

Missed this one a while back, but worth noting: From Erin Ross at Nature: “In the past, I’ve done armchair activism — you know, ‘hashtag activism’,” says Bradley, who works at Pennsylvania State University’s Brandywine campus in Media. But this year, he says, “I felt it was important to get involved on the ground.” His trip to Capitol Hill was organized by the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA). For the past three years, the group has invited linguists, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists from across the country in Washington DC, for a brief training session before a whirlwind day of meeting with members of Congress and their aides to advocate for science funding. This year, participation set a record: Read More ›

From Alun Anderson at New Scientist, reviewing The Truth about Language: The Truth about Language What it Is and Where it Came from: During the 19th century, Alfred Russel Wallace doubted whether natural selection could explain such a unique power. In our century, Noam Chomsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology academic who has dominated linguistics for 60 years, has supported a hypothesis that language and thought arose suddenly within the past 100,000 years. In The Truth About Language, Michael Corballis rejects all such “miraculist” explanations. He lays out a plausible route by which spoken language might have evolved, not from the calls of our primate ancestors, but through stages in which a language of gesture and mime dominated. … When Read More ›

Oh, look, everybody’s got a haunt, right? But they are not equally damning. From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: On the story about evolutionary atheist Richard Dawkins getting disinvited as an event speaker by a progressive Berkeley radio station (see here and here), Discovery Institute chairman of the board Bruce Chapman points out the best irony. While Dawkins protests his “de-platforming” over past comments on Islam, in 2009 he helped get Ben Stein de-platformed as a commencement speaker at the University of Vermont over — you guessed it — Stein’s take on evolution and his role in the film Expelled. More. Of course. Dawkins thought he would be eaten last on the progressive menu but he was really Read More ›

From Toni Airaksinen at Campus Reform: he National Science Foundation (NSF) gave out more than three million dollars to fight “implicit bias,” “microaggressions,” and “lack of diversity” in STEM fields this July. Founded by Congress in 1950, the NSF is a federal agency that seeks to “promote the progress of science” by funding research and collaborating with scientists, according to its website. This month alone, the NSF has funded at least three social-justice themed projects, which together cost taxpayers $3,173,684. And you thought it was being spent on cancer research and space exploration? It will be interesting to see, now that post-modernism is hitting the sciences, which bureaucracies will buckle and which will respond as if a science-based way of Read More ›

Further to Dawkins dumped from Berkeley due to “hurtful words,” neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and editor David Klinghoffer weigh in: Egnor: Dawkins gets expelled: You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh Why, one asks, is it fine to criticize Islam, but not Darwin? Dawkins has fought mightily to “de-platform” intelligent design scientists and anyone who harbors even a shimmer of doubt about Darwinian theology. But now he’s shocked — shocked — that defenders of another religion get to silence heretics too. Atheism and its Darwinian creation myth have gained ascendancy in the Western world over the past century, and in several unfortunate nations, have grasped state power. It’s been an ugly ascent, complete with gulags and holocausts Read More ›

Just like Coulter and Yiannopoulos? From Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist: Richard Dawkins has a new collection of essays coming out next month in a book called Science in the Soul. Naturally, he’ll be visiting the U.S. on a book tour. One of the stops was going to be in Berkeley, California on August 9. It was sponsored by KPFA, a progressive radio station in the area, in a city known for being the hotbed of liberal activism. But that talk has now been canceled. More. Jerry Coyne quotes the cancellation notice: We had booked this event based entirely on his excellent new book on science, when we didn’t know he had offended and hurt – in his tweets and Read More ›

From John Steele at Nautilus, interviewing cosmologist Paul Davies: Steele: What do you think are the most exciting recent advances in understanding time? … Davies: In terms of fundamental physics, is there anything especially new about time? I think the answer is not really. There are new ideas that are out there. I think there are still fundamental problems; we’ve talked about one of them: Is time an emergent property or a fundamental property? And the ultimate origin of the arrow of time, which is the asymmetry of the world in time, is still a bit contentious. We know we have to trace it back to the Big Bang, but there are still different issues swirling around there that we Read More ›

From Nathan Cofnas at Weekly Standard: What is really disturbing, though, is that Hawking has flagrantly given up on even the pretense of engaging with actual science. He speaks entirely from authority: I am a scientist. Adopt this political policy that I favor or suffer fire and sulfuric acid. The threatened punishment for noncompliance substitutes sulfuric acid for the regular sulfur (brimstone) that features in old-fashioned religion. As far as the justification for the claim, there is no important difference between this and a religious statement that is supposed to be believed simply because it issues forth from a high priest. That can lead to awkward problems when the promoters of scientism turn out to be less than virtuous. Consider Read More ›

From Carie Mott and Daniel Cockayne, “Citation matters: mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of ‘conscientious engagement’” at Journal Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography: Abstract: An increasing amount of scholarship in critical, feminist, and anti-racist geographies has recently focused self-reflexively on the topics of exclusion and discrimination within the discipline itself. In this article we contribute to this literature by considering citation as a problematic technology that contributes to the reproduction of the white heteromasculinity of geographical thought and scholarship, despite advances toward more inclusivity in the discipline in recent decades. Yet we also suggest, against citation counting and other related neoliberal technologies that imprecisely approximate measures of impact, influence, and academic excellence, citation Read More ›

From Michelle Malkin at Townhall: As I’ve been chronicling in my newspaper columns and CRTV.com investigative reports, many state crime labs and police departments are particularly ill-equipped and inadequately trained to interpret DNA evidence, especially “touch” or “trace” DNA — minute amounts of DNA of unknown origin often transferred through incidental contact — which has resulted in monstrous miscarriages of justice against innocent people. The aura of infallibility conferred on crime lab analysts by “CSI”-style TV shows exacerbates the problem when juries place undue weight on indeterminate DNA evidence of little to no probative value. Just last week, North Carolina’s Mark Carver, who was convicted of murdering a college student based on dubious touch DNA that was likely the result Read More ›

From Daniel Cossins at New Scientist: The ethics issue: Should we impose population controls? Future generations risk inheriting an overcrowded, suffocating planet. Taking action may mean what was taboo is now common sense Um, er, just a minute here. Who are the “we”? One sensse that the “we” are childless-by-choice types like most of Europe’s top leaders. So there must be a “they” somewhere out there. Who are the “they”? Africa? Fears that we are too many are nothing new. As long ago as 1798, the English writer Thomas Malthus warned that a growing population would eat its way through the planet’s finite resources, condemning millions to die of starvation. Fast forward. Thanks to visionary scientists like John “gene gun” Read More ›

From Uri Harris at Quillette: What is particularly striking about this shift is that the number of moderates has dropped sharply among professors. … From Bankston’s description, it seems clear that any non-leftist would find working in sociology almost unbearable. The research in the original paper suggests that the leftward shift in social science is likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination. More. We all knew this but why persist with the pretense that these disciplines are any kind of sciences at all? And why should they be publicly funded? See also: All sides agree: progressive politics is strangling social sciences

From Sandrine Ceurstemont at New Scientist: The Neomorphus ground cuckoos live in forests in Central and South America, where they often follow herds of wild peccaries so they can feed on the invertebrates that the peccaries disturb as they plough through the leaf litter. Ecologists have noticed that when the cuckoos clap their beaks together they sound a lot like the tooth clacks the peccaries make to deter large predatory cats. Generally, the proposed explanations rely on far more intelligence than either species has or both put together. Biondo and her colleagues have considered alternatives too. For instance, by making the same sounds, cuckoos and pigs could be teaming up to protect each other. The birds could be taking on Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at Evolution News and Views:: Those who still defend a reality-based view of science seem to be slowly losing ground. Overall, science is experiencing a massive invasion of post-fact. There is a marked difference between the style of the literature that celebrates naturalism in and of itself and the more traditional excitement around, say, finding the Higgs boson. Theory now needs only a tangential relationship to the methods and tools of science. But then perhaps our expectations of science are changing. Possibly many no longer want information so much as they want attitudes they can live with. What strikes one is the fundamental unseriousness of it all. That would not necessarily matter. Unserious disciplines can often be Read More ›

This is becoming an anthology. From Joshua C. Tom at Sociological Perspectives: Social Origins of Scientific Deviance: Examining Creationism and Global Warming Skepticism Abstract: Scientific communities maintain respected authority on matters related to the natural world; however, there are instances where significant portions of the population hold beliefs contrary to the scientific consensus. These beliefs have generally been studied as the product of scientific illiteracy. This project reframes the issue as one of social deviance from the consensus of scientific communities. Using young-earth creationism and global warming skepticism as case studies, I suggest that consensus perception in light of public scientific deviance is a valuable dialectical framework, and demonstrate its utility using logistic regression analyses of the 2006 Pew Religion Read More ›