Naturalism

On how to calm down a client, from Lawyers Weekly:  Meet in a quiet room with pictures of nature or wildlife on the walls. This reduces the effect of the stress hormone cortisol. Apart from anything else the cortisol mitigation will ensure the client is less likely to have a heart attack on your premises! Offer refreshment – including food – to the client. This encourages the production and uptake of two vital anti-stress neurochemicals glutamate and oxytocin. More. Pictures of nature? Ever anxious to help, we recommend this picture from nature, free with the biscuits and coffee. You did notice the hippie beads around the bobcat’s neck, didn’t you? Yes, they’re there! You just aren’t looking hard enough. Fast Read More ›

Maybe naturalism is reaching its natural basement. I just got this media release: Bigotry, dismissiveness, stereotyping and objectification are all forms of depersonalization that are negatively shaping human behavior. Dr. Dorothy I Riddle, psychologist and economic development specialist, has dedicated her life to ending violence. In her new book, she provides practical strategies for re-wiring how humans and nonhumans relate to the world, such as tolerance and working towards compassion for all. May I send you a complimentary copy of “Moving Beyond Duality” or help coordinate an interview or guest article? The tome in question would seem to be some iteration of this one: Are you free of prejudice? Less than five percent of us are because of the pervasiveness Read More ›

Atheists/materialists/physicalist/naturalists are delusional. Here are 10 reasons why: 1. They dismiss morality as nothing more than strongly felt subjective preference, but admit they act as if morality is objective in nature. 2. They speak, act and hold others responsible for their behaviors as if we all have some metaphysical capacity to transcend and override the deterministic effects of our body’s physical state and causative processing, yet they deny any such metaphysical capacity (like free will) exists. 3. They deny truth can be determined subjectively while necessarily implying that their arguments and evidences are true and expecting others to subjectively determine that their arguments are true. 4. They deny that what is intelligently designed can be reliably identified when virtually every Read More ›

From Columbia mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: One possible reaction to the phenomenon of hype in fundamental physics is to not worry much, figuring that it should be a self-limiting process. While there’s a huge appetite in the media and elsewhere for the “exciting new idea”, overhyped “new” ideas sooner or later should pass into the category of no longer “new”, and less capable of producing “excitement”. The problem is that this doesn’t seem to be happening: favored physics hype keeps getting promoted as “new” and “exciting”, no matter how old it is. More. Woit perhaps doesn’t grasp that some theses in cosmology are not held on a rational basis, and evidence for or against them does not Read More ›

From Retraction Watch: Pro-life activists have asked JAMA to retract a 2005 paper that suggested fetuses can’t feel pain before the third trimester. Critics are arguing that newer findings have shown pain sensation appears earlier in gestation, yet the 2005 data continue to be cited in the discussion around abortion. What’s more, they note, some of the authors failed to mention their ties to the abortion industry. The 2005 paper has been cited 191 times, according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science. We spoke with Howard Bauchner, Editor in Chief at JAMA and The JAMA Network, who told us something similar to what he said last week, when PETA asked to retract a paper they claim could be harmful to Read More ›

The same way naturalism builds rubble. From Kathleen McAuliffe at Aeon: Our ancestors reacted to parasites with overwhelming revulsion, wiring the brain for morals, manners, politics and laws There’s a clear pattern to these findings, as an investigation by Mark Schaller and Damian Murray, psychologists at the University of British Columbia, reveals. People who are reminded of the threat of infectious disease are more inclined to espouse conventional values and express greater disdain for anyone who violates societal norms. Disease cues might even make us more favourably disposed toward religion. In one study, participants exposed to a noxious odour were subsequently more likely to endorse biblical truth than those not subjected to the polluted air. When we’re worried about disease, Read More ›

Today? Looking back on the Darwin-in-the-schools wars from the vantage point of rethinking evolution, one calls to mind textbook author Douglas Futuyma’s dictum: Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx’s materialistic theory of history and society and Freud’s attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin’s theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism Never Read More ›

Yes, that’s just what it sounds like. Every morning, the alarm clock rings, and there is a new theory of consciousness. Today’s contender is from Michael Graziano at Atlantic: Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, evolution has been the grand unifying theory of biology. Yet one of our most important biological traits, consciousness, is rarely studied in the context of evolution. Theories of consciousness come from religion, from philosophy, from cognitive science, but not so much from evolutionary biology. Maybe that’s why so few theories have been able to tackle basic questions such as: What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it? The Attention Schema Theory Read More ›

From New Scientist: No disease, no natural conception, no mind of your own. Excited? Imagine a world without sex and disease, and where all of our brains are networked. It sounds wonderful, but it will bring a new set of moral questions More. There’s also a special feature on the nature of nothingness. Party seriously? See also: New Scientist astounds: Information is physical Follow UD News at Twitter!

Because there is something fundamentally wrong with its typical view of life. Life forms are not merely matter in motion. From Jonathan Wells at Evolution News & Views on Third Way (for evolution) thinker Stephen L. Talbott: According to his profile at The Third Way of Evolution, Talbott spent many years working in the engineering organizations of computer manufacturers before he joined the Nature Institute in 1998 (the same year I joined Discovery Institute). He “attempts to show how our understanding of the organism and its evolution is transformed once we recognize and take seriously the organism as an intelligent agent meaningfully (though not necessarily consciously) pursuing its own way of life.” In his most recent article (the first in Read More ›

Science historian Darin Hayton eloquently fumes, Once again the internet is all excited by some scientists’ findings that solve a historical mystery. In this case, “UTA scientists use Planetarium’s advanced astronomical software to accurately date 2500 year-old lyric poem” (as the University of Texas at Arlington press announcement puts it). Unsurprisingly, UTA’s “press release” (by which I mean “propaganda”) misrepresents the article. Despite the link to the article in the “press release,” nobody at UTA—either in media relations or in the planetarium—apparently could be bothered to read the article. I shouldn’t, therefore, be surprised that most other people trafficking in this story have likewise ignored the article. While not surprised, I am disheartened to see that even purportedly reputable, pro-science Read More ›

From Jessica Riskin at ABC: Since Weismann’s [a 19th century German biologist] refutation of Lamarckism was obviously false, you might think it couldn’t have had much influence. On the contrary. Weismann actually had a huge influence on Darwinism that has lasted until the present day. Today’s neo-Darwinists—people such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett—are really Weismannians (in fact, Dawkins has called himself an ‘extreme Weismannian’). Even outside of evolutionary biology, some of the most influential thinkers and writers in biology and cognitive science today have adopted the Weismannian view that living organisms are essentially passive, made of dumb and inert mechanical parts. Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker is an example: he has written that the human mind can be reduced to Read More ›

Readers may recall cosmologist Sean Carroll and his new book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. At Science, science philosopher Barry Loewer reviews it, noting Sean Carroll’s “poetic naturalism” tries to make naturalism palatable to the rest of us. However, the reviewer points out that there are unanswered questions. The last few paragraphs ask some questions that many of us would want to ask Carroll. For example: “Another challenge is understanding how thought, consciousness, and free will fit into physical theory. [. . .] But poetic naturalism should not be satisfied until it can include an account of how these elements emerge from fundamental physics or, if such an account is not forthcoming, Read More ›

A friend draws our attention to a current festival in Britain, “How the light gets in,” with presenters in the sci tech area such as: Steve Fuller, one of the few philosophers of science who has tried to write seriously about the ID community (Dissent over Descent) Massimo Pigliucci (one of the Altenberg 16, back when challenging Darwinism wasn’t normal) “This morning, Massimo Pigliucci poses the radical question: does science need evidence?”* Rupert Sheldrake, who challenged Darwinism back in the late 1960s, when it was the sign of a sick mind. Denis Noble, who, many say, is the point man behind the rethinking evolution project (here). See how many others you spot. * An attempted non-radical answer: Not if science Read More ›

From Futurism: When it comes to building at the nanoscale, DNA is the construction material of choice. That may seem a little strange. After all, DNA is nature’s hard drive, encoding the software of life. But the macromolecule turns out to be a very hardy and versatile building material, perfectly suited to building complex structures with dimensions measured in nanometers-what is known as “DNA origami.” Biology has settled on the DNA double helix as the default configuration, but there are many more possibilities. Rearrange the base pairs or insert other molecules, and DNA can twist into just about any shape you could wish for. More. “Biology has settled on DNA?” After due consideration, at a series of committee meetings? When Read More ›