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From chemistry site Compound Interest: The vast majority of people will get their science news from online news site articles, and rarely delve into the research that the article is based on. Personally, I think it’s therefore important that people are capable of spotting bad scientific methods, or realising when articles are being economical with the conclusions drawn from research, and that’s what this graphic aims to do. Note that this is not a comprehensive overview, nor is it implied that the presence of one of the points noted automatically means that the research should be disregarded. This is merely intended to provide a rough guide to things to be alert to when either reading science articles or evaluating research. Read More ›

Should know better. In an article defending consensus science, physicist Ethan Siegel opines, Think about evolution, for example. Many people still rally against it, claiming that it’s impossible. Yet evolution was the consensus position that led to the discovery of genetics, and genetics itself was the consensus that allowed us to discover DNA, the “code” behind genetics, inherited traits and evolution. Actually, modern genetics started with Gregor Mendel who was as oblivious to Darwin’s work as Darwin was to his. The triumph of Darwinism has distorted genetics, such that horizontal gene transfer, epigenetics, and convergence were for many decades routinely underresearched. Scientists scrambled for evidence of the great wonders of accumulated information supposedly performed by Darwin’s natural selection acting on Read More ›

In a paywalled Wall Street Journal story, theory of mind researcher Alison Gopnik informs us that “Young children develop the concept of free will in the short period between ages 4 and 6.” Here’s a free copy from her site: Along with Tamar Kushnir and Nadia Chernyak at Cornell University and Henry Wellman at the University of Michigan, my lab at the University of California, Berkeley, set out to see what children age 4 and 6 think about free will. The children had no difficulty understanding the first sense of free will: They said that Johnny could walk through the doorway, or not, if the door was open, but he couldn’t go through a closed door. But the 4-year-olds didn’t Read More ›

The new atheists have been holding out on us lately. On the other hand, someone told us about this Raw Story item: Professional atheist Sam Harris looks like an idiot in this email exchange with Noam Chomsky My, my. What do readers think? Is it no longer cool to be a new atheist? Follow UD News at Twitter! Search Uncommon Descent for similar topics, under the Donate button.  

Jazz Shaw at Hot Air advises us all as to what a scientist’s wife thinks God must do to kep is ratings high: I can only imagine how eager you all are to redefine God in a radically new and empowering way, and your various church and temple leaders will doubtless be looking forward to the upcoming lightening of their workload. But how exactly are we to structure this new god for the 21st century? Well, Ms. Abrams has five helpful bullet points which don’t so much involve who God is, but who He can not possibly be. These are characteristics of a God that can’t be real: God existed before the universe. God created the universe. God knows everything. Read More ›

From Physics Today: Brace yourself for the possibility that you will not like how the science writers depict you or your science. Unflattering portrayals and missing the real point of the science are among the top complaints we hear from researchers, and most senior scientists we know have felt burned at one time or another by a story in the mainstream press that discussed their work. Science reporters may focus on elements you deem unimportant, even trivial. They may quote an outside expert who challenges your work—or an activist or politician who questions why we are spending money on your research in the first place. You have no control over where they take the story, and you probably won’t have Read More ›

Science, like all disciplines today, is coming under heavy demands for censorship. People who used to be called dissenters or dissidents are now “denialists.” In short there is One Right Answer, to which no research not sponsored by an Establishment can add. But the history of science progress feature a grand parade of witnesses called by Counsel for the Defense. As a matter of fact, the likely outcome of the current mood is stagnation. Most new insights that proved valid were hotly contested, along with a lot of stuff that fell by the wayside. But very often no one knows for sure.* Paul Driessen writes, Brandeis disinvited Ayan Hirsi Ali, because her views on women’s rights might offend some Muslim Read More ›

Further to Build your own worm (and bring your own dirt too), from Ann Gauger at Evolution News & Views: offers, The white space in evolutionary thinking. When certain biologists discuss the early stages of life there is a tendency to think too vaguely. They see a biological wonder before them and they tell a story about how it might have come to be. They may even draw a picture to explain what they mean. Indeed, the story seems plausible enough, until you zoom in to look at the details. I don’t mean to demean the intelligence of these biologists. It’s just that it appears they haven’t considered things as completely as they should. Like a cartoon drawing, the basic Read More ›

We didn’t think so, but just for the record: From the Edge: One of the things that I’ve always done is not make a clear separation between books that are aimed at popularizing, books that are aimed at explaining things to other people, and books that explain things to myself, or explain things to my scientific colleagues. I think the separation between doing science and popularizing science has been overdone. And I have found that the exercise of explaining to other people, which I suppose I’ve been fairly successful at, is greatly helped by the fact that I first have to explain it to myself. And explaining it to myself … the biomorph program, which I originally wrote to explain Read More ›

A reader thinks so, and submits the YouTube below as evidence, noting: The man is not as compelling a speaker as he is a writer, nevertheless he as a materialist is questioning an aspect of materialism. And as thoughtful materialists question aspects of materialism, I think it good that we take note and understand what they are saying. Thomas Nagel‘s (2012) Mind & Cosmos : Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False was well worth reading, as also was Rupert Sheldrake‘s (2013) Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery. Lee Smolin, like Sheldrake, proposes a kind of cosmic natural selection whereby the laws of physics evolve, and thus he eschews what he calls “timeless truths.” Read More ›

So we are told at ScienceDaily: According to this new model developed by researchers DB Krupp (Psychology) and Peter Taylor (Mathematics and Statistics, Biology) at Queen’s and the One Earth Future Foundation, individuals who appear very different from most others in a group will evolve to be altruistic towards similar partners, and only slightly spiteful to those who are dissimilar to them. However, individuals who appear very similar to the rest of a group will evolve to be only slightly altruistic to similar partners but very spiteful to dissimilar individuals, often going to extreme lengths to hurt them. Taken together, individuals with ‘common’ and ‘rare’ appearances may treat each other very differently. This finding is a new twist on established Read More ›

Here: For much of our existence on Earth, we humans thought of ourselves as a pretty big deal. Then along came science and taught us how utterly insignificant we are. We aren’t the centre of the universe. We aren’t special. We are just a species of ape living on a smallish planet orbiting an unremarkable star in one galaxy among billions in a universe that had been around for 13.8 billion years without us. … Science also teaches us that the laws of physics are ridiculously, almost unbelievably, “fine-tuned” for you and me. One must log in or subscribe to find out how they straighten it out. Huh? Isn’t the whole basis of New Scientist’s existence that it isn’t real? How Read More ›

Devolution? From ScienceDaily: A new study offers not only a sweeping analysis of how pollination has evolved among conifers but also an illustration of how evolution — far from being a straight-ahead march of progress — sometimes allows for longstanding and advantageous functions to become irrevocably lost. Moreover, the authors show that the ongoing breakdown of the successful but ultimately fragile pollination mechanism may have led to a new diversity of traits and functions. That’s well, but it can also lead to extinction. In evolution, the research shows, selection pressure or pure chance can break a functional relationship among such loosely related traits such as the one Leslie studied, even if that relationship has been working well. In fact, once Read More ›

Here: The “Hugos” are widely called the most prestigious awards in the world of science fiction and fantasy publishing. They are awarded every year by a vote of the membership of the World Science Fiction Convention, which SF fans have called “Worldcon” since time immemorial. Starting three years ago, Larry Correia, successful science fiction writer, decided to test his suspicion that the Hugo Awards of the World Science Fiction Society were increasingly being awarded through the action of a small group, and increasingly reflect the tastes of that small group rather than a more general population of science fiction readers. Correia’s experimental method was to publish a list of suggested nominees for the Hugo Awards that he thought wouldn’t otherwise Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Moving one’s body rapidly through water is a key to existence for many species. The Persian carpet flatworm, the cuttlefish and the black ghost knifefish look nothing like each other — their last common ancestor lived 550 million years ago, before the Cambrian period — a new study uses computer simulations, a robotic fish and video footage of real fish to show that all three aquatic creatures have evolved to swim using the same mechanical motion. These three animals are part of a very diverse group of aquatic animals — both vertebrate and invertebrate — that independently arrived at the same solution of how to use their fins to maximize speed. And, remarkably, this so-called “convergent” evolution happened Read More ›