News

From Discovery Institute: As Americans celebrate their country’s freedom this week, a new survey reveals that an overwhelming 93 percent of American adults agree that “teachers and students should have the academic freedom to objectively discuss both the scientific strengths and weaknesses of the theory of evolution.” And 88 percent agree that “scientists who raise scientific criticisms of evolution should have the freedom to make their arguments without being subjected to censorship or discrimination.” More. Some of us wonder at times about the use of the term “dissent,” as if it were something special. Dissent is, in general, evidence of thinking. There is little dissent among a herd of cows about anything that pertains to being a cow. See also: Read More ›

Published on Jul 4, 2016 NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured a unique time-lapse movie of the Galilean satellites in motion about Jupiter. The movie begins on June 12th with Juno 10 million miles from Jupiter, and ends on June 29th, 3 million miles distant. The innermost moon is volcanic Io; next in line is the ice-crusted ocean world Europa, followed by massive Ganymede, and finally, heavily cratered Callisto. Galileo observed these moons to change position with respect to Jupiter over the course of a few nights. From this observation he realized that the moons were orbiting mighty Jupiter, a truth that forever changed humanity’s understanding of our place in the cosmos. Earth was not the center of the Universe. For the Read More ›

From Talk Origins, a lengthy excursus on the views of mid-twentieth century Nobelist George Wald (1906-1997), excoriating those who misquote him: We nonetheless read that he really did say with amazement: When we consider the spontaneous origin of a living organism, this is not an event that need happen again and again. It is perhaps enough for it to happen once. The probability with which we: are concerned is of a special kind; it is the probability that an event occur at least once. To this type of probability a fundamentally important thing happens as one increases the number of trials. However improbable the event in a single trial, it becomes increasingly probable as the trials are multiplied. Eventually the Read More ›

No, really. Berra’s blunder is now official Darwinian science From ScienceDaily: A UCLA-led team of researchers has taken a unique approach to explain the way in which technologies evolve in modern society. Borrowing a technique that biologists might use to study the evolution of plants or animals, the scientists plotted the “births” and “deaths” of every American-made car and truck model from 1896 to 2014. … Based on the study, the researchers can project how the electric car marketplace will evolve over the next several years. Alfaro said the field now is in an early phase of rapid diversification, and although it’s likely that many more electric and hybrid models will be introduced over the next 15 to 20 years, Read More ›

From Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: accepting Templeton Prize: A free society is a moral achievement. Without self-restraint, without the capacity to defer the gratification of instinct, and without the habits of heart and deed that we call virtues, we will eventually lose our freedom. That is what Locke meant when he contrasted liberty, the freedom to do what we ought, with licence, the freedom to do what we want. It’s what Adam Smith signalled when, before he wrote The Wealth of Nations, he wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It’s what Washington meant when he said, “Human rights can only be assured among a virtuous people.” And Benjamin Franklin when he said, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.” And Read More ›

From Olivia Goldhill at Quartz: Not much is definitively proven about consciousness, the awareness of one’s existence and surroundings, other than that its somehow linked to the brain. But theories as to how, exactly, grey matter generates consciousness are challenged when a fully-conscious man is found to be missing most of his brain. Several years ago, a 44-year-old Frenchman went to the hospital complaining of mild weakness in his left leg. It was discovered then that his skull was filled largely by fluid, leaving just a thin parameter of actual brain tissue. And yet the man was a married father of two and a civil servant with an IQ of 75, below-average in his intelligence but not mentally disabled. More. Zap! Read More ›

Could there be worse news? From Joe Carmichael at Inverse: Yasunori Nomura is a theoretical physics professor at University of California, Berkeley. He’s refining both multiverse and string theories, and tells Inverse that he commiserates with the pre-Socratics. “These old Greek scientists must have been doing similar reasonable, educated guessing,” he says. Like those ancient philosophers, even some of Nomura’s peers — contemporary, cutting-edge physicists — criticize his work as too speculative. “We are saying that there may be some multiple universes,” Nomura says. “And some people say, ‘You cannot go outside the universe — what are you talking about?’ But the methodology of science is always the same. You just make the theories based on what you can measure.” Read More ›

Here: Observations, not stories, are the pillars of good science. Today’s journals however, favor story-telling over observations, and congruency over complexity. As a consequence, there is a pressure to tell only good stories. Moreover, incentives associated with publishing in high-impact journals lead to loss of scientifically and ethically sound observations that do not fit the storyline, and in some unfortunate cases also to fraudulence. The resulting non-communication of data and irreproducibility not only delays scientific progress, but also negatively affects society as a whole. Here at Sciencematters, we publish the true unit of science, the observation. You make an observation, make sure it’s solid and ethically sound, and then submit it to us. We guide your manuscript through triple-blind peer Read More ›

From Statnews: A new analysis in the journal PLOS ONE has found that research papers in the life sciences have become increasingly dense over the past quarter-century. They have higher page counts, more — and more detailed — figures and tables, longer lists of authors, and richer appendices of supplementary data. The authors of the paper gathered all of those elements into an “average publishing unit,” which they found has doubled in the past two-plus decades. Although all that additional information packed into an individual study might be a good thing for science, the authors suggest that it could be too much strain for the system to bear. Peer reviewers are, after all, practicing scientists themselves with their own deadlines Read More ›

Slow news day. Enjoy.

Take a good look. Now be grateful for the neighbours we do have, none of whom would be staring at us, grinning, from behind a laptop. Question: How do people who think they are smarter than the rest of us manage to look so dumb?

It’s unfalsifiable: So personal testimony will do. In a recent presentation to a bunch of political operatives, the Mann put his pseudo-scientific foot in his mouth. From the Washington Times: Leading climate doomsayer Michael Mann recently downplayed the importance of climate change science, telling Democrats that data and models “increasingly are unnecessary” because the impact is obvious. “Fundamentally, I’m a climate scientist and have spent much of my career with my head buried in climate-model output and observational climate data trying to tease out the signal of human-caused climate change,” Mr. Mann told the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee at a hearing. “What is disconcerting to me and so many of my colleagues is that these tools that we’ve spent years Read More ›

From an obituary for William Provine (1942-2015), a naturalist atheist who hung out with ID types, by Anya Plutynski: Life may have no ultimate meaning, but I sure think it can have lots of proximate meaning. Free will is not hard to give up, because it’s a horribly destructive idea to our society. Free will is what we use as an excuse to treat people like pieces of crap when they do something wrong in our society. We say to the person, “you did something wrong out of your free will, and therefore we have the justification for revenge all over your behind.” We put people in prison, turning them into lousier individuals than they ever were. This horrible system Read More ›

From Phil Plait at Slate: I was wrong. I underestimated just how thoroughly the GOP had salted the Earth. Philosophical party planks of climate change denial, anti-evolution, anti-intellectualism, intolerance, and more have made it such that Trump can literally say almost anything, and it hardly affects his popularity.More. Izzatso? Trump was the first candidate in modern history to exploit the fact that no one now cares what legacy media, including Slate, think. When I travel the Toronto-Ottawa rail corridor in Canada, almost everyone is using a handheld to reach whoever or whatever they want anywhere on the planet. That can’t be stuffed back into a bottle. Trump spent almost nothing on publicity, trusting that the full pack cry against him Read More ›

Yeah. They were short. So? From The Scientist: New research suggests that Homo floresiensis—ancient hominins often called “hobbits”—lived closer in time to modern humans than previously thought. Researchers from the University of Wollongong in Australia have found evidence that modern humans were using fire on the Indonesian island of Flores as far back as 41,000 years ago, whereas the hobbits lived until roughly 50,000 years ago, the team reported today (June 30) in the Journal of Archaeological Science.More. Enough. Can we call off the Darwinian search for a lesser type (species) of human? Isn’t this getting, um, weird? See also: The Little Lady of Flores spoke from the grave. But said what, exactly? Follow UD News at Twitter!