Category: Science
Compassion director dumped at prominent science institute
| December 9, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Science |
No, we don’t sit around here, making stuff up: Tania Singer, 48 , had achieved prominence outside the scientific world in recent years. She caused a sensation with her interdisciplinary studies on the foundations of social emotions such as empathy, envy, fairness or revenge. Since 2013 , she has headed the ReSource project at the […]
Bots are to blame for science credibility issues!
| December 8, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Media, Naturalism, Science |
At least, if you credit a National Academy of Sciences study on the subject: Iyengar and Massey (hereafter I & M) are convinced, in any event, that the revolution in media over the last three decades means that the world is sinking into abject falsehood. In the 1970s, as they relate, media were controlled by […]
Rob Sheldon: Have a little pity for scientists scared of SJWs
| December 8, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Science |
Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon takes exception to my (O’Leary for News)’s post, “The Darwinians’ cowardice before SJW mobs explained in detail: They thought the mob was coming for someone else, ” At least in part. He writes, I thought the Aero article was the most honest I have met in a long while. […]
Hi tech mogul tells campus autocrats to grow up or get lost
| December 2, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Science |
Well, PayPal’s Peter Thiel put it more politely but… that’s the bottom line. We don’t usually hear tech moguls talking this way. More frequent news is stuff like Is it Google-com or Google.gov? or Digital dictatorship. But Thiel thinks the riot is over: “The reformation is going to happen,” Thiel added, noting it won’t come […]
Media are flabby from a diet of junk science
| December 2, 2018 | Posted by News under Media, Peer review, Science |
Should we believe them when they tell us that the drinking four cups of coffee daily lowers our risk of death people with spouses live longer? A statistician and a physician team up to explain why not: A subtler manifestation of dishonesty in research is what amounts to statistical cheating. Here is how it works… […]
Without free speech, science would be back in the Stone Age
| December 2, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Science |
Every new idea, good or bad, has had its establishment detractors who want Something To Be Done about the hateful people who make them uncomfortable. Joe Miller and guests talk about science and free speech at More Than Cake: In the tradition of natural law theorists such as John Stuart Mill, Free Speech is considered […]
Can AI help scientists formulate ideas?
| December 1, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Design, Mind, Peer review, Science |
Yes, if you mean “dumb AI,” and there ain’t no “smart AI”: Quantity is definitely a solved problem. STM, the “voice of scholarly publishing” estimated in 2015 that roughly 2.5 million science papers are published each year. Some are, admittedly, in predatory or fake journals. But over 2800 journals are assumed to be genuine. From […]
Larry Krauss? Francisco Ayala? And now Neil deGrasse Tyson?
| November 30, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Science |
No, they haven’t all come to their senses and seen that of course the frame of reality we live in is designed. Like Larry Krauss and Francisco Ayala, astronomer and science popularizer Tyson has been #MeToo’d: Dr. Katelyn N. Allers, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Bucknell University, told me that she was “felt […]
Could the recent Pew Center survey on meaning help us interpret some controversies?
| November 25, 2018 | Posted by News under Atheism, Culture, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Religion, Science, Society |
What do Americans think matters in life? Americans with high levels of household income and educational attainment are more likely to mention friendship, good health, stability and travel. A quarter of Americans who earn at least $75,000 a year mention their friends when asked to describe, in their own words, what makes life meaningful, compared […]
Is religion vs. science warfare “far from inevitable”?
| November 24, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Religion, Science |
It’s usually just fake news*, as some thoughtful academics point out: There are many sciences, many religions. A scientific innovation problematic for one religious tradition may be irrelevant to another. One science may pose a threat to religious beliefs when other sciences do not. Arguing for an essential conflict between science and religion fails because, […]
Are Angels “Naturalistic”?
| November 22, 2018 | Posted by johnnyb under Mind, Science |
One of my main criticisms of methodological naturalism is that the word “naturalism” seems to not have any real content. It merely means “whatever the author wants to include in science” and non-naturalism means “whatever the author doesn’t want to include in science”. This paper by Halvorson is a case in point. One of the […]
There will be cyborgs on Mars! says well-known astronomer
| November 15, 2018 | Posted by News under Artificial Intelligence, Culture, Intelligent Design, Media, Science |
From Sir Martin Rees at NBC: AI apocalypse is certainly in the air. Elon Musk, Henry Kissinger, and the late Stephen Hawking have all predicted an AI doomsday. Industry professionals’ doubt and disparagement don’t seem to register with the media in the same way. Rees, who is former president of the Royal Society, goes further, […]
Astonishing! A pop science article on fine-tuning that isn’t just plain stupid
| November 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Fine tuning, Intelligent Design, Media, Multiverse, Science |
Get a load of this: More recently, scientists have pointed out that if one tweaks many of the dimensionless physical constants — numbers like pi that are independent of units and simply exist as fundamental ideas — none of the cosmos we see would exist. One of these numbers is omega, the density parameter, which […]
No, life cannot have meaning in a random universe. Next question?
| November 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Atheism, Intelligent Design, Science, theism |
In an excerpt from his recent book, Finding Purpose in a Godless World: Why We Care Even If the Universe Doesn’t, a psychiatrist explains how we can have meaning even though we don’t: People assume that our human sense of purpose is dependent on the universe having a purpose, and without such purpose they assume […]
Science-based morality: 400 years of failure?
| November 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Ethics, Intelligent Design, Science |
From a review of James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky’s Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality Can science tell us how we ought to behave? In Science and the Good, a book that crosses the boundaries of history, philosophy, and psychology, sociologist James Davison Hunter and philosopher Paul Nedelisky […]
Atheist historian combats claim that the Church persecuted classical learning
| November 11, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Atheism, Culture, Education, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Religion, Science |
A historian draws our attention this post from late 2016, a reflection on the survival of classical learning during the Christian era, in response to “Skep,” an energetic atheist blogger: But the usual way that those who are forced to admit that there were, in fact, many medieval natural philosophers studying all kinds of proto-scientific […]
Stress: Scientist to be sentenced for trying to poison labmate
| November 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
We run this story as a public service. Sometimes the pressure might get to you but it is almost never entirely that person’s fault and this is not the way to go about dealing with it: Graduate student Zijie Wang has pleaded guilty to poisoning a co-worker in the chemistry labs at Queen’s University in […]
Requests for actual statistics FRAUD not unusual, science writer finds
| November 7, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Science |
There may be an additional, more sinister explanation for the ongoing reproducibility crisis, he suggests: A stunning report published in the Annals of Internal Medicine concludes that researchers often make “inappropriate requests” to statisticians. And by “inappropriate,” the authors aren’t referring to accidental requests for incorrect statistical analyses; instead, they’re referring to requests for unscrupulous […]
Millennials are dumping religion for witchcraft, not science
| November 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Religion, Science |
It’s not a new story. We’ve covered it here, here, and here within the last year or so. People don’t seem to be ditching traditional religion for science as much as for witchcraft: Interest in spirituality has been booming in recent years while interest in religion plummets, especially among millennials. The majority of Americans now […]
John Gray: New Atheists don’t acknowledge their myths and beliefs
| November 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Atheism, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Religion, Science |
British political philosopher John Gray, author of Seven Types of Atheism (2018) and also of Straw Dogs, comments in an interview: Indeed. I’m a skeptic by nature, so I’m resistant to claims by anyone to have complete answers to intractable human problems. I’m particularly annoyed by what’s now called “New Atheism,” and I react strongly […]
