Category: Science
Why Teach Algebra, Pt. 2
| October 17, 2017 | Posted by johnnyb under Culture, Science |
Denyse was kind enough to <a href="post a link to the first part of my article on why Algebra is an important subject for high-school and college students. Part 2 of my article is now available as well.
Philip Cunningham’s critique of methodological naturalism
| October 14, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Philosophy, Science |
Here. From the paper: “Contrary to what many people believe, “Methodological naturalism is certainly NOT a ‘ground rule’ of science today”. Paper. See also: Why the “Naturalism” Part of “Methodological Naturalism” is Both Misleading and Unnecessary (Barry Arrington)
SETI prediction: Evidence for aliens by 2035 if they exist
| October 14, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Extraterrestrial life, Intelligent Design, Science |
Due to more efficient technology, says SETI astronomer Seth Shostak at Nautilus: Most of our experiments so far have used large radio antennas in an effort to eavesdrop on radio signals transmitted by other societies, an approach that was dramatized by Jodie Foster in the 1997 movie Contact. Unlike other alien potboilers, Contact’s portrayal of […]
Physicist Rob Sheldon responds to Objectivity is a myth. Bring the social justice warriors into science!
| October 13, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Science |
He concedes that William A. Wilson makes some good points at First Things but … A truly excellent article on the metaphysics underlying the scientific enterprise. Every debate on MN needs to begin with this essay. I know the first paragraph sounds very post-modern, but by the time you reach the end of the essay, […]
Another view: Objectivity is a myth. Bring the social justice warriors into science!
| October 12, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Peer review, Philosophy, Science |
From software engineer William A. Wilson at First Things: My friends who work in scientific fields were aghast when they saw that the organizers of a planned “March for Science” had tweeted that “colonization, racism, immigration, native rights, sexism, ableism, queer-, trans-, intersex-phobia, & econ justice are scientific issues [black power emoji][rainbow emoji].” Who can […]
Ouch! Scott Turner on “settled science”
| October 10, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Science |
From J. Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, Traditionally, therapeutic bloodletting was justified by the need to release from the patient an excess of one vital humor that was out of balance with another. Release the excess humor, and the balance of humors would […]
Teach the Controversy: Science Teachers Say “Thank You!”
| October 7, 2017 | Posted by johnnyb under Darwinism, News, Science |
This is old news, but I only just learned about it, and I don’t think it was talked about when it happened. In 2006, the Ouachita Parish (i.e., county) School Board decided to allow a “teach the controversy” approach to science education. After the policy was enacted, the science teachers wrote a letter thanking the […]
Post-modern science 101: How gender theory “harms” pets
| October 7, 2017 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Culture, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Science |
From Mark Latham at Rebel Media on gender theory as harmful for dogs: Yes, a new dimension in post-modern science. More. Note: from a Humane Society member and donor: Neglected, mistreated, and abandoned dogs have way bigger problems than human opinions about gender. See also: Nature: Stuck with a battle it dare not fight, even for […]
Replication: Can new metric crack science’s credibility problem?
| October 7, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
From Dalmeet Singh Chawla at PhysicsToday: A newly proposed, citation-based metric assesses the veracity of scientific claims by evaluating the outcomes of subsequent replication attempts. Introduced in an August bioRxiv preprint by researchers at the for-profit firm Verum Analytics, the R-factor was developed in response to long-standing concerns about the lack of reproducibility in biomedicine […]
Eureka! Scientist discovers that the post-modern left hates science the way it hates every form of external reality
| October 4, 2017 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Intelligent Design, Science |
From Heather Heying ( Bret Weinstein’s wife, also a biologist) at Wall Street Journal: The revolution on college campuses, which seeks to eradicate individuals and ideas that are considered unsavory, constitutes a hostile takeover by fringe elements on the extreme left. Last spring at the Evergreen State College, where I was a professor for 15 […]
Quotes to ponder: Steve Fuller and the cult of the expert
| September 30, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Naturalism, Science |
From Steve Fuller, who has studied the intelligent design controversy, “Brexit as the unlikely leading edge of the anti-expert revolution,” European Management Journal: At this point, we confront one of the big canards perpetrated by defenders of expertise, namely that anti-experts are anti-intellectuals who privilege ignorance over knowledge and would treat all opinions as equally […]
Physicist at Forbes: The inflationary universe is not science any more
| September 29, 2017 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Science |
From theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder at Forbes: The problem with inflation isn’t the idea per se, but the overproduction of useless inflationary models. There are literally hundreds of these models, and they are – as the philosophers say – severely underdetermined. This means if one extrapolates the models that fit current data to regimes which […]
Do gut feelings hurt science decisions?
| September 28, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Education, Intelligent Design, Science |
From R. Kelly Garrett at Phys.org: Where people differ is in how often they do so. A 2016 survey that my colleague Brian Weeks and I conducted found that 50.3 percent of all Americans agreed with the statement “I trust my gut to tell me what’s true and what’s not.” Some of those polled felt […]
Philip Cunningham: Multiverse mania vs. reality
| September 24, 2017 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Culture, Intelligent Design, Multiverse, Philosophy, Science |
Paper. See also: The multiverse is science’s assisted suicide
Food for thought from that paywalled soft dino tissue article in Science
| September 20, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Science |
From the Science paper by Robert F. Service: The challenges of fieldwork are minor compared with the storm of criticism she’s endured for the central claim of her work: that her team has recovered fragments of proteins from dinosaurs as old as 80 million years. The evidence, which she has laid out in a series […]
At last: Amount of “spin” in biomedical papers calculated
| September 13, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Medicine, Peer review, Science |
And the type catalogued. From ScienceDaily: More than a quarter of biomedical scientific papers may utilize practices that distort the interpretation of results or mislead readers so that results are viewed more favorably, a new study suggests. Their findings, published in PLOS Biology, found more than 26 percent of papers identified as systematic reviews or […]
Was post-modern philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend really science’s worst enemy?
| September 11, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Naturalism, Science |
Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994), philosophy professor at the University of California (Berkeley), sometimes said that what is termed science in one culture is called voodoo in another: To those who look at the rich material provided by history, and who are not intent on impoverishing it in order to please their lower instincts—their craving for intellectual […]
It would be worth having a science vs religion discussion if evidence still mattered, but…
| September 10, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Religion, Science |
From SCIO: Scholarship and Christianity at Oxford, Application Deadline: 15 September 2017 Bridging the Two Cultures of Science and the Humanities II, 2017–19, is a significant opportunity for up to 25 early- to mid-level career faculty members from the CCCU and across the globe to experience an enhanced summer programme aimed at developing interdisciplinary skills […]
Peer review: Predatory journals are not just a Third World thing
| September 8, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Peer review, Science |
From Ivan Oransky at Retraction Watch: “Common wisdom,” according to the authors of a new piece in Nature, “assumes that the hazard of predatory publishing is restricted mainly to the developing world.” But the authors of the new paper, led by David Moher of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, found that more than half — […]
Question for multiverse theorists: To what can science appeal if not evidence?
| September 7, 2017 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Multiverse, Science |
They could just as well say that whatever created horses created unicorns too. The multiverse advocates’ project is not to undermine the evidence base as such. There just isn’t any evidence for a multiverse. Their project is rather to undermine the idea that evidence, as used in normal science, should matter in cosmology. String theory, […]
