Sabine Hossenfelder’s view: Realism is a philosophy. It’s a belief system, and science does not tell you whether it is correct.
Science
Science philosopher attempts to repair split between science and philosophy
The main disadvantage of not acknowledging the philosophy from which we proceed is that we assume it to be “the correct view of all right-thinking people.” That’s almost a definition of narrow-mindedness. It’s worth considering that many Darwinians who can’t get with the times about problems in evolution may have precisely that problem: They have never asked themselves why they are attached to a picture of the world of life that does not appear to be correct or complete.
Bill Nye as “a terrible spokesman for science”
Remember this when people suggest relying on Nye for information about evolution, as opposed to information about what somnolent educrats are saying about evolution. Is this personal history relevant to a general decline in Darwinism?
Astonishing duplicity continues around Haeckel’s embryos
So stuff that isn’t true provides an “excellent foundation” and “compelling proof of the theory of common descent?”Wow. What a way to make people who never doubted common descent before start to do so…After all, one can only assume that an accurate presentation would not have supported the theory.
What Bill Nye is doing now
It’s not clear why people who behave this way expect their causes to be taken seriously. UD News’ take on Bill Nye is that he was a schoolroom celeb but didn’t really age into a science guru for adults
Proposed new definition of life would include embryos, exclude AI
To be honest, we were fully expecting that the next thing we’d hear is that AI is life and embryos aren’t. These guys must be doing some thinking.
Religious Nones: The bigger picture shows increasing polarization
The rise of the Nones means something important: Those who care about the Big Questions are more VISIBLY polarized. In politics, the Religious Nones are the largest group in the Democratic Party (30%) and 70% of declared Republicans believe in the “God of the Bible.”
Falsifiability is overrated, some cosmologists say
The article doesn’t explain what the “fine-tuning problem” means. It means that the universe shows evidence of design. No one has been able to explain that away. However, if basic thinking in science is jerked around enough, maybe ideas that don’t work can be offered social promotions and sit right alongside demonstrated ones.
The key to falsifiability of not evidence but observability
Laszlo Bencze: The multiverse theory is irrefutable because alternate universes are, by definition, forever inaccessible. (If they were accessible through some very difficult convoluted route, they would still be part of our universe.)
The day Stephen Hawking undercut the multiverse
Regis Nicoll: Stephen Hawking had for many years considered the idea that “black holes are birthing centers for Star Trek phenomena like wormholes, time tunnels and multiple universes.” Then, in 2004, he turned on the idea.
Sabine Hossenfelder on the flight from falsifiability
Hossenfelder is right to be concerned. Some cosmologists would like to dump falsifiability as a criterion. If they could, they would remove an obstacle to demanding public belief in ideas like the multiverse, ideas that cannot be falsified because there is no evidence for them.
Kirk Durston: What do we do when Darwinism looks less like science all the time?
Craig Venter: All living cells that we know of on this planet are “DNA software”-driven biological machines, comprised of hundreds of thousands of protein robots, coded for by the DNA.
Do science hero stories stand in the way of progress?
Sabine Hossenfelder thinks that in fundamental physics the problem is not a shortage of smart people but a shortage of smart people who grasp that they are simply “wheels in the machinery.”
Jonathan Bartlett and the war on Occam’s Razor
Bartlett on Sober’s Occam’s Razors: I’m only 30 pages in, and its already worth the time and price of reading. Even if it were all downhill from here, I highly recommend it! A great discussion on the philosophy of science and the principles of reasoning from Copernicus forward.
A biophysicist looks at the limits of what science can tell us
Kirk Durston: An essential prediction of the Darwinian theory of common descent, for example, is that functional genetic information increases through a process of mutations, insertions, and deletions. Experimental science, however, consistently falsifies this prediction.