Science

We’ve noted here the growing cave-in of hard science to post-modernism. One of the signs is talk of intersectionality among people supposedly committed to science. We knew it was bad news but we didn’t realize that it was enmeshed with fashionable anti-Semitism. Maybe we should have realized that. From Alan Dershowitz at the Washington Examiner: Students at the University of Illinois recently took to social media to express their distress after flyers were plastered around campus calling for the “end of Jewish privilege.” The flyer stated in bold letters that: “ending white privilege starts with ending Jewish privilege.” The posters had outlines of silhouettes with Stars of David printed out, and an arrow pointing to them with the accompanying caption Read More ›

The term “machine learning” has started to be thrown around everywhere. However, I just don’t get excited about it, myself.
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One way to boost your uni’s ranking: Ask faculty to cite each other This is elsewhere called a citation ring. Also from the same post: Of course, this isn’t the only technique universities use to boost their metrics. Recently, we ran a story in Science about institutions (including many in Western countries) who pay faculty for publications; a 2011 report in Science showed that universities in Saudi Arabia were giving tens of thousands of dollars to highly cited researchers to take a secondary position there, ensuring the institution gets listed on prominent papers. SAGE journal retracts three more papers after discovering faked reviews: This trio of retractions is the second batch of papers withdrawn by Technology in Cancer Research & Read More ›

And it’s only August. A special issue of Interface Focus on New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives, organized by Denis Noble, Nancy Cartwright, Patrick Bateson, John Dupré and Kevin Laland is now available. The Royal Society journal is “devoted to a particular subject at the interface of the physical and life sciences.” Some of the articles in this edition are open access. One open access article is theoretical biologist Gerd B. Müller’s piece, Why an extended evolutionary synthesis is necessary: As can be noted from the listed principles, current evolutionary theory is predominantly oriented towards a genetic explanation of variation, and, except for some minor semantic modifications, this has not changed over the past seven Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at Evolution News & Views: For many people today, post-modern science is more of a quest to express an identity as believer in science, irrespective of evidence. Cosmologist Paul Steinhardt got a sense of this in 2014, when he reported that some proponents of early rapid cosmic inflation “already insist that the theory is equally valid whether or not gravitational waves are detected.” It fulfilled their needs. In 2017, cosmologist George Ellis, long a foe of post-modern cosmology, summed it up: “Scientific theories have since the seventeenth century been held tight by an experimental leash. In the last twenty years or so, both string theory and theories of the multiverse have slipped the leash.” We have so Read More ›

My latest ‘Critic’s Corner’ post is now up. This one features the work of ID critic Sahotra Sarkar. Sarkar is one of the more sophisticated critics of ID so his work is worth engaging with. I have responded to some of his arguments in a previous post and plan to do more in the future:                          Critic’s Corner: Sahotra Sarkar     

From Meera Nanda, author of Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India, at Butterflies and Wheels: Science studies, as I said, is not an ordinary academic discipline. It constitutes the beating heart of postmodernism, for it aims to “deconstruct” natural science, the very core of a secular and modern worldview. Since its inception in the 1970s, the discipline has produced a sizeable body of work that purports to show that not just the agenda, but even the content of theories of natural sciences is “socially constructed.” All knowledge, in different cultures, or different historical times – regardless of whether it is true or false, rational or irrational, successful or not in producing reliable knowledge – Read More ›

From English prof Lisa Emerson’s publisher: In The Forgotten Tribe: Scientists as Writers, Lisa Emerson offers an important corrective to the view that scientists are “poor writers, unnecessarily opaque, not interested in writing, and in need of remediation.” She argues that scientists are among “the most sophisticated and flexible writers in the academy, often writing for a wider range of audiences (their immediate disciplinary peers, peers in adjacent fields, a broad scientific audience, industry, and a range of public audiences including social media) than most other faculty.” Moreover, she notes, the often collaborative and multidisciplinary nature of their work results in writing practices that “may be more socially complex, and require more articulation, mediation, and interpersonal communication, and more use Read More ›

Suzan Mazur asks neuroscientist Andrew Newberg, who offers some thoughts at HuffPost: Suzan Mazur: What is your understanding of when, historically, humans thought up religion? British anthropologist Maurice Bloch has said humans largely live in their reflective imagination, something that first arose 40,000 to 50,000 years ago and that “[t]he kind of phenomena that the English word “religion,” and the associated word “belief,” can be made to evoke have, at most a history of five thousand years.” You’ve said religious and spiritual ideas have been around “since the dawn of civilization.” When would that be—-“the dawn of civilization”? And what is the evidence? Andrew Newberg: Certainly, a more formalized aspect of religion has been around for about 5,000 years going Read More ›

From Massimo Pigliucci at Footnotes to Plato: Theoretical biology’ is a surprisingly heterogeneous field, partly because it encompasses ‘‘doing theory’’ across disciplines as diverse as molecular biology, systematics, ecology, and evolutionary biology. Moreover, it is done in a stunning variety of different ways, using anything from formal analytical models to computer simulations, from graphic representations to verbal arguments. A few years ago I co-organized a workshop on this topic at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for theoretical biology in Vienna, and then published an edited volume of the journal Biological Theory collecting all contributions. It certainly sounds as though Pigliucci talking about the shot heard round the world, The Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry (2009), though he does Read More ›

In order to prepare ourselves for the upcoming solar eclipse on Monday, August 21, David Coppedge posted a YouTube video showing the Great Baja Eclipse of 1991 and people’s reactions to it.

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Announcing from on high that it is Against Discrimination, Nature tells us: Science cannot and should not be used to justify prejudice.  No indeed. But is there any general wish that it did? Then, Difference between groups may therefore provide sound scientific evidence. But it’s also a blunt instrument of pseudoscience, and one used to justify actions and policies that condense claimed group differences into tools of prejudice and discrimination against individuals — witness last weekend’s violence by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the controversy over a Google employee’s memo on biological differences in the tastes and abilities of the sexes. A nice touch that, to equate hapless engineer Damore’s ejection from the Goolag with white supremacist violence. The two Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary (O’Leary for News) at MercatorNet: When I use the term fake news, I do not mean deliberate sabotage of news sites by, for example, Russia’s troll house. Or opposition research marketed as news. Or false information that merits retraction and results in dismissals as at CNN recently. Nor material that is outed by traditional media sources themselves as fake news. Consider, for example, the BBC’s displeasure at the glut of fake anti-Trump stories (“Many people on the left right now are feeling overwhelmed and fearful and unsure of what’s going to happen next”), many of which have also been debunked by Snopes as“patterns of falsehoods.” At some level, the people creating the news have to know that Read More ›

The Third Way of Evolution is a group of non-Darwinian or minimally Darwinian evolutionary biologists. From Tom Heneghan at Religion News: Since scientists succeeded in sequencing the genome in the late 1990s, they have found that epigenetic markers that regulate patterns of gene expression can reflect outside influences on a body. Even simpler living objects such as plants contain a complex internal genetic system that governs their growth according to information they receive from outside. To theologians who see a “new biology” emerging, this knowledge points to a more holistic system than scientists have traditionally seen, one more open to some divine inspiration for life. In this view, the fact that epigenetic markers can bring outside pressures to bear on Read More ›

From Columbia mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong on some recent developments in theoretical physics: …it seems that the field is moving ever forward in a post-modern direction I can’t follow. Tonight the arXiv has something new from Susskind about this, where he argues that one should go beyond “ER=EPR”, to “GR=QM”. While the 2013 paper had very few equations, this one has none at all, and is actually written in the form not of a scientific paper, but of a letter to fellow “Qubitzers”. On some sort of spectrum of precision of statements, with Bourbaki near one end, this paper is way at the other end. More. Post-moderns are indeed marchin’, marchin’ and they are deadly serious about Read More ›