Further to the claim that dropping the algebra requirement would enable more students to enter community college. From David Freddoso at Washington Examiner: For many decades, educators have viewed algebra as something students need to understand in high school, if not earlier. Now, we have college administrators who think it’s too hard, causing too many of their students to fail and thus preventing them from getting a college degree. And that, of course, means we should get rid of algebra, the chancellor of California’s community college system told NPR this week. … I don’t even want to get into the laughable and arguably racist assumption that algebra creates some kind of color barrier ? and by the way, the Arabs Read More ›

With comments by linguist Noel Rude. From Arika Okrent at Aeon, summarizing the story told in Tom Wolfe’s Kingdom of Speech, of how linguist Daniel Everett challenged grey eminence Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar: The crucial hypothesis is that its core, essential feature is recursion, the capacity to embed phrases within phrases ad infinitum, and so express complex relations between ideas (such as ‘Tom says that Dan claims that Noam believes that…’). More. But Everett found that the Amazonian language Piraha did not have recursion, and felt the wrath of the Chomskyites. Chomsky and his supporters replied that … even if Pirahã has no recursion, it matters not one bit for the theory of universal grammar. The capacity is Read More ›

From Cortney O’Brien at Townhall: The Los Angeles Times recently did an interview with Bill Nye the Science Guy about his new book, “Everything All at Once.” One of the pressing topics of discussion was climate change and those who deny it. More. About which he said, “Climate change deniers, by way of example, are older. It’s generational,” Nye told the Los Angeles Times. Nye said that he is calling them out with “due respect,” acknowledging that he is “now one of them.” “We’re just going to have to wait for those people to ‘age out,’ as they say,” Nye went on, adding that “age out” is a euphemism for “die.” “But it’ll happen, I guarantee you — that’ll happen.” (LA Read More ›

From Jesse Dunietz at Scientific American: Scientists aren’t yet certain that electrons and their relatives are violating the Standard Model of particle physics, but the evidence is mounting The evidence comes from electrons and their more massive cousins, muons and tau leptons. According to the Standard Model, these three particles should behave like differently sized but otherwise identical triplets. But three experiments have produced growing evidence—including results announced in just the last few months—that the particles react differently to some as-yet mysterious influence. The findings are not yet conclusive, but if they hold up, “it would be a complete revolution,” says California Institute of Technology theorist Mark Wise. More. Many have been revolting against the Standard Model and the Big Read More ›

Further to Dawkins dumped from Berkeley due to “hurtful words,” neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and editor David Klinghoffer weigh in: Egnor: Dawkins gets expelled: You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh Why, one asks, is it fine to criticize Islam, but not Darwin? Dawkins has fought mightily to “de-platform” intelligent design scientists and anyone who harbors even a shimmer of doubt about Darwinian theology. But now he’s shocked — shocked — that defenders of another religion get to silence heretics too. Atheism and its Darwinian creation myth have gained ascendancy in the Western world over the past century, and in several unfortunate nations, have grasped state power. It’s been an ugly ascent, complete with gulags and holocausts Read More ›

Recently, we’ve been running a featurette, Tales of the Tone Deaf, featuring dim profs writing in dozy journal about why people doubt Science and how to fix them. They do not appear able to process the fact that the public is well aware of any number of dubious findings about nutrition, for example, marketed for decades as Science. And is beginning to learn about the corruptocrat crime labs. Yes, Science again. And then there are all the scandals around peer review to stumble over. Skeptics are replacing worshippers for a reason. The growing reputation of universities for suppressing honest discussion in favour of group thumbsucking does not help. No matter, a new book by Austin Ruse, Fake Science: Exposing the Read More ›

From BEC CREW at ScienceAlert: Researchers have discovered that the lungs play a far more complex role in mammalian bodies than we thought, with new evidence revealing that they don’t just facilitate respiration – they also play a key role in blood production. In experiments involving mice, the team found that they produce more than 10 million platelets (tiny blood cells) per hour, equating to the majority of platelets in the animals’ circulation. This goes against the decades-long assumption that bone marrow produces all of our blood components. More. W|e are expected to believe that that all just happened by natural selection acting on random mutations and that no source of information is required. Sure. The article in Nature. Abstract: Read More ›

From Mike Wall at Space.com: A strange radio signal that seemed to emanate from a small nearby star probably came from Earth-orbiting satellites, astronomers say. Late last week, researchers announced that, on May 12, the 1,000-foot-wide (305 meters) Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico detected a bizarre radio signal in the vicinity of Ross 128, a red dwarf star that lies just 11 light-years from Earth. The signal was theoretically consistent with a transmission from an alien civilization, the astronomers said, though they stressed that hypothesis was “at the bottom of many other explanations.” More. Coffee: Not really. Psychologically, aliens were at the top of the list. And they are much more fun than any other explanation even if they Read More ›

Just like Coulter and Yiannopoulos? From Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist: Richard Dawkins has a new collection of essays coming out next month in a book called Science in the Soul. Naturally, he’ll be visiting the U.S. on a book tour. One of the stops was going to be in Berkeley, California on August 9. It was sponsored by KPFA, a progressive radio station in the area, in a city known for being the hotbed of liberal activism. But that talk has now been canceled. More. Jerry Coyne quotes the cancellation notice: We had booked this event based entirely on his excellent new book on science, when we didn’t know he had offended and hurt – in his tweets and Read More ›

One of the things that I find interesting from a design perspective is the existence of adaptive systems that don’t presently help them out. That is, they may have cellular response systems which help them in all sorts of scenarios which an ordinary individual is not subject to.
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The icon perished and became a zombie, lurking in the shadows of tax-funded textbooks. But let Wells tell it: Don’t miss the eighteen-winged dragonfly which has never existed except in tax-funded biology textbooks (you can see an illustration in the vid). Note: Tax-funded textbooks? That’s most of what keeps the zombies deadwalking. The vast majority of people compelled to pay for the textbooks cannot make a full-time job of opposing the pressure groups and lobbies that keep the textbooks bad. They can’t afford the time to even know about it. See also: Zombie Science and DNA replication film undermines textbooks

From Kayla Lattimore and Julie Depenbrock at NPR: Algebra is one of the biggest hurdles to getting a high school or college degree — particularly for students of color and first-generation undergrads. It is also the single most failed course in community colleges across the country. So if you’re not a STEM major (science, technology, engineering, math), why even study algebra? That’s the argument Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor of the California community college system, made today in an interview with NPR’s Robert Siegel. … Oakley is among a growing number of educators who view intermediate algebra as an obstacle to students obtaining their credentials — particularly in fields that require no higher level math skills. More. Hmmm. If we dropped Read More ›

From John Steele at Nautilus, interviewing cosmologist Paul Davies: Steele: What do you think are the most exciting recent advances in understanding time? … Davies: In terms of fundamental physics, is there anything especially new about time? I think the answer is not really. There are new ideas that are out there. I think there are still fundamental problems; we’ve talked about one of them: Is time an emergent property or a fundamental property? And the ultimate origin of the arrow of time, which is the asymmetry of the world in time, is still a bit contentious. We know we have to trace it back to the Big Bang, but there are still different issues swirling around there that we Read More ›

This is certainly the day for “earlier than thoughts.” Look on the bright side; it is way more interesting than Tales of the Tone Deaf, which predominated some short while back, about the prof-led move to Stamp Out Doubt. From Rachael Lallensack at Nature: The results, published on 18 July in Nature Communications1, push back against a controversial 2016 study2 that suggested dogs were domesticated twice. The latest analysis also add weight to previous research that moves the timing of domestication back as far as 40,000 years ago. … The researchers estimate that dogs and wolves diverged genetically between 36,900 and 41,500 years ago, and that eastern and western dogs split 17,500–23,900 years ago. Because domestication had to have happened Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: While it is accepted that humans appeared in Africa some 200,000 years ago, scientists in recent years have placed the approximate date of human settlement in Australia further and further back in time, as part of ongoing questions about the timing, the routes and the means of migration out of Africa. Now, a team of researchers, including a faculty member and seven students from the University of Washington, has found and dated artifacts in northern Australia that indicate humans arrived there about 65,000 years ago — more than 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. A paper published July 20 in the journal Nature describes dating techniques and artifact finds at Madjedbebe, a longtime site of archaeological research, that Read More ›