Maybe, if even The Atlantic has articles with this title: The Multiverse Idea is Rotting Culture There’s no way we could ever carry out any experiment to test for the multiverse’s existence in the world, because it’s not in our world. It’s an article of faith, and not a very secure one. What’s more likely: a potentially infinite number of useless parallel universes, or one perfectly ordinary God? There’s nothing wrong with faith, but if it’s not recognized for what it is then monsters start to spawn, not in some distant reality, but right here. No religion is complete without a moral code, but how do you live ethically in our shapeless foam of worlds, invisible to telescopes but throbbing Read More ›

Statistician William M. Briggs reports an amazing medical case where the

“skull was filled largely by fluid, leaving just a thin perimeter of actual brain tissue.”
Here’s the kicker: And yet the man was a married father of two and a civil servant with an IQ of 75, below-average in his intelligence but not mentally disabled…

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From Steven Novella at Neurologica blog, in response to science writer Katie L. Burke, who argues that the term is counterproductive: Burke concludes that, rather than labeling something pseudoscience, we should describe exactly what it is and how it fails. This is a false choice, however. We can do both. I completely agree that we should not substitute a label for an actual description or analysis of something. This is good advice in any intellectual arena. This is just not what good skeptics and science communicators do. We do give a detailed analysis of exactly why a claim is wrong, and exactly what brand of pseudoscience it is. Suggesting we don’t betrays an unfamiliarity with the vast majority of popular Read More ›

The Kingdom of Speech In “Piecing together a celebrity scientist,” Tom Bartlett writes re Tom Wolfe’s recent book, The Kingdom of Speech might seem an unlikely project for a white-suited literary legend who hung out with Ken Kesey back in the day and later wrote best-selling novels in the social-realist vein. But it actually fits nicely alongside two other books in the Wolfe ouevre: The Painted Word, and From Bauhaus to Our House, both extended essays that send up pretension in the worlds of art and architecture, respectively. My paperback copy of The Painted Word bears the following cover blurb: “Another Blast at the Phonies!” Wolfe is on the hunt for phonies here, too. In the first half of the Read More ›

From Annalee Newitz at Ars Technica: The classic model of scientific progress is that the field advances when new findings contradict or supersede old ones. But a new study reveals that this process isn’t working today—at least, not in scientific journals, where most data is shared with colleagues. Indeed, the researchers found that “rebuttals scarcely alter scientific perceptions about the original papers.” More. That’s bad news. It’s the Gossip Model of news dissemination. The gossip that flew around town building is recollected far more sharply and frequently than any clarification. See also: Most science findings wrong or useless? The replication crisis (few studies are done to replicate cool new findings) had been noted for decades but no one did anything Read More ›

From biologist Katie L. Burke at American Scientist: The word pseudoscience is also used to claim a certain value system: scientism, or valuing and trusting science exclusively. Relatively few people ascribe to scientism, even if they like science. Many if not most people, at least in the United States, value science and see it as an important decision-making tool. But most people—even many scientists—are religious or simply not doggedly empirical, and believe in truths other than those derived from science. In such views, science is a tool with limits, and outside those limits lie beliefs, ideas, and knowledge gathered through art, philosophy, intuition, metaphysics, or culture. When science-affiliated factions use a term that inherently implies that people are ignorant or Read More ›

From Steven Hayward at Powerline: … this article actually appears in the current issue of Evolutionary Psychological Science: Duration of Cunnilingus Predicts Estimated Ejaculate Volume in Humans: a Content Analysis of Pornography Abstract Humans perform copulatory behaviors that do not contribute directly to reproduction (e.g., cunnilingus, prolonged copulation). We conducted a content analysis of pornography to investigate whether such behaviors might contribute indirectly to reproduction by influencing ejaculate volume—an indicator of ejaculate quality. We coded 100 professional pornography scenes depicting the same male actor copulating with 100 different females, affording control for between-male differences in estimated ejaculate volume. … (public access) Hayward: A few observations. First, it sounds like a fancy excuse for a bunch of pervs to watch a lot Read More ›

Weren’t hard enough on Tom Wolfe, author of The Kingdom of Speech From Jerry Coyne at Why Evolution Is True: This weekend, National Public Radio (NPR) host Scott Simon interviewed renowned author Tom Wolfe about Wolfe’s new book The Kingdom of Speech. You can hear the five-minute interview here. I just now listened to it, but several exercised readers emailed me yesterday complaining about Wolfe’s criticisms of evolution—criticisms that weren’t called out by Simon. Oh dear. “Anti-science” strikes again. Jerry treats us to a long rant about the facts of “evolution” (as he understands them). But if interviewers like Simon derailed the discussion by stopping for demands for fidelity to same we would never get to hear what Wolfe has Read More ›

From science writer Miriam Kramer at Mashable: Yes, it’s amazing that this possibly rocky planet is orbiting a star just 4 light-years away, possibly close enough to one day launch a mission to, but there is still so much we don’t know about this brave new world. Plus, Proxima b is far from being a twin of our planet. Scientists aren’t sure what kind of atmosphere it has or even if it’s able to support a magnetic field, two things that it would need to sustain habitability in orbit around its active, flaring star. We simply don’t know if it can support water, life or much of anything on its surface at all. Beyond the inaccuracy in this particular case, Read More ›

From Guardian: Jared Taylor was prominently featured in a Hillary Clinton campaign ad released ahead of her speech denouncing the “alt-right” in Reno on Thursday and “appreciates” the Democratic presidential nominee for “calling attention to the message I have for America”. … Asked to define what the diffuse alt-right stands for, Taylor said there were “areas of disagreement”, but that “the central element of the alt-right is the position it takes on race.” Now here is where it gets interesting: For Taylor, and other members of the alt-right, race is an inescapable biological fact, which has consequences. “The races are not equal and equivalent. If a nation changes demographically, its society will change,” he said. But where does this stuff Read More ›

From Tom “Bonfire of the Vanities” Wolfe’s interview with NPR on his new book, The Kingdom of Speech: The Kingdom of Speech is Tom Wolfe’s first non-fiction book in 16 years. Wolfe tells NPR’s Scott Simon that speech is “the attribute of attributes,” because it’s so unrelated to most other things about animals. “We’ve all been taught that we evolved from animals, and here is something that is totally absent from animal life,” he says. More. … On whether he’s worried that creationists will begin to cite his work as scientific proof I wouldn’t think so, because there’s not a shred of whatever that depends at all on faith, on belief in an extraterrestrial power. In fact, I hate people who go Read More ›

From Rachel Feltman at Washington Post: But now scientists have found something entirely new: a galaxy with the same mass as the Milky Way but with only 1 percent of our galaxy’s star power. About 99.99 percent of this other galaxy is made up of dark matter, and scientists believe it may be one of many. The galaxy Dragonfly 44, described in a study published Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, is 300 million light years away. If scientists can track down a similar galaxy closer to home, however, they may be able to use it to make the first direct detection of dark matter. More. See also: Dark matter skeptics wanted These people should really talk. Follow UD News Read More ›

From Ronald Bailey at Reason: “Science, the pride of modernity, our one source of objective knowledge, is in deep trouble.” So begins “Saving Science,” an incisive and deeply disturbing essay by Daniel Sarewitz at The New Atlantis. … And then there is the huge problem of epidemiology, which manufactures false positives by the hundreds of thousands. In the last decade of the 20th century, some 80,000 observational studies were published, but the numbers more than tripled to nearly 264,000 between 2001 and 2011. S. Stanley Young of the U.S. National Institute of Statistical Sciences has estimated that only 5 to 10 percent of those observational studies can be replicated. “Within a culture that pressures scientists to produce rather than discover, Read More ›

Again: From Science 2.0: Redefining Homo — Does Our Family Tree Need More Branches? … Is it brain size; limb, hand and foot proportions; the ability to communicate or use tools? How do the added complexities of new Homo species found in Asia further rewrite the history of the genus and other hominins? In the September issue, EARTH Magazine delves into the challenges that have arisen as scientists still ask, “What makes a human, human?” Read at: http://bit.ly/2bC63Yf.More. Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Jacob Aron at New Scientist, A planet just 30 per cent more massive than Earth orbits in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri, which is just 4.25 light years away. How Earth-like is it really? … The planet – Proxima b – was discovered by astronomers who spent years looking for signs of the tiny gravitational tug exerted by a planet on its star, after spotting hints of such disruption in 2013. Proxima Centauri is 4.25 light years from Earth, making it slightly closer than the binary star system of Alpha Centauri, which the Proxima star is thought to loosely orbit. More. From Rob Sheldon I wouldn’t get my hopes up. Years ago, people didn’t put this type of Read More ›