Kevin Loria tells us at Business Insider: Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks there’s a ‘very high’ chance the universe is just a simulation … So at this year’s 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate at the American Museum of Natural History, which addressed the question of whether the universe is a simulation, the answers from some panelists may be more comforting than the responses from others. Physicist Lisa Randall, for example, said that she thought the odds that the universe isn’t “real” are so low as to be “effectively zero. But on the other hand, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was hosting the debate, said that he thinks the likelihood of the universe being a simulation “may be very high.” … “And Read More ›

From this 2005 interview: “Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society Read More ›

Readers may recall “No I in me and no sense in Sam Harris” wherein Waynesburg University (Pennsylvania) biology prof Wayne Rossiter, comments on the conundrum that Harris thinks dispensing with the idea that one exists is the key to deeper knowing of the nature of reality. But, Rossiter, not to worry, some can go Harris, a Darwin fan, one better: Evolution shows our perceptions are not real Anyway, seriously, Harris is getting slammed for Islamophobia, and Jerry Coyne offers, First, Sam asks hard questions, and people don’t like to think about hard questions. Should we ever lie? Is torture ever justifiable? Is it even possible to even imagine a first strike against Islamic enemies? Is it possible that religion can Read More ›

From David Snoke’s notes on the annual meeting of the Christian Scientific Society Robin Collins gave a great overview of the topic of fine tuning in cosmology, and raised the argument (subject of new work he is doing) that the cosmos is fine tuned not only for the existence of life or observers, but for the existence of scientific discovery. This is along the lines of Gonzalez and Richards’ The Privileged Planet from a few years ago, but with new and more rigorous arguments. More. Doubtless, a book is forthcoming… ? It tells us something about the times we live in that, whatever the evidence suggests, the people most likely to resist such a view would actually benefit from its Read More ›

But can’t, for psychological reasons. First, why the divorce? From Philip Ball at Nautilus: [Ernst] Mayr made perhaps the most concerted attempt by any biologist to draw clear disciplinary boundaries around his subject, smartly isolating it from other fields of science. In doing so, he supplies one of the clearest demonstrations of the folly of that endeavor. His characterization of physics as rigid, notes Ball, was “thoroughly flawed, as a passing familiarity with quantum theory, chaos, and complexity would reveal.” Of course, that defect deepens the mystery of why his view dominated, largely unchallenged. Most people with even a passing interest in science are aware of quantum effects. Again, from Ball, But Mayr’s argument gets more interesting—if not actually more Read More ›

From Amanda Gefter at Quanta: The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality It’s an interview with cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman on the basic theme “Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be.” More. If Hoffman is correct, evolution makes science hopeless. Some people have said that for years, but we didn’t think they’d be getting their evidence from Darwin’s crowd itself. See also: Neuroscience tried wholly embracing naturalism, but then the brain got away and Would we give up naturalism to solve the hard problem of consciousness? Follow UD News at Twitter!

Following on: Bill Nye open to jail time for climate change skeptics, from The Federalist: But Nye isn’t just speculating about putting people in jail. He is referring to a specific attempt to use the model of those old tobacco lawsuits to prosecute any company that has ever funded research or advocacy skeptical of claims about global warming. This campaign was started last year and has taken its newest steps recently with a meeting of state attorneys general who vowed to launch “investigations into whether fossil fuel companies misled investors and the public on the impact of climate change.” The attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands—whom you would think would have enough to deal with at home straightening out Read More ›

One thing we can all agree on is that the infamous finches on the Galápagos Islands are a classic icon of evolution. The difference is that evolutionists are playing the fool. Ever since Darwin wondered aloud that if the different types of finches he saw on the Galápagos Islands were not merely variants of a species, but in fact different species, then it “would undermine the stability of species,” and therefore the finches (and everything else) must have spontaneously arisen, evolutionists’ dullness has been embarrassing. Like the co-worker who reveals his ignorance as he rambles on about his pet peeve, evolutionists’ positivistic proclamations about the finches reveal an astonishing level of ignorance.  Read more

DNA proves it, say researchers. From ScienceDaily: New research examining the DNA of North American mammoths challenges the way we categorize a species. Several species of mammoth are thought to have roamed across the North American continent. The new study results show that while mammoths clearly evolved differences in their physical appearance to deal with different environments, it did not prohibit them from cross-breeding and producing healthy offspring. Paper. (public access) – Dan Fisher et al. Mammuthus Population Dynamics in Late Pleistocene North America: Divergence, Phylogeography and Introgression. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, April 2016 DOI: 10.3389/fevo.2016.00042 … A species can be defined as a group of similar animals that can successfully breed and produce fertile offspring. By using differences Read More ›

From Kirk Durston at Contemplations: There are countless people who use the following rationale to justify why there was no need for an intelligent creator behind life – evolution has had a near-infinite number of trials in which to create the full diversity of life, including its molecular machines, molecular computers, and digitally encoded genomes. Here, we will take an opportunity to examine these points more closely. In other scientific disciplines, the first step one must take before figuring out a solution, is to establish the boundary conditions within which a problem must be solved. Since we should require the same standard of scientific rigour from evolutionary biology, let us calculate an extreme upper limit for the total number of Read More ›

Were we talking nearly $9 million? From beneficiary Evolution Institute: My interest in the EES arose in the aftermath of the Altenberg meeting. It was clear that the notion of an extended synthesis divided the evolutionary biology community, generating both enormous excitement and strong negative responses. However, I held the view that the negativity arose primarily from the absence of a clear rationale for an EES, and the mistaken perception that the EES was a rejection of neo-Darwinism. If it were possible to harness the enthusiasm and new ideas, whilst at the same time circumventing the concerns of more orthodox evolutionists, then the EES could prove a stimulant to the field. Love it! “Mistaken perception that the EES was a Read More ›

From Elizabeth Pennisi at Science: For many evolutionary biologists, nothing gets their dander up faster than suggesting evolution is anything other than the process of natural selection, acting on random mutations. So some are uneasy that the John Templeton Foundation has awarded $8.7 million to U.K., Swedish, and U.S. researchers for experimental and theoretical work intended to put a revisionist view of evolution, the so-called extended evolutionary synthesis, on a sounder footing. Using a variety of plants, animals, and microbes, the researchers will study the possibility that organisms can influence their own evolution and that inheritance can take place through routes other than the genetic material. Critics are against evolutionary biologists accepting this money and argue that evolutionary theory already Read More ›

From Adam Marcus at Stat News: What do Henry Kissinger and Martin Scorsese have in common? Fun fact: Both evidently review scientific manuscripts for money. … The EditPub site (which seemed on Thursday to be no longer up and running), is almost entirely in Chinese, but its homepage bills it as a “service center for scientific research.” Its existence came to light earlier this month after the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology retracted a 2015 article by a group from Dalian University in China. According to the journal, EditPub had “compromised” the peer review process in a way that the journal has so far refused to make public. The retraction is but the latest in some 300 similar instances of Read More ›

Note to self: Toss out dictionary Recently, we looked at the way Richard Dawkins made Darwinian evolution sound so easy that people who don’t want to do much thinking—but do want to feel up-to-date—embraced it. And it has been easy for them to persecute dissenters with a good conscience because, in fairness, most of them never had enough real grasp of the issues to understand why there could be any dissent. Or sufficient curiosity to wonder. A great package, if you like, for union science teachers, especially “aren’t I good?” girls. Much of that has to do with Dawkins’ skill with language, which is not at all the same thing as having correct information or great ideas. But it usually Read More ›

It was Henri Bergson’s fault, and the issue was time, says Jimena Canales at Nautilus: According to Einstein, philosophy had been used to explain the relation between psychology and physics. “The time of the philosopher, I believe, is a psychological and physical time at the same time,” he explained in Paris. But relativity, by focusing on very fast phenomena, had shown just how off-the-mark psychological perceptions of time really were. Psychological conceptions of time, Einstein insisted, were not only simply in error, they just did not correspond to anything concrete. “These are nothing more than mental constructs, logical entities.” Because of the enormous speed of light, humans had “instinctively” generalized their conception of simultaneity and mistakenly applied it to the Read More ›