… can afford so many administrators and pump up grades? And the problem of burgeoning bureaucracy helps explain some worrying trends, foremost being a perceptible decline in academic standards over time (it’s evident in grade inflation; there are three times as many Oxford Firsts now as there were 30 years ago) and — a lesser problem — the way private donors to the university are losing the run of themselves. You don’t have to dig deep to find academics enraged at how administration flourishes while faculties are cash-strapped. That also explains why students with no sympathy for academic or intellectual freedom just want to be educrats, not indebted baristas. That’s where the action is today in academic life. Prediction: It’ll Read More ›

By any reasonable measure the Global Warming Alarmists’ predictions have been utter failures.  Their solution:  Monkey with the data. Robert Tracinski reports A lot of us having been pointing out one of the big problems with the global warming theory: a long plateau in global temperatures since about 1998. Most significantly, this leveling off was not predicted by the theory, and observed temperatures have been below the lowest end of the range predicted by all of the computerized climate models.  So what to do if your theory doesn’t fit the data? Why, change the data, of course!  Hence a blockbuster new report: a new analysis of temperature data since 1998 “adjusts” the numbers and magically finds that there was no Read More ›

The Age of Mass Delusion Highly illuminating.  You can see these undercurrents in many debates here and at TSZ. One of the best books that cracks the code on what we are living through was written by Dutch psychiatrist Joost A. M. Meerloo about 60 years ago. Mull over the first line of his book’s forward, and you will think he is writing about today: “This book attempts to depict the strange transformation of the free human mind into an automatically responding machine – a transformation which can be brought about by some of the cultural undercurrents in our present-day society as well as by deliberate experiments in the service of a political ideology.” (…) Ignorance was cultivated in the Read More ›

Irreducible complexity From Yahoo News: The new research — which involves two studies, one led by Charles Carter and one led by Richard Wolfenden, both of the University of North Carolina — suggests a way for RNA to control the production of proteins by working with simple amino acids that does not require the more complex enzymes that exist today. This link would bridge this gap in knowledge between the primordial chemical soup and the complex molecules needed to build life. Current theories say life on Earth started in an “RNA world,” in which the RNA molecule guided the formation of life, only later taking a backseat to DNA, which could more efficiently achieve the same end result. Like DNA, Read More ›

It is appropriate to pause a moment to reply to RTH at TSZ: >>your FYI / FTR posts are a bad idea. Here’s why: By not allowing criticism to be directly attached to them you are not proceeding in the most intellectually honest way. You keep relinking to them so criticisms have to be redrafted after every ‘reboot’ You post on a blog that censors, edits and even DISSAPEARS whole commenters. No rationale or many times even acknowledgement is given by the moderators. The above are hallmarks of dogma, not honest inquiry. If your ideas are good, they’ll hold up under scrutiny. Exposing them to pointed criticism may help you refine them.>> The central problem with this is that it Read More ›

Here: So it’s not just that students refuse to countenance uncomfortable ideas -they refuse to engage them, period. Engagement is considered unnecessary, as the immediate, emotional reactions of students contain all the analysis and judgment that sensitive issues demand. Yes. We know. Maybe it is time we had this conversation. They have no experience with, interest in, or tendency to support intellectual freedom. Greg Lukianoff of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has pointed out that generally, students today do not support students who question the establishment. They want to be educrats, not baristas. And that’s all they want. Prof, you raised them. You own them. You suck it up. We have suffered enough. And we have definitely had Read More ›

Closing our religion coverage for the week, as so often, with the new atheists, we note an op-ed in the New York Times asking for a theology of atheism. (It must be new atheism because the old-fashioned atheism didn’t ask for a theology, by definition.) Here: I’d come for Sunday Assembly, a godless alternative to church founded in London in 2013. A cheerful woman with a name tag stood and promised a crowd of about 40 people “all the fun parts of church but without any religion, and with fun pop songs.” The band led us in secular “hymns” like “Walking on Sunshine” and “Lean on Me.” The day’s guest preacher, a Ph.D. candidate from Duke, described his research on Read More ›

From Nature: If the British public likes chemistry — at least more than the chemists believed — then it is positively glowing about science in general. Survey respondents described it with words such as ‘welcoming’, ‘sociable’ and ‘fun’. And a separate poll by Ipsos MORI this year showed that scientists are among the most trusted professionals in Britain; some nine in ten people said that they trust scientists to follow all of the research rules and regulations relevant to them. “Nine in ten people trust scientists to follow the rules. How many scientists would say the same?” How many scientists would say the same? Not many, probably, of the attendees at this week’s 4th World Conference on Research Integrity in Read More ›

In a current UD News thread, we see how Megan Fox at PJ Media reports: >>If you want to know why people dislike atheists, it’s because they’re thoroughly dislikeable. And if you should find yourself on the wrong side of atheists, like I did by simply posting a video [–> perhaps, this] of myself walking through the Field Museum in Chicago asking questions about evolution — a topic many still view as controversial — be prepared to have to go to the police and file reports of harassment and cyberstalking. You are not allowed to question the gods of the atheists, namely Darwin and the scientists who bow at the altar of Darwin. If you do, you’ll face nothing but insults, Read More ›

Here. Finally, creationism has a solid hold in African American churches. There’s important outreach to be done on that front, and it’ll have to be accompanied by an acknowledgment of racism in science, both historically and in its current practice. While science is not itself racist, and neither is evolution, both have been tainted by and abused for the benefit of racism, and the African American community has cause for its ambivalence. Those of us who love evolution, love science, and want to share that love with our brothers and sisters of all races and religions need to find better ways to bridge these gaps. Well, just admitting it would be a welcome change. They could also stop promoting Darwinism, Read More ›

Between space exploration and lunacy, presumably: A few months ago in the journal Nature, two leading researchers, George Ellis and Joseph Silk, published a controversial piece called “Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics.” They criticized a newfound willingness among some scientists to explicitly set aside the need for experimental confirmation of today’s most ambitious cosmic theories — so long as those theories are “sufficiently elegant and explanatory.” Despite working at the cutting edge of knowledge, such scientists are, for Professors Ellis and Silk, “breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical.” More. If it is not empirical (evidence-based), why should the taxpayer fund it? Why should anyone care what they think? As I have said Read More ›

From a book excerpt at Salon, a mag you’d read if you believe you are smart despite evidence: Over the next two decades Darwin revised the “Origin of Species” five times. Even in his final revision, he did not take the theory to its logical end; but he had already privately concluded that his principles of natural selection applied to the human race as well. “As soon as I had become . . . convinced that species were mutable productions,” he wrote in his later “Autobiography,” “I could not avoid the belief that man must come under the same law.” In 1871 he finally published “The Descent of Man,” an extension of his evolutionary principles to the human race. The “Descent” brought Read More ›

Get the graphic. Megan Fox at PJ Media If you want to know why people dislike atheists, it’s because they’re thoroughly dislikeable. And if you should find yourself on the wrong side of atheists, like I did by simply posting a video of myself walking through the Field Museum in Chicago asking questions about evolution — a topic many still view as controversial — be prepared to have to go to the police and file reports of harassment and cyberstalking. You are not allowed to question the gods of the atheists, namely Darwin and the scientists who bow at the altar of Darwin. If you do, you’ll face nothing but insults, harassment, death and rape threats, as I quickly found Read More ›

Remember those micro flies which are practically invisible? Well perhaps even more amazing are the micro frogs from the island of New Guinea which at their largest are about … Read more

A friend writes to note a piece recently posted at ENV, “John West on Alfred Wallace and the Road Not Taken”: At the inception of the theory of evolution, Darwin and co-discoverer Alfred Russel Wallace represented two paths forward, one headed in the end to nihilism, atheism, and despair — basically, today’s ascendant culture — the other to a wondrous and hope-giving recognition that material stuff is not all there is in the universe. As Wallace argued, a source of intelligent agency lies behind the changing façade of nature: Wallace expounded his views at length in two scientific books near the end of his life: Man’s Place in the Universe (1903) and The World of Life (1910). He saw evidence Read More ›