From Huffington Post Mind Controlled Robot Arm Lets Paralyzed Man Drink a Beer on His Own … doesn’t that mean mind over matter? A man paralyzed for 13 years can finally have a drink on his own again, thanks to a robotic arm he’s able to control using his brain. More. See also: Neuroscience tried wholly embracing naturalism but then the brain got away Follow UD News at Twitter!

Recently, there has been a lively exchange of views on the subject of animal rationality and animal immortality between Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart and Thomist philosopher Edward Feser. A fair-minded reader would have to conclude that Feser has gotten the better of Hart in this exchange. (For a handy summary of the arguments put forward on both sides, I would warmly recommend Professor Feser’s latest article; his earlier articles can be found here, here and here. Hart’s articles in First Things can be found here and here.) Nevertheless, I have strong reservations about some of Feser’s arguments. In a nutshell: Feser seems to want to place a period where the available evidence – from both science and philosophy Read More ›

Here, based on this post on a remarkably pungent academic disgrace: Peter Thiel’s comments on the American university system say it all. A variety of academics, scientists and particularly Ivy League professors and alumni inherit a priestly-caste status. They are the truth holders. They are the diviners of the universe. And we must pour an endless stream of funds, and an increasingly greater amount of resources into their steadily decreasing return of investment. The education bubble is ready to burst; and it will be far more glorious than the housing or tech bubbles. But does anyone know how to short sell or buy put options on Harvard? Follow UD News at Twitter!

Noted by Barry Arrington here. Whitewash duly reported in the New Yorker is In retrospect, Green wishes he had asked for the raw data earlier. And yet, in collaborations in which data is collected at only one institution, it’s not uncommon for the collecting site to anonymize and code it before sharing it. The anonymized data Green did see looked plausible and convincing. “He analyzed it, I analyzed it—I have the most ornate set of graphs and charts and every possible detail analyzed five different ways,” Green said. Ultimately, though, the system takes for granted that no one would be so brazen as to create the actual raw data themselves. The author burbles on, as expected, about the nature of Read More ›

From Nature: The tests being used to work that out are extremely subtle, and have yet to produce a definitive answer. But researchers are optimistic that a resolution is close. If so, they will finally be able to answer questions that have lingered for decades. Can a particle really be in many places at the same time? Is the Universe continually dividing itself into parallel worlds, each with an alternative version of ourselves? Is there such a thing as an objective reality at all? “These are the kinds of questions that everybody has asked at some point,” says Alessandro Fedrizzi, a physicist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. “What is it that is really real?” More. But why Read More ›

Readers may remember Suzan Mazur’s interview with a senior NASA scientist: senior NASA origin of life scientist: In a couple of e-mails to me in January 2013, Andrew Pohorille, the senior-most scientist at NASA working in the origin of life field, objected to my story, “The RNA World’s Last Hurrah?”, “The RNA World’s Last Hurrah?”, in which I interviewed Paul Davies’ collaborator at Arizona State University, physicist Sara Walker. … Hey, we got you hooked? Then how be this, a followup: Pohorille is now even less enthused about the RNA world since Princeton and said there were also fewer scientists currently pursuing that line of research. He also thinks the answer to origin of life is not about a thermodynamic Read More ›

Well, here is one: Crap about “Intentional change” = stuff government will probably try to make us do, if it gets votes:  The Evolution Institute says it uses evolutionary science to solve real-world problems. Currently, there is no mechanism for applying current theory and research to public policy formulation. We aim to provide the mechanism. Working with our large network of advisors, we can: Identify and assemble the evolutionary expertise for virtually any topic relevant to human welfare. Organize workshops, coordinate the writing of position papers, and provide advisors. Assist in the implementation of the policies that we formulate. Does that include SWAT teams? Curiously, it took a Canadian to publicize how many semi-useless bureaucrats in the United States have SWAT Read More ›

Alternatively, when do we finally get to the end of the Darwin stupid? Humans are supposed to have an “evolutionary” fear of snakes. In large numbers, snakes can seem disgusting. But snakes are rarely present in large numbers. See the vid below for an explanation of a very rare exception to this rule* in Canada. In my own background (News), the Fat Broad ruled, and venomous snakes can be an endangered species. So I’d never heard that humans were “naturally” afraid of snakes until I encountered the writings of tenured evolutionary psychologists proclaiming their apes’r’us truth to the masses. In real off-campus life, where News grew up, we were always far more worried about rabid mammals. (Look, if you simply can’t Read More ›

Following up on a story UD News reported earlier, Retraction Watch reports: In what can only be described as a remarkable and swift series of events, one of the authors of a much-ballyhooed Science paper claiming that short conversations could change people’s minds on same-sex marriage is retracting it following revelations that the data were faked by his co-author. If one digs further into the story it will quickly become apparent that the data backing the paper were facially absurd.  Where was the much ballyhooed peer review process?   *The phrase “advocacy science” should, of course, be an oxymoron.  Sadly, it is not.            

From John Leslie’s review of Nobelist Steven Weinberg’s new book, To Explain the World: Experience has shown that seeking goodness, purpose, signs of a divine plan, is totally unprofitable Despite fine tuning of the universe? All the same, Weinberg gives a rule for what scientists should avoid. Experience has, he thinks, shown that seeking goodness, purpose, signs of a divine plan, is totally unprofitable. It doesn’t mean that he rejects such statements as “Hearts exist so that blood can be pumped”. They are useful if understood in the way Darwin suggested. God didn’t design hearts benevolently, or give living things “an inherent tendency to improve” that would have “ruled out any unification of biology with physical science”. What Darwin instead Read More ›

Maybe don’t? “The Big Bang blip.” Whatever its state of ripeness, that banana is made of particles of matter, just like you: its intrinsic matteryness is why you can see, feel and taste it. What you don’t see is what a banana does 15 times a day or so. Blip! It produces a particle of something else, something that vanishes almost instantaneously in a flash of light. That something else is antimatter. Actually, antimatter is explained in another article in New Scientist you can read for free. Also at NASA Here, we don’t know what happened to the banana. Follow UD News at Twitter!

Further to Notable retractions of possible interest, here’s something interesting from Nature: Potential flaws in genomics paper scrutinized on Twitter Reanalysis of a study that compared gene expression in mice and humans tests social media as a forum for discussing research results. A recent Twitter conversation that cast doubt on the conclusions of a genomics study has revived a debate about how best to publicly discuss possible errors in research. Yoav Gilad, a geneticist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, last month wrote on Twitter that fundamental errors in the design and data analysis of a December 2014 study2 led to an unfounded conclusion about the genetic similarities between mice and humans. Gilad and his co-author Orna Mizrahi-Man, a Read More ›

Three items from Retraction Watch: 1. Unhelpful retractions: A group of authors have withdrawn a 2011 Journal of Biological Chemistry paper, but then appear to have re-published almost the same paper a month later, only this time with just five of the original nine authors. … As we’ve come to expect from the JBC, here’s the full retraction notice, in all its inexplicit glory … If you ever find out what happened, tell us. 2. Faked data: In what can only be described as a remarkable and swift series of events, one of the authors of a much-ballyhooed Science paper claiming that short conversations could change people’s minds on same-sex marriage is retracting it following revelations that the data were Read More ›

Biases? In science? From Nautilus: Sometimes it seems surprising that science functions at all. In 2005, medical science was shaken by a paper with the provocative title “Why most published research findings are false.”1 Written by John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, it didn’t actually show that any particular result was wrong. Instead, it showed that the statistics of reported positive findings was not consistent with how often one should expect to find them. As Ioannidis concluded more recently, “many published research findings are false or exaggerated, and an estimated 85 percent of research resources are wasted.” It’s likely that some researchers are consciously cherry-picking data to get their work published. And some of the problems surely Read More ›

Here, from Stan Persky’s review of Barry Dainton’s Self: Philosophy in Transit: Many well-known and respected philosophers and scientists deny that selves exist in any meaningful way and suggest that our sense of having or being a self is simply an illusion. As Barry Dainton puts it in the book under review, It is worth noting that in some contemporary intellectual circles the doctrine that there exists anything resembling a self as traditionally conceived — a fundamentally mental thing that is in principle separable from a body — is widely assumed to have been wholly discredited, regardless of how most people might think of themselves. Indeed, the banishment of the self as traditionally conceived is sometimes seen as a hallmark of Read More ›