Tag Archives: science

From A Lion Behind A Bush To God Behind The Oz Curtain: The Evolution Of God Belief

Posted on June 22, 2015 by

What is the relation between God belief and ignorance? I have a colleague in the science department at my college who said this to me yesterday (I’m paraphrasing): “I’m less sympathetic to the young Earth creationist of today than the … Continue reading →

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Does Time Exist? Einstein, Julian Barbour, Lee Smolin, Some Greek Philosophers–And The New Data From The NASA Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope

Posted on June 2, 2015 by

Julian Barbour, Albert Einstein, and Parmenides vs. Anaximander and Lee Smolin. Theoretical physicist, Julian Barbour, believes that what we experience as time passing actually consists of frozen moments of space-time in relation to one another (akin to a flip book). It … Continue reading →

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How to Save Adam and Eve from Genetics and Darwin

Posted on May 10, 2015 by

Darwin and genetics have blown up the idea that Adam and Eve had a special creation physically. No new species tends to bottleneck down to two (unless perhaps two stray birds get isolated on an island and start a new … Continue reading →

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Why Adam and Eve Never Existed (Illustrated By An Analogy To Birds On An Island)

Posted on March 25, 2015 by

Imagine an island off the coast of a continent. Two birds from the continent–a male and female–get swept up by a storm and find themselves stranded on this island. They go on to mate and a new species of bird … Continue reading →

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Life on Enceladus?

Posted on March 12, 2015 by

It appears that beneath the ice of Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, is an ocean with sand resting on its bottom and heat vents reaching 190 degrees. Life around the vents? Possibly. Cassini will get within thirty miles of Enceladus … Continue reading →

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How Do You Know? Factive Verbs in Relation to Political, Religious, and Scientific Discourse

Posted on March 3, 2015 by

I’m thinking about factive verbs this morning in relation to such things as global warming, God’s existence, evolution, the future of the stock market, etc. ESTABLISH, for example, is a very strong, emphatic verb, as in, “I’ve established the truth … Continue reading →

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How Global Warming Denialists Are Likely to “Reason” about Berkeley Physicist Richard Muller’s Findings

Posted on February 13, 2015 by

I suppose Berkeley physicist Richard Muller is a fool for putting together a team that included a Nobel Prize winning scientist, revisiting all the data on climate change to date, and coming to the same conclusion as the current scientific … Continue reading →

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From His Book, “Unweaving the Rainbow”

Posted on February 8, 2015 by

This is terrific. Richard Dawkins on death. And life.

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Letter Writers Heart Richard Dawkins

Posted on January 22, 2015 by

The beloved Oxford evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, reads out representative samples of the love he attracts from those who follow his work. __________ The tone and content of the letters remind me of numerous pronouncements made by famous theologians and … Continue reading →

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Hubble Zooms In On A Distant Island Universe

Posted on January 22, 2015 by

Some life perspective. In the below video released by NASA this month, the Hubble telescope does a gigapixel zoom-in on Andromeda, another island universe beyond our own. (It was Kant who first speculated that distant nubulae–tiny, blurry “clouds” visible in … Continue reading →

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The Evolution of Kindness and Sympathy

Posted on January 5, 2015 by

A really good evolution education video via the University of California at Berkeley. We’ve evolved to be more like bonobos than sharks, and it’s one reason why I’m not worried that the decline of religion will lead to deteriorating moral … Continue reading →

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An Analogy for Comprehending Why Population Geneticists Say Adam and Eve Never Existed

Posted on December 30, 2014 by

Imagine an island off the coast of a continent. Two birds from the continent–a male and a female–get swept up by a storm and find themselves stranded on this island. They go on to mate and a new species of … Continue reading →

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Charles Darwin vs. Thomas Aquinas: What Follows from Our Nature?

Posted on November 23, 2014 by

At his blog recently, Thomist philosopher Edward Feser wrote the following: “For Aquinas, what is good for us is necessarily good for us because it follows from our nature. As such, even God couldn’t change it, any more than he … Continue reading →

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Jeremy England on the Origin of Life

Posted on October 1, 2014 by

__________ More on Jeremy England here.

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Your Genes Made You Do (Half) Of It

Posted on September 28, 2014 by

Relax a bit. Much less than we probably imagine is really under our control. Note this quote, for instance, from two psychologists recently summarizing at Slate some findings on genes vs. environment: “Genes influence not only our abilities, but the environments we … Continue reading →

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Bayes Rule, Julia Galef, and TAM 2014

Posted on July 15, 2014 by

I went to TAM 2014 in Las Vegas over the weekend and saw Julia Galef of the Center for Applied Rationality on a panel with philosopher Daniel Dennett. I’d never heard of Galef before this weekend, but she has a … Continue reading →

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God and Evolution?

Posted on July 13, 2014 by

As an agnostic, I never have any problem with somebody who says, “13.7 billion year-old cosmos and evolution, yes, obviously, but not, ‘It all happened via the combination of chance and natural selection.’ Something more is up, and I think … Continue reading →

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Breeding for Intelligence? A Google Employee Asks the Question to Researcher Stephen Hsu of the Beijing Genomics Institute

Posted on June 25, 2014 by

In the below Google Tech Talk, Stephen Hsu talks to Google employees about the search for the genes behind intelligence (and seeks to recruit them into an ongoing study being conducted at the Beijing Genomics Institute). I shit you not. … Continue reading →

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Humans Cause Global Warming By Tipping The Balance

Posted on June 1, 2014 by

Is it true that humans make only a tiny contribution to the Earth’s carbon cycle each year? Yes. Does this mean that humans aren’t causing global warming? No. Science journalist Graham Wayne explains: Although our output of 29 gigatons of CO2 … Continue reading →

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Gavin Schmidt Of NASA On Why Climate Change Models Are Growing Increasingly Accurate

Posted on May 23, 2014 by

In the below TED talk, Gavin Schmidt of NASA explains, clear as a bell, why global climate change models mirror, with ever greater accuracy, what we actually observe on Earth. It has to do with a trial-and-error process of calibrating … Continue reading →

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