‘Rationality is useless if it is not sound. This is what Martin Luther meant when he called reason a “whore”. Pick the wrong premises, and rationality is utterly screwed. Therefore, merely that someone is “rational” means absolutely nothing about whether that person is well-connected to reality.’
Oh shit. UPDATE: On February 19, HB1674 passed through the Oklahoma Common Education committee on a 9-8 vote. In biology class, public…
Science Daily reports:
Feb. 20, 2013 — The base pairs that hold together two pieces of RNA, the older cousin of DNA, are some of the most important molecular interactions in living cells. Many scientists believe that these base pairs were part of life from the very beginning and that RNA was one of the first polymers of life. But there is a problem. The RNA bases don’t form base pairs in water unless they are connected to a polymer backbone, a trait that has baffled origin-of-life scientists for decades. If the bases don’t pair before they are part of polymers, how would the bases have been selected out from the many molecules in the “prebiotic soup” so that RNA polymers could be formed?
The BBC have produced the following fascinating article. What do you good people think?
Scientists say they may be able to determine the eventual fate of the cosmos as they probe the properties of the Higgs boson.
A concept known as vacuum instability could result, billions of years from now, in a new universe opening up in the present one and replacing it.
Couldn’t resist. Funny as hell. http://youtu.be/CknpHpmIJtI
I’ve been thinking. In doing the philpapers inspired Philosophy 101 series (found here and here, so far), touching on the questions asked in the largest ever survey of philosophers, i thought i would give some nice, basic factfiles explaining what some of the key philosophers have brought to the philosophical table. We hear so much about Aristotle, Plato, Hume and Descartes, but who the hell are they and what did they think (in a really short, easy-to digest manner)?
In my last post I looked at what I could find in the news or related to articles and books on the subject of the Star of Bethlehem. There wasn’t too much going on there, so now I want to explore what is going on in the world of blogs. I think this is showing where the conversations are really moving to rather than in newspapers and journal articles, at least for things not done in a strictly academic fashion.
This is Part 1 of a critical examination of the MMEL hypothesis of the Star of Bethlehem. Go to the index…
As if any was needed.
Science Daily – Feb. 14, 2013 — A genome-wide analysis searching for evidence of long-lived balancing selection — where the evolutionary process acts not to select the single best adaptation but to maintain genetic variation in a population — has uncovered at least six regions of the genome where humans and chimpanzees share the same combination of genetic variants.
So having posted the Philpapers survey results, the biggest ever survey of philosophers conducted in 2009, several readers were not aware of it (the reason for re-communicating it) and were unsure as to what some of the questions meant. I offered to do a series on them, so here it is – Philosophy 101 (Philpapers induced). I will go down the questions in order. I will explain the terms and the question, whilst also giving some context within the discipline of Philosophy of Religion.
I love research like this, it just fascinates me, and adds to the mountains of empirical evidence that supports the logical and philosophical evidence / argumentation which underpins determinism (or, more accurately, the lack of libertarian free will) about which I wrote my first book – Free Will? An investigation into whether we have free will or whether I was always going to write this book. Which, you will glad to know, has some cracking reviews.
People seem to be talking about internet civility an awful lot at the moment. For example, Dan Fincke at Camels with Hammers has been asking people to sign up to a civility pledge. I have been involved in my own debate with a rather infamous apologist, JP Holding. For those who do not know JP Holding, he is an ex-prison librarian cum self-styled apologist who runs Tektonics.org (Tekton Apologetics Ministries) and Theology Web. He has a Masters Degree in Library Science, which will be important for a later point.
Here is a concise synopsis from Smilodon’s Retreat, here at SIN. I am fascinated with endogenous retroviruses (ERVs). It seems that they are simply not adequately explained on a creationism thesis. This usually entails trying to debunk them since they have no other answer!
Mwah! In light of Darwin Day… I love this one:
So I have joined twitter, for good or for bad. Here is my handle (and here’s my spout):
https://twitter.com/ATipplingPhilo
@ATipplingPhilo
You need to know a few things before reading this:
1) The BBC got into trouble last year for having a serial paedophile (celebrity DJ and charity man Jimmy Savile) about whom I wrote this post about cognitive dissonance.
2) I went to a Skeptics in the Pub talk last night given by Rob Brotherton, a PhD psychology postgrad student doing research on cognitive biases and the causal factors involved with believing in conspiracy theories. The talk on conspiracy theories and theorist (CT) from a psychological perspective was really interesting, to say the least. Showing how certain people think, and the expressing of the huge gamut of cognitive biases and heuristics involved in fallible beliefs is always worth listening to.
A big thanks to the three Pauls who create the Skepticule podcast and who have granted me a short counter-apologetics segment on their show. The one which I recorded was about perfection, a topic about which I have blogged before. Check it out! My segment starts at 21.54, but check out the whole podcast, too!
James G. Crossley is a biblical scholar who has written a good few books. He stands out in the biblical studies community as being secular – a rarity in a field which spends so much time analysing the Bible. Crossley rose to a little more fame than the standard when he debated William Lane Craig. Crossley also has an unusual position of adhering to a particularly early dating for Mark.
If you, like me, were at the Stephen Law vs William Lane Craig debate, your jaw will have dropped when Craig, in defence of God vis-a-vis animal suffering and the problem of evil, claimed that animals don’t suffer pain.
He claimed that most animals didn’t have the conscious awareness of pain that humans and other primates do. He was solely relying on the work of Michael Murray in Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering. This book sets out that there are, broadly speaking, three levels of pain suffering and related awareness, amoebas in the first, humans in the last, and most higher animals in the middle. They feel pain but are not consciously aware of it in the same way as humans are.
This is a hilarious post from Less Wrong. Zombies, the Movie (philosophical zombies, of course). For those who are not familiar with philosophical zombies, here is wiki’s definition:
So I wrote a post some time back which detailed my plans on writing a zombie fiction book which should hopefully include a good deal of philosophy. Well, here is a rough prologue to the book (called Survival of the Fittest – Metamorphosis). What do you think?