Post navigation <\/p>\n
An interesting essay in Aeon by neurologist Jules Montague: <\/p>\n
Why is the brain prone to florid forms of confabulation? <\/p>\n
She had visited Madonnas mansion the week before, Maggie told me during my ward round. Helped her choose outfits for the tour. The only problem was that Maggie was a seamstress in Dublin. She had never met Madonna; she had never provided her with sartorial advice on cone brassieres. Instead, an MRI scan conducted a few days earlier when Maggie arrived at the ER febrile and agitated revealed encephalitis, a swelling of the brain. <\/p>\n
Now she was confabulating, conveying false memories induced by injury to her brain. Not once did Maggie doubt that she was a seamstress to the stars, no matter how incongruous those stories seemed. And thats the essence of confabulation: the critical faculty of doubt is compromised. These honest lies were Maggies truth <\/p>\n
The resident professional philosopher of TSZ recently wrote this: <\/p>\n
memes! is a dumb explanation. <\/p>\n
Yes, I agree! (Although that person doesnt seem to know the difference between memes and memetics. e.g. I dont mind memes used for popular shared internet links, but thats not memetics.) <\/p>\n
Well, given the weekends significance for a billion+,lets crucifymemetics then.Why is memetics a dumb explanation?And theres no need tohold back with merely dumb. If one is an ideologicalnaturalist, isnt one forced into something like memetics because they share the same materialist, naturalist, agnostic\/atheist worldview as (chuckling at his own supposed lack of self-identity!)Daniel Dennett? Isnt the built-in materialism of memetics what made it so attractive to certain peopleand for the same reasonobviously not attractive or believable to most others? <\/p>\n
Continue reading <\/p>\n
From Wired: <\/p>\n
But when Stanford University geneticist Jin Billy Li heard about Joshua Rosenthals work on RNA editing in squid, his jaw dropped. Thats because the work, published today in the journal Cell, revealed that many cephalopods present a monumental exception to how living things use the information in DNA to make proteins. In nearly every other animal, RNAthe middleman in that processfaithfully transmits the message in the genes. But octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish (but not their dumber relatives, the nautiluses) edit their RNA, changing the message that gets read out to make proteins. <\/p>\n
In exchange for this remarkable adaptation, it appears these squishy, mysterious, and possibly conscious creatures might have given up the ability to evolve relatively quickly. Or, as the researchers put it, positive selection of editing events slows down genome evolution. More simply, these cephalopods dont evolve quite like other animals. And that could one day lead to useful tools for humans. <\/p>\n
From the paper itself: <\/p>\n
Continue reading <\/p>\n
Easter is approaching, but skeptic John Loftus doesnt believe in the Resurrection of Jesus. Whats more, he thinks youre delusional if you do. I happen to believe in the Resurrection, but I freely admit that I might be mistaken. I think Loftus is wrong, and his case against the Resurrection is statistically flawed; however, I dont think hes delusional. In todays post, Id like to summarize the key issues at stake here, before going on to explain why I think reasonable people might disagree on the weight of the evidence for the Resurrection. <\/p>\n
The following quotes convey the tenor of Loftus views on the evidence for the Resurrection: <\/p>\n
Continue reading <\/p>\n
I wanted to bring to your attention a lovely profile piece on Dan Dennett, Daniel Dennetts Science of the Soul. Its nice to see a philosopher as respected and well-known as Dennett come alive as a human being. <\/p>\n
Id also like to remind those of you interested in this sort of thing that Dennett has a new book out, From Bacteria to Bach And Back: The Evolution of Minds. The central project is to do what creationists are always saying cant be done: use the explanatory resources of evolutionary theory to understand why we have the kinds of minds that we do. There are decent reviews here and here, as well as one by Thomas Nagel in New York Review of Books that I regard as deliberately misleading (Is Consciousness an Illusion?). <\/p>\n
[Note: The profile and\/or the Nagel review may be behind paywalls.] <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Well, should scientists be legally liable for deceiving the public and manipulating the evidence to support their OWN brliefs based on untrue claims and unsupported by scientific evidence? <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
In a podcast on the show, ID the Future (March 14, 2017), Dr. Ann Gauger criticized a popular argument that purports to show how easy it is to get new proteins: namely, the evolution, over a relatively short 40-year period, of nylonase. (Nylonase is an enzyme that utilizes waste chemicals derived from the manufacture of nylon, a man-made substance that was not invented until 1935.) While Dr. Gauger made some factual observations that were mostly correct, her interpretation of these observations fails to support the claim made by Intelligent Design proponents, that the odds of getting a new functional protein fold are astronomically low, and that its actually very, very hard for new proteins to evolve. Lets call this claim the Hard-to-Get-a-Protein hypothesis (HGP for short). <\/p>\n
To help readers see whats wrong with Dr. Gaugers argument, I would like to begin by pointing out that for HGP to be true, two underlying claims also need to be correct: <\/p>\n
1. Functional sequences are RARE. 2. New functions are ISOLATED in sequence space. <\/p>\n
In her podcast, Dr. Gauger cites the work of Dr. Douglas Axe to support claim #1, when she declares that the odds of getting a new functional protein fold are on the order of 1 in 10^77 (an assertion debunked here). Dr. Gauger says little about claim #2; nevertheless, it is vital to her argument. For even if functional sequences are rare, they may be clustered together in which case, getting from one functional protein to the next wont be so hard, after all. <\/p>\n
If claims #1 and #2 are both correct, then getting new functions should not be possible by step-wise changes. Remarkably, however, this is precisely what Dr. Gauger concedes, in her podcast, as well see below. <\/p>\n
Continue reading <\/p>\n
Contradictions are rife in the Christian bible. Here at The Skeptical Zone we have recently discussed those surrounding how Saul died. Weve also noted the two conflicting accounts of Judas death and what he did with the thirty pieces of silver. There are dozens more. <\/p>\n
The Skeptics Annotated Bible and The Thinking Atheist are two of several excellent resources on biblical contradictions and absurdities. The sheer volume of contradictions, though, is best demonstrated visually as is done at BibViz: <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The creators of this site started with a cross-index of topics in the bible and pulled out those that contradict each other. You can click on the links to get more detail. As a bonus, the site includes references to the sections in the bible that contain Scientific Absurdities & Historical Inaccuracies, Cruelty & Violence, Misogyny, Violence & Discrimination Against Women, and Discrimination Against Homosexuals. <\/p>\n
Obviously most Christians arent foolish enough to claim their bible is inerrant. Those that do, in the words of Desi Arnaz, have got some splainin to do. <\/p>\n
Over at her blog, BackReAction, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has written a cogently argued article titled, No, we probably dont live in a computer simulation (March 15, 2017). Ill quote the most relevant excerpts: <\/p>\n
According to Nick Bostrom of the Future of Humanity Institute, it is likely that we live in a computer simulation <\/p>\n
Among physicists, the simulation hypothesis is not popular and thats for a good reason we know that it is difficult to find consistent explanations for our observations <\/p>\n
If you try to build the universe from classical bits, you wont get quantum effects, so forget about this it doesnt work. This might be somebodys universe, maybe, but not ours. You either have to overthrow quantum mechanics (good luck), or you have to use qubits. [Note added for clarity: You might be able to get quantum mechanics from a classical, nonlocal approach, but nobody knows how to get quantum field theory from that.] <\/p>\n
Even from qubits, however, nobodys been able to recover the presently accepted fundamental theories general relativity and the standard model of particle physics <\/p>\n
Indeed, there are good reasons to believe its not possible. The idea that our universe is discretized clashes with observations because it runs into conflict with special relativity. The effects of violating the symmetries of special relativity arent necessarily small and have been looked for and nothings been found. <\/p>\n
Continue reading <\/p>\n
Im pretty sure that most knowledgeable people know that someone who claims to be an atheist is just making an overstatement about his\/her own beliefs. As most knowledgeable people who claim to be atheist probably know that even the most recognizable faces of atheistic propaganda, such as Richard Dawkins, admitted publicly that they are less than 100% certain that God\/gods dont exist. <\/p>\n
My question is: Why would anyone who calls himself an atheist make a statement like that? <\/p>\n
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Read more: <\/p>\n
The Skeptical Zone | "I beseech you, in the bowels of ...<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Post navigation An interesting essay in Aeon by neurologist Jules Montague: Why is the brain prone to florid forms of confabulation? She had visited Madonnas mansion the week before, Maggie told me during my ward round. Helped her choose outfits for the tour Continue reading