"They talk the language of science, but it is really a post-God religion that rejects relativist materialism."
-BBC reporter Michael Buerke
Podcast Transcription below the fold.
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Trust is a pretty important factor that plays a positive role in a functioning society. To trust someone basically entails that you can rely on the actions of another person to conform to certain virtues or expectations while basically abandoning your own control over the situation.
Let’s look at two examples of where trust plays an important role. Firstly, you have money to do empirical research. You provide the money to a scientific researcher with a good track record and you ask him to do research on the clinical effects of a certain compound. You trust the scientist to use your money in such a manner that will result in good results. You are basically abandoning your own control over the situation (doing your own research) and transferring control to another. The outcome is unknown, but you trust that it will end in a certain manner i.e. good results.
News is filtering through that there might be a Higgs boson. This appears to imply that there is a Higgs field that provides mass to anything. And this Higgs field is labelled by some as the Higgs-ether and this apparently has the potential to clash with general relativity.
Interesting times, maybe Aristotle was right about there being an ether or a "fifth element" or a quintessence? Any physicists out there that want to comment on the implications of the Higgs field and how it mixes or does not mix with general relativity?
Witness reason based morality in action.
China's "One Child Policy" is a very reasonable solution to overpopulation, which makes it reasonable to value males over females, which makes it reasonable to abort females in pregnancy up to late term, which makes it reasonable for society to care very little for the death of a small Chinese female.
All very reasonable.
HT: voxday
Would you shake hands with a man who could write stuff like that? Would you share a platform with him? I wouldn't, and I won't. Even if I were not engaged to be in London on the day in question, I would be proud to leave that chair in Oxford eloquently empty.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Steven Pinker | ||||
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Jonathan M. at evolution news recently criticized the hypothesis of a monophyletic origin of the eyes.
The common evolutionary rationalization of this phenomenon is to posit that the gene in question had some kind of propensity for promoting the development of the respective structure. But this solution appears dubious, particularly in the case of the even more spectacular example of eye development…
Scientists call it LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, but they don't know much about this great-grandparent of all living things. Many believe LUCA was little more than a crude assemblage of molecular parts, a chemical soup out of which evolution gradually constructed more complex forms. Some scientists still debate whether it was even a cell.
New evidence suggests that LUCA was a sophisticated organism after all, with a complex structure recognizable as a cell, researchers report. Their study appears in the journal Biology Direct.
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The study lends support to a hypothesis that LUCA may have been more complex even than the simplest organisms alive today, said James Whitfield, a professor of entomology at Illinois and a co-author on the study.
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| Life's Solution by Simon Conway Morris |
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| The Design Matrix: A Consilience of Clues by Mike Gene |
