Psychologists Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg recently wrote about why people resist the counter-intuitive findings of science and concluded their essay with a plea for trust:

The community of scientists has a legitimate claim to trustworthiness that other social institutions, such as religions and political movements, lack. The structure of scientific inquiry involves procedures, such as experiments and open debate, that are strikingly successful at revealing truths about the world. All other things being equal, a rational person is wise to defer to a geologist about the age of the earth rather than to a priest or to a politician.

Given the role of trust in social learning, it is particularly worrying that national surveys reflect a general decline in the extent to which people trust scientists. To end on a practical note, then, one way to combat resistance to science is to persuade children and adults that the institute of science is, for the most part, worthy of trust.

The whole trust issue is something I have been writing and warning about for years. It doesn't matter how smart and knowledgeable someone is if they don't have the trust of their target audience. Because without this trust, the average person will simply conclude the speaker is using his/her high intelligence and great knowledge to carefully and selectively "frame" the issue. But sometimes, the problem can be even more basic than this. To show this, let us use Paul Bloom himself as a case study.

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I finally watched the movie, Flock of Dodos. I thought it was actually quite good and filmmaker Randy Olson did a nice job of putting a human face on the sociological aspects of this whole debate. Olson, like all filmmakers, provides his own angle to the story, but it is clear to me that he makes a sincere effort to understand what is driving the cultural debate and wants to share this with his viewers.

So what is the main message that comes out of this film?

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Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. He has criticized Intelligent Design as follows:

Another practice that isn't science is embracing ignorance. Yet it's fundamental to the philosophy of intelligent design: I don't know what this is. I don't know how it works. It's too complicated for me to figure out. It's too complicated for any human being to figure out. So it must be the product of a higher intelligence.

As someone who has been seriously thinking about intelligent design for many years, I can report that Tyson's characterization is NOT "fundamental to the philosophy of intelligent design." On the contrary, Tyson is simply repeating a superficial perception of ID that is common among its critics. Thus, this is one reason why I simply do not assign much weight to the criticism of many ID critics. They may be very intelligent and very good at what they normally do, but their basic grasp of ID is not very impressive. For example, when it comes to the type of questions that interest me, someone like Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn't seem to offer me anything useful or interesting.

Well, what d'ya know? Look what those cadherins are up too:

And finally, a nice little summary:

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has just taken a picture of a Hole in Mars:

My, just how deep does that hole go? Lucky for TT readers, we have the software and expertise to magnify and enhance this image to peer inside:

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Here is a little background information about the formation of a multi-cellular state:

Okay, now we are ready to meet an important player, the cadherins. Notice how the eukaryotic cell design seems awfully well-suited to facilitate multi-cellular existence, where a network of cytoskeletons are physically linked together to become one:

But it gets better"¦..

The fascinating discussions from this thread deserve a new home. Enjoy.

Macht made me do it.

Here is an interesting story:

Researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (AEC) have found evidence that certain fungi possess another talent beyond their ability to decompose matter: the capacity to use radioactivity as an energy source for making food and spurring their growth.

the researchers measured the electron spin resonance signal after melanin was exposed to ionizing radiation and found that radiation interacts with melanin to alter its electron structure. This, they believe, is an essential step for capturing radiation and converting it into a different form of energy to make food. Until now, melanin's biological role in fungi – if any – had been a mystery. Interestingly, the melanin in fungi is no different chemically from the melanin in our skin, leading Casadevall to speculate that melanin could be providing energy to skin cells.

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Lately there has been a rash of anti-religion books by the likes of Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and Stenger. The one thing that the New Atheists just don't seem to get is that most people on the planet have a compelling sensibility that there is an underlying ultimate purpose to the cosmos. This sensibility may not be "scientific" as traditionally defined but it is still extremely compelling. What is this sensibility? It can come in infinite varieties. The anecdotes abound. Many find it in their experience of nature. Or in the beauty of love, art, mathematics, music, reason, scientific discovery, etc. And even the horrors of life. When it comes, it comes with power. A power that is not easily dissuaded. Now the materialists will claim that this sensibility is just an adaptive feature or a coincidental byproduct of evolution, but for those who have it that doesn't convince.

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Stanley L. Miller, a scientist known for his landmark origin of life study, died Sunday of heart failure at the age of 77. His name is associated with Harold Urey, a geochemist who worked with Miller, on what many subsequently referred to as the Miller Urey experiment.

"Dr. Miller was known for a classic experiment that he performed as a graduate student and published in 1953. The experiment showed how amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, could easily be generated from the simple chemicals assumed to have been present on the primitive earth."

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