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The Greatest Show on Earth: the Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins: review - Telegraph
Steve Jones hails Richard Dawkins's new book, which brings together his thinking on Darwin
Sex, flies and videotape: the secret lives of Harun Yahya | New Humanist
Inspired by the high profile of its Christian American counterpart, Muslim creationism is becoming increasingly visible and confident. On scores of websites and in dozens of books with titles like The Evolution Deceit and The Dark Face of Darwinism, a new and well-funded version of evolution-denialism, carefully calibrated to exploit the current fashion for religiously inspired attacks on scientific orthodoxy and “militant” atheism, seems to have found its voice. In a recent interview with The Times Richard Dawkins himself recognises the impact of this new phenomenon: “There has been a sharp upturn in hostility to teaching evolution in the classroom and it’s mostly coming from Islamic students.”
Creation/Evolution Journal | NCSE
The Creation/Evolution Journal was first published in 1980. In 1997, it became a part of Reports of the National Center for Science Education.
Is free will an illusion?
This debate has focused on humans and 'conscious free will'. Yet when it comes to understanding how we initiate behaviour, we can learn a lot by looking at animals. Although we do not credit animals with anything like the consciousness in humans, researchers have found that animal behaviour is not as involuntary as it may appear. The idea that animals act only in response to external stimuli has long been abandoned, and it is well established that they initiate behaviour on the basis of their internal states, as we do. (Nature)
WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?
"What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"
Does evolution explain human nature?
This is the fifth in a series of conversations among leading scientists, scholars, and public figures about the "Big Questions." (A Templeton Conversation)
The Relation Between Essentialist Beliefs and Evolutionary Reasoning
Historians of science have pointed to essentialist beliefs about species as major impediments to the discovery of natural selection - Cognitive Science: A Multidisciplinary Journal
How religion generates social conservatism
You could make a reasonable case that pencils have a purpose, but pencil shavings just exist. But what about elephants? Religious people and children are, of course, more likely than non-religious adults to say that animals exist for a purpose. (Epiphenom)
Storm by Tim Minchin (with text)
Tim Minchin's brilliant & witty demolition of irrationality in all its many guises - with rolling text from me -all in the medium of a 9-minute beat poem.
Open-mindedness
A look at some of the flawed thinking that prompts people who believe in certain non-scientific concepts to advise others who don't to be more open-minded.
THE SONGS OF SONGS By Armand Leroi
In this EdgeVideo, evolutionary biologist Armand Leroi reports on his art/science conversation and collaboration with musician Brian Eno which began when the two sat next to each other an an Edge dinner in London. The dinner discussion began with evolution and music, proceeded to the evolution of music, and led to the following question: has anybody attempted to reconstruct the history of human song? People around the world sing in different ways. Is it possible to retrieve that history. Can we do for songs what we've done for genes, for language?
Daniel Dennett: Is science showing that we don't have free will?
A public lecture by Daniel C. Dennett, Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. In his lecture, Professor Daniel Dennett discussed some of the current work in psychology bearing on this question. He also drew on Hume, Darwin and Turing, three Enlightenment heroes.
Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience
As initially reported by Mind Hacks, a new "bombshell of a paper" (Vul et al., 2009) questioned the implausibly high correlations observed in some fMRI studies in Social Neuroscience. A new look at the analytic methods revealed that over half of the sampled papers used faulty techniques to obtain their results. (The Neurocritic)
Now - The Rest of the Genome
new large-scale studies of DNA are causing her and many of her colleagues to rethink the very nature of genes. They no longer conceive of a typical gene as a single chunk of DNA encoding a single protein. “It cannot work that way,” Dr. Prohaska said. There are simply too many exceptions to the conventional rules for genes. - NYTimes.com
What Makes the Human Mind?
Across the board, Hauser says, there are signs that animal evolution passed along some capabilities “and then something dramatic happened, a huge leap that enabled humans to break away. Once symbolic representation happened, if the combinatorial capacity was there, things just took off. Precisely how and when this happened, we may never know.” (November-December 2008)
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even though human brains have inherited many of the raw abilities observed in nonhuman animal species, a divergence arises from the ways in which multiple capacities interact in humans, allowing them to convert information into myriad forms to serve infinitely diverse ends.
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Hauser summarizes the distinguishing characteristics of human thought under four broad capacities. These include: the ability to combine and recombine different types of knowledge and information in order to gain new understanding; the ability to apply the solution for one problem to a new and different situation; the ability to create and easily understand symbolic representation of computation and sensory input; and the ability to detach modes of thought from raw sensory and perceptual input.
Language: Disputed definitions : Nature News
If you want to start an argument, ask the person who just said 'paradigm shift' what it really means. Or 'epigenetic'. Nature goes in search of the terms that get scientists most worked up
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