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Hollywood stars as public spokespersons Nowadays it is not at all unusual for Hollywood stars to lend their public celebrity status to endorse or promote some cause. For example, Angelina Jolie has lent her name and support to international efforts dealing with the refugee crisis. Sean Penn personally assisted efforts to deal with the Haiti Continue reading Are Hollywood stars qualified to comment on science? C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” Back in 1959, the influential British scholar C. P. Snow gave a lecture entitled The two cultures and the scientific revolution. In this discourse Snow warned of a widening divide between the scientific world on one hand and the humanities on the other: “This polarization is a sheer loss to us Continue reading Carlos Rovelli’s “Reality Is Not What It Seems” Introduction Is the universe fine-tuned for intelligent life? Astrophysicist Geraint Lewis and cosmologist Luke Barnes, both at the University of Sydney, Australia, wade into this perplexing and controversial arena in a new book, published by Cambridge University Press, entitled A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos. The book presents a comprehensive analysis of Continue reading Is the universe fine-tuned for intelligent life? What do exoplanets, four-billion-year-old life, Fermi’s paradox and zero-one laws of probability theory have to do with each other? Quite a bit, actually. Let us review these developments, one by one: New exoplanet discoveries Depiction of the seven exoplanets of the TRAPPIST-1 system. Courtesy NASA. On 22 February 2017, a consortium of NASA and Continue reading Exoplanets, 4 billion-year-old life, Fermi’s paradox and zero-one laws Introduction Recently several books written by prominent authors have been published that attack religious belief as a pernicious delusion. The four most prominent authors are Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens [Dawkins2006; Dennett2006; Harris2006; Hitchens2007]. Along this line, physicist Victor J. Stenger, in his book God: The Failed Hypothesis and other writings, Continue reading Christmas 2016: Benefits of a charitable life Shawn Otto has written a new book on science denialism, entitled The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About it. Otto argues that modern science is under attack from three directions: (a) the academic left, which has asserted that science has no claim to objective truth, (b) the Continue reading Shawn Otto’s “The War on Science” Introduction Foster in Contact, saying “They should have sent a poet” Earlier this year, Kentucky governor Matt Bevin declared that state colleges and universities should educate more electrical engineers and fewer French literature majors: “All the people in the world that want to study French literature can do so, they are just not going Continue reading Why science needs the humanities How fast can evolution operate? A common arguments against evolution raised by creationist and intelligent design writers is that no significant changes have ever been observed by humans in biological species, so evolution must be regarded only as a “theory.” In a previous Blog, we mentioned how this argument is refuted by recent research results, Continue reading Bacteria adapt to antibiotics before your eyes Creationists often argue that evolution is “only a theory” [Miller2008]. This claim of course confuses the vernacular meaning of “theory” (a half-baked conjecture that has not been seriously tested) with the scientific meaning of “theory” (a solid, falsifiable hypothesis that has led to a rich literature of quantitative, empirical science). Behind the creationists’ comment Continue reading How fast can evolution operate? Introduction In Williamstown, Kentucky, a full-scale reproduction of Noah’s ark is now open to the public. Claimed to be the largest all-wood structure in the world, it is 155 m (510 ft) long, 26 m (85 ft) wide, and 16 m (51 ft) high, closely corresponding to the biblical dimensions, given in Genesis 6:15, namely Continue reading Are Noah’s ark and flood literal scientific facts? |
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