VIEW HEADLINES ONLY
Politics and Ethics

Evolutionary Ethics Teeters on Brave New World
November 29, 2006
What happens when science pursues whatever it can do, unfettered by moral standards?  Three recent news stories should cause all futurists to ponder the ramifications: A BBC News story this month asked, “UK scientists are seeking permission to place human nuclei into animal eggs in a bid to create stem cell lines.  Why do researchers […]
CONTINUE READING
Politics and Ethics

Anti-Religious Sentiment Increases in Intensity
November 25, 2006
The two poles could hardly be farther apart.  In the East, a hundred million radical Muslims swear death to all Americans and Jews and work themselves into frenzies of jihad for the worldwide triumph of Islam.  In the West, radical atheists are determined to eradicate religion from the Earth.  Somewhere in between, millions of Christians […]
CONTINUE READING
Uncategorized

Quote: Chuck Norris Joke
October 23, 2006
Alleged Chuck Norris Fact: “There is no theory of evolution.  Just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live.”  What does Chuck Norris himself think of this? It’s funny.  It’s cute.  But here’s what I really think about the theory of evolution: It’s not real.  It is not the way we got here.  […]
CONTINUE READING
Cell Biology

Science Potpourri
October 13, 2006
Interesting articles from recent issues of Science have piled up in the queue.  These might have made separate entries in CEH if time and space were unlimited. Deep Impact:  The team of the Deep Impact mission to a comet published spectral results in the July 13 issue.  “Emission signatures due to amorphous and crystalline silicates, […]
CONTINUE READING
Uncategorized

Evolutionary Anthropologists Seek to Study Christianity
October 2, 2006
According to a press release on EurekAlert, “Anthropologists have almost no track record of studying Christianity, a religion they have generally treated as not exotic enough to be of interest.”  This omission needs to be rectified, says Joel Robbins (UC San Diego): “Anthropologists, who are specialists in the study of religion outside the West, ought […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

Atheist Dilemma: Fight or Smooth-Talk Religion?
September 25, 2006
The unpopularity of evolutionism and the persistence of religious faith has scientific materialists confounded and dumbfounded over how to respond.  Some want to fight, some want to shrug it off, and some want to dialog with religious believers, in hopes of convincing some of them that evolution is not the bogeyman they think.  Richard Dawkins […]
CONTINUE READING
Human Body

Evolving Consciousness Without a Soul
July 7, 2006
A paper tackling the theory of consciousness begins, Any scientific study of consciousness is based on the premise that phenomenal experience is entailed by neuronal activity in the brain.  Given this premise, an adequate theory of consciousness must be consistent with physics and with evolutionary principles.  Nonphysical or dualistic forces or processes must be excluded, […]
CONTINUE READING
Astronomy

Paper View:  Why SETI Hears Only a “Great Silence”
June 30, 2006
Enrico Fermi posed a curious question in 1950: “Where is everybody?”  If life emerges on planets as a consequence of evolution, there should be other intelligent civilizations out there, and some of them must have colonized other worlds.  He thought there must have been plenty of time for galactic colonizers to achieve technologies far beyond […]
CONTINUE READING
SETI

Researcher Denies SETI Is a Religion
June 3, 2006
Apparently irritated by charges that SETI research is like a religion (see, for instance, the article by novelist Michael Crichton mentioned in our 12/27/2003 entry), David Darling of the SETI Institute has issued a response.  On Space.com, his title was direct: “Of Faith and Facts: Is SETI a Religion?”  The answer was a forthright NO […]
CONTINUE READING
SETI

Deities for Atheists, or Atheism for Dummies?
March 9, 2006
Michael Shermer wrote a book review in Science entitled “Deities for Atheists.”1  The article reviewed George Basalla’s recent book, Civilized Life in the Universe: Scientists on Intelligent Extraterrestrials (Oxford, 2005).  Basalla (historian of science and technology, U of Delaware) contends that SETI is the continuation of an ancient religious quest.  If so, who are the […]
CONTINUE READING
Dumb Ideas

How Apemen Learned to Give Christmas Presents
December 25, 2005
For your Christmas amusement, some scientists think they have solved the evolution of gift giving.  In an announcement on EurekAlert called “Why we give: New study finds evidence of generosity among our early human ancestors,” the introduction states, “A groundbreaking new study examines the origins of holiday giving and finds that our early human ancestors […]
CONTINUE READING
Intelligent Design

Catholic Astronomer Takes On the Pope, and Other ID Battles
November 19, 2005
Right after Pope Benedict XVI essentially affirmed intelligent design (11/10/2005), his court astronomer rejected it.  The Rev. George Coyne, Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, sounded like he was reading the NCSE playbook: “Intelligent design isn’t science even though it pretends to be…. If you want to teach it in schools, intelligent design should be […]
CONTINUE READING
Early Man

Is Archaeology Like SETI, or is SETI Like Religion?
September 24, 2005
Archaeologists have their Rosetta Stone, but so far, SETI investigators have no artifacts.  Still, Douglas Vakoch wrote for Space.com, archaeologists and anthropologists can teach SETI researchers how to prepare for encountering “exotic cultures with strange languages.”     Vakoch recounted the interest in this angle at an anthropology conference last year: One of the best-attended […]
CONTINUE READING
Human Body

Does the Brain Produce the Mind – and Ethics?
July 15, 2005
Two contrasting views on the mind/body problem appeared in science journals recently.  In Nature this week,1 Paul Bloom (Yale) reviewed The Ethical Brain (Dana Press, 2005) by Michael S. Gazzaniga, a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics.  Bloom felt the need to clarify the difference between theological and evolutionary views on the source of […]
CONTINUE READING
Uncategorized

Evangelical Christians Split on How to Handle Evolution
June 3, 2005
A dismal picture of controversy dividing Christian brother against brother, with no resolution in sight, is painted by Paul Nussbaum in the Philadelphia Inquirer.  He says evangelical Christians are not monolithic in their opposition to evolution, but as divided as much of the rest of the nation.  He quotes a spokesperson for the American Scientific […]
CONTINUE READING
All Posts by Date
[archives type="yearly" cat_id="6080"]