This guy thinks it’s possible, in this century. He takes all the fun out of it, though:

…Mallett

Here’s a study that says that children are natural scientists:

Apparently it takes a concerted effort on the part of many so-called science teachers in the public schools to slowly beat it out of them, over the course of several years.

But I wonder if anyone pondered the implications of this?

Schulz said she believes this is the first study that looks at how probabilistic evidence affects children’s reasoning about unobserved causes. The researchers found that children are conservative about unobserved causes (they don’t always think mysterious things are happening) but would rather accept unobserved causes than accept that things happen at random.

This probably explains the appeal of ID (partly because evolution isn’t properly explained). If one believes that evolution is “random” (which is how it’s too often explained), then there will be a natural tendency to look for the man behind the curtain.

But of course, it’s not. What’s random is the mutations themselves, not how they’re selected. One sees many fallacies related to this in critiques of evolution, in which people figure out the probability of a monkey typing a sonnet, by assuming that each monkey starts anew with each try, and showing that it’s astronomically improbable. With that assumption, of course, the creation of the sonnet is quite unlikely.

But if a monkey gets the first word right, and that’s the starting point for the next monkey, then the result will out, and in a surprisingly short time, because the process isn’t random. It’s directed by an evolutionary force (in this particular case, the desire to have something that looks like a sonnet).

In the natural case, of course, it’s driven by the fact that things that don’t look like sonnets (that is, that have traits that cause their phenotypes to die before reproducing) don’t go on to the next generation.

Madeleine Bunting, on how the militant atheism of Dawkins and Dennett may be backfiring:

…while Dembski, Dawkins and Dennett are sipping the champagne for their very different reasons, there is a party pooper. Michael Ruse, a prominent Darwinian philosopher (and an agnostic) based in the US, with a string of books on the subject, is exasperated: “Dawkins and Dennett are really dangerous, both at a moral and a legal level.” The nub of Ruse’s argument is that Darwinism does not lead ineluctably to atheism, and to claim that it does (as Dawkins does) provides the intelligent-design lobby with a legal loophole: “If Darwinism equals atheism then it can’t be taught in US schools because of the constitutional separation of church and state. It gives the creationists a legal case. Dawkins and Dennett are handing these people a major tool.”

There’s no room for complacency, urged Ruse over lunch in London last week. Last December’s court ruling against the teaching of intelligent design in some Pennsylvania schools may have been a blow, but now the strategy of the creationist/intelligent-design lobby is to “chisel away at school-board level” across the US. The National Centre for Science Education believes that as many as 20% of US schools are teaching creationism in some form. Evolution is losing the battle, says Ruse, and it’s the fault of Dawkins and Dennett with their aggressive atheism: they are the creationists’ best recruiting sergeants.

Yes. Too many people believe in God for this to be a successful debating tactic. People have to be made to understand that religion and science don’t have to be incompatible, and that we don’t have to abandon science (as the “science” of intelligent design does) when the going gets tough. As Galileo said, the one tells us how to get to heaven, the other describes of what the heavens are made. Of course, with modern science and rocketry, perhaps science will allow us to do both.

Madeleine Bunting, on how the militant atheism of Dawkins and Dennett may be backfiring:

…while Dembski, Dawkins and Dennett are sipping the champagne for their very different reasons, there is a party pooper. Michael Ruse, a prominent Darwinian philosopher (and an agnostic) based in the US, with a string of books on the subject, is exasperated: “Dawkins and Dennett are really dangerous, both at a moral and a legal level.” The nub of Ruse’s argument is that Darwinism does not lead ineluctably to atheism, and to claim that it does (as Dawkins does) provides the intelligent-design lobby with a legal loophole: “If Darwinism equals atheism then it can’t be taught in US schools because of the constitutional separation of church and state. It gives the creationists a legal case. Dawkins and Dennett are handing these people a major tool.”

There’s no room for complacency, urged Ruse over lunch in London last week. Last December’s court ruling against the teaching of intelligent design in some Pennsylvania schools may have been a blow, but now the strategy of the creationist/intelligent-design lobby is to “chisel away at school-board level” across the US. The National Centre for Science Education believes that as many as 20% of US schools are teaching creationism in some form. Evolution is losing the battle, says Ruse, and it’s the fault of Dawkins and Dennett with their aggressive atheism: they are the creationists’ best recruiting sergeants.

Yes. Too many people believe in God for this to be a successful debating tactic. People have to be made to understand that religion and science don’t have to be incompatible, and that we don’t have to abandon science (as the “science” of intelligent design does) when the going gets tough. As Galileo said, the one tells us how to get to heaven, the other describes of what the heavens are made. Of course, with modern science and rocketry, perhaps science will allow us to do both.

Madeleine Bunting, on how the militant atheism of Dawkins and Dennett may be backfiring:

…while Dembski, Dawkins and Dennett are sipping the champagne for their very different reasons, there is a party pooper. Michael Ruse, a prominent Darwinian philosopher (and an agnostic) based in the US, with a string of books on the subject, is exasperated: “Dawkins and Dennett are really dangerous, both at a moral and a legal level.” The nub of Ruse’s argument is that Darwinism does not lead ineluctably to atheism, and to claim that it does (as Dawkins does) provides the intelligent-design lobby with a legal loophole: “If Darwinism equals atheism then it can’t be taught in US schools because of the constitutional separation of church and state. It gives the creationists a legal case. Dawkins and Dennett are handing these people a major tool.”

There’s no room for complacency, urged Ruse over lunch in London last week. Last December’s court ruling against the teaching of intelligent design in some Pennsylvania schools may have been a blow, but now the strategy of the creationist/intelligent-design lobby is to “chisel away at school-board level” across the US. The National Centre for Science Education believes that as many as 20% of US schools are teaching creationism in some form. Evolution is losing the battle, says Ruse, and it’s the fault of Dawkins and Dennett with their aggressive atheism: they are the creationists’ best recruiting sergeants.

Yes. Too many people believe in God for this to be a successful debating tactic. People have to be made to understand that religion and science don’t have to be incompatible, and that we don’t have to abandon science (as the “science” of intelligent design does) when the going gets tough. As Galileo said, the one tells us how to get to heaven, the other describes of what the heavens are made. Of course, with modern science and rocketry, perhaps science will allow us to do both.

…and now it’s the geocentrists, who want to return to the days of Ptolemy:

Mention geocentrism and physicist Lawrence Krauss sighs. He is director of the Center for Education and Research in Cosmology and Astrophysics at Case Western Reserve University and author of several books including “Fear of Physics: A Guide for the Perplexed.”

“What works? Science works. Geocentrism doesn’t. End of story,” Krauss said from Cleveland. “I’ve learned over time that it’s hard to convince people who believe otherwise, independent of evidence.”

To Sungenis, of Greencastle, Pa., evidence is the rub.

For several years the Web site of his Catholic Apologetics International (www.catholicintl.com) offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could disprove geocentrism and prove heliocentrism (a sun-centered solar system).

There were numerous attempts, Sungenis said, “some serious, some caustic,” but no one did it to his satisfaction. “Most admitted it can’t be proven.”

There’s also no proof that the Earth rotates, he said.

But what about Foucault’s famous pendulum? Its plane of oscillation revolves every 24 hours, showing the rotation of the planet. If the Earth didn’t rotate, it wouldn’t oscillate.

Nope, Sungenis said: There just may be some other force propelling it, such as the pull of stars.

These loons are like the “NASA faked the moon landings” type. They’re impervious to facts, evidence or logic. But everyone can look down on someone:

Sungenis wants to make sure “people don’t classify geocentrists with Flat Earthers. We don’t believe that at all.”

Oh, well, that’s all right then.

[Late afternoon update]

One of Jonah’s emailers had a (sort of, well not really) defense of geocentrism:

It is not my intent to defend geocentrism, but I do weary of the common rebuttal that “the earth goes around the sun.” Imagine, if you will, if the earth and sun were the only two bodies in the solar system. How would one make the case that the earth went around the sun and not vice versa? And is it not curious that no one argues that the moon goes around the sun, although technically, it does? The problem is not who revolves around whom, but what frame of reference yields the simplest description of motion. Copernicus did not overthrow geocentrism so much as he provided a different reference point that made it possible to describe planetary motions as ellipses rather than epicycles and other wierd paths.

Well, no, even that doesn’t help.

The problem with geocentrism isn’t that it merely claims that the sun goes around the earth. It’s true, as Jonah’s emailer writes, that both earth and sun revolve around each other (though the sun barely budges in its tiny orbit around their common center of gravity, which is contained entirely within itself, and superimposed with the motion resulting from its interactions with all of the other planets).

The geocentrists’ problem is that they believe that the sun going around the earth explains the daily cycle of light and dark. But the sun and earth revolve around each other once a year, not once a day. They are essentially denying the very fact of the earth’s rotation in inertial space. Note that their explanation also makes it much more complicated to explain seasons, since they’ve essentially denied the natural motion that causes things to go through an annual cycle (that is, the sun can’t go around the earth both once a day, and once a year).

It’s not caused by CO2–it’s caused by H2O.

That nasty dihydrogen monoxide. Is there any evil it’s not capable of, any problem of which it’s not, at root, the cause? It’s got to be the most deadly substance on the planet.

How many more must die before we get the message? We must wean ourselves off it as soon as possible.

Here’s an interesting piece on both the irreconciliability of theistic religion and science, and the non-need for it.

Asexuals.

…some experts question if asexuality even exists. There’s been virtually no research on the subject. Psychologists disagree on how to define it. And there’s no certainty on what might influence it. Do hormones, genetics, personal experiences play a part? With no clinical or scientific conclusions on the subject, asexuals create their own definition.

And that definition is a far cry from celibacy, Jay pointed out. “It’s not a choice. Celibacy is a choice, whereas asexuality is just the way that you are. Much like being gay is not a choice, or being straight or being right-handed,” he said.

Some studies show that asexual behavior does exist in the animal world. Dr. Anthony Bogaert of Brock University in Ontario, who has conducted one of the few studies of human asexuality said he found as much as 1 percent of the population may be asexual.

But, as with other abnormal sexual orientations, there are some people determined to “fix” them.

And before anyone gets upset with my use of the word “abnormal,” there’s nothing wrong with that.

Joe Bastardi says that the Northeast is due for a major hurricane, perhaps this year (note, probably not a permalink):

The current cycle and above-normal water temperatures are reminiscent of the pattern that eventually produced the 1938 hurricane that struck Providence, R.I. That storm killed 600 people in New England and Long Island. The 1938 hurricane was the strongest tropical system to strike the northeastern U.S. in recorded history, with maximum gusts of 186 mph, a 15- to 20-foot storm surge and 25- to 50-foot waves that left much of Providence under 10-15 feet of water. Forecasters at AccuWeather.com say that patterns are similar to those of the 1930s, 40s and 50s when storms such as the 1938 hurricane, the 1944 Great Atlantic Hurricanes and the Trio of 1954–Carol, Edna and Hazel–battered the coast from the Carolinas to New England. The worry is that it will be sooner, rather than later, for this region to be blasted again.

New York can’t be complacent–there is potential for twenty-foot surges coming up the East and Hudson rivers, which could make New Orleans look like a kiddie pool.

It also says that this season will be another busy one, but not as bad as last year, when we ran out of names. A pretty easy prediction–just regression to the mean coming off a record.