At the Daily Grail, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake describes an interview between him and Richard Dawkins which ends rather abruptly when Sheldrake suggests they actually take a look at the scientific evidence for telepathy:

We then agreed that controlled experiments were necessary. I said that this was why I had actually been doing such experiments, including tests [...]

Posted in Science 1 Comment »

I followed an amazing chain of links to get to
this lecture by I-don’t-want-to-call-him-atheist Sam Harris. I’m linking to it here primarily as a bookmark for later review, because there’s a lot going on. But he seems to have latched on to much of what I’ve been writing about the problems of atheism and where [...]

Posted in Religion, Science No Comments »

The
James Randi Educational Foundation Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge will end on March 6, 2010 — so you have just a little over two years to prove (to the JREF) that you can do paranormal things. I think I’ll be glad to see the end of this. Randi’s gimmick has been mistaken for science [...]

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Tristero has noticed a significant problem about the evolution-vs.-creationism debate — at a certain point, the argument becomes incomprehensible to laypeople. Even laypeople who are well educated in the subject:

Until very recently, I could follow, sometimes with difficulty, most of the actual arguments being made, and the rebuttals by scientists. Things like the notorious bacterial [...]

Posted in Politics, Science 1 Comment »

J. Lynne
mentioned Occam’s Razor, which reminded me that I’ve been meaning to write about the Razor for a long time.
Strictly speaking, Occam’s razor translates to “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity,” which people have popularly interpreted as “all things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the right one.” This latter [...]

Posted in Science 9 Comments »