Daniel Dennett says:

A lot of the evangelicals don't really care what you believe as long as you say the right thing and do the right thing and put a lot of money in the collection box.

Questions for Daniel C. Dennett

Everybody does it. Some say animals do it.

That’s where agreement ends.

I felt compelled to tell you about this story. I don't expect you to actually read it. Don't, I said!

I'm hoping the authors and the people profiled in the story will offer me lots of money in return.

Or at least maybe tell a few people about MemeStreams.

Altruism 101: What and why

Will there ever be a second coming of Einstein? I have my doubts.

Einstein seems bigger than modern physicists because, for the first half of the last century, physics mattered. These days, biology has displaced physics as the scientific enterprise with the most intellectual, practical and economic clout.

But science as a whole has lost its moral sheen. It has come to be perceived as just another guild pursuing its own selfish interests alongside truth and the common good.

Einstein didn't think he lived up to his own reputation either. "I am no Einstein," he once said.

Einstein Has Left the Building

Our present obsession with science's ability to solve crimes and put ancient mysteries to rest has become epidemic.

This might seem little more than a passing fancy, except for the fact that

forensic science has become one of the hot undergraduate degrees.

How ridiculous is that? I mean, how many forensic scientists can the nation employ? They can't all be actors.

Are you not appalled at this faddish approach to career selection?

A Head for Music

This makes me feel better about the money I just spent on a copy of Windows XP.

Addressing 275 of the world's most brilliant scientists, Bill Gates cracked a joke. They laughed.

They were gathered to celebrate some of the oddest-sounding projects in the history of science -- their answers to the Grand Challenges in Global Health that Mr. Gates posed in a 2003 speech in Davos.

Mr. Gates, in an interview, sidestepped a request to name his favorite projects. "Oh, I love all my children," he said.

"Eighty percent of these are likely to be dead ends," he said. "But even if we have a 10 percent hit rate, it will all have been worthwhile."

What follows is a selection of the winning projects.

I saw some basic news articles about the award late last week, but this article is a nice pop-science overview of a few projects.

Better Bananas, Nicer Mosquitoes

Wilson invites the serious public to do what far too few of us have done: to read what Darwin wrote.

...with an emphasis on serious -- this book is 1706 pages! On the up side, Amazon is taking orders for $26.

The formulation of intelligent design is a default argument advanced in support of a non sequitur. The designer is seldom specified, but in the canon of intelligent design it is most certainly not Satan and his angels.

...

The inexorable growth of biology continues to widen, not to close, the tectonic gap between science and faith-based religion. Rapprochement may be neither possible nor desirable. There is something deep in religious belief that divides people and amplifies societal conflict.

Intelligent Evolution, by E.O. Wilson

Richerson and Boyd reject the simplistic model of gene-like "memes," but they are rather vague, as they must be, on how to recognize culture or its structure. They are aware that one aspect of culture will change in reaction to and in concert with other aspects of culture, that there is a complex network of causal dependency among parts of culture. Changes in technology, occupation, education, political attitudes, division of household labor and parental responsibility, leisure activities, and styles of speech and dress are connected as both causes and effects within and between generations.

The most important question is why we should use a Darwinian model at all for history and culture.

That a theoretical formulation is desirable because it makes it easier and more efficient to write more articles and books giving simple explanations for phenomena that are complex and diverse seems a strange justification for work that claims to be scientific. It confuses "understanding" in the weak sense of making coherent and comprehensible statements about the real world with "understanding" that means making correct statements about nature. It makes the investigation of material nature into an intellectual game, disarming us in our struggle to maintain science against mysticism.

The Wars Over Evolution

Great scientists come in two varieties, which Isaiah Berlin, quoting the seventh-century-BC poet Archilochus, called foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes know many tricks, hedgehogs only one. Foxes are interested in everything, and move easily from one problem to another. Hedgehogs are interested only in a few problems which they consider fundamental, and stick with the same problems for years or decades. Most of the great discoveries are made by hedgehogs, most of the little discoveries by foxes. Science needs both hedgehogs and foxes for its healthy growth, hedgehogs to dig deep into the nature of things, foxes to explore the complicated details of our marvelous universe. Albert Einstein was a hedgehog; Richard Feynman was a fox.

Wise Man

Is "intelligent design" a legitimate school of scientific thought? Is there something to it, or have these people been taken in by one of the most ingenious hoaxes in the history of science?

Daniel Dennett rants again. Long after the NYT OpEd retreats into the walled garden, you'll still be able to read Show Me the Science on edge.org.

Show Me the Science

All of life is a game and evolution by natural selection is no exception. The evolutionary game theory developed in this book provides the tools necessary for understanding many of nature's mysteries, including co-evolution, speciation, extinction and the major biological questions regarding fit of form and function, diversity, procession, and the distribution and abundance of life. Mathematics for the evolutionary game are developed based on Darwin's postulates leading to the concept of a fitness generating function (G-function). G-function is a tool that simplifies notation and plays an important role developing Darwinian dynamics that drive natural selection. Natural selection may result in special outcomes such as the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS). An ESS maximum principle is formulated and its graphical representation as an adaptive landscape illuminates concepts such as adaptation, Fisher's Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection, and the nature of life's evolutionary game.

Evolutionary Game Theory, Natural Selection, and Darwinian Dynamics