Paul Braterman is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Glasgow University, and former Regents Professor at the University of North Texas. His research has involved chemistry related to conditions on the early Earth and to the origins of life, and collaborations with Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Sandia National Laboratories, and NASA’s Astrobiology Institute. His earlier book, From Stars to Stalagmites, discusses aspects of chemistry in their historical and everyday contexts, and he is now working on a book exploring the links between creationism, climate change denial, conspiracy theories, and right-wing politics. Email: [email protected]; contactable at @[email protected]
by Paul Braterman For disrespectful blogging and criticism of the religious authorities, one thousand lashes, to be administered 50 at a time. A fine of one million Riyals (roughly £170,000). 10 years in jail. If, like me, you have been wondering what horrible crimes could merit so severe a punishment, now you can find out.…
by Paul Braterman It looks as if life on Earth just got older, and probably easier. Tiny scraps of carbon have been found inside 4.1 billion year old zircons, and examination shows that this carbon is most probably the result of biological activity. This beats the previous age record by 300 million years, and brings…
by Paul Braterman Darrow: Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife? Bryan: No, sir; I leave the agnostics to hunt for her. Both sides, I will argue, were long-term loses in this exchange. But why were such matters being discussed in a Tennessee court of law in the first place? The story so…
by Paul Braterman What is the purpose of this examination? We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States, and that is all. Dayton Courthouse today Inherit the Wind, the prism through which the public sees the Scopes Trial, is a travesty. William Jennings Bryan, who prosecuted…
by Paul Braterman Good to eat, in traditional Mediterranean and oriental cuisines. Good food for farmed fish, not that they (the fish, I mean) really have much choice in the matter. Good as a source of possible biofuels. And now good for almost a million pounds of research funding. Your sister, the sea squirt, actual…
by Paul Braterman “And if he insists on being killed … then at the end, by the authority of the ruling body, it's done.” Sheikh Kamal El Mekki, who expounds with apparent approval the law on beheading ex-Muslims, spoke this February at Trinity College Dublin. Maryam Namazie, equal law campaigner, ex-Muslim and prominent critic of…
by Paul Braterman In my last post, I said that the right way to undermine creationism is to promote appreciation of the science of evolution, by presenting it in ways that are engaging, enjoyable, and above all personal. In this post, I review two more books that succeed in doing this; Alice Roberts' The Incredible…
by Paul Braterman My previous post here described Siccar Point, where an 80,000,000 year time gap is present between near-vertical tilted strata, and their roughly horizontal overlay. This gap corresponds to the formation and subsequent erosion of fold mountains thrown up when Iapetus, precursor to the modern North Atlantic, closed. Today's post is (mainly) about…
by Paul Braterman I have recently visited two very different sites where time is turned to stone, where just looking at the rocks shows the passage of enormous lengths of time, dwarfing all of recorded human history. At the first site, the rocks I was looking at were ancient sediments, with the clearest possible evidence…
by Paul Braterman What's wrong with this argument? More than you think! All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal. It's perfectly valid, meaning that if the premises are true, the conclusion must also be true. Despite this, as Bertrand Russell explained very clearly many years ago,[1] the argument is almost…
by Paul Braterman Science, some say, rejects supernatural explanations on principle; this is called intrinsic methodological naturalism (IMN). In Part I I argued, following the work of Boudry et al. (here, here , and here), that this strategy is misguided. Here I go into more detail, using actual past and present controversies to illustrate the…
by Paul Braterman Science, it is often said, is restricted in principle to the search for natural causes. Is this a fundamental rule for doing science? Or merely a useful procedural guide, derived from experience? Is it even true? Or meaningful? Does it matter? These questions are addressed in an important series of papers in…
by Paul Braterman That's my friend Ramin Forghani from Iran, standing next to Maryam Namazie, carrying a placard outside the Law Society offices in London. He knows that what he is doing, and what he is about to say, could get him killed. Imagine that you want to write your will according to sharia law,…
by Paul Braterman Scientific theories are antifragile; they thrive on anomalies. Some things are fragile – they break. Some are robust – they can withstand harsh treatment. But the most interesting kind are antifragile, emerging strengthened and enriched from challenges. Whatever does not kill them makes them stronger. Science is as successful as it is,…
by Paul Braterman Last November, creationist objectors in Texas tried yet again to sabotage the state's textbook adoption process. One of the objections concerned the age of the Earth, using the long refuted cooling argument that goes back to Kelvin in the 1860s. An online conversation about the matter directed me to the real flaw…
by Paul Braterman Lord Kelvin (Smithsoinian Instituion Libraries collection) Kelvin calculated that the Earth was probably around 24 million years old, from how fast it is cooling. Rutherford believed that Kelvin’s calculation was wrong because of the heat generated by radioactivity. Kelvin was wrong, but so was Rutherford. The Earth is indeed many times older…
by Paul Braterman I am browsing school science textbooks published and marketed by an influential and nationally accredited US university. Here is what I find.[1] Satan wants people to believe in evolution. This is probably the main reason that evolution is so popular. Evolution relies on processes that cannot be observed, therefore it isn’t a…
by Paul Braterman Rotation of back paw allows red panda to descend head first down tree. Taken at the Cincinnati Zoo. Photo by Greg Hume through Wikipedia Keywords: sex, violence, baby swapping, mistaken identity, DNA testing, international relations, Richard Nixon, Viagra, Sixth Mass Extinction Same thumb, different family Names can be deceptive. The red panda…
by Paul Braterman Professor Plantinga lecturing, 2009 Prof Alvin Plantinga, of Notre Dame University, is perhaps the most distinguished critic of current views on evolution. He claims that if our conceptual apparatus is simply the product of naturalistic Darwinian evolution, it will generally give rise to unreliable results. From this premise he argues that it…
by Paul Braterman Watercolour, Darwin after return from The Beagle, by George Richmond Charles Darwin regarded our minds, like our bodies, as the products of undirected evolution. He therefore considered them unreliable on topics vastly more abstruse than the experiences that had shaped them. Alvin Plantinga claims that minds produced by undirected evolution could not…