Weekly Links Roundup… Feb 20

We’ll go in reverse order today and start with science and religion/philosophy/etc (i.e. the space-between). Three highly varying choices for music… enjoy: door 1 door 2 door 3

The space-between:

• Heh. Theists are too willing to change their views. Kind of like how science works?
• Ard Louis on evolutionary metaphors and the importance of language for science and religion.
• Karl Giberson at BioLogos on models for the relationship between science and religion. I’ve written on these before. Karl is generally in favor of independence, it would appear, but at the end of the post he takes to criticizing it. Will he be in favor of dialogue or integration in a future post? You know I am…
• Why do many scientists dismiss philosophy so arrogantly? Why are others so bad at it?
• An introduction to Alfred North Whitehead.
• Open Parachute with On being philosophical about science. I was introduced to Edward Feser this week and I linked to his outstanding post on why scientists are so bad at philosophy. Again, I think science has no limits, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only game in town and scientists would do right to shut up every now and then and acknowledge it. Soap box dismount.
• How free are our wills? Not in the sense you think, but in a different sense.
• Nature on Templeton. To Coyne, Templeton is a 4 letter word.
• Transcendant Man. A look at Ray Kurzweil and his view that the singularity is near. Do we simply laugh this off? I wouldn’t…
• HA!

Science:

• Adult brain activity stirs before birth. Like even at 20 weeks. Take note.
• Darwin Day, the year of Darwin, Darwin Day week… a few scientists are a little “Darwin’d”out. I concur.
• Biological anthropologists question human ancestor fossil remains. This is going to get heated, but it’s how science works sometimes.
• Beautiful. Yet deadly.
• Absolute WOW (via @meyourprofessor). Boy Without a Cerebellum Baffles Doctors.
• Also via @meyourprofessor, are we being Googlized? And Arthur C. Clarke writes a 31-word short story that’s fascinating.
• Knocking Out a “Dumb” Gene Boosts Memory in Mice. I shared my concerns on Twitter. Still interesting though.
• Gonorrhea steals DNA from humans. An interesting finding by a friend of a friend. Lots of others wrote this up too including Ed Yong provides a great write-up and appropriate context and 80beats summarizes.
• Also by Ed Yong, mutant SOD1 can cause normal SOD1 to misfold in prion-like manner? (I wonder: why in PNAS?) and a crystal ball for predicting the future of flu?
• Jonah Lehrer writes that while focus is obviously important, “distractability” can also be a good thing.
• All the World’s Computers = One Human Brain? Interesting, but there’s a few flaws here.
• Evolution in action. Evolution in simulation.
• The Brain’s Vacation Therapy.
• Awesome. What 11 Pairs of Eyeballs Watching a Movie Looks Like.
• Is is not just the particular pheromone that triggers smell? Could the vibration of the molecules also play a role?
• Meanwhile, could pesticides block male hormones?
• Organs on a chip?
• Is relativity hard? This biologist thinks so, but I guess not so much.
• An eye-opening look at the U.S. academic standards. It’s grim, to be sure.
• And if that’s not enough science links, Ed Yong has 1 or 2 more…

Religion:

• Richard Beck of Experimental Theology with an excellent piece: Universalism and the Open Wound of Life.
• By Evolving Christian, The God of the Gaps is not God.
• Jimpethicus on What Genesis Doesn’t Say.
• On the Jesus Creed, a touching story on why we have children.
• Post-grad degrees don’t necessarily lead to atheism. This will be discussed and discussed and…

News (at least the news I see fit to print, er link to):

• Lots and lots and lots of talk about IBM’s “Watson” this past week on account of it beating the best players in Jeopardy history. Could it or its offspring revolutionize research or be used in medical diagnoses? Humans pushed back a bit. Here’s a tongue-in-cheek look at 10 things Watson can’t do and a claim that wisdom and intelligence aren’t the same thing (and, of course, computers can’t be “wise”). Jonah Lehrer with, as usual, an interesting take. Last, Ben Zimmer asks Is It Time to Welcome Our New Computer Overlords?
• For the college or “intrigued” crowd, 10 foods you can allegedly make in your coffeemaker.
• The evolution of Mr. Potato Head.
• Heh. The 5PM Daily Quiz: Doogie Howser’s diary or random twitter update?
• TED Launches Quora-Like Platform for Intelligent Discussion.
• GoogleDocs gets even more functionality. Is there a reason not to just use this and present from an iPad?
• Legionellosis at the Playboy mansion?
• Eye-opening. Do you have what it takes to be “working poor?
• A new Facebook for children that parents can get behind? Everloop.
• And last, and absolutely least, this caused me to throw up a little…

 

NOTE: Just a heads-up, but Weekly Links Roundup will be coming out on Mondays in the future…