As a supplement to the unit and the Goldsmiths Psychology programme, the APRU organised a series of lectures presented by invited speakers from other institutions or organisations. These speakers, who are all specialists within their respective fields of Psychology and anomalistic research, kindly agreed for their presentations to be recorded and made available. The links below provide complete and free access to these recordings, and will also be updated as new presentations are given. The unit have also endeavoured to provide any support materials, such as the lecture slides, where appropriate and possible. This is definitely worth your time:

http://www.gold.ac.uk/apru/lectures/

Brendan O’Neill criticises the ASA’s censure of religious advertisements for God’s healing powers

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100135253/if-christians-are-not-free-to-say-god-heals-then-there-is-no-religious-freedom-in-this-country/

The ASA has been itching to ban the words “God heals” for quite a while. Last June, it rapped the knuckles of a church in Nottingham for putting up a poster that said “God can heal you today!” after the church was grassed up to the ASA by some snitch in Nottingham’s Secular Society. And now it has actually banned a Christian group from proselytising about God’s healing powers. What next? Should we ban groups from declaring that “Jesus loves you!”, considering that is probably also technically untrue and could promote “false hope”? How about banning depictions of Jesus walking on water, since that is a physically impossible feat and might encourage children to try it out, with potentially deadly consequences? There’s no end to the expressions of religious faith that might be banned by the Secular Inquisition that the ASA is speedily morphing into.

However, Tom Chivers says that religious organisations should not be exempt from advertising laws if they make such claims:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/100135398/why-should-religions-be-exempt-from-advertising-rules/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/jan/29/david-attenborough-desert-island-discs

I don’t think an understanding and an acceptance of the 4 billion-year-long history of life is any way inconsistent with a belief in a supreme being,” the 85-year-old broadcaster and writer will tell presenter Kirsty Young. “And I am not so confident as to say that I am an atheist.

The Ri Channel has uploaded the classic lecture series exploring the Solar System by Professor Carl Sagan.

You can watch the series here.

The Ri Channel forms part of the Royal Institution’s mission to “connect people to the world of science”.

Life.com has published some excellent photos from Chicago’s Anti-Superstition Society, 1940.  It states:

On December 13, 1940 — a Friday, no less — LIFE magazine attended a gathering spread across 13 tables in Room 13 of the Merchants & Manufacturers Club of Chicago. (Yes, each table sat 13 people). The result? The odd and endearing article, “Life Goes to a Friday-the-13th Party,” published a few weeks later in the
magazine. Now, in light of January 2012′s very own Friday the 13th, LIFE.com resurrects that feature, and celebrates some old-school businessmen unafraid to step on a crack. 

 

Muslim biology students are boycotting lectures about evolution because they conflict with their creationist beliefs, one of Britain’s leading scientists has revealed.

Read full article here: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/uk-muslim-students-boycott-lectures-on-evolution/story-e6frgcjx-1226208363347

The Guardian reports that Rhys Morgan, a 17-year-old Welsh schoolboy, has faced down a Texan medical clinic and won after blogging about its unproven treatments.

Morgan, who is studying maths, chemistry, biology and psychology at AS level, is well known among a rising army of sceptics as the boy who exposed Miracle Mineral Solution after it was pushed on an internet forum for people with Crohn’s disease. The product’s website claims it has cured cancer, Aids and malaria. The US Food and Drug Administration called it industrial bleach and urged anyone using it to stop immediately.

Read the full report here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/29/schoolboy-blogger-us-clinic

Sheffield Christian Free School are hoping to set up a creationist Free School in 2013, as are the previously rejected Everyday Champions Church. And yet, the Government was clear in its rejection of the latter. Richy Thompson asks, why do these groups keep applying?

Fairy DNA by kyz

Richy Thompson is the BHA’s Education Campaigner. The BHA’s e-petition, Teach evolution, not creationism!, is now approaching 15,000 signatures. If you’re a UK resident, please sign, and urge all your friends, family and colleagues to do likewise.

Last week we broke the news that a group applying to open a Free School, Sheffield Christian Free School, intends to teach creationism throughout the curriculum. The group behind the bid, Sheffield Christian Family Schools Ltd, already runs two private schools in Sheffield, including the Bethany School. The group has said that it is ‘unashamedly creationist’.

We have been leading the way in countering creationism in the UK. For example, in September we coordinated the new campaign, Teach evolution, not creationism! This garnered support from big names such as Sir David Attenborough, BHA Vice President Richard Dawkins and Revd Prof Michael Reiss. It was also supported by a number of other organisations, such as the British Science Association, Association for Science Education, Campaign for Science & Engineering and Ekklesia.

The story about the Sheffield school has been picked up by a number of places. It was in Friday’s TES, will be in the Guardian next week, and also led to me debating Ken Walze, head of Bethany School, on BBC Radio Sheffield. You can listen to the full debate, or read a transcript, on the BHA’s website.

Although the government has told us that it does not support creationist schools and even recently rejected Everyday Champions Church’s bid solely for that reason, it has failed to take action on any of the recommendations of the Teach evolution, not creationism! campaign which would prevent many future problems. In fact, Everyday Champions Church has said it intends to bid again. Representatives are meeting with civil servants at the Department for Education today in an attempt to get the decision overturned, and their local MP, Patrick Mercer, is meeting with Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove next Monday to attempt the same thing.

Sheffield Christian Free School are also undeterred. In the interview, referring to the government’s opposition to creationist Free Schools, I asked, ‘I wonder if Ken can explain how he hopes to get past this barrier?’ Ken explained that,

‘We’re just offering the model that we’ve got. As I said, we do tick a lot of the boxes about how Free Schools can be set up. We do, obviously, very clearly have creation as part of our curriculum… We’re hoping that Michael Gove, as he begins to investigate this a little bit further, will start to see that we’re providing very good schools… There’s nothing to fear from creationism, it’s a valid part of our society. Millions have a faith, and believe the Christian story and way of life. It’s something I’m hoping Michael Gove – as he gets more and more applications from schools like ours – will begin to investigate a bit further.’

In other words, they’re hoping that Gove will change his mind.

The only way Gove can send the right message to these groups, and stop these and others, like Creation Ministries International, from teaching creationism as science in schools, is to make statutory and enforceable the government guidance that its portrayal as science is unacceptable.

The excellent blog Letters of Note, writes:

Early-1981, following IBM’s withdrawal of support due to the organisation’s continued exclusion of women within its ranks, renowned astronomer Carl Sagan sent the following impassioned letter to each and every fellow member of The Explorers Club — an international society dedicated to scientific exploration since its inception in 1904 — and argued beautifully for a change of policy.

You can read Carl Sagan’s letter here:

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/03/if-membership-is-restricted-to-men-loss.html

The WSF Live Forum was a global discussion about mind-bending physics, hosted by Brian Greene, joined by renowned theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind and Saul Perlmutter, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.

You can watch a replay of the live forum below:

Here’s a video (via BoingBoing) of Richard Feynman monologing about the way that science creates new ways to appreciate the beauty of the world around us.

The Feynman Series is a companion project with The Sagan Series https://www.facebook.com/thesaganseries in hopes to promote scientific education and scientific literacy in the general population.

CURIOSITY – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmTmGLzPVyM
HONOURS – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkv0KCR3Yiw

CREDITS
MUSIC : Goldmund – Threnody – http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the-malady-of-elegance/id286067899
NARRATION: Richard Feynman – The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
Home – http://www.homethemovie.org/
BBC Planet Earth – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Earth_(TV_series)
BBC Life – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_(BBC_TV_series)
BBC The Grand Rift – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Rift:_Africa’s_Wild_Heart
BBC The Secret Life Of Chaos – http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pv1c3
Microcosmos – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117040/
NASA – http://www.youtube.com/user/NASAtelevision
Chronos – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088919/
BBC The South Pacific – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pacific_(TV_series)

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.

This year’s biology prize went to Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of of Australian beer bottle.

You can find out more about the event here.

Widely reported this week, in Italy a number of scientists are being tried for manslaughter after failing to predict a 2009 earthquake that killed 309 people.

The Week magazine askes if there is any merit in it, but meanwhile, the Guardian reports that:

Seismologists around the world in uproar at legal move, which they say is an attack on science.

And you can also read the Wall Street journal article here.

Scientific American writes in its article Peace of Mind: Near-Death Experiences Now Found to Have Scientific Explanations:

Near-death experiences are often thought of as mystical phenomena, but research is now revealing scientific explanations for virtually all of their common features. The details of what happens in near-death experiences are now known widely—a sense of being dead, a feeling that one’s “soul” has left the body, a voyage toward a bright light, and a departure to another reality where love and bliss are all-encompassing.

According to a Gallup poll, approximately 3 percent of the U.S. population says they have had a near-death experience, although, the publication goes on to report that ‘not all of these experiences actually coincide with brushes with death—one study of 58 patients who recounted near-death experiences found 30 were not actually in danger of dying, although most of them thought they were.’

Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at Reading University, has been gradually implanting electronics into his body for the past thirteen years.

Motherboard.tv has a documentary his work and an updated interview about what he has been up to since.

It’s been nearly a year since Motherboard made a documentary on Warwick, so we gave him a call to see how things are going. He was kind enough to chat away with us about how he’s making biological brains that control robots, Michael Crichton, his appearance in 2009’s Transcendent Man, Terminator and the future of man and machine. Talking to him, it’s not a matter of if humans evolve into cyborgs. The real question is if we survive it.

Exciting news reported from National Geographic News:

If you look to the stars tonight, consider this: No matter how innumerable they may seem, there are far more planets than stars lurking out there in the darkness, a new study suggests.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/05/110518-planets-jupiters-worlds-space-science-nature/

For the last 16 years University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore VA Medical Center and Medical Alumni Association have produced an annual conference called “The Historical CPC“.

A CPC, or Clinicopathologic Conference, is a medical clinical exercise in which the history of a patient’s illness is presented to an experienced clinician for discussion in a didactic setting. The conference is used to teach  students and house staff how an experienced clinician would approach a difficult or challenging case. On a weekly basis they present an unusual, modern case, but once a year the CPC strays from modern cases and discusses an historical figure.

This year, the conference focused on Charles Darwin, narrowing down his then-mysterious collection of symptoms to probably being attributable to one of three ailments: cyclic vomiting syndrome, Chagas disease, or peptic ulcers.

The New Scientist has a good write up about the event: Link

Humanist philosophers reviewing each other! BHA Vice President (soon to be President) AC Grayling reviews Julian Baggini’s new book, The Ego Trick.  If humanist morality is based on the self-initiated actions of human moral agents, then “What is a self?” seems like a pretty important question.

The problem of self-understanding is a perennial one. But even before you tackle it there is a prior problem: making sense of selfhood itself. What is a “self”? Given that we change physically and psychologically throughout life, what is it that somehow makes us remain the same person in spite of those changes? If I borrowed money from you 20 years ago, and in the interval much happened that drastically altered me, surely I still owe you that money nonetheless?

In this entertaining, educative and gracefully written book, Julian Baggini explores the question of the nature of the self and in what sense it persists through time. Ever since the philosopher John Locke devoted a chapter to the problem in the second edition of his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1692, these questions have been central to much philosophical enquiry.

But, as Baggini shows, they are not “merely” philosophical questions. Psychology, neurology, gender issues, brain tumours, head injuries and dementia, multiple personality, memory, social construction of personae, ideas about souls, reincarnation and the afterlife – all these are in some way relevant to the debate and Baggini considers them in pursuit of clarification, arguing that there are, indeed, answers to be found.

Continues: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/84eb910a-6165-11e0-a315-00144feab49a.html

Last night’s talk by Sam Harris and conversation with Richard Dawkins is available now via The Pod Delusion.

The event was co-hosted by the British Humanist Association, the Richard Dawkins Foundation, Centre for Inquiry UK, Oxford Atheists, Secularists and Humanist, Project Reason and Blackwell Books(!). A video from RDF will be available soon.

The BHA’s next event is the 2011 Voltaire Lecture. In the footsteps of Kenan Malik (2009) and Brian Cox (2010), this year classicist turned comedian, author and broadcaster Natalie Haynes will speak on what we modern folk have to learn from the ancients: “What the Romans and Greeks Did For Us”.

Using language apparently borrowed from Dan Dennett’s Breaking The Spell, in which the philosopher encourages his readers to regard religious adherence as a subject that can and should be studied scientifically, the Guardian asks contributors to do the same for the atheist point of view.

Science must consider atheism as naturalistically as it considers religion. The word describes a number of beliefs around which social structures may form, or may not. It clearly isn’t natural or any kind of human universal, since it is unknown in most cultures and at most times. But the same is true of any particular theological belief. They are all equally susceptible to sociological and psychological analysis.

The first two contributors, Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi (Institute for the Study of Secularism at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA) and Wendy M Grossman (Skeptic Magazine), paint a not unflattering picture of the evidence on the non-religious. Beit-Hallahmi notes that the non-religious are generally “younger, mostly male, with higher levels of education and income, more liberal, but also more unhappy and more alienated from wider society. Such findings have been reported in the US, Australia, and Canada.”

Irreligiosity is tied to greater political liberalism, and to being less prejudiced.

… The claim that atheists are somehow likely to be immoral or dishonest has long been debunked. Studies that looked at readiness to help or honesty showed atheists standing out, not the religious. When it comes to the more serious matter of violence and crime, ever since the field of criminology got started, and data collected of the religious affiliation of criminal offenders, the fact that the unaffiliated and the non-religious had the lowest crime rates has been noted.

Starting in 1925, LM Terman and his colleagues studied 1,528 gifted youth from California with IQ levels higher than 140 who were about 12 years old. Members of this group were followed up throughout life, and were found to be consistently irreligious. Studies on the religiosity of scientists and academics have shown consistently low levels of religiosity, and the prevalence of atheism. Moreover, the more eminent scientists were less religious than others.

… Can we speak about an atheist personality? A tentative psychological profile can be offered. We can say that atheists show themselves to be less authoritarian and suggestible, less dogmatic, less prejudiced, more tolerant of others, law-abiding, compassionate, conscientious, and well-educated. They are of high intelligence, and many are committed to the intellectual and scholarly life.

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/apr/11/aetheists-research-scientists

Drawing mainly on research by one Jon Lanman, Wendy Grossman indicates that higher levels of irreligiosity are to be found when people are more “comfortable” and have less reason to start attributing agency and finding Fate where none exists.

[T]he US has massive inequality and a weak welfare state and a very small percentage of (open) non-theists. In the mid-20th century, Scandinavia built a very strong welfare state and now has a high percentage of non-theists.

Strong atheism, however, is a different matter: “Atheism can also be an identity,” [Lanman] said (just as religious beliefs can serve as markers for social groups), “though I wouldn’t call it a religion.” As an ideology, strong atheism tends to emerge under the threat of theocracy. Strong atheism found its public voice in the US under the twin stresses of George W Bush’s second term in office and 9/11′s demonstration of the worst dangers of fundamentalism.

“The UK,” Lanman concluded, “seems right in the middle between Scandinavia and the US.” The UK had Blair, and has blasphemy laws [ed: actually the blasphemy laws per se were abolished in 2008], a growing perception of the dangers of militant Muslims, and increasing numbers of faith schools – “but you don’t have Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee”.

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/apr/12/strong-atheism-origin-religion