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.

Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape

Sam Harris is in the UK this week talking about his new book, The Moral Landscape, about how the fact-value distinction has led us astray. Harris argues that far from being outside the purview of science, moral questions are properly scientific questions. Moral questions are, Harris argues, questions about our personal and social welfare, the avoidance of suffering and the promotion of flourishing, happy, productive lives. These questions have real answers which can in the broad sense be determined by science: will this policy solve social problems? will this act cause distress to that person? will this drug cause me long term harm? These are moral and scientific questions and the line is not as distinct as many like to think.

He is interviewed this week by Humanist Philosopher and British Humanist Association Distinguished Supporter Julian Baggini in The Independent and the book is reviewed by Simon Blackburn, another Humanist Philosophers member and also a Vice President of the BHA.

Baggini uses his interview opportunity to put some criticisms to Harris. The Moral Landscape is unusual in that arguably it pits scientists directly against moral philosophers, arguing that much of what philosophers have done for morality is only to cause confusion, whereas science can now come along and clean up the mess. But are things really so clear cut?

[Baggini] But it’s puzzling how science could tell us, for example, how to prioritise between rights of free speech and privacy?

[Harris] There are probably some trade-offs where there isn’t an important difference. So privileging free speech to some degree and privileging privacy to another degree leads you to different circumstances, but perhaps they are not importantly different. If you and I and everyone affected by those changes could live out both lives, and have our brains scanned all the while, and have every marker of our inner lives analysed, we would come out saying they were a little different, but we don’t know which we like better. That is an intelligible prospect and that is why the moral landscape has many peaks and valleys that are different but equivalent in terms of well-being.

Isn’t well-being too ill-defined to be scientifically tractable? Take the classic thought experiment of whether a person who lives a normal life with ups and downs is better or worse off than someone who takes a happiness pill. There doesn’t seem to be a factual answer as to what’s better, discoverable by examining fMRI scans, for instance.

I think we can have a rational discussion about how much we want our states of consciousness, our emotional lives, to track the reality of our lives. We definitely want it to track it for the most part because otherwise, if we’re just taking this perfect narcotic each day, it’s not a sustainable situation. You’re just lying on the couch in bliss, but your relationships have dissolved, you’ve lost your job, and your children have starved to death. It’s materially unsustainable if nothing else. But your love for the people in your life, which you value and which is major component of well-being – your connections to others, your ability to function in the world – all of this is predicated on your states of consciousness tracking the actual reality of your life in the world.

Full interview: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-moral-formula-how-facts-inform-our-ethics-2265991.html

Simon Blackburn’s review of the book’s argument, reflecting the view taken of Harris’s argument by many philosophers, insists that there are questions of principle and priority and value which are not reducible to empirical facts.

[Harris's] idea is that with sufficient knowledge, and generous help from neuroscience, we can learn to gauge “wellbeing” and then it is just a technical question of how to maximise it. Not only religion, but moral philosophy with its dilemmas and conflicts, is unnecessary, now that we can observe and calculate. On the dust-jacket, Richard Dawkins enthusiastically endorses the same triumphalist line.

It is one thing to say that behaving well requires knowledge. It clearly does, and the more we know about the world the better (and worse) we can behave in it. But it is quite another thing to think of “science” as taking over the entire domain of morality, and that there is a reason that it cannot do so. While it is one thing to know the empirical facts, it is another to select and prioritise and campaign and sacrifice to promote some and diminish others.

… Striving to maximise the sum of human wellbeing is making oneself a servant of the world, and it cannot be science that tells me to do that, nor how to solve the conflict, which was central, for instance, to the utilitarian thinking of Henry Sidgwick. Harris considers none of all this, and thereby joins the prodigious ranks of those whose claim to have transcended philosophy is just an instance of their doing it very badly.

Full article: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/03/blackburn-ethics-without-god-secularism-religion-sam-harris/

Astronomer Martin Rees has accepted the controversial Templeton Prize, accused in the past of insidiously blurring the lines between science and religion. Rees’ acceptance speech offers little that is controversial, however, and he could almost have been chosen as a way for Templeton to go a year without being subjected to wide criticism. In his speech Rees gives a big picture overview of our place in the universe, argues for a more long-term approach to scientific and technological thinking, and states that while reductionism is true it’s “seldom true in a useful sense. Problems in biology, and in environmental and human sciences, remain unsolved because it’s hard to elucidate their complexities – not because we don’t understand subatomic physics well enough.” That view that reductionism is basically correct but different scientific disciplines work on different levels hardly seems equivalent to “affirming life’s spiritual dimension” which the Prize is meant to honour. (Maybe Templeton has run out of genuinely quasi-religious high profile scientists and philosophers to honour?)

To our ancestors, the Earth seemed vast, with open frontiers. Today, no new continents remain to be discovered, and our planet seems constricted, and overcrowded – a fragile “pale blue dot” in a vast cosmos.

Our sun is one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy; billions of those stars are orbited by planets (many perhaps with biospheres). Our galaxy is itself just one of many billion galaxies in range of our telescopes. And there is compelling evidence that this entire panorama emerged from a hot, dense “beginning” nearly 14bn years ago.

But, as always in science, each advance brings into focus new questions that couldn’t previously have even been posed and which enlarge our horizons still further. The vast domain that astronomers can observe could be an infinitesimal part of the totality. Our big bang may not be the only one: we may be living in a “multiverse” – an archipelago of cosmoses, perhaps governed by an array of different physical laws.

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/apr/06/templeton-prize-2011-martin-rees-speech

In a Guardian interview Ian Sample seemingly struggles to elicit some kind of controversial statement on religion and science from Rees. After a shaky start (Sample enquires about Rees’ finances off the bat, receiving “No comment”,) the transcript seems to indicate that Rees provides often short and dismissive answers evading questions about religion, God, and the Templeton controversy as far as is humanly possible without actually getting up and leaving the interview.

IS: And what about theological issues?

MR: Well, I’ve got no religious beliefs at all. Of course some of the winners have, but I think not all of them.

IS: What do you think the Templeton prize achieves? What is the value of it?

MR: That’s not for me to say to be honest.

IS: You must have a view?

MR: No.

IS: But you think it achieves something?

MR: Well, I mean as much as other prizes, certainly, but I wouldn’t want to be more specific than that.

IS: That’s a shame. Might you at some time in the future?

MR: They are very nice people who are doing things which are within their agenda, but their agenda is really very broad. I should say that I was reassured by the rather good piece in Nature a few weeks ago, which talked about the Foundation and I found that reassuring. Certainly Cambridge University, I know, has received grants from Templeton for editing Darwin’s correspondence, which is a big Cambridge project, and also for some mathematical conferences. They support a range of purely scientific issues.

IS: Have you considered what to do with the money?

MR: I haven’t, no.

IS: You have been described as a churchgoer who doesn’t believe in God. Is that an accurate description?

MR: I suppose so. What I’ve said is I’m happy to attend my college chapel and things like that, because I see this as part of my culture, just like many Jews light candles on Friday night even though they don’t believe anything, and my culture is the Church of England, as it were.

IS: Are you a regular churchgoer?

MR: Not very regular, no. In my college, I go once a week during term as the Master of the College. And in Trinity College, we’re lucky enough to have a wonderful choir rated number five in the world by Gramophone magazine, so it’s worth hearing.

IS: Why don’t you believe in God?

MR: Um. Which God?

IS: A God.

MR: I don’t think I can answer that.

IS: Really?

MR: Mm.

Rees does go on to call concerns about Templeton “excessive” and states that science and religion do not “have much scope for constructive interaction, but they have in common perhaps an awareness of mystery.”

Full interview: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/apr/06/astronomer-royal-martin-rees-interview

“If the Big Bang was the start of everything, what came before it?”

That is one of the questions being posed by a new website being set up by the Vatican and Italy’s scientific community.

After centuries of mistrust between religion and science, the intention is to give the public a greater understanding of both sides.

The website, which will be available in Italian and English, has information on everything from astronomy to theology, from space missions to philosophy and art.

… The venture is being run jointly by the Vatican and the Italian Space Agency, ASI.

Monsignor Gianfranco Basti, the dean of the Pontifical Lateran University’s philosophy department, will be the Vatican’s point man on the scheme.

He says: “From the Church’s point of view, this is about getting religious people to see that scientists are not the enemy and getting scientists to see that religious people are not the enemy.

“The aim is for both sides to come together for the good of humanity.”

This BBC article does go on to point out that the Italian Space Agency and the Vatican might be “uneasy bedfellows”.

Full article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12244279

The Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks every 22 years and the rate of sun spot formation and attendant flares peaks every 11 years. The two events will combine in 2013 to produce potentially much stronger flares. Previous flares hitting the Earth have caused physical damage to power grids and with more satellites and more sensitive equipment in human hands year on year, the potential for disruption grows.

Britain could face widespread power blackouts and be left without critical communication signals for long periods of time, after the earth is hit by a once-in-a-generation “space storm”, Nasa has warned.

National power grids could overheat and air travel severely disrupted while electronic items, navigation devices and major satellites could stop working after the Sun reaches its maximum power in a few years.

Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes “from a deep slumber” sometime around 2013, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

In a new warning, Nasa said the super storm would hit like “a bolt of lightning” and could cause catastrophic consequences for the world’s health, emergency services and national security unless precautions are taken.

Scientists believe it could damage everything from emergency services’ systems, hospital equipment, banking systems and air traffic control devices, through to “everyday” items such as home computers, iPods and Sat Navs.

“We know it is coming but we don’t know how bad it is going to be,” Dr Richard Fisher, the director of Nasa’s Heliophysics division, said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.

“It will disrupt communication devices such as satellites and car navigations, air travel, the banking system, our computers, everything that is electronic. It will cause major problems for the world.

“Large areas will be without electricity power and to repair that damage will be hard as that takes time.”

The Telegraph quotes Dr Richard Fisher, the director of Nasa’s Heliophysics division, saying:

“We know it is coming but we don’t know how bad it is going to be … It will disrupt communication devices such as satellites and car navigations, air travel, the banking system, our computers, everything that is electronic. It will cause major problems for the world.

“Large areas will be without electricity power and to repair that damage will be hard as that takes time.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7819201/Nasa-warns-solar-flares-from-huge-space-storm-will-cause-devastation.html

Given that we  cover hysterical religious apocalypse fears every so often, the skeptic is often unsure how to take an alleged scientifically based threat. The post-modern response is to treat it as exactly the same (a silly panic based on esoteric reasoning). The occasional failure of secular apocalypse fears (like the Millennium Bug) encourages this attitude, and a seemingly rational concern is unravelled when the prediction fails. But to treat all threats coming from science as relative to each other and relative to supernatural Armageddon stories would be cynical. In the case of global warming it becomes outright “denialism”. Where do mega-Sun flares fall on the spectrum of skepticism about theoretical global crises?

An evangelical church, which intends to teach creationism as part of its science curriculum, has submitted a proposal to open a free school in Nottinghamshire.

The Everyday Champions Church in Newark handed its plans to open a 625-pupil secondary school in the area to the Department for Education last week.

… Pastor Gareth Morgan, the church leader and the driving force behind the free school bid, confirmed that creationism would be taught across the curriculum, should the school be given the green light.

… According to the British Humanist Association (BHA), seven out of 10 free school applications have a faith-based ethos.

BHA head of public affairs Naomi Phillips said schools such as the Everyday Champions Academy reaffirmed the association’s concerns over free schools.

“This type of school holds up our fear from when Michael Gove first put forward his proposals – that they would be schools with faith-based and sometimes extreme views that would largely be applying to take over the running of our state-funded schools,” Ms Phillips said.

“This is despite Michael Gove saying that the Government would protect against creationists and other extreme religions … It’s clear there are no such protections in place.”

Full story: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6069260

The British Humanist Association has consistently opposed state-funded ‘faith’ schools for many years.

New president of the Royal Society, Nobel Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse, presents a BBC Horizon programme addressing the erosion of trust in science,  asking whether science is under concerted attack, and whether scientists themselves are partly to blame.

Obviously science itself should be deeply sceptical, critical, and self-examining. But Nurse’s focus is on those outright attempts to diminish the whole process of scientific method, and the growth industry in pseudoscientific “denialist” attacks on well-corroborated theories even once the alternatives have been thoroughly discredited, “from the theory that man-made climate change is warming our planet, to the safety of GM food, or that HIV causes AIDS.”

[Paul Nurse] interviews scientists and campaigners from both sides of the climate change debate, and travels to New York to meet Tony, who has HIV but doesn’t believe that that the virus is responsible for AIDS.

This is a passionate defence of the importance of scientific evidence and the power of experiment, and a look at what scientists themselves need to do to earn trust in controversial areas of science in the 21st century.

Watch on iPlayer until 22 Feb 2011: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00y4yql/Horizon_20102011_Science_Under_Attack

Rightly or wrongly, the eye is often held up as the crowning achievement of evolution (or indeed as something beyond evolutionary explanation. Wrongly).

School biology always seems to cover the “rods and cones” cells that detect light on the retina. But another class of cells has now been found to have a direct role in detecting light.

Russell Foster remembers his first human subject, an 87-year-old woman, as she sat in a dark room facing a backlit pane of frosted glass. A genetic disorder had destroyed the light-sensing rod and cone cells in her eyes, leaving her blind for the past 50 years. She was convinced that she would see nothing. But as the wavelength of light in the room shifted to blue, she reported — after some hesitation — a sort of brightness.

“That just blew us away,” says Foster, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK, and one of the senior authors of a 2007 study reporting the finding[Zaidi, F. H. et al. Curr. Biol. 17, 2122-2128 (2007)].

Foster and his collaborators had done nothing to treat the woman’s blindness. Instead, her awareness of light owed itself to a class of light-sensitive cells discovered in 2002. Studies of these intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs) have since revealed many surprises. Scientists initially thought that, rather than contribute to vision, the cells simply synchronized the circadian clock, which sets the body’s 24-hour patterns of metabolism and behaviour, with changing light levels. However, recent work suggests that ipRGCs have been underestimated. They may also have a role in vision — distinguishing patterns or tracking overall brightness levels — and they seem to enable ambient light to influence cognitive processes such as learning and memory.

Full story: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110119/full/469284a.html

Science teacher and writer Alom Shaha celebrates a rare piece of original research by school children and how it found its way into a Royal Society journal.

A scientific paper published today in the prestigious Royal Society journal Biology Letters reveals that “bumble-bees can use a combination of colour and spatial relationships in deciding which colour of flower to forage from.” This is an exciting discovery that deepens our knowledge of the buff-tailed bumble-bee (Bombus terrestris) and is described in an accompanying commentary as a “significant piece of research giving a novel insight in the colour and pattern vision of the bee”.

However, there is a more important discovery that is included in the paper, a discovery that I hope readers of this blogpost and the original paper will share with as many people as possible – the authors, while researching the behaviour of bees, ”also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before”.

As you’ve probably guessed, the authors of this particular paper are not your usual research team. The research was “conceived, carried out, summarized and written up by a class of 8 to 10 years olds” from Blackawton Primary School in Devon. The paper is deliberately written in “kids speak”, which, as well as being charming (“if we are lucky we will be able to get them to do Sudoku in a couple of years’ time”), serves as a constant reminder that this work was genuinely carried out by young schoolchildren.

Continues: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2010/dec/22/schoolchildren-bumble-bee-research-journal

In a BBC World Service documentary out today – made with the BBC Radio science unit, rather than current affairs – we explain why science is different, and why it is dangerous to have laws that restrict the everyday scrutiny of each others’ ideas and practices that scientists and doctors necessarily engage in.

Under the current libel laws, reading about cases such as Wilmshurst’s, Thomsen’s, Singh’s and my own, scientists and doctors are increasingly aware that every utterance could have bizarre and unpredictable legal consequences; that even if you’re proved right, a case may still take years of working unpaid every evening and weekend, and hundreds of thousands of pounds you cannot spare.

In science and medicine, mutual criticism has a massive societal benefit, because we all benefit from the way it makes medicine safer, but the burden of libel is shouldered entirely by individuals who are unprepared and often unprotected. You cannot reasonably expect scientists to be experts in the details of libel law as well as their own field, and you cannot reasonably expect people to constantly and unpredictably put their families’ homes at stake, just for doing the job we expect of them.

Full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/08/science-libel-laws-mutual-criticism

NASA-funded astrobiology research has changed the fundamental knowledge about what comprises all known life on Earth.

Researchers conducting tests in the harsh environment of Mono Lake in California have discovered the first known microorganism on Earth able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic. The microorganism substitutes arsenic for phosphorus in its cell components.

“The definition of life has just expanded,” said Ed Weiler, NASA’s associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington. “As we pursue our efforts to seek signs of life in the solar system, we have to think more broadly, more diversely and consider life as we do not know it.”

This finding of an alternative biochemistry makeup will alter biology textbooks and expand the scope of the search for life beyond Earth. The research is published in this week’s edition of Science Express.

Full article: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/astrobiology_toxic_chemical.html

Martin Rees introduces a selection of scientists’ suggestions for big questions which science must answer. They range from the self-described “esoteric” such as whether there is a deeper pattern to prime numbers, to BHA Distinguished Supporter Brian Cox’s question, “Can we make a scientific way of thinking all pervasive?”

This would be the greatest achievement for science over the coming centuries. I say this because I do not believe that we currently run our world according to evidence-based principles. If we did, we would be investing in an energy Manhattan project to quickly develop and deploy clean energy technologies. We would be investing far larger amounts of our GDP in the eradication of diseases such as malaria, and we would be learning to live and work in space – not as an interesting and extravagant sideline, but as an essential part of our long-term survival strategy.

John Sulston’s big question is “How do we ensure humanity survives and flourishes?” and Kathy Sykes asks “What is consciousness?”

Full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/nov/30/10-big-questions-science-must-answer

A spacecraft has tasted oxygen in the atmosphere of another world for the first time while flying low over Saturn’s icy moon, Rhea.

Nasa’s Cassini probe scooped oxygen from the thin atmosphere of the planet’s moon while passing overhead at an altitude of 97km in March this year.

Until now, wisps of oxygen have only been detected on planets and their moons indirectly, using the Hubble space telescope and other major facilities.

Instruments aboard Cassini revealed an extremely thin oxygen and carbon dioxide atmosphere that is sustained by high-energy particles slamming into the moon’s surface and kicking up atoms, molecules and ions.

… “This really is the first time that we’ve seen oxygen directly in the atmosphere of another world,” said Andrew Coates, at UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory, a co-author of the study published in the journal Science.

“Active, complex chemistry involving oxygen may be quite common throughout the solar system and even our universe,” said team leader Ben Teolis of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. “Such chemistry could be a prerequisite for life. All evidence from Cassini indicates that Rhea is too cold and devoid of the liquid water necessary for life as we know it.”

Full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/nov/25/oxygen-saturn-moon-rhea

Richard Holmes outlines his new book on The Lost Women of Victorian Science, a sequel to his earlier The Age of Wonder (see review on HumanistLife).

Certainly compared with their literary sisters, the scientific women of the 19th century still appear invisible, if not actually non-existent. What female scientific names can be cited to compare with Jane Austen, Fanny Burney, the three Brontë sisters, George Eliot or Harriet Martineau?

Yet my re-examination of the Royal Society archives during this 350th birthday year has thrown new and unexpected light on the lost women of science. I have tracked down a series of letters, documents and rare publications that begin to fit together to suggest a very different network of support and understanding between the sexes. It emerges that women had a far more fruitful, if sometimes conflicted, relationship with the Royal Society than has previously been supposed.

It is at once evident that they played a significant part in many team projects, working both as colleagues and as assistants (though hitherto only acknowledged in their family capacities as wives, sisters or daughters). More crucially, they pioneered new methods of scientific education, not only for children, but for young adults and general readers. They also played a vital part as translators, illustrators and interpreters and, most particularly, as “scientific popularisers”.

Indeed, the Royal Society archives suggest something so fundamental that it may require a subtle revision of the standard history of science in Britain. This is the previously unsuspected degree to which women were a catalyst in the early discussion of the social role of science.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/nov/21/royal-society-lost-women-scientists

In an article called “Universe’s Quantum Weirdness Limits Its Weirdness” Wired Science describes the limits nonlocality and how it cannot be used to solve every problem in information transmission.

The more one probes the universe at smaller and smaller scales, the weirder matter and energy seem to behave.

But this strangeness may limit its own extent in quantum mechanics, the theory describing the behavior of matter at an infinitesimal level, according to a new study by an ex-hacker and a physicist.

“We’re interested in this question of why quantum theory is as weird as it is, but not weirder,” said physicist Jonathan Oppenheim of the University of Cambridge. “It was an unnatural question for people to have asked even 20 years ago. The reason we’re able to get these results is that we’re thinking of things in the way a hacker might think of things.”

… [T]here’s a limit to how useful nonlocality can be. Two separated people can’t send messages faster than the speed of light.

“It’s surprising that that happens,” said Stephanie Wehner, an ex-hacker and quantum-information theorist at the National University of Singapore. “Quantum mechanics is so much more powerful than the classical world, it should surely go up to the limits. But no, it turns out that there is some other limitation.”

As strange as quantum mechanics is, it could be stranger.

Full article: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/11/entangled-uncertainty/

…Dr Thomas Dixon delves into the BBC‘s archives to explore the troubled relationship between religion and science. From the creationists of America to the physicists of the Large Hadron Collider, he traces the expansion of scientific knowledge and asks whether there is still room for God in the modern world.

The relationship between science and religion has been long and troubled: from the condemnation of Galileo by the Catholic Church in 17th century Italy, through the clashes between creationism and evolution in 20th century America, right up to recent claims that the universe does not need God.

Delving through the rich archives of material from BBC’s “Horizon” programme and BBC Science, Thomas Dixon looks at what lies behind this difficult relationship. Using original footage from 1925, he tells the story of John Scopes, a Tennessee teacher who was tried for teaching evolution. He sees the connections between religion and American politics in the story of a more recent court case — the trial of Intelligent Design. He looks at what happens when new scientific discoveries start to explain events that were once seen as the workings of God, and CLAIMS that some of our most famous scientists have seen God in the grandest laws of the universe. Finally, he finds intriguing evidence from brain science which hints that belief in God is here to stay.

Full article with videos: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/2010/oct/31/1

Brian Cox, a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association who delivered this year’s Voltaire Lecture, presents a tribute to science popularizer and eminent physicist Richard Feynman.

Widely regarded as the finest physicist of his generation and the most influential since Einstein, Feynman did much to popularise science, through lectures, books and television, not least his revelation at a press conference in which he demonstrated the exact cause of the Challenger Shuttle explosion in 1986.

Described as the ‘Mozart of physics’, Feynman’s amazing life and career seemingly had no end of highlights.

A student at MIT and then Princeton (where he obtained an unprecedented perfect score on the entrance exam for maths and physics), he was drafted onto the Manhattan Project as a junior scientist.

There his energy and talents made a significant mark on two of the project’s leaders, Robert Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe.

The latter would become Feynman’s lifelong mentor and friend.

Bethe called his student “a magician”, setting him apart from other scientists as ‘no ordinary genius’.

Listen at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00b6djp (via RDF)

In his new book The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris claims that science ‘reveals’ values to us. Kwame Anthony Appiah is one of the many who have pointed out that Harris makes the common mistake of seeking to derive an ‘ought’ from a series of mere ‘is’ statements, a mistake pointed out by David Hume centuries ago.

But the relationship between natural science and normative ethics does raise interesting questions. Let’s assume that Harris is correct in thinking that the right action is that which maximizes overall well-being, and assume also that well-being consists in the greatest balance of pleasure over pain. Pleasantness and painfulness are properties that scientists — psychologists in particular, but others too — can talk about, and if we assume that these properties can be measured in some way or other, then we find that the property that makes actions right is a property that can be studied by natural science.

But what is the relation between rightness and the property of maximizing well-being? In recent years, several naturalistically inclined philosophers have been inclined towards identifying them. So, just as heat turns out to be the same as molecular kinetic energy, so rightness turns out to be the same as maximizing well-being.

Full article: http://www.practicalethicsnews.com/practicalethics/2010/10/science-and-morality.html

You can find Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape in the BHA Amazon store.

Here we are, small beings on a small planet orbiting an unremarkable star in a really rather ordinary galaxy in an otherwise undistinguished part of an unimaginably vast universe.

Yet something about our existence feels, well, special. From the ructions of the early cosmos to the growing pains of our planet and life’s daring evolutionary leaps, not everything about how we got here seems obvious, or even likely.

Perhaps in other corners of the cosmos other sentient beings are also pondering the implausibility of their origins. Perhaps that very implausibility means we are alone with such questions. Either way, follow the trail as we visit 10 turning points in our history – the cosmic accidents that led to us.

Full article: http://www.newscientist.com/special/cosmic-accidents-10-lucky-breaks-for-humanity

So while there are plenty of good books by scientist-atheists, they sometimes under-emphasise the main lesson from science: that our knowledge is vastly outstripped by our ignorance. For me, a life in science prompts awe and exploration over dogmatism.

A life in science prompts awe and exploration over dogmatism
Given these considerations, I do not call myself an atheist. I don’t feel that I have enough data to firmly rule out other interesting possibilities. On the other hand, I do not subscribe to any religion. Traditional religious stories can be beautiful and often crystallise hard-won wisdom – but it is hardly a challenge to poke holes in them. Religious structures are built by humans and brim with all manner of strange human claims – they often reflect cults of personality, xenophobia or mental illness. The holy books of these religions were written millennia ago by people who never had the opportunity to know about DNA, other galaxies, information theory, electricity, the big bang, the big crunch, or even other cultures, literatures or landscapes.

So it seems we know too little to commit to strict atheism, and too much to commit to any religion. Given this, I am often surprised by the number of people who seem to possess total certainty about their position. I know a lot of atheists who seethe at the idea of religion, and religious followers who seethe at the idea of atheism – but neither group is bothering with more interesting ideas. They make their impassioned arguments as though the God versus no-God dichotomy were enough for a modern discussion.

Full article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727795.300-beyond-god-and-atheism-why-i-am-a-possibilian.html