Preface
Introduction
Weekly World News ONLINE
And You Call Yourself a Scientist!
Voluntary Human Extinction Exhibit
The Darwin Awards
Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)
Science and Pseudoscience: General
Astrology - It's All in the Stars
Phrenology - the Bumps on Your Head
http://wwwtw.vub.ac.be/ond/etec/cit/phreno/home.htm
Brains4Zombies.com -- Your online home for Brains
"I need phrenology like a need a hole in my head!" If that's how you really feel, then see these sites about some long-popular applied pseudoscience:
The Skeptics Dictionary
The Auger - an on-line journal for trepanning
Fringe Ware, Inc. sources
Trepanning Advocacy
On post-1995 superstring theory, with informative graphics:
http://theory.caltech.edu/people/jhs/strings/index.htm
The best available "popular" account of superstring theory, by a physicist directly involved in its development, is:
The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene 448 pages (February 1999) W.W. Norton & Company; ISBN: 0393046885 $27.95 (now available in paperback)
Parapsychology - ESP and Paranormal Phenomena
The Rhine Research Institute
Professor Daryl Bem, Psychology, Cornell University is a respected research psychologist who takes parapsychological research seriously.
Ray Hyman's critique of some recent work
Scientific Creationism in the Courts
If you want to read four US court decisions about the role of SC in the public schools, see the bottom of the page at:
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-debates.html
The Arkansas case we discussed, McLean v. Arkansas:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mclean-v-arkansas.html
For some indication of the content of testimony by defense expert witnesses, called by the State of Arkansas to defend its Creation Science Law, see:
A member of the Institute for Creation Science recounts some defense testimony
Geoscience Research Institute
Institute for Creation Science
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/matson-vs-hovind.html
The US Supreme Court's decision most directly relevant to creation science laws, Edwards v. Aguillard:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/edwards-v-aguillard.html
and a brief submitted by Nobel Laureates opposing the Louisiana creation science law:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/edwards-v-aguillard/amicus1.html
A paper that provides possibly helpful summaries of conceptual issues and which extends the discussion in philosophy of science:
http://www.dla.utexas.edu/depts/philosophy/faculty/koons/ntse/papers/Abney.html
The talkorigins.org site contains other useful information, including links to sites advocating SC and criticising EVT.
Seeking Scientific Creationism
The discussion of the Random Argument and the concept of real (or, irreducible) randomness raises for some the question, Does quantum mechanics require that there be real randomness at the atomic level, or is that theory consistent with merely apparent randomness? Einstein had the same question about quantum mechanics and raised it most pointedly in a 1935 paper, with co-authors Podolsky and Rosen, giving rise to the so-called "EPR Paradox." Einstein's formulation of the question has received a great deal of discussion since then, and has been answered in favor of real randomness. The key mathematical result, is called "Bell's Theorem," or sometimes, "Bell's Inequality." There is some helpful discussion at:
http://www.berlinet.de/schmelzer/PG/Bell.html
http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/GeneralInterest/Harrison/BellsTheorem/BellsTheorem.html
but the best introduction to the issues raised is:
Peter Kosso, Appearance and Reality: an introduction to the philosophy of physics (Oxford University Press, 1998). DH Hill Library QC6.K62 1998
In case you want more detail than Kitcher gives about two topics pertinent to current discussion of SC, please see
http://talkorigins.org/faqs/molecular-genetics.html
on biochemical similarities among organisms and the implications for the SC notion of basic kind; and
The age of the earth by G. Brent Dalrymple. (Stanford University Press, 1991).
Material: xvi, 474 p. : ill., maps ; 24 cm. Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 407-443) and index. ISBN: 0804715696 System ID No: ACO-5257
NCSU Natural Resources Library QE508 .D28 1991
on the isochron method of dating the age of the Earth, which yields a figure of about 4.5 billion years.
Published works on Biochemical Evolution
The Tree of Life Home Page
Trinity International University Theology Website
Angelic Science
For some information on cross-cultural demonology, see:
http://www.djmcadam.com/demons.htm
For an informative article from the 1916 Catholic Encyclopedia, see:
http://www.knight.org/advent/cathen/04713a.htm
-and the link to "angels" therein. The primary text of demonology, highly praised by Feyerabend in "The Strange Case of Astrology," is:
The Malleus Maleficarum
New Age Resonances
New Age Lexicon
The sci.skeptic FAQ
Chinese Acupuncture - A Useful Theory
National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine
Saucers and Sex - UFOlogy and Sexology
UFOlogy
Sexology
Chaos and Paradigms
http://www.dailyimac.com/toychest/fractals.html
http://www.artmatrix.com/
Multifractality in human heartbeat dynamics
PLAMEN CH. IVANOV, LUIS A. NUNES AMARAL, ARY L. GOLDBERGER, SHLOMO HAVLIN, MICHAEL G. ROSENBLUM, ZBIGNIEW R. STRUZIK & H. EUGENE STANLEY
http://www.nature.com/server-java/Propub/nature/399461A0.abs_frameset
Fractal analysis of Pollock's drip paintings
RICHARD P. TAYLOR, ADAM P. MICOLICH & DAVID JONAS
http://www.nature.com/server-java/Propub/nature/399422A0.abs_frameset
Lessons about Gatekeeping
Science and Religion - General
There is an on-going lecture series, "God and Computers," at MIT, that bastion of science, pure and applied.
http://web.mit.edu/bpadams/www/gac/
http://www.aaas.org/SPP/DSPP/DBSR/RESOURCE/WARMING.HTM
Separation by Cognitive Standards
Separation by Reference
A site that provides very useful information about the diversity of the world's religions:
http://www.adherents.com/
"Health Food Fundamentalism," and the diversity of religious beliefs:
http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~jkh8x/soc257/profiles.html
Separation by Attitude
Separation by Personal Improvement
Separation by Fact and Value
Albert Einstein, "Science and Religion"
Separation by Foundation
Separation by Explanation
For an excellent discussion of arguments from design which links them to the debate between Scientific Creationists and evolutionary theorists, and also makes connections to important general questions about testability see
Elliott Sober, "Testability"
Clicking on the link above will download an 84K .pdf file, which can then be read with Adobe Acrobat Reader.
You can find other papers by Professor Sober, one of the best philosophers of biology, through:
http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/papers.htm
The Mystery of Our Being: Limits of Causal Explanation?
Cosmology with a New Purpose?
For a public radio story on current cosmology:
http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/atc/19990602.atc.07.ram
(requires Real Player software).
The Meaning of "Life": Analyzing Living Thing
Groundrules: Evaluating Analytical Definitions
Two Ancient Definitions: Thales and Aristotle
Vitalistic and Mechanistic Intuitions
Naive Vitalism and Naive Mechanism
Transition to Modern Definitions
Introducing Organicism and Biological Functionalism
Two Kinds of Explanation
Two Analyses of Function
Which Functions are Organic?
Questions about reducibility of biology (or psychology) may also be posed in terms of emergent properties. One good way to learn about the idea of an emergent property is through recent research on Artificial Life. Using free software, you can build your own life forms.
ARTIFICIAL LIFE
From The Santa Fe Institute, "Artificial Life: A Brief Definition" :
Introduction to Artificial Life
Biology is the scientific study of life - in principle anyway. In practice, biology is the scientific study of life on Earth based on carbon-chain chemistry. There is nothing in its charter that restricts biology to carbon-based life; it is simply that this is the only kind of life that has been available to study. Thus, theoretical biology has long faced the fundamental obstacle that it is impossible to derive general principles from single examples.
Without other examples, it is difficult to distinguish essential properties of life - properties that would be shared by any living system - from properties that may be incidental to life in principle, but which happen to be universal to life on Earth due solely to a combination of local historical accident and common genetic descent.
In order to derive general theories about life, we neeed an ensemble of instances to generalize over. Since it is quite unlikely that alien lifeforms will present themselves to us for study in the near future, our only option is to try to create alternative life-forms ourselves - Artificial Life - literally "life made by Man rather than by Nature."
Artificial Life ("AL" or "Alife") is the name given to a new discipline that studies "natural" life by attempting to recreate biological phenomena from scratch within computers and other "artificial" media. Alife complements the traditional analytic approach of traditional biology with a synthetic approach in which, rather than studying biological phenomena by taking apart living organisms to see how they work, one attempts to put together systems that behave like living organisms.
The process of synthesis has been an extremely important tool in many disciplines. Synthetic chemistry - the ability to put together new chemical compounds not found in nature - has not only contributed enormously to our theoretical understanding of chemical phenomena, but has also allowed us to fabricate new materials and chemicals that are of great practical use for industry and technology.
Artificial life amounts to the practice of "synthetic biology" and, by analogy with synthetic chemistry, the attempt to recreate biological phenomena in alternative media will result in not only better theoretical understanding of the phenomena under study, but also in practical applications of biological principles in the technology of computer hardware and software, mobile robots, spacecraft, medicine, nanotechnology, industrial fabrication and assembly, and other vital engineering projects.
By extending the horizons of empirical research in biology beyond the territory currently circumscribed by life-as-we-know-it, the study of Artificial Life gives us access to the domain of life-as-it- could-be, and it is within this vastly larger domain that we must ground general theories of biology and in which we will discover practical and useful applications of biology in our engineering endeavors.
The best popularization of alife research is
Author:
Levy, Steven.
Title:
Artificial life : the quest for a new creation
Published:
New York : Pantheon Books, c1992.
Edition:
1st ed.
Subject(s):
Neural networks (Computer science)
Material:
viii, 390 p., [8] p. of plates : ill. (some col.) ; 25 cm.
Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (p. 349-370) and index.
LCCN:
91050749
ISBN:
067940774X :
System ID No:
ACQ-9647
Location
Call Number
Volume
Material
DH Hill Library
QA76.87 .L49 1992
c.1
Book
The author describes it as
"The first ... history of a new science--a-life, the creation of the behaviors of biology inside the computer and in the actions of robots. The technology of artificial life was first conceived by John von Neumann, who also had plenty to do with the nuclear effort, the technology of artificial death--and now a lot of a-life work is being done at Los Alamos. The book introduces the a-life scientists--a fascinating bunch--explains what they're up to, and explores some of the moral issues behind the work."
For help in thinking about emergent properties of complex systems, see
Author:
Resnick, Mitchel.
Title:
Turtles, termites, and traffic jams : explorations in massively parallel microworlds / Mitchel Resnick
Electronic Access:
View/Checkout this electronic book via netLibrary's web site. (NC State Only)<!-
Published:
Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c1994
Subject(s):
Parallel processing (Electronic computers)
Artificial intelligence.
Starlogo (Computer program language
Series:
Complex adaptive systems
Material:
xviii, 163 p. : ill. ; 24 cm
Notes:
"A Bradford book."
Includes bibliographical references (p. [157]-163).
Foreword / Seymour Papert -- 1. Foundations. The Era of Decentralization -- 2. Constructions. Constructionism. LEGO/Logo. StarLogo. Objects and Parallelism -- 3. Explorations. Simulations and Stimulations. Slime Mold. Artificial Ants. Traffic Jams. Termites. Turtles and Frogs. Turtle Ecology. New Turtle Geometry. Forest Fire. Recursive Trees -- 4. Reflections. The Centralized Mindset. Beyond the Centralized Mindset -- 5. Projections. Growing Up. Appendix B: StarLogo Overview.
Notes:
Also available as an electronic book to subscribers of netLibrary Incorporated via the WWW
LCCN:
94010956
ISBN:
0262181622
System ID No:
AFZ-6120
Internet Resource -- CALL NUMBER: Electronic book http://www.netlibrary.com/summary.asp?ID=1998
Location
Call Number
Volume
Material
DH Hill Library
QA76.58 .R47 1994
c.1
Book
Resnick's current version of Starlogo is free and can be used to build new artificial life forms.
For (much) more on alife, go to http://alife.org/
Is a Science of the Mind Possible?
Are You a Computer?
For more on PARRY and ELIZA, see:
http://www-cgi.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/ai-repository/ai/areas/classics/parry/0.html
http://www-cgi.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/ai-repository/ai/areas/classics/eliza/0.html
Three Sources of Resistance to the Computer Model of the Mind
http://www.artmatrix.com/cgi/gallery.cgi
Dualism and Thinking Things
Digression: Separation by Immaterial Causation
Behaviorism
The Turing Game
Machine Functionalism
Virtual Tour of the Ear: Hearing Mechanism
The best philosopher of psychology is Professor (of Philosophy and of Psychology) Ned Block, now at NYU. If you want additional philosophical depth in discussion of the computer model of the mind, see:
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/msb.html
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/functionalism.html
For a list of Block's papers on-line, many of which are also relevant to the third part of the course, see:
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/
School Board Problems
At The Freedom Forum or at The National Bible Association you'll find a recent document on teaching religion in public schools. What it has to say is directly relevant to our discussion, "School Board Problems." (If you download the .pdf version, you'll need the most recent version of Adobe Acrobat Reader (4.0) to view it; links are provided on the referenced page. By following links, you can also find a plain text version that is not as pretty but still contains all the relevant information.)
http://www.freedomforum.org/religion/1999/11/12oklatexts.asp
reports on a decision in Oklahoma to give increased notice to alternatives to evolutionary theory in public school texts.
Appendix: Two Court Decisions on Defining Religion
FindLaw: United States Case Law: Supreme Court
Unresolved Questions: Concluding Bibliographical Essay
Miscellaneous
The "No Significant Difference Phenomenon"
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This page last updated on July 14, 2000