Reg the Fronkey Farmer

As I prepared Sunday School this week, I noticed that it had quite a few posts about Christian Nationalism. That got me thinking about how Ireland in the past functioned very much like a Christian Nationalist state, even if that term wasn’t used at the time. Not fascistic Christian Nationalism like the U.S. fringe wants today, but a soft tacit t…[Read more]

Have a great week everyone and a peaceful and pleasant Thanksgiving.

Our lineage split from the other apes circa 5–7 million years ago. That’s when the hominin line begins. Homo erectus appears much later, around 1.9 million years ago and evolved in Africa and yes, they were the first major successful wave to leave Africa. I think they first spread in Eurasia.

But cooperative breeding, known as ‘[Read more]

Surely we grew bigger and more complex brains throughout our evolution, leaving the chimpanzee brain behind a long time ago.

Chimps are not frozen in evolutionary time, stuck at a checkpoint on the way to being human. Modern chimps have been evolving for the exact same 6–8 million years since our lineages split from a shared common ancestor.  …[Read more]

Measles are being spotted more often……

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20702883/

Two students ultimately outperformed the chimp on the brief-display condition. The authors conclude there’s no evidence for a fundamentally superior spatial memory system in chimps; intensive training plus strategy can explain Ayumu-level performance.

Some new science on gene editing…..

Summary from AI;

Most rare diseases aren’t “rare” in aggregate — 400 million people worldwide have one.
But each specific mutation is rare, so big pharma won’t touch them because the economics are hopeless.

Liu’s new approach (PERT) is a mutation-agnostic gene-editing engine for diseases caused by prematur…[Read more]

Personally, I disagree somewhat with the heading that “Groupthink in science isn’t a problem; it’s a myth.”

In principle, yes. In practice, Groupthink happens whenever careers, funding, prestige, or consensus incentives push people to ‘not rock the boat’. Science has mechanisms to counter this, but those mechanisms are imperfect.…[Read more]

This is going to be a hugely successful album. Millions of plays already on Spotify. Not my usual scene but the musicianship is top class.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lux_(Rosal%C3%ADa_album)

There’s no evidence that a cartel vs government conflict is directly causing measles vaccine supply problems in Mexico. But cartel control of territory does indirectly make healthcare delivery harder in some regions. So the relationship is indirect and structural, not the main driver. Public-health workers sometimes avoid cartel-dominated areas. T…[Read more]

Did I not answer your questions? Oh, I didn’t! I would call them secondary to the main questions about R nought, the anti-vax movement, and flaws or laziness in human cognition.

@PopeBeanie – Yes, you are correct with the basics of ‘R Nought (12-18). But it does not explain why Canada lost elimination status before the US. But elimination statu…[Read more]

..or at least a non sequitur….as most people who use the Galileo Gambit aren’t making a formal logical argument….it appeals not to reason but to ego, making it less an argument and more a psychological defense mechanism.

Yes, I guess it is more of a cognitive bias than a logical fallacy.

Cheers Strega! Hope all is good with you!

I am still thinking about what the ideas of the Enlightenment……..

The Lillian Hellman Fallacy and the Galileo Gambit.

There’s a predictable pattern in modern argument, especially online, where someone with a weak or poorly supported claim begins by presenting themselves as a courageous dissenter—someone who “refuses to cut their consc…[Read more]

Have a great week!

Appreciate it, PopeBeanie….I just rhyme what the evidence taught.
Gift of the gab, not the gift of God……
Critical thinking’s my creed, skepticism my sport.

Once you no longer reserve a hidden compartment in your reasoning for “maybe there’s a divine exception,” the entire field of view opens up. You stop having to protect contradictions, and patterns that were once blurred by reverence or taboo become visible. I don’t carry a residual conceptual veto. When you remove that invisible constraint of ma…[Read more]