The most notorious argument presented in favour of the theory that asserts that living beings are necessarily the result of a conscious and deliberate act of intelligent creation, is William Dembski’s ‘explanatory filter’ (EF). According to this argument, when explaining anything, we have three alternatives: first, we shall try to explain it as the result […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Antarctic ice growing at record-setting pace Antarctic sea ice is on track to reach a record high this month while Arctic ice has decreased to its sixth-lowest level, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Antarctic ice usually reaches its maximum level each September, about the same time as the Arctic reaches its […]
In the last decades, the most popular philosophical defence of scientific realism has been what is known as the ‘no miracle argument’ (NMA; Putnam 1981). Though there is a range of different interpretations of NMA, it typically asserts that scientific realism is ‘the best explanation’ (or perhaps, the only reasonable one) of the ‘success of […]
This is the English version of a section in Ferreira (2014) , a paper dedicated to overview the experiments in Industrial Organization, to appear in Revista de Economía Industrial, and is reproduced here with the permission of the journal. In 1994, the American FCC (Federal Communications Commission) decided to conduct an auction to allocate the […]
Author: Jaume Navarro received his PhD in history of science from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (1998). He has been a researcher at the universities of Cambridge, Imperial College (London) and the Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Berlin). Currently he is an Ikerbasque Research Professor and a member of the Praxis Group at the Faculty […]
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Long extinct squirrel-like creatures hold clues to earlier mammal evolution Mammals may have evolved much earlier than previously thought, according to researchers who’ve been studying the fossils of squirrel-like creatures that date back about 160 million years to the Triassic Period. The creatures have mammalian features and are from previously unknown species of haramiyid, which […]
Author: Katy Price is a lecturer in modern and contemporary literature at Queen Mary University of London. ‘ We must live before we can attain to either intelligence or control at all. We must sleep if we are not to find ourselves, at death, helplessly strange to the new conditions. And we must die before […]
Humanities & Social Sciences • Science • Technology • Weekly Selection
Coffee genome offers insights on why caffeine is produced Scientists have cracked the genome of Coffea canephora, one source of coffee beans, to gain insights into how caffeine evolved and why plants make it. A study published in Science details the complex evolution of caffeine in coffee and the ways in which that differs from […]
That prediction is one of the main goals of science goes without saying, but how exactly predictive success contributes to the epistemic value of a scientific theory has proven to be an awfully complicated philosophical riddle for centuries. By ‘epistemic value’ I don’t mean something for which we can offer a formal definition (this is […]
One of the most common misconceptions regarding inequality consists of thinking that an unequal distribution of resources is the result of an unequal effort to achieve them. Although this might be the case in certain situations, when it comes to particular individuals, the fact is that there are systemic structural forces governing the result of […]