Discovering the AI in your life By Berry Billingsley with additional creative input and expert knowledge by Ted Selker Dr Berry Billingsley is Professor in Science Education at Canterbury Christ Church University. Dr Ted Selker is a computer scientist and a designer of new ways to interact with machines.   For decades we've been told to expect artificially intelligent machines and for decades we've prepared ourselves and each other with stories about what they will be like. But Asimov’s stories about robots didn’t prepare us for GenAI chatbots like Bing Chat, Bard and ChatGPT. And I think I am probably more affected than most. My interest is not only personal but also professional. As a teacher and university academic I run workshops for students of all ages to

Remembering Ron Numbers Edward J Larson and Michael Ruse   Recollections of Ron Numbers by Edward J. Larson I first met Ron – Professor Numbers then, of course – when I returned to the University of Wisconsin in 1982 to complete my Ph.D. in the history of science. He had been there by the mid-1970s, when I earned my M.A. in field, but I had not known of him then.  After being exiled from Loma Linda College for having lost his Adventist religious faith and documenting the reasons, Ron found refuge at UW in some sort of position that eventually evolved into a chaired professorship. Ron had achieved tenure at Wisconsin by the time I met him but yet renowned. My intended major professor Bill Coleman having died,

The Battle between Mechanism and Organicism in Biology   Michael J. Reiss and Michael Ruse   The Scientific Revolution, which we can conveniently bracket as lasting from Copernicus to Newton, was above all a change in what linguists call ‘root metaphors’, from seeing the world as an organism – organicism – to seeing the world as a machine – mechanism. To use other language, science pre-Revolution demanded that one think of entities as functioning wholes, ‘holism’; science post-Revolution worked by looking at entities as composed of individual parts, ‘reductionism’. However, the flies in the mechanistic ointment are living organisms. They seem too intricately constructed for many to think that they could be the product of the blind laws we associate with machines.   People worried about this problem

Mind’s Role in Nature Bill Phillips   The common assumption of a fundamental separation between science and religious faiths resonates with the common assumption of a fundamental separation between minds and brains. Indeed, many take it for granted that religious faiths and ethics are creations of the human mind. Maybe they are, but, even if so, they are not thereby either invalidated or isolated from science. If minds are thought of as being fundamentally separate from brains, then minds, faiths, and morality can be thought of as existing within a fundamentally different realm from that of brains and science. Recent discoveries relating basic aspects of mental life to their cellular foundations may therefore be of interest to many in the ISSR and beyond because they imply that religious

Magisteria Attempts to ‘tidy up’ the relationship between science and religion, either the historical relationship or any normative understanding of their interaction, are, it seems, doomed to failure. The two have been shackled together by dint of a powerful but ill-fitting metaphor for about 150 years, since the chemist and would-be intellectual historian John Draper helped reify the disciplines and their alleged relationship in his book History of the Conflict between Religion and Science. His idea that the two entities were in fundamental conflict was true enough to be believable, at least in the atmosphere of the later nineteenth century, if not true enough to be actually true. The metaphor stuck. Attempts to revise this model have been underway since the history of science and religion became its