


































v2018i1


Volume 1, Issue 1

News

Blyth Institute Mobile Microscopy
Lab Makes Appearances

The Blyth Institute’s mobile microscopy laboratory has
been touring homeschooling conventions in the Oklahoma
area. The goal of the lab is to provide students (and their
parents) the ability to have a hands-on look at life at the
tiniest levels, and to have experience with some of the tools
that make modern discovery possible.

During the lab sessions, Blyth Institute volunteers show
students how to take samples, make simple stains, and view
their samples under the microscope. The sessions are usu-
ally employ fairly standard types of samples, such as onion
skin, pond water, and vegetable ferments. Various samples
of flowers and other objects are made available for viewing
under the stereo microscope.

There is a limit to the amount of actual lab work that can be
down in a crowd, but getting students used to the methods
and thought processes behind it can start them thinking
about what goes in to the scientific discoveries they will
learn during their education.

AM-Nat Business and Technology
Conference Information

Originally, The Blyth Institute had planned to do another
Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism conference fo-
cused on business and technology theory and applications.
However, this idea is sufficiently new and different that we
have had trouble sourcing talks for such a conference. We
are still planning to do something along these lines, but
instead of our normal conference format, we are currently
planning on doing a series of introductory seminars to spark
further interest in the topic.

MindMatters: Using Technology
Instead of Worshipping It

The technology blog MindMatters (https://
mindmatters.ai) recently appeared on the scene. It
is the news and popular content wing of the Walter
Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.
The blog’s authors include several members of The Blyth
Institute. The topics are wide-ranging, but the focus is on
artificial intelligence and its role within society. It deals
with the good and the bad of technology, proper use and
misuse, and the personal, moral, and spiritual impacts
that technology can have.

Blyth Institute Press Books Now
Available Online

In addition to hosting the online version of this journal,
https://journals.blythinstitute.org/ will also hold
the digital editions of Blyth Institute Press books, including
Engineering and the Ultimate and Naturalism and Its Al-
ternatives in Scientific Methodologies. The Blyth Institute
also recently registered with the DOI network, so all papers
and chapters will receive a DOI. For those unaware, a DOI
makes referencing and linking scholarly material easier.

New Model of Species Relationships
Proposed

In the latest issue of Bio-Complexity, Winston Ewert pro-
posed a new model of species relationship—the dependency
graph. His paper, “The Dependency Graph of Life,” shows
that the relationships among species based on their gene
families better represents a dependency graph than a tree.
Ewert shows that, in absence of the proper model, depen-
dency graphs look like trees when compared to random
distributions (which is what they are normally compared
against in the literature). This is why the tree hypothesis
has such vigorous support—when compared against a ran-



58 News

dom null model, the data looks like a tree. However, when
compared against a dependency graph, the data looks ex-
ceptionally more like a dependency graph than a tree.

While this is definitely an exciting development, this re-
search is still in its early stages, and many questions are
unanswered. Further work will show what model of species
relationships best fits the data.

Latest Business Trends Combine AI
and Human Creativity

Early work in AI had the long-term goal of replacing hu-
man creativity with machine intelligence. However, over the
years, it is becoming increasingly evident that the best AI
models actually include human input at various stages. For
instance, in Eric Holloway’s “Imagination Sampling” paper
(in Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Method-
ologies, 2016), he suggested that AI could be augmented
by including humans in exploring the hypothesis space. A
new European software company takes this idea to the ex-
treme. Engineer.ai, for instance, is a new startup that uses
an AI to help build new software projects, and incorporates
human talent on an as-needed basis.

Some companies, such as iFLYTEK, have been caught using
humans instead of AIs, at least in demos. To some extent,
this isn’t even really a problem, as the user would not care
whether the work is done by a computer or by a human.
However, for investors, it is important to know if the core
technology is computing, which is relatively cheap to source,
or humans, who tend to be more expensive. In any case, for
difficult jobs, we are finding more and more that humans
and computers each have important but distinct roles.

Health Risks of Mutation
Accumulation

Recently, John Sanford gave a talk at the NIH on the
question of whether or not mutation accumulation poses a
health risk to humans. Sanford’s population genetics simu-
lator, Mendel’s Accountant, has shown repeatedly the prob-
lem of getting rid of slightly deleterious mutations through
natural selection. Below a certain threshold, deleterious
mutations are essentially invisible to natural selection, and
therefore, according to standard population genetic models,
they accumulate in populations which eventually experience
mutational meltdowns. In his NIH talk, Sanford discusses

the medical implications of this result. The talk is available
at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqIjnol9uh8 .

Blyth Institute Director Releases
New Calculus Book

Blyth Institute director Jonathan Bartlett released his new
calculus book titled Calculus from the Ground Up, as well
as a full solution manual. This book was developed while
teaching calculus to homeschool co-op classes. Being frus-
trated with calculus books that seemed to miss the actual
beauty and wonder of calculus, Bartlett decided to embark
on a quest to write his own that would capture the aes-
thetics as well as the content of calculus. As an example,
in the section on representing functions as series, the book
uses this as a springboard to a general discussion of how to
solve impossible problems.

New Types of Journals Starting to
Take Hold

While the Internet brought many new methods of publica-
tion (online, Open Access, etc.), other innovations in aca-
demic publishing have gone relatively unnoticed. While the
traditional journals remain the mainstay of published aca-
demic content, some other types of journals are starting to
arise.

Quillette (https://quillette.com/) is a social issues jour-
nal founded in 2015 dedicated to a more free exchange of
ideas not bound by typical norms. It includes topics rang-
ing from why you should drop out of school to the way
that trans activism negatively affects the political speech
of women.

Next is the upcoming Journal of Controversial Ideas. This
journal is based on the fact that many researchers have been
attacked and their academic freedom threatened due to the
controversial nature of their research. This journal aims to
provide an outlet for communicating valid but unpopular
findings, where the researchers can use aliases to protect
their privacy.

On the science side is the journal Inference: Interna-
tional Review of Science (https://inference-review.
com/). The goal of this journal is be to science what art
criticism is to art. Essentially, the idea is that science needs
critics as much as it does cheerleaders. Since the Internet



Volume 1, Issue 1

The Blyth Institute 59

is awash in sites declaring just how much they love sci-
ence (and every ridiculous paper and press release put out
by science organizations), they are providing (among other
things) a critical review of what is being published.

Finally, this journal is providing a way to solidify the front-
end of science. Journals used to provide more space for
conjectural and early-stage ideas. Communications of The
Blyth Institute aims to prime the pump of research while
still maintaining a solid review process.

It remains to be seen whether these publications will suc-
ceed in their aim, if others will succeed in their place, or if,
perhaps, some of the publications are altogether misguided.
In any case, as traditional journals have closed themselves
off from certain areas of inquiry and analysis, new and spe-
cialized journals are rising to fill the vacuum left behind.


