Do You Really Have to Believe?

Do You Believe in Presentiment?

with, the supernatural, which would seem to relegate it to the domain of the theologian or the preacher ? To which of these it more properly belongs, need not be determined at present, but I may be permitted to add that I think it may be accounted for on either hypothesis, without any serious offence to, or violent disruption of, existing beliefs, and 1 heartily agree with Copland* when he says...

How much do you believe?

This paper responds to a number of criticisms of Dempster-Shafer theory made by Judea Pearl. He criticises Dempster-Shafer belief for not obeying the laws of Bayesian belief," however, these laws lead to well-known problems in the face of ignorance, and seem unreasonably restrictive. It is argued that it is not reasonable to expect a measure of belief to obey Pearl's sandwich principle. The sta...

Unravelling Mycosphaerella: do you believe in genera?

Many fungal genera have been defined based on single characters considered to be informative at the generic level. In addition, many unrelated taxa have been aggregated in genera because they shared apparently similar morphological characters arising from adaptation to similar niches and convergent evolution. This problem is aptly illustrated in Mycosphaerella. In its broadest definition, this ...

Do you believe in Santa Claus?

Do You Believe In Global Warming?

Very often, when I talk to the public or the media about “global warming”, they ask me if I believe in global warming. This unfortunate question is apparently very popular among scientists as well. And I say ‘unfortunate’ because when we are dealing with a scientific problem ‘believing’ has no place. In science we either ‘prove’ or ‘disprove’. We ‘believe’ only when we cannot possibly prove a t...