Naturalism, Evolution and Culture

In my essay, I will argue that evolution does not undermine naturalism. This is because Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism rests on a false and unmotivated premise and is thus invalid. My argument consists of two parts: In the expository part, I outline Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism in considerable detail (section 2). In the argumentative part, I firstly pose William Ramsey’s challenge to Plantinga’s probabilistic claim that the reliability of human cognitive faculties is low and critically examine Plantinga’s response in order to reinforce it (section 3). Secondly, I attack Plantinga’s understanding of human evolution, which motivates his cognitive skepticism, as being unduly narrow (section 4)

Water purchases to save the Murray-Darling Basin

Murray-Darling Basin communities have suffered recurring and prolonged droughts over the past decade. Now that the rains have returned, these communities see the Sustainable Diversion Limits (SDLs) planned by the Commonwealth as a new threat. Modelling with TERM-H2O assumes that since the SDL process is voluntary, Commonwealth purchases will proceed slowly over the next 12 years. This gives farmers time to utilize water saving technologies as they emerge. This is in contrast to the relatively rapid purchase of 920 GL up until September 2010 that has already occurred. These relatively rapid sales reflect hardship associated with drought. If the Commonwealth is to reach the 3500 GL target, it may need to pay over $4 billion more to farmers for water (2010 dollars). The Commonwealth’s budget constraint will limit the volume purchased. Implementing (SDLs) will raise the price of water and the asset value of water held by farmers. At the same time, the value of irrigated land will fall, partly offsetting the increase in the asset value of water. This means that some irrigators may gain more than others. Those who do best will be those whose water entitlements have a high value relative to the value of their land. Under a voluntary scheme that proceeds slowly and gives time for further water savings to occur, there will be modest job losses across the basin. These might fall to 500 jobs below forecast by the year 2026. The extent to which farmers who sell water to the Commonwealth leave the region will have a moderate influence on regional outcomes. TERM-H2O is the only model which has been calibrated by using the drought of 2006-07 to 2008-09 to estimate regional impacts. In the drought scenario, over 6,000 jobs were lost in the short term relative to forecast across the basin. Therefore, SDL impacts are much smaller than drought impacts.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Artificial boundary conditions for stationary Navier-Stokes flows past bodies in the half-plane

We discuss artificial boundary conditions for stationary Navier-Stokes flows past bodies in the half-plane, for a range of low Reynolds numbers. When truncating the half-plane to a finite domain for numerical purposes, artificial boundaries appear. We present an explicit Dirichlet condition for the velocity at these boundaries in terms of an asymptotic expansion for the solution to the problem. We show a substantial increase in accuracy of the computed values for drag and lift when compared with results for traditional boundary conditions. We also analyze the qualitative behavior of the solutions in terms of the streamlines of the flow. The new boundary conditions are universal in the sense that they depend on a given body only through one constant, which can be determined in a feed-back loop as part of the solution process

CGE modelling of the resources boom in Indonesia and Australia using TERM

The sharp increase in Australia's terms of trade since 2003-04 has dramatic regional and sectoral implications. Mining-intensive regions have gained from the jump in export prices. Import-competing sectors have faced greater competition both from falling import prices and due to rising demand for domestic factors from the mining sectors. The drought of 2006 will widen the gap between winning and losing regions. In Indonesia, even if we assume that the oil extraction sector is facing resource depletion, a long-run terms-of-trade improvement may result in aggregate consumption increasing should real GDP fall relative to the base case. The TERM framework is highly suitable for modelling Brazil and China, each with around 30 regions.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,