Researchers: The new James Webb Space Telescope, which launches in October, “could feasibly detect ammonia around six gas dwarf planets after just a few orbits”
Indian jumping ants can shrink and regrow their brains
It’s certainly true that the brain is plastic. but human brains can do more remarkable things than ant brains. People can function with split brains or half a brain or hardly any brain and be intellectually normal. We didn’t know that before brain scanning.
From a research paper: “It’s amazing how clear cut the change from ‘no dinosaurs’ to ‘all dinosaurs’ was.”
David Klinghoffer: The paper acknowledges an “explosive increase in dinosaurian abundance.” As Dr. Bechly says, that’s the kind of observation you wouldn’t be surprised at coming from the dreaded “creationists,” and yet it’s a straightforward finding of mainstream paleontology. Watch the rest below, and enjoy.
String theory skeptic Peter Woit reflects on Stephen Hawking
Peter Woit on Hawking’s 2010 The Grand Design, co-written with Leonard Mlodinow: ” I wrote about this book in some detail here. Put bluntly, it was an atrocious rehash of the worst nonsense about M-theory and the string theory landscape, with an argument for atheism thrown in to get more public attention. This is the sort of thing that has done a huge amount of damage to both the public understanding of fundamental physics, and even to the field itself.”
Coyne Believes a Version of “Turtles all the Way Down”
As our News Desk has noted, over at Mind Matters Michael Egnor engages with Jerry Coyne on whether, as a matter of logic, the cosmos can be self-existent. Egnor says no, and one reason he gives is the logical principle that any causal chain points to a first cause. He writes: Imagine a chain hanging Read More…
Sabine Hossenfelder: Does the universe have higher dimensions?
Hossenfelder: If one adds 7 dimensions of space to our normal three dimensions, then one can describe all of the fundamental forces of nature geometrically. And that sounds like a really promising idea for a unified theory of physics. Indeed, in the early 1980s, the string theorist Edward Witten thought it was intriguing that seven additional dimensions of space is also the maximum for supergravity. However, that numerical coincidence turned out to not lead anywhere. This geometric construction of fundamental forces which is called Kaluza-Klein theory, suffers from several problems that no one has managed to solved.
Michael Egnor to Jerry Coyne: Why the universe itself can’t be the most fundamental thing
Egnor: The cause of the universe must be something other than the universe itself and must have the power to cause things independently of the laws of nature. That is what all men call God.
Robert J. Marks: How materialism proves unbounded scientific ignorance
Mathematician Kurt Gödel showed that there is an infinite number of truths that are provably unprovable. That’s bad news for scientism, though not for science.
“‘Oumuamua is a spacecraft!” astronomer has come up with a SENSIBLE idea: Search the Moon
Avi Loeb has come up with a very reasonable idea for searching for evidence of other civilizations in our galaxy: Look for alien debris on our still, lifeless, atmosphere-free Moon.
Philosopher Mary Midgeley (1919–2018) on scientism
At RealClearScience: Science is a method and discipline, but Scientism is something more – it establishes a set of beliefs by which to view things. It sees science as “realistic” or “just the facts”, like some objective totem. What’s more, Midgley argued that Scientism is invariably aligned with some kind of excessive reductionism, where everything is reduced to neurons or evolutionary psychology, for instance.
Researchers: Cyanobacteria were an important part of marine ecosystems 1400 million years ago
Well then, how did a complex process like photosynthesis get the time to “evolve” by natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism)? Researchers (wisely, for now) state such findings without making any obvious inferences. But the number of these situations is building.
If photosynthesis could really be as old as life itself…
Well, that’s good news for the hope of finding life on other planets! But researchers hoping to rush in and save Darwinism should know that if the earliest organisms could photosynthesize, an intelligent origin of life is virtually certain.
What has information theory to say about talking to spiders?
There’s a way we can do that, provided the spider has anything to say. One of the presentations at the American Chemical Society’s Spring 2021 meeting featured an algorithm that makes music from the analysis of spiders’ webs.
The Twin Peaks of the Second Amendment
In the wake of another senseless shooting yesterday we can expect progressive attacks on our Second Amendment freedom to become even more shrill and frenetic. That is why now is a good time to go back to basics. In this essay I will explain the history and theoretical underpinnings of the Second Amendment and discuss Read More…
At Popular Mechanics: The universe is a “machine that keeps learning”
It sounds as though some would like to hold onto the name of Darwinism while — in reality — adopting panpsychism. That would be consistent with other trends we’ve noted.