Move over Mother Theresa! Wild chimps sometimes share food with others
| October 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Evolution, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
From ScienceDaily: Sharing meat after hunting and exchanging other valued food items is considered key in the evolution of cooperation in human societies. One prominent idea is that humans share valuable foods to gain future favors, such that those we chose to share with are more likely to cooperate with us in the future. Despite […]
Science as tourist studies among the hunter-gatherers
| October 14, 2018 | Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind |
From report on a study of the rules developed by East African hunter-gatherers (the Hadza) around sharing food: Some camps share food more than others, but Hadza circulate among all camps rather than clustering in the most cooperative ones. Hadza individuals adjust their willingness to share food to the accepted standards, or social norms, of […]
Museum director: “Darwin’s theory of evolution not only underpins all biological science, it has an immense predictive power.”
| October 14, 2018 | Culture, Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Religion, science education |
And he is serious. Even bout the predictive power. At the Guardian Michael Dixon, director of London’s Natural History Museum is upset about the downplaying the teaching of evolution which he perceives to be happening in the United State and Israel (not many details offered). Sarah Chaffee reminds us: If you remember, this is the […]
Jonathan Bartlett: The spiritual side of a digital society
| October 14, 2018 | Culture, Intelligent Design, Mind, Spirituality |
The more that software encompasses the whole of life, the more it needs to take into account the whole of the person using it: In the early days of computing, software developers could completely ignore the spiritual needs of users. Computers were a tool—usually a business tool, used for brief periods to accomplish a task. […]
Michael Egnor: Does your brain construct your conscious reality?
| October 13, 2018 | Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
Part I A reply to computational neuroscientist Anil Seth’s recent TED talk Anil Seth’s talk is a breathtaking compendium of fallacies on the mind and the brain. We can learn a lot from him—by understanding the errors into which he falls and the way out of those errors. Part II Does your brain construct your conscious […]
Michael Egnor: Does brain stimulation research challenge free will?
| October 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Mind, Naturalism |
If we can be forced to *want* something, is the will still free? If an electrode is applied to a specific brain region during “awake” neurosurgery, the patient may experience a strong desire to perform a related action and may even be mistaken about whether he has done so. For example, the study Movement intention […]
Jay Richards: A Short Argument Against the Materialist Account of the Mind
| October 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
You can picture yourself eating a chocolate ice cream sundae: John Searle’s Chinese Room scenario is the most famous argument against the “strong AI” presumption that computation-writ-large-and-fast will become consciousness: … His argument shows that computers work at the level of syntax, whereas human agents work at the level of meaning: … I still find […]
Fossil Discontinuities: A Refutation of Darwinism and Confirmation of Intelligent Design
| October 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Video |
Vid with Gunter Bechly The fossil record is dominated by abrupt appearances of new body plans and new groups of organisms. This conflicts with the gradualistic prediction of Darwinian Evolution. Here 18 explosive origins in the history of life are described, demonstrating that the famous Cambrian Explosion is far from being the exception to the […]
ID-related posts deleted from friendly Facebook pages as spam
| October 13, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Media |
I (O’Leary for News) just discovered this fact because, acting on a tip, I was trying to find out whether mine was one of the millions of recently hacked accounts. I haven’t found that out yet but here is a list of posts Facebook removed from various groups’ Facebook pages as spam: Sociologist Steve Fuller: How […]
Organisms found that hover indefinitely between life and death
| October 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology |
Researchers have found some of the oldest and slowest life forms on Earth: In a bid to hone in on the lower energy limits for life, Hans Røy at Aarhus University in Denmark probed the clays below the North Pacific gyre. Under the microscope, he found a community made up of bacteria and single-celled organisms called […]
Cosmologist: String theory is incompatible with dark energy
| October 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Rob Sheldon mentioned a story going the rounds earlier today, about whether dark energy was “even allowed.” Here’s the story, from ScienceDaily: In string theory, a paradigm shift could be imminent. In June, a team of string theorists from Harvard and Caltech published a conjecture which sounded revolutionary: String theory is said to be fundamentally […]
Rob Sheldon on why so many sciences seem to be devolving – not just social sciences
| October 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Peer review, Physics, Psychology |
Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon, occasioned by the social sciences’ war on empirical fact and objectivity: — Duke University professor John Staddon’s Quillette article is particularly relevant in light of the recent 20-paper hoax on the “grievance studies” division of sociology. As John Ioannidis has observed, many areas of science are suffering from “non-reproducibility.” […]
Social sciences: The war on empirical fact and objectivity
| October 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Psychology, Science |
Some of us have a perhaps unhealthy fascination with just how bad the social sciences have become. We hope we can justify our amazement (and hilarity) over the easy hoaxes and all that on the grounds that real science also faces a war on math (“say goodbye to x and y”). Watching what happens to […]
New Scientist: Monkeys “look like” they are domesticating wolves
| October 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Ecology, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
Then that is the monkeys’ mistake, not the wolves’: In the alpine grasslands of eastern Africa, Ethiopian wolves and gelada monkeys are giving peace a chance. The geladas – a type of baboon – tolerate wolves wandering right through the middle of their herds, while the wolves ignore potential meals of baby geladas in favour […]
Stephen Hawking’s final paper, just released, tackled the “information paradox”
| October 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Information, Intelligent Design, Physics |
Quantum theory specifies that information is never lost but what happens to the information when a black hole vanishes? In the latest paper, Hawking (1942-2018) and his colleagues show how some information at least may be preserved. Toss an object into a black hole and the black hole’s temperature ought to change. So too will a […]
Rob Sheldon on the failure of selfish gene theory and peacocks, as well as bees
| October 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Intelligent Design |
Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon writes to offer some thoughts on the recent study of bees, which failed to confirm selfish gene thinking as an explanation for communal life: This is really a most interesting study. If you recall, E. O. Wilson got fame and glory for studying ants. The problem he addressed, is […]
Researchers: The selfish gene does not drive cooperation after all
| October 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Genetics isn’t as important as once thought for the evolution of altruistic social behavior in some organisms, a new insight into a decade-long debate. This is the first empirical evidence that suggests social behavior in eusocial species — organisms that are highly organized, with divisions of infertile workers — is only mildly attributed […]
Why does more gender equality lead to fewer women in science?
| October 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intelligent Design, Science |
The Atlantic is asking: Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap only grows worse from there: Just 18 percent of American computer-science college degrees go to women. This is in the United States, where many college […]
Podcast: Winston Ewert on the Dependency Graph vs. Darwin’s Tree of Life, Part 1
| October 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design, Tree of life |
Here: On this episode of ID the Future, guest host Robert J. Marks talks with Dr. Winston Ewert about Ewert’s groundbreaking new hypothesis challenging Darwin’s common descent tree of life. The new model is based on the well-established technique of repurposing software code in different software projects. Ewert, a senior researcher at Biologic and the […]
Researchers: Pheromone-sensing gene evolved over 400 million years ago
| October 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) have discovered a gene that appears to play a vital role in pheromone sensing. The gene is conserved across fish and mammals and over 400 million years of vertebrate evolution, indicating that the pheromone sensing system is much more ancient than previously believed. This discovery […]
