West: Unfortunately, the Buffalo shooter’s evolutionary racism is not an outlier among recent mass killers. Arguments drawn from evolution have been prominent in the ideologies of many mass shooters in recent years, including Anders Breivik in 2011, a Norwegian mass murderer cited as a role model by the Buffalo shooter. Other shooters smitten by Darwinian evolution have included the Columbine High School shooters in 1999, Finnish shooter Pekka Eric Auvinen in 2007, the Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter in 2009, and the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooter in 2019.
Does a puzzling quantum scenario violate the conservation of energy?
If the scenario really violates the Law of Conservation of Energy, all bets are likely off about evolution issues of any type. Most likely, though, there is another explanation.
Researchers: Ediacaran explosion? There were complex ecosystems before the Cambrian
One can claim that the Cambrian explosion was nothing new only at the risk of shortening the time to establish complex ecologies, which should begin to create doubt about random processes in an active mind.
At Mind Matters News: Can largely rearranged genomes explain why octopuses are smart?
Takehome: It’s still not clear just how intelligence develops in a life form. The relationship between massive genome rearrangement and very high intelligence in an invertebrate remains unclear but it is a promising research avenue.
Is China seriously contemplating [imminent?] invasion of Taiwan?
In 1958, full orbed hot war threatened to break out after dogfights over the Taiwan straights that saw a breakthrough use of Sidewinder missiles that brought down several Red Chinese Migs. We may be contemplating that brink again, if a current report on a claimed, leaked audiotape of discussions by Chinese authorities is credible. (The Read More…
830 mya organisms found in Australia may still be alive
The implications for finding fossil remnants of life on Mars are addressed in the article. The researchers acknowledge that survival of microorganisms over geological timescales is “not fully understood.”
At Mind Matters News: Claim: Honeybees, “like humans” can tell odd vs. even numbers
Bees are not six-legged humans. They are incorporating the mathematical structure of the universe into their survival strategies. The researchers mainly demonstrated that we can use operant conditioning on bees.
Researchers: Eukaryotes got started from a merger between bacteria and archaea, without oxygen
On the whole, it might be easier to conclude that the timing is somewhat off than that complex life started without oxygen. But symbiosis is an intriguing theory nonetheless.
At Mind Matters News: Must we be able to reason to be thought of as human persons?
Reason is a natural quality of the human being but, like everything in nature, it develops in stages. One can’t say it doesn’t exist when undeveloped.
At Nautilus, a science writer muses on efforts to grapple with time — the universe’s odd dimension
Annaka Harris: “I think the flow of time is not part of the fundamental structure of reality,” theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli tells me. He is currently working on a theory of quantum gravity in which the variable of time plays no part.”
Michael Egnor muses on some shaky arguments for abortion
Egnor: “if the fetus is a part of the mother’s body, then all pregnant women are chromosomal mosaics. That is, they are organisms that have two sets of genomes. Chromosome mosaicism is a rare disorder and is not synonymous with pregnancy.”
Studies of co-evolution biased toward “striking and exaggerated phenotypes”, researchers say
The authors seem to suspect that “the widespread impression that coevolution is a rare and quirky sideshow to the day-to-day grind of ecology and evolution” is wrong and that new tools for uncovering it will show it to be more common. Co-evolution must require a fair amount of cooperation between utterly different life forms. If natural selection is the model, one failure would end a multi-stage process.
Rebranding some junk DNA as spam DNA
Perhaps science is a bit more like business than we think. In business, products get rebranded when vice presidents outnumber customers for the old brand.
At Mind Matters News: Among 5000 known exoplanets, there are some really strange ones
To sum up, whatever we see or read about planets in science fiction, something out there is likely stranger still. It will be most interesting to see how many of the more conventional exoplanets have life and if there is in fact a reliable formula for predicting it. Those who claim that Earth is just an ordinary planet are certainly wrong — but is Earth unique? The universe is fine-tuned, as is Earth, and that would be an argument for life on exoplanets.
Denton’s prior fitness argument: Everything seems to have come together to produce humans
But didn’t Freeman Dyson (1923–2020) say, “The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.” The idea isn’t new; there’s just much more evidence for it.