Died out as a distinct ethnic group, that is. We are also told that current humans and Neanderthals definitely interbred. From LiveScience: Neanderthals may have died off because they failed to harness the power of fire to the extent their human cousins did, a new data analysis suggests. Using fire for cooking would have allowed these other groups of ancient human relatives to get more calories from the same amount of food, thereby edging out the Neanderthal population. Over time, the anatomically modern human population would have risen, while the Neanderthal population plummeted toward extinction, according to the model. Last month, a speculation walloped through the pop science media that wolves helped current humans kill off Neanderthals. That thesis is vulnerable Read More ›

Formamide detected in Nebulosa NGC1333/NASA-Spitzer From ScienceDaily: One of science’s greatest challenges is learning about the origin of life and its precursor molecules. Formamide (NH2CHO) is an excellent candidate for helping to search for answers as it contains four essential elements (nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon and oxygen), and can synthesise amino acids, carbohydrates, nucleic acids and other key compounds for living organisms. However, this molecule is also abundant in space, mainly in molecular clouds or the concentrations of gas and dust where stars are born. This has been confirmed by an international team of researchers, including Spanish investigators, after searching for formamide in ten star-forming regions. “We have detected formamide in five protosuns, which proves that this molecule (in all probability Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The new research, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that structures once thought to be Earth’s oldest microfossils do not compare with younger fossil candidates but have, instead, the character of peculiarly shaped minerals. In 1993, US scientist Bill Schopf described tiny carbon-rich filaments within the 3.46 billion-year-old Apex chert (fine-grained sedimentary rock) from the Pilbara region of Western Australia, which he likened to certain forms of bacteria, including cyanobacteria. The apparent find was controversial but the ensuing debate was hard to resolve until more advanced equipment became available, at which point: Now Dr David Wacey, a Marie Curie Fellow in Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, in collaboration with the late Professor Read More ›

At Braindecoder: “Spiders are very smart, that’s why we’re studying them,” says Ronald Hoy, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University. “They use visual cues to steer by, and the kind of mazes that they can solve is considered to be pretty impressive for an invertebrate.” There is a limit to how small neurons can get, so Perhaps as a solution to space limits, some small spiders have brains that spill out all the way into their legs. Scientists have discovered that the central nervous systems of the smallest spiders fill up almost 80 percent of their total body cavity, including about a quarter of the space inside their legs. More. It was easier to believe in Darwinism Read More ›

Interesting piece on John Searle by Frank Free man at Weekly Standard: Mistake Number One is the idea “that there is some special problem about the relation of the mind to the body, consciousness to the brain, and in their fixation on the illusion that there is a problem, philosophers have fastened onto different solutions to the problem.” Mistake Number Two “is the mistake of supposing that we never directly perceive objects and states of affairs in the world, but directly perceive only our subjective experiences.” So that’s all right then. All the people who perceive a problem can just take a well-deserved break. A proponent of Direct Realism, Searle argues, Like Wittgenstein, but with less openness, he seems to Read More ›

Story here. For the first time in US history, a judge has decreed that a pair of chimpanzees held at a university research facility are covered by the same laws that govern the detention of humans, effectively rendering the animals as legal “people” in the eyes of the law. New York Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe said that the apes, held at Stony Brook University for research purposes, are covered by a writ of habeas corpus — a basic legal principle that lets people challenge the validity of their detention. The bag of chemicals we call “ape” is in principle no different from the bag of chemicals we call “human.” Justice Douglas famously wanted to extend rights to rocks and Read More ›

In response to Science writer boilerplate Jonathan Wells writes to say, Based on my reading of thousands of Peer-Reviewed Articles in the professional literature, I’ve distilled a template for writing scientific articles that deal with evolution: 1. Darwinian evolution is a fact. 2. We used [technique(s)] to study [feature(s)] in [name of species], and we unexpectedly found [results inconsistent with Darwinian evolution]. 3. We propose [clever speculations], which might explain why the results appear to conflict with evolutionary theory. 4. We conclude that Darwinian evolution is a fact. Yes, it’s a fact, all right. About the mindset of the people who do that. Wells is the author of The Myth of Junk DNA, which is not short of examples on Read More ›

So claims writer Mark Strauss at Slate: Ridiculing astrobiologists is a favorite sport at the Discovery Institute, which complains on its news site that “hardly a month goes by lately when the science media fail to breathlessly report the discovery of a new planet, in some star’s ‘habitable zone,’ that might hypothetically be capable of supporting life.” The institute attributes the coverage in part to hype purposefully generated by “organized science” to shake down the government for grant money. But the creationists also see a more sinister agenda than naked greed. They place astrobiologists among the ranks of the “Darwin Brigades” who have always been “eager to undermine human exceptionalism,” since “the alleged ordinariness of the human race was vital Read More ›

David Bentley Hart calls subjective self-awareness the “primordial datum.” It is a fact that cannot not be known. It follows that everyone knows it to be a fact. Denying that it is a fact immediately descends into absurdity. Consider “I deny that I am subjectively self-aware.” Here is a chart of the chemicals that make up the human body: A group of oxygen atoms do not have the capacity to deny a truth claim. I am sure you would agree that the sentence “the oxygen atoms denied truth claim X” is absurd, no matter what X is. What is true for oxygen is also true for the atoms of the other elements of the body, i.e., carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, Read More ›

It seems that this is the week in which eigenstate has insisted on making himself the poster child for materialist lunacies. OK. We will oblige him and use his latest as the basis for a post on the licit and illicit use of language. What is our goal when we use language? The answer to that question seems obvious. Unless we are intentionally trying to obscure, prevaricate, or dissemble, our goal is to convey our true meaning to those with whom we are trying to communicate. How do we convey meaning? To answer that we need to answer a more basic question. What does it mean to mean? I am sure most people will agree with Wittgenstein on this point. Read More ›

Recently, StephenB wrote, RDFish is wrong; Barry Arrington is right: Materialism cannot be reconciled with objective morality: In several previous posts, RDFish stumbled into a serious philosophical error that needs to be addressed. Barry Arrington had made the unassailable point that materialism (understood as physicalism) is incompatible with such concepts as good, evil, and objective morality. The reason is clear: Materialism reduces all choices to electro-chemical processes in the brain. With that model, all apparent moral decisions are really nothing more than chemcial-physical operations or functions. Though RDF failed to refute the argument, confront the argument, or even define his own terms, he sought, nevertheless, to attack it through the back door, claiming that past atheist philosophers embraced both metaphysical Read More ›

Astrophysicist Mario Livio shares some thoughts: Math: Discovered, Invented, or Both? The puzzle of the power of mathematics is in fact even more complex than the above examples from electromagnetism might suggest. There are actually two facets to the “unreasonable effectiveness,” one that I call active and another that I dub passive. The active facet refers to the fact that when scientists attempt to light their way through the labyrinth of natural phenomena, they use mathematics as their torch. In other words, at least some of the laws of nature are formulated in directly applicable mathematical terms. The mathematical entities, relations, and equations used in those laws were developed for a specific application. Newton, for instance, formulated the branch of Read More ›

Sir James Gray stated in a 1954 issue of *Nature *(v. 173; 227) that No amount of argument, or clever epigram, can disguise the inherent improbability of orthodox [Darwinian] theory; but most biologists feel it is better to think in terms of improbable events than not to think at all; there will always be a few who feel in their bones a sneaking sympathy with Samuel Butler’s skepticism. And why are those the only options? Essentially, Darwinian evolution is a cultural mood. Evidence isn’t really needed because it functions as a kind of religion for everyone from the biologists to the airheads on TV. From Dawkins: “My argument will be that Darwinism is the only known theory that is in principle capable of explaining Read More ›

Further to Barry Arrington’s UD’s Helpful List of Materialist Dodges, I’ve been know to accuse science writers of waving pom poms and loudhailers. Two types of expressions come to mind that generally fit the description of boilerplate. 1. Claims that science is described as uniquely self-correcting. Rubbish. Business is self-correcting too (market discipline). So is religion (reformations and revivals, for example). In fact, all human endeavours that succeed for any length of time must be self-correcting. 2. Claims that science is about evidence, not belief or superstition Well, goodness, we would hope so. The trouble is, the current mess that peer review is in shows that science is about a bunch of other things as well. The idea that basing Read More ›

Asks nkendall. All that follows is his: Okay lets see what I can come up with. This is just one of several disproofs of materialism that I have tried out on atheist websites. Never once had anyone lay of glove on it: DREAM SEQUENCES – A SIMPLE DISPROOF OF MATERIALISM Here is a simple disproof of materialism that everyone can understand; consider dream sequences: ASSUMPTIONS: 1. Dreams always involve novel (NEW) content – they are not rehashings or restructuring of various memories; although the topics are in the context of one’s life experiences. 2. Dreams are high definition imagery. 3. Dreams are real imagery, i.e. you are unaware or unable to distinguish the dream imagery when it is going on Read More ›