What inclines me now to think that you may be right in regarding it as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives, is not so much your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders. C.S. Lewis The “it” to which Lewis was referring was evolution. Today, “it” could well be climate alarmists. According to this paper the climate alarmists are undermining science itself: Scientists don’t like this lèse majesté, of course. But it’s the citizen science that the internet has long promised. This is what eavesdropping on science should be like—following the twists and turns of each story, the ripostes and counter-ripostes, making up your own mind Read More ›

From Quanta Magazine: Several years ago, Eric Gaucher, a biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, even resurrected a 700-million-year-old protein from E. coli. Now, in a new twist on paleogenomics, Kacar has engineered that ancient protein into modern E. coli and tracked how the microbe adapted to it. The new approach, which Kacar presented yesterday at NASA’s Astrobiology Science Conference in Chicago, provides a more integrated view of the mechanisms of evolution — for example, how a protein’s position in a broader network influences its rate of change or how protein networks evolve as a whole. They seem to have a mind of their own. Kacar then synthesized that gene and inserted it into E. coli in Read More ›

From Mars. According to a paywalled review in New York Review of Books: Today, driven by ongoing technological innovations, the exploration of the “nanoverse,” as the realm of the minuscule is often termed, continues to gather pace. One of the field’s greatest pioneers is Paul Falkowski, a biological oceanographer who has spent much of his scientific career working at the intersection of physics, chemistry, and biology. His book Life’s Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable focuses on one of the most astonishing discoveries of the twentieth century-that our cells are comprised of a series of highly sophisticated “little engines” or nanomachines that carry out life’s vital functions. It is a work full of surprises, arguing for example that all of Read More ›

An interesting listicle features ten topics you’d think we’d know the answer to, but don’t. Here’s one: Here’s #8: Often when we are about to fall asleep, we experience a kind of a falling sensation which causes us to wake up with a start. It happens to almost everybody, and the sensation is known as a hypnic jerk. It also sometimes happens when you tilt the chair you’re sitting on too far—somehow you can sense when you’re about to fall, and you wake up with a hypnic jerk. We really have no idea what causes them or whether they serve any modern purpose, but science has come up with some interesting theories.One hypothesis suggests that our bodies developed this mechanism Read More ›

See here. It seems to me that that a news organization’s reputation for veracity is its most critical asset, without which it is literally nothing. And it is not as if there isn’t an oversupply of pretty boys who can read the news. It’s as if they don’t care that they are throwing away what little credibility they had left. Can someone please help me make sense of this seemingly senseless decision?

I have been spending the past few hours reading Pope Francis’ latest encyclical, Laudato si’, alongside a document called An Ecomodernist Manifesto (sympathetically reviewed here), which was written by a group of prominent environmental thinkers and development specialists such as Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, many of whom are affiliated with a think-tank called The Breakthrough Institute. Both documents make for fascinating reading. I had expected the encyclical to be written in that very high-flown, profound but impenetrable style that some wags have dubbed “Vaticanese” – which is the main reason by most Catholics never read papal encyclicals: they just can’t get through them. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Pope’s encyclical actually reads quite well. I Read More ›

Further to Barry Arrington’s Chasing shadows: How long can we keep looking for dark matter?, curiously, New Scientist has been asking the same question: We’ve known we need dark matter since the 1930s, but still haven’t found it. The search can’t go on forever Even CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, our best and by far most expensive tool for finding it, has so far drawn a blank. How much longer can we keep looking? … Perhaps we have simply been looking for the wrong thing. Perhaps dark matter particles are very massive, rather than fairly light, as many assume. The first experiments are now under way to detect any such “superheavy” dark matter that might have been created when the universe Read More ›

Chicken Little must be on vacay. From New Scientist: While greater bleaching is undoubtedly on the list of things that are threatening coral reefs (see “Reefs at risk”), this is a rare instance of where the climate pudding may have been over-egged. New research is painting a very different portrait of corals, one that casts them in the light … [of buy a subscription] Over-egging the pudding is not rare, it is the usual practice in Acrockalypse Kitchens, Inc. Indeed, if there is truly a worldwide shortage of eggs, consider that source of overeggage first. Life forms that have lasted as long as corals (500 mya) probably have many built-in mechanisms for resisting unfavourable changes, as they must surely have Read More ›

From Jewish World Review: Jewish guilt’ may be inherited … “We certainly know that human experiences affect how our genes are expressed,” says Rachel Yehuda, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, who has performed epigenetic studies on Holocaust survivors. “But we don’t know for sure how this process works and how strong a contributor epigenetics really is compared to other things like genes.” Life experience capable of shaping perceptions and reactions even without touching DNA. In studies published over the past decade, Yehuda has found that children of Holocaust survivors have altered stress response systems and differences in methylation on the gene that regulates the number of Read More ›

Here: Science, Now Under Scrutiny Itself* The crimes and misdemeanors of science used to be handled mostly in-house, with a private word at the faculty club, barbed questions at a conference, maybe a quiet dismissal. On the rare occasion when a journal publicly retracted a study, it typically did so in a cryptic footnote. Few were the wiser; many retracted studies have been cited as legitimate evidence by others years after the fact. But that gentlemen’s world has all but evaporated, as a remarkable series of events last month demonstrated. In mid-May, after two graduate students raised questions about a widely reported study on how political canvassing affects opinions of same-sex marriage, editors at the journal Science, where the study Read More ›

Also can’t avoid this: A fly in this ointment is that there are serious reasons to doubt that fitness is in fact maximised. The central assumption of the approach has been known to be untrue in general for decades… Not that the rest of us were necessarily let in on that. The goal of the formal darwinism project is to construct a mathematical bridge between two of the many ways of studying natural selection. One approach is population genetics, in which models are constructed that trace the change over time of the frequencies of some defined set of genotypes. … The other approach is based on the expectation of finding good design in nature: this stretches back at least to Read More ›

No, according to this article, which states that “the aether was a theoretical idea that never found experimental support.”  It goes on to state: Aether was a concept introduced by physicists for theoretical reasons, which died because its experimental predictions were ruled out by observation. Dark matter and dark energy are the opposite: they are concepts that theoretical physicists never wanted, but which are forced on us by the observations. This seems to be exactly wrong.  The aether (or the “luminous aether” as it is sometimes called), was, of course, never observed.  Why then was its existence presumed?  Simple.  Certain observations (the wave-like properties of electro-magnetic radiation in particular) seemed to demand its existence.  The reasoning went like this:  Waves Read More ›

Libertarian John Stossel writes This year is the 10th anniversary of a book called “The Republican War on Science.” I could just as easily write a book called “The Democratic War on Science.” Oh yes, that’d be the one by Chris Mooney. Wasn’t he the fellow who claimed that the big shill for 99% DNA identity beteen humans and chimps terrifies creationists. Hey, we still get Darwin followers in the combox, insisting on that stat. What mainly terrifies us is their simplemindedness. They can’t seem to absorb the fact that the more they claim that chimps are exactly like people, the less they are credited with providing useful information. We know that’s not true by the most elementary observations. I Read More ›

To ask that question is to answer it. World Mag here: After decades of being touted for its mathematical elegance and adored for its explanatory power, supersymmetry was finally ready for experimental verification at Switzerland’s famous particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). While the LHC made some important discoveries, most notably the Higgs boson particle (sometimes called the God particle), scientists found nothing at all to confirm supersymmetry. After many a particle was smashed, crashed, accelerated, and spun, no supersymmetric “partners” could be found—a bitter blow for physicists ready to leap to the next frontier. In the ashes of disappointment, “the specter of evidence-independent science” arose, according to Gleiser and Frank. They note that while some scientists are prepared Read More ›

Further to: Is Is Discover Mag’s blasphemy issue re dark matter really about fine tuning? (Proposing a change to our statements of the laws of gravity in order to eliminate fine tuning as a factor in our universe merely advertises how severe the problem is.) A reader sends in this snippet from The Edge: Priyamvada Natarajan, Professor in Departments of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University, focusing on exotica in the universe—dark matter, dark energy, and black holes. Now I’ve been teaching at Yale for more than ten years, so I’ve had some fantastic students and colleagues who have helped me in refining and shaping how I think. In particular, one of the things that I am after is clarity. Read More ›