From +plus Living Mathematics: Organisms — humans, animals and arguably even plants — have a striking ability to predict what their environment might throw at them. They use information from the past to respond to cues in the world and learn from surprises, meaning that when they encounter similar situations again in the future, they can act faster and more appropriately. In fact, this so-called predictive inference is such an important skill that it helps organisms to stay alive. But Susanne Still and Gavin Crooks think that this ability might also hold the key to understanding how all types of living systems behave efficiently in the natural world — perhaps with a little help from quantum information processing. Their work Read More ›

Darwin incidence: A planned event that must be treated as a coincidence, irrespective of probability. What do readers think? At 11.32am (EDT) on 8 July, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) computers went down, causing a four-hour suspension of transactions. In a four-hour period the NYSE averages about $400m (£259m) in trades – a substantial daily loss. The NYSE and Homeland Security both quickly announced the problem was not due to a cyberattack. At around the same time that the NYSE went down, the Wall Street Journal’s website went offline, as did that of popular financial blog Zero Hedge. United Airlines also experienced a “network connectivity issue” which impacted almost 5,000 flights worldwide. Given the criticality of technology to United Read More ›

Here is an article in Cosmos that apparently wasn’t edited by Chicken Little. It addresses defects in our current knowledge: Setting aside the vague definition, calculating the extinction rate is tricky. A logical method is to divide how many species became extinct over a certain time by the total number of species on the planet. But scientists don’t know how many different animal species exist. Estimates vary wildly. One recent example was published by University of Melbourne entomologist Andrew Hamilton and colleagues in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Hamilton calculated that the number of terrestrial arthropod species – which includes insects and spiders, and is the largest single group of animals – is around 6.8 million. That’s far Read More ›

(485 to 444 mya) We are told: From ScienceDaily: Spectacular Moroccan fossils redefine evolutionary timelines Some of the oldest marine animals on the planet, including armoured worm-like forms and giant, lobster like sea creatures, survived millions of years longer than previously thought, according to a spectacularly preserved fossil formation from southeastern Morocco. ‘Horseshoe crabs, for example, turn out to be at least 20 million years older than we thought. The formation demonstrates how important exceptionally preserved fossils are to our understanding of major evolutionary events in deep time’ says Peter Van Roy, also of Yale, who first recognised the scientific importance of the Fezouata fauna and is lead author of the study, part of a project funded by the National Read More ›

From Frank Wilczek, How Physics Will Change-and Change the World -in 100 Years: Unification VI: Mind and Matter Although many details remain to be elucidated, it seems fair to say that metabolism and reproduction, two of the most characteristic features of life, are now broadly understood at the molecular level as physical processes. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA’s structure, put forward the “astonishing hypothesis” that it will be possible to bring understanding of basic psychology, including biological cognitive processing, memory, motivation, and emotion, to a comparable level. One might call that “reduction” of mind to matter. But mind is what it is, and what it is will not be diminished for being physically understood. I’d be thrilled to understand how Read More ›

From: Evolution: The Fossils Speak, but Hardly with One Voice 5. Far too much attention may be given to genes and DNA. So much current evolution thinking, including questionable fields like evolutionary psychology, depends on the alleged power of the gene. Does anyone remember that fellow who said in the early 90s that a CD of your genome is “you”? Not even close. From the New Statesman: “According to a growing number of researchers, the standard story of the influence of genes is overblown. So many other factors influence how we turn out as individuals and how we evolve as a species that the fundamentals of biology need a rewrite.” “This is no storm in an academic tearoom,” a group Read More ›

Perhaps the most unlikely part, of all the many unlikely parts, of evolutionary theory is the evolution of the brain, with all that that entails, including 200 billion nerve cells, one quadrillion synapses, and the thousand or more molecular-scale switches in each synapse. Not surprisingly researchers sometimes can hardly find the words to express what they are studying. The brain is “truly awesome” beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief. (You can read more here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,here, here, here, and here).  Read more

From ScienceDaily: Those who are born to parents from diverse genetic backgrounds tend to be taller and have sharper thinking skills than others, the major international study has found. But can we unharness the cart from the horse here? Wouldn’t smarter people be more likely to look to genuine advantage as opposed to narrow bigotry, when picking mates? Researchers analysed health and genetic information from more than 100 studies carried out around the world. These included details on more than 350,000 people from urban and rural communities. The team found that greater genetic diversity is linked to increased height. It is also associated with better cognitive skills, as well as higher levels of education. It’s at least worth noting that Read More ›

we should care much about climate change (paywalled!) One serious non-paywalled reason would have been enough. Non-paywalled excerpt: Most of us have taken some steps in the right direction. However, we continue to produce greenhouse gases. Sometimes, we truly cannot do better. Not everyone can afford to buy solar panels, rural residents cannot commute by subway, and people who live in cold climates cannot go without heating. These are structural barriers, beyond an individual’s control. The biggest problem is that we live and breath and want to, like, DO stuff. Maybe better our lives or something. Sorry, our bad. Follow UD News at Twitter!

He talks about his findings here (public access): In February 1988, Richard Lenski set up 12 replicate populations of a single genotype of Escherichia coli in a simple nutrient medium. He has been following their evolution ever since. Here, Lenski answers provocative questions from Jeremy Fox about his iconic “Long-Term Evolution Experiment” (LTEE). The LTEE is a remarkable case study of the interplay of determinism and chance in evolution—and in the conduct of science. More. A reader writes, “Sounds like Lenski admits that there is no experiment or hypothesis in the traditional sense. I wonder if he would admit that to a popular audience.” Was the reader thinking of this? JF: Ok, so let me ask you that. Is the Read More ›

Suzan Mazur interviews biologists who take the information nature of life seriously: I thought it might be time to ring up Kalevi Kull, a theoretical biologist in Estonia at the University of Tartu’s Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics to talk about developments. Kull is known for his contributions to the field of biosemiotics and currently serves as president of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies. His most recent book is Towards a Semiotic Biology: Life is the Action of Signs Suzan Mazur: Is biosemiotics an exact enough science at this point to be poking holes in the Modern Synthesis? Are the operational concepts developed enough? Kalevi Kull: I would say they are developed as much as linguistics can be called Read More ›

From the series: Evolution: The Fossils Speak, but Hardly with One Voice 8. Evolution is often spoken of as if it were a deliberating intelligence, though the idea is considered a heresy. “Evolution,” we are told by one respected source, has been “experimenting” with different types of early humans, based on the fact that skeletons show more diverse features than expected. That prompts two questions: If all the passengers in a subway car in a large, multicultural city met a mishap and were fossilized, how many “different species” would be identified today, using current methods? Second, is evolution (Evolution?) an intelligent agent? If it is not possible to speak of evolution’s course without resort to the language of agency, is Read More ›

After fifteen years of news coverage on issues of interest to the ID community, I finally got to say what seems evident to a news writer (who doesn’t wave pom poms for Darwin’s followers): First, the fossils speak, but hardly with one voice: University of Chicago biochemist James Shapiro, not a design theorist, offers in one of his lectures four kinds of rapid, evolutionary change that Darwin “could not have imagined”: horizontal DNA transfer, symbiogenesis, genome doubling, and built-in mechanisms of genome restructuring. His approach is in sharp contrast to the “defend Darwin” strategy usually championed in the academy. So it is no surprise that he is a controversial figure. But is he right in saying that many possible mechanisms Read More ›

Further to South Africans used milk-based paint 49,000 years ago, in a paywalled article at Nature:, we learn, I reach the Cradle of Humankind after half an hour’s drive from Johannesburg, through the Gauteng Highveld of South Africa. Sort of like going to a private Mass in Vatican City, celebrated by the Pope. But developments there are spurring questions over which part of the nation they serve. Palaeontologists will rejoice over the launch, on 21 July, of a state-of-the-art vault to house star local finds, an adjunct to Wits’s Centre of Excellence for Palaeosciences. The vault will allow specimens to be compared with other finds, both hominin and non-hominin, from around Africa. … But it is strictly for researchers’ use. What Read More ›

The claim in the title of the science PR is How our sense of smell evolved, including in early humans Most receptors can detect more than one smell, but one, called OR7D4, enables us to detect a very specific smell called androstenone, which is produced by pigs and is found in boar meat. People with different DNA sequences in the gene producing the OR7D4 receptor respond differently to this smell — some people find it foul, some sweet, and others cannot smell it at all. People’s responses to androstenone can be predicted by their OR7D4 DNA sequence, and vice versa. Professor Cobb from The University of Manchester’s Faculty of Life Sciences and the other researchers studied the DNA that codes Read More ›