From ScienceDaily: New research from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University has found that pairs of rabbitfishes will cooperate and support each other while feeding. While such behaviour has been documented for highly social birds and mammals, it has previously been believed to be impossible for fishes. “We found that rabbitfish pairs coordinate their vigilance activity quite strictly, thereby providing safety for their foraging partner,” says Dr Simon Brandl from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. More. … “By showing that fishes, which are commonly considered to be cold, unsocial, and unintelligent, are capable of negotiating reciprocal cooperative systems, we provide evidence that cooperation may not be as exclusive as Read More ›

While it is doubtful whether Pope Francis’ speech to the United Nations actually ascribed rights to Nature, the Pope clearly denied that humans have the right to harm Nature: doing so harms humanity, he said. I believe this kind of thinking is dangerous for two reasons: it ignores the lessons of history and it will inevitably stymie human development in poor countries. (To give credit where credit is due, though, I was heartened that the Pope saw fit to mention the unborn in his latest speech – something he didn’t do in his speech to Congress.) What did the Pope actually say? For the benefit of readers, here is the relevant passage from Pope Francis’ United Nations speech (Al Jazeera Read More ›

You know, separate human species and all that. From BBC News: The conventional wisdom had been that Neanderthals did not have the capacities or technology that allowed them to capture fast-moving prey. Why was that the conventional wisdom? Does it not belong to an anthropology that is utterly without evidence and should be classified as wrong, along with eugenics? In order to validate Darwinism (fourth rate, tax funded science)? Only our own ancestors had these abilities, among them the skills to catch birds. Equipped with a package of skills, which included the exploitation of marine resources, our ancestors spread across the world from their African home following coastlines. Neanderthals are part of our ancestry. They aren’t a “separate species.” In Read More ›

Sounds like science fiction. But from ScienceDaily: New theory of stealth dark matter may explain universe’s missing mass A group of national particle physicists known as the Lattice Strong Dynamics Collaboration, led by a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory team, has combined theoretical and computational physics techniques and used the Laboratory’s massively parallel 2-petaflop Vulcan supercomputer to devise a new model of dark matter. It identifies it as naturally “stealthy” (i.e. like its namesake aircraft, difficult to detect) today, but would have been easy to see via interactions with ordinary matter in the extremely high-temperature plasma conditions that pervaded the early universe. “These interactions in the early universe are important because ordinary and dark matter abundances today are strikingly similar in Read More ›

Thinking about taking CHY 431—Structure and Mechanism in Biological Chemistry next semester at the University of Maine? If so you likely will be fed junk evolutionary science like this page:  Read more

No kidding. Further to New Scientist commands!: Adjust moral compass: Line up and listen (we’ll be hearing way more ), the ever obliging mag chimes in. We can’t rely on science alone to make us better people But even the tabloids know better than that. Our sense of right and wrong is often inadequate for modern challenges. But the combination of rationality and humanity can lead us to more effective morality Nope. What is lacking in these fatuous claims is free will, which most of their go-for-quotes people don’t likely  believe in. One would think centuries of bloodshed in favour of more “scientific” regimes would lead us to doubt. How come no one ever says more “evidence-based” regimes? Follow UD News Read More ›

… In an historic edict, Pope Francis warned that failing to act would have “grave consequences”, the brunt of which would fall on the world’s poorest people. His words came as a stark reminder that global climate change is among the most pressing moral dilemmas of the 21st century. It joins a long list. He could have added spiralling inequality, persistent poverty, death from preventable diseases and nuclear proliferation to the ethical challenges that define our times. Some are newer than others, but all could plausibly be fixed. The fact we’re struggling with all of them raises a troubling question: does our moral compass equip us to deal with the threats we face … One must apparently pay for more Read More ›

Further to the current blaze of nonsense re the multiverse and the unfortunate news that naturalism is dead, at Not Even Wrong, mathematician Peter Woit notes, re Arkani-Harmed, here, A couple years ago I was struck by a talk of his in which he showed a lot of self-knowledge, describing himself as an “ideolog” (see here). There’s more about this in the Quanta profile: “It’s important for me while I’m working on something to be very ideological about it. And then, of course, it’s also important after you are done to forget the ideology and move on to another one.” The ideologies on display this time include a very speculative picture of a future union of mathematics and theoretical physics:More. ‘Nuff Read More ›

In a 1977 paper published in theJournal of Theoretical Biology, Hubert Yockey used information theory to evaluate the likelihood of the evolution of a relatively simple protein. Yockey’s model system was cytochrome c, a protein consisting of about one hundred amino acids. Cytochrome c plays an important role in the mitochondria’s electron transport chain (ETC) which helps to convert the chemical energy in carbon-carbon and carbon-hydrogen bonds, in the food we eat, to an electrochemical potential energy in the form of hydrogen ions (or protons) stored within the mitochondria’s inner membrane. Like water pressing against a dam and turning its turbines to generate electricity, the high-concentration hydrogen ions drive the ATP synthase “turbine” to create the high-energy ATP molecule. Like Read More ›

In a new study out of the University of Liverpool evolutionists now say they have found empirical evidence that a genetic complex, involving dozens of protein-coding genes related to altruism, can evolve. Such a finding would be truly ground-breaking given that, at least up until now, the evolution of even a single protein has been found to be scientifically unlikely. It would be astonishing if now evolutionists have overturned a substantial body of work establishing molecular evolution to be effectively impossible. But of course evolutionists have done no such thing. There was no finding of molecular evolution, no new proteins or genes, no empirical evidence, nothing. Just another ridiculous claim made by evolutionists. It’s the same old pattern—evolutionists look at Read More ›

Like many readers, I watched the Pope’s speech earlier today. It was in many ways a beautiful speech, which brought members of Congress to their feet (many with tears in their eyes) in a standing ovation. While the issues it addressed were all vital ones, I was a little disappointed at the issues it didn’t address, or barely mentioned. Perhaps there was a good reason for that. But then I decided that instead of whingeing, I would do something constructive: write an alternative speech that the Pope could have delivered, covering all the issues that I felt he needed to draw people’s attention to. I don’t write speeches for a living, so I apologize to readers if my poor effort Read More ›

We can’t help you. Sign noted in a computer guy’s office somewhere in North America: If after ten minutes at the poker table you do not know who the patsy is—you are the patsy. First, what exactly is Darwin’s theory anyway, other than an invite to the approved parties? Here it is: Information can be created without intelligence. That is, natural selection acting on random mutation explains the order of life we see all around us. What can’t survive won’t, and that explains how very complex life forms and structures — including the human mind — get built up. True: Things that can’t survive don’t. But why would that fact alone drive nature to produce anything as simple as a Read More ›

We didn’t think anyone would be so honest about it, but get this from Quanta Magazine: As things stand, the known elementary particles, codified in a 40-year-old set of equations called the “Standard Model,” lack a sensible pattern and seem astonishingly fine-tuned for life. Arkani-Hamed and other particle physicists, guided by their belief in naturalness, have spent decades devising clever ways to fit the Standard Model into a larger, natural pattern. But time and again, ever-more-powerful particle colliders have failed to turn up proof of their proposals in the form of new particles and phenomena, increasingly pointing toward the bleak and radical prospect that naturalness is dead. … Arkani-Hamed considers his tendency to speculate a personal weakness. “This is not Read More ›

It is time to move on from preliminary logical considerations to key foundational issues relevant to design theory. Of these, the challenge of complexity, information and functionally specific organisation is first and foremost. Hence this post. We live in a technological age, and one that increasingly pivots around information. One in which we are surrounded by trillions of technological entities showing how what we can describe as functionally specific, complex organisation and/or associated information (FSCO/I for short) is a characteristic result and highly reliable indicator of intelligently directed configuration. That is, of design. For simple illustration, we may examine the exploded view of a 6500 C3 baitcasting reel: . . . which shows the characteristic pattern of a network of Read More ›

Ah yes ,the time of year in many parts of North America when, everywhere you look, there is a Monarch (an orange butterfly) flap gliding around. They migrate in vast masses from mid-north Canada to Mexico. Now, from New Scientist: Wasps first turned bracoviruses into biological weapons around 100 million years ago. There are now thousands of species of braconid wasp, each of which parasitises a specific butterfly or moth and produces a unique bracovirus carrying a set of genes that is different to those of other wasp species. But sometimes things go awry. Wasps occasionally lay an egg in the wrong host, for instance, in which case the wasp larva may not survive. In such cases, if genes from Read More ›