Like we’d expect. Mike the Mad Biologist offers, via Buzzfeed Instead of taking years to assess the fossils and publish reports on their features in a long series of studies, White complained that the discovery team had tried to publish a dozen papers on the find. But this effort led to their rejection by the prestigious journal Nature, a diss widely discussed in paleontology. And adds, I’m glad to see scientists pushing back on being forced by publishers to fit their writing to a structure that is driven by a business model, not the needs of scientists and their readers. Note: The homo Naledi find. Something about this story doesn’t sound quite right to me. Or rather, if it IS Read More ›

No, it’s a serious question, as New Scientist asks, and wants money to hear an answer: But one always finds oneself coming back to the Big Question with a Bigger Question: What if nothing did? What if it is like asking what is the natural number that comes before 1? For that matter, what if we just didn’t exist before we were conceived? For whom is that a problem and why? Don’t know or care, just wondering. See also: Cosmology in the age of confusion.

The Japanese National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) are reporting about new research that throws a small wrinkle into the search for life on planets outside our solar system. Such bodies, known as “exoplanets,” have emerged as one of the more exciting areas of astronomical study — an entire new field of research having essentially arisen in little more than two decades and now occupying many full-time researchers, several earth-bound telescopes, and even dedicated space missions. Early results have been impressive, with the improvements in sensor technology matched by the exponential increase in discovered bodies. After the first lone exoplanet was discovered around a main sequence star in 1995, a small trickle of additional exoplanets were discovered. Then the trickle Read More ›

Readers may recall that I (O’Leary for News) have been writing a series on how evolution can actually happen, and not the bumf people are forced to pay taxes for (Darwinism). (Evolution does not necessarily produce really big changes, but that isn’t the same thing as saying it doesn’t happen.) Anyway,here’s one theory that makes some sense: — But some entities in nature are not material at all: the number 7 comes to mind. Some philosophers have argued that we can construct a theory of items grouped by sevens without using a concept like 7. But whatever advantages these philosophers’ suggestion may offer, it does not represent what people do. We have an immaterial concept of 7 that organizes items and Read More ›

Havel’s 1978 essay on the power of the powerless has much to teach our civilisation in this time of PC triumphalism and cynical imposition of agendas. For instance, consider his reflection on a sign in the window of a greengrocer’s shop: >>THE MANAGER of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment’s thought to Read More ›

In a previous post, I exposed yet another of eigenstate’s outrageous lies.  Then I asked: The real question is what motivates him to engage in such insane denials? I have to admit that I am utterly flummoxed by it. He knows he is lying. I know he is lying. Everyone else who reads his comment knows he is lying. What in the world motivates such outrageous conduct? If I did not see it myself I would not believe it. Commenter Charles replies: He can’t help himself. It has become his nature. I have watched liars lie for years, and I have noted their inability to admit even the simplest of truths. I have observed their self-destructive behavior (as a consequence Read More ›

Who says internet combox discussions are never fruitful?  After almost two weeks of back and forth, Learned Hand has finally come around on the infallibility of the law of identity. LH before:  I cannot therefore be logically, absolutely certain of anything—not even that A=A. LH today:  Defining A as equal to A is defining A as equal to A; the proposition is not fallible if the only metric is its own definition. Now if we could only convince him that he does not have to doubt whether he is Mount Everest.

It seems that Seversky has fallen into an exemplary case of error in the nothing certain thread that needs to be headlined and corrected for the record: Sev, 13: >>What I see in the writings of the likes of kf, BA and BA77 is the same craving for certainty [in context, held by murderous dictators of C20 and compared to “religious zealots” of the remoter past] – some impregnable bedrock Truth – on which their lives and beliefs can be founded. Let me say that I don’t believe for one moment that anyone here would knowingly do anyone any harm in the name of their beliefs. But the siren-song of that need for certainty is what can and has lured Read More ›

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humor or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

From ScienceDaily,: The virus takes the form of a roughly spherical particle, approximately 0.6 μm long, containing a genome of approximately 650,000 base pairs coding for more than 500 proteins. Most of these proteins bear no resemblance to those of its Siberian predecessor, Pithovirus sibericum. Furthermore, unlike Pithovirus, which only requires the cytoplasmic resources of its cellular host to multiply, Mollivirus sibericum uses the cell nucleus to replicate in the amoeba, which makes it as host-dependent as most “small” viruses. This strategy, and other specific traits, such as a deficiency in certain key enzymes that allow synthesis of its DNA building blocks, mean that Mollivirus sibericum is more similar to the common viral types, including human pathogens such as Adenovirus, Read More ›

eigenstate says that under “evolutionary eithcs,” we are ethically obligated to do whatever is “adaptationally advantageous.”  Which led to this exchange: Barry:  “If our environment somehow changed so that torturing infants for pleasure became adaptationally advantageous, would we then have an ethical obligation to torture infants for pleasure?” eigenstate: ” yes” Madness. In that same  thread eigenstate  writes: The priorities – the values that we are wired with, are not “good” or “bad” or “ethical” or “unethical” by some external-to-humans rule . . . These priorities are not “set by God” or a function of some superstitious notion of deities and their moral dicta. Humans as a social group in real environments do not survive when cheaters proliferate. Some marginal number of Read More ›

First, the sensible stuff: From BioLogic Institute’s  Ann Gauger Homo naledi as Spin Detector: In reading the coverage of Homo naledi, as the species is called now, it seems clear to me that the spin put on the actual bones depends on the assumptions of the writers. What do I mean? Bones can only tell us so much. The rest is a matter of interpretation, and one’s point of view inevitably tends to color that interpretation. Let me give two examples: The first example is how writers interpret skull size. H. naledi had a small brain compared to ours, about the size of a chimpanzee’s. To some writers that seems to indicate the probable lack of high levels of cognition. Read More ›

One of the issues that has come up in recent days is the fallacious misuse of definitions that beg questions at stake. Accordingly, I think it advisable to headline a comment from the Nihilism thread and give an example from origins issues: _____________ KF, 262: >>Aleta (attn BA, LH, ES & WJM): While a lot else happened, this is important: [A, 227:] A definition, as a stipulation within a logical system, can’t be in error because we are just declaring that it is what it is. Definitions, even in formal systems, can beg questions (etc. of course) and become dubious as a result. The fallacy of begging the question in an explicit definition or a definition by discussion or a Read More ›

Closing off our religion coverage for the week: Look, this is really bad news for Dawkins Enterprises : Dawkins-ism isn’t selling the way it once did. Get this, via  Nature, A curious stasis underlies Dawkins’s thought. His biomorphs are grounded in 1970s assumptions. Back then, with rare exceptions, each gene specified a protein and each protein was specified by a gene. The genome was a linear text — a parts list or computer program for making an organism —insulated from the environment, with the coding regions interspersed with “junk”. Today’s genome is much more than a script: it is a dynamic, three-dimensional structure, highly responsive to its environment and almost fractally modular. Genes may be fragmentary, with far-flung chunks of DNA Read More ›

Well, it is more or less the same subject The last time we agreed was that New York Times’s David Brooks is a dreadful novelist. His stinker was an “evolutionary psychology” novel, a description which principally guarantees ballast under the thinking person’s canoe shed. Anyway, Myers says, I must have been taking a nap a couple of years ago. I just found this interesting discussion of EP by a psychologist, and I agree very much with it. Evolutionary psychologists believe that the human mind works much like the body… that it is an information-processing system, with pre-specified psychological programs (or environmentally-triggered ones), adapted much like the rest of the body, to meet specific problems in our … More. What’s mainly Read More ›