A classic in the state of pop science writing today, from Yahoo News: Un-intelligent Design: No Purpose for Vestigial Ear-Wiggling Reflex Around the human ear are tiny, weak muscles that once would have let evolutionary ancestors pivot their ears to and fro. Today, the muscles aren’t capable of moving much — but their reflex action […]
Month: October 2015
Writing Biosemiosis.org
In September of 2009 I started a new document on my computer entitled “A System of Symbols”, where I was going to write about the part of design theory that interested me the most – that is, the representations that are required for self-replication (von Neumann, Pattee). My goal was to inventory all the […]
Tyrannosaur lunch: Another tyrannosaur
‘Twas ever thus: A nasty little 66-million-year-old family secret has been leaked by a recently unearthed tyrannosaur bone. The bone has peculiar teeth marks that strongly suggest it was gnawed by another tyrannosaur. The find could be some of the best evidence yet that tyrannosaurs were not shy about eating their own kind. … Serrated […]
Scientists urge focus on microbiome
Microbiome = the microbes that mostly run things on our planet and in our bodies. (Or so they say. We’re just the back office.) From Carl Zimmer at New York Times: In two papers published simultaneously in the journals Science and Nature, the scientists called for a government-led effort akin to the Brain Initiative, a […]
The Skeptical Zone asks: What is a code?
Over at the Skeptical Zone, Petrushka has written a post arguing that “DNA is a template, not a code.” In today’s post, I’d like to briefly review the reasons why we claim that the genetic code is a literal reality, not a metaphor, and explain exactly what a code is. But before I do that, […]
Will humans evolve fast enough to beat AI?
From How We Get to Next: If, many decades from now, some form of rogue artificial intelligence does manage to follow the playbook of a thousand science-fiction narratives and enslave the human race, I suspect the last remaining historians will look back to an obscure computer science experiment conducted at the turn of this century […]
Cosmos publisher thinks we are galaxy’s most advanced species
Some people offer the 15 best reasons to think aliens are real. Others say, no. But it’s not even clear how we would recognize alien life. From Cosmos, Alan Finkel questions whether the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos is worth the effort. Let’s say there is an intelligent civilisation on Kepler-452b and […]
Can randomness produce music?
Philosopher and photographer Laszlo Bencze writes to say, The Wall Street Journal had an article today (28 Oct.) on a game called Compose Yourself created by a cellist named Philip Sheppard “who is passionate about showing people that they are fundamentally musical, and he wants to make learning about music, and composing in particular, more […]
Shocka! Needless complexity in academic writing?
Please tell us it’s not true. From the Atlantic: In 2006, Daniel Oppenheimer, then a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, published research arguing that the use of clear, simple words over needlessly complex ones can actually make authors appear more intelligent. The research garnered him the Ig Nobel Prize in literature—a […]
Nuclear Membrane Not Just a Bubble
Phys.Org has a new summary about a new finding regarding heterochromatin repair in the nucleus which involves the nuclear membrane. In their discussion, they make some interesting points: Previously, the nuclear membrane was thought to be mostly just a protective bubble around the nuclear material, with pores acting as channels to transport molecules in and […]
Rosetta finds primordial oxygen on comet
Rosetta’s most surprising discovery so far. From Phys.org: Stunned scientists announced Wednesday the unexpected discovery of large quantities of oxygen on a comet which streaked past the Sun in August with a European spacecraft in tow. The find came as a “big surprise”, and challenges mainstream theories on the formation of our Solar System, said […]
Brain is just a computer … ?
So most neuroscientists are wrong about the brain? From Nautilus: Here’s Why Most Neuroscientists Are Wrong About the Brain From a computational point of view, directions and distances are just numbers. And numbers, rendered in binary form, are just bit strings. It’s a profound truth of computer science that there is no such thing as […]
Reactions to Scientific Method Is a Myth
In case you wondered what would happen when postmodernism gets science by the throat: Myth? Yes, as in here. Discover Magazine thought they should make it clear: Now for the good news. The scientific method is nothing but a piece of rhetoric. Granted, that may not appear to be good news at first, but it […]
Suzan Mazur’s Paradigm Shifters is now available from Amazon
Here: Major scientists from a dozen countries present evidence that a paradigm shift is underway or has already taken place, replacing neo-Darwinism (the standard model of evolution based on natural selection following the accumulation of random genetic mutations) with a vastly richer evolutionary synthesis than previously thought possible. About The Author Suzan Mazur is the […]
Thoughts re johnnyb’s comments on ID and common descent
Here: The issue is that most people understand common descent entirely from a Darwinian perspective. That is, they assume that the notion of natural selection and gradualism follow along closely to the notion of common descent. However, there is nothing that logically ties these together, especially if you allow for design. In Darwinism, each feature […]