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 still exists. These muscles are vestigial, meaning they’re remnants of evolution that once had a purpose but no longer do. However, humans may be able to repurpose these useless muscles for their own uses, according to Steven Hackley, a psychologist at the University of Missouri and author of a new review of research on the forgotten muscles in the journal Psychophysiology. For one, these muscles Read More ›

  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 physical conditions necessary for one thing to represent another thing in a material universe. I wrote and rewrote that essay for more than four years — reading, learning, and sharing along the way. As it turns out, writing that essay was my way of coming to understand the issues, and I spent a great deal of that time trying to articulate things I had come to Read More ›

‘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 teeth rule out crocodiles and point directly to a theropod dinosaur like T. rex. The fact that the only large theropods found in the Lance Formation are two tyrannosaurs –Tyrannosaurus rex or Nanotyrannus lancensis — eliminates all interpretations but cannibalism, explained McLain, who will be presenting the discovery on 1 Nov. at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Baltimore. … Even Read More ›

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 monumental multiyear project intended to develop new technologies to understand the human brain. … In recent decades, microbiologists have begun to map their astonishing diversity. The animal kingdom contains about 40 major groups, or phyla. Microbiologists now recognize upward of 1,000 phyla of microbes. “Plants and animals are a patina on the microbial world,” said Margaret J. McFall-Ngai of the University of Hawaii, a co-author Read More ›

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, I’d like to critique Petrushka’s short post, titled, What Is A Code? (October 20, 2015): Lots of heat surrounding this question. My take is that a code must be a system for conveying meaning. In my view, an essential feature of a code is that it must be abstract and and able to convey novel messages. DNA fails at he level of abstraction. Whatever “meaning” Read More ›

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 as an augur of the revolution to come. The experiment was the brainchild of two researchers at the University of Sussex named Jon Bird and Paul Layzell, and it involved a programming technique known as “evolutionary” software that uses a kind of simulated version of natural selection to engineer and optimize solutions to a design problem. If Darwinism produces intelligence, why aren’t Boltzmann brains floating Read More ›

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 that they have built a powerful transmitter to send signals to us. If we picked up such a signal today and responded, our signal would take 1,400 years to reach them. Their response would take just as long, so it would be our descendants 2,800 years from now who would receive the reply. That would make for a rather drawn-out conversation. Even if they did Read More ›

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 approcachable for children.” The game consists of 60 transparent overlays sized about 4” x 6” that contain short musical phrases of a few notes. These are to be laid side to side to create compositions. The cards can be inverted or flipped over so each one codes for four separate phrases. Each variation is numbered. So when a series of cards are laid down the Read More ›

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 parody of the Nobel Prize that, according to a Slate article by the awards’ creator, Marc Abrahams, and several academics I consulted, is always given to improbable research and sometimes serves as a de facto criticism or satire in the academic world. (Oppenheimer for his part believes he got the award because of the paper’s title: “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems Read More ›

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 out. But in a study published on October 26 in Nature Cell Biology, a research team led by Irene Chiolo documents how broken strands of a portion of DNA known as heterochromatin are dragged to the nuclear membrane for repair. The reason why we don’t experience thousands of cancers every day in our body is because we have incredibly efficient molecular mechanisms that repair the Read More ›

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 scientist Andre Bieler of the University of Michigan. The oxygen is believed to be older than our solar system. As O2 mixes easily with other elements, “we never thought that oxygen could ‘survive’ for billions of years” in a pristine state, said Kathrin Altwegg of the University of Bern, who co-authored a study in the journal Nature. More. We are advised not to jump to Read More ›

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 information that is not in a deep sense numerical. Claude Shannon’s famous 1948 paper, which founded the field of information theory, used a symphony concert as an example of an information-transmission problem that could be treated numerically. A consequence is that it does not make sense to say that something stores information but cannot store numbers. Neuroscientists have not come to terms with this truth. Read More ›

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 actually is. No, it isn’t good news, unless we believe that evidence is whatever the Party says it is. But, in fairness, many science writers are not far off that. The scientific method as rhetoric is far more complex, interesting, and revealing than it is as a direct reflection of the ways scientists work. Science fiction functions that way too, but then it claims no authority Read More ›

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 author of two previous books, The Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry and The Origin of Life Circus: A How To Make Life Extravaganza. Her reports have appeared in the Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, Archaeology, Astrobiology, Connoisseur, Omni, Huffington Post, Progressive Review, CounterPunch, Scoop Media and other publications, as well as on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been Read More ›

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 is a selected accident. Therefore, Darwinian phylogenetic trees often use parsimony as a guide, meaning that it tries to construct a tree so that complex features don’t have to evolve more than once. The ID version of common descent, however, doesn’t have to play by these rules. Okay, but first: The immense significance of genome mapping to discussions of common descent is not appreciated as Read More ›