2015

As readers will gather, the religion news was a bit late on Sunday. Here we are dragging in with our last news item Monday morning, like the tomcat back from his travels. Well, it’s from Britain’s Daily Express: The colossal question has troubled religions, philosophers and scientists since the dawn of time but now a Canadian team believe they have solved the riddle. And the findings are so conclusive they even challenge the need for religion, or at least an omnipotent creator – the basis of all world religions. Whoa! An omnipotent creator is not the basis of all the world’s religions; alert! horseshoe in the works. Scientists have long known that miniscule particles, called virtual particles, come into existence Read More ›

LiveScience: The Origins of Religion: How Supernatural Beliefs Evolved … But not everyone agrees that religious thinking is just a byproduct of evolution — in other words, something that came about as a result of nonreligious, cognitive faculties. Some scientists see religion as more of an adaptation — a trait that stuck around because the people who possessed it were better able to survive and pass on their genes. Robin Dunbar is an evolutionary psychologist and anthropologist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom whose work focuses mostly on the behavior of primates, including nonhuman primates like baboons. Dunbar thinks religion may have evolved as what he calls a “group-level adaptation.” More. The first thing that strikes a Read More ›

One minute apologist: What is the difference between ID and creationism? Bobby Conway interviews Jonathan McLatchie on the difference between ID and Creationism. Thoughts? Would it make a difference to design detection if there were no religious texts as at all? What if they had all disappeared in a barbarian onslaught (as much classical literature did during the Dark Ages)? Would we ask the same questions? Follow UD News at Twitter!

  Question: Isn’t most scientism just popular culture in a lab coat? That is, would one find a greater proportion of true believers in scientism at a meeting of Nobelists or at a science media writers convention? Worth someone’s while finding out, surely. From Evolution News & Views, quoting Oxford philosopher Roger Trigg’s forthcoming “Why Science Needs Metaphysics,” There is such a thing as scientific progress, and it happens through systematic trial and error or, in Karl Popper’s terminology, conjecture and refutation. A “scientific realist” has to be wary, though, about how such realism is defined. A realism that makes reality what contemporary science says it is links reality logically to the human minds of the present day. Science is Read More ›

Readers may remember Larry “All scientists should be militant atheists” Krauss. At The Public Discourse, Thomist philosopher Ed Feser offers, Scientists Should Tell Lawrence Krauss to Shut Up Already Dr. Feser, may we assume that you are not a fan? In a recent opinion piece for The New Yorker, physicist Lawrence Krauss proclaims that “all scientists should be militant atheists.” Why? You won’t get any clear answer from the article, which is even thinner on argumentation (as opposed to sheer assertion) than the usual New Atheist tract—indeed, even thinner than the usual Lawrence Krauss tract, which is saying something. Most of the piece is about Kim Davis, Hobby Lobby, and other matters of public controversy entirely irrelevant to either science Read More ›

From Forbes: The Cosmos Inside Your Head: Neuroscientist David Eagleman Tells The Story Of The Brain On PBS Like many forty-something scientists working in labs today, Dr. David Eagleman remembers watching Carl Sagan on television as a kid and feeling his imagination expand. Each week on Cosmos (1980), Sagan provided context for our place in the universe, giving the unfathomably enormous cosmos a door of accessibility. For Eagleman, walking through that door was the beginning of a lifelong project to do for the brain what Sagan did for the universe. Book coming as well. The universe is in Sagan’s debt, presumably. Some who watch will struggle with an inescapable conclusion: the “you” at the center of your personal universe is Read More ›

One of the primary things keeping traditional evolutionary theory afloat is not the mountain of evidence supposedly existing in its favor, but the way in which the evidence is interpreted in the context of the pre-existing Darwinian paradigm. The key is the way evolutionary theorists tend to proceed from an observation to a series of conclusions. When you are steeped in evolutionary thought, when no alternative explanations are permitted as a matter of fiat, when the only possible interpretation open to you is a purely naturalistic and materialistic explanation, the conclusions seem to follow naturally. To paraphrase Philip Johnson’s wry (and somewhat sarcastic) observation: Evolution is really easy to prove. Since “evolution” means both tiny changes and the whole grand Read More ›

From BBC News: Human evolution was shaped by interbreedng After modern humans first left Africa, they came into contact with Neanderthals and things got cosy. These early frolics are now visible in our DNA. Genetic analysis indicates that Europeans and Asians obtained 1-4% of their DNA from Neanderthals. It seems everyone was at it. Neanderthals interbred with another species, the Denisovans, as did some of us. Some people from South East Asia have up to 6% Denisovan DNA. Even Africans whose ancestors never left the continent carry some Neanderthal DNA, because 3000 years ago people from Europe and Asia migrated to Africa. Many modern Africans have inherited some genes, including some Neanderthal ones, from these people. Now some scientists are Read More ›

From National Geographic: It’s Official: Pluto Is Even Weirder Than We Thought Sure enough, that’s what the spacecraft found when it sped by the dwarf planet last July at more than 30,000 m.p.h.—a tortured, highly varied landscape that pointed to a living, geologically active world rather than an inert blob hovering at the frozen edge of the solar system. Even now, three months after New Horizons’ close encounter, scientists are just beginning to get a handle on what’s going on with Pluto and it’s large, equally intriguing moon Charon. But what they know already, laid out in a new paper in Science, is impressive—and deeply perplexing. Pluto appears to have been resurfaced (no craters) but That would only be possible Read More ›

Cosmologist Marcelo Gleiser: Despite what physicists like Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss say, we are far from understanding the physics of the Big Bang. In fact, it isn’t even clear that we can provide a complete scientific explanation of the origin of the universe. Because such an understanding should account for the origin of laws of nature. Even the multiverse won’t help in this case, because such a theory would “still use a conceptual structure derivative of present-day physics.” What seems to be needed is a new way of depicting the laws of nature not as static truths about the world but as emerging behaviors that unfold and take hold as time elapses. Physicist Lee Smolin and philosopher Mangabeira Unger Read More ›

“Popperazi” = falsifiability enthusiasts, a la Karl Popper Here. When George Ellis and Joe Silk wrote an op-ed in the prestigious Nature magazine, dramatically entitled “Defend the integrity of physics,” cosmologist Sean Carroll responded via Twitter (not exactly a prestigious scientific journal, but much more effective in public discourse) with, and I quote: “My real problem with the falsifiability police is: we don’t get to demand ahead of time what kind of theory correctly describes the world.” The “falsifiability police”? Wow. It’s how he sees them, Massimo, and whatever appears to be true to him is true. The focus, of course, is superstring theory and related concepts (such as that of a multiverse), which appear to be dominant in the Read More ›

From big think: MIT Physicist Proposes New “Meaning of Life” MIT physicist Jeremy England claims that life may not be so mysterious after all, despite the fact it is apparently derived from non-living matter. In a new paper, England explains how simple physical laws make complex life more likely than not. In other words, it would be more surprising to find no life in the universe than a buzzing place like planet Earth. Excuse me, but we currently have a sample size of 1. What does all matter—rocks, plants, animals, and humans—have in common? We all absorb and dissipate energy. While a rock absorbs a small amount of energy before releasing what it doesn’t use back into the universe, life Read More ›

While the warm-blooded vs. cold-blooded argument rages, from New Scientist: Robert Eagle of the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues estimated the body temperature of two types of dinosaur by analysing fossil eggshells. They found that Titanosaurus, a long-necked sauropod around 10 metres long and 13 tonnes in weight, had a body temperature around 38 ̊C, similar to modern mammals. On the other hand, Oviraptor, a theropod about 2 metres long and 35 kilograms in weight, had a body temperature around 32 ̊C. This is still warmer than crocodiles and their relatives, suggesting that oviraptors generated some heat internally to keep their bodies above the ambient temperature and allow them to be more active. But it also suggests their Read More ›

Jupiter’s moon Europa has long been favoured as a possible site for life because of its underground oceans. This from Discovery.com If alien life swims in the ocean beneath Europa’s icy surface, it might have got its start from comets cracking the icy shell to deliver vital pre-life ingredients, say researchers. Imagine a geyser hundreds of kilometers high. Sound crazy? Well, on Jupiter’s moon they exist, and what these super geysers eject could give us invaluable insight into this unique, ice-covered planet. New simulations show that a specific family of comets have the mass, velocity and opportunity to do the job — penetrating the full range of likely Europan ice thicknesses. More. A comet getting through the ice depends on Read More ›

While shopping at the gene counter, we learned from The Scientist : Published genomes are chock-full of contamination. But as awareness of the problem grows, so do methods to help combat it. When Supratim Mukherjee noticed the same bacteriophage sequence popping up again and again in hundreds of microbial genomes from a database he was analyzing, he got excited. Mukherjee, a bioinformatician at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was comparing the metabolic pathways of the microbes, and he began to wonder what the nearly ubiquitous sequence was. “I thought we must have discovered something novel,” he recalls. “This entire bacteriophage genome was intact in all these diverse microbes.” But when Mukherjee looked up the bacteriophage sequence, he learned that it was Read More ›