2015

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 ›

WJM, of course, often puts up gems well worth headlining and pondering. Here, he tackles truth denialism in reply to KS in the is nothing certain thread: _______________ >>I’ve never understood what Keiths point is in making this argument. So there is some technical chance that god or aliens or demons are deceiving us into believing false propositions. So what? What difference in day to day life would it make to keep reminding oneself that there is a technical possibility that they are in error about anything they think? People still have to act as if they are certain about all sorts of things. People still have to argue as they know some things are true. Keith is as operationally Read More ›

Two years ago, KeithS, who surely needs no introduction here, mounted a skeptical argument in a thread on Uncommon Descent. The argument purported to show that we should never claim absolute certainty for any thought – a very strong conclusion. It was not until today that this argument came to my attention, when I read a comment by KeithS in a post by Colin over at TSZ, on self-evident truths. In this post, I will not be arguing that there are any self-evident truths. My aim is a more modest one: to show that the strong version of skepticism defended by KeithS does not follow from the premises in his argument. KeithS’s skeptical argument To give credit where credit is Read More ›

Here’s the abstract: There is a huge variety of RNA- and DNA-containing entities that multiply within and propagate between cells across all kingdoms of life, having no cells of their own. Apart from cellular organisms these entities (viroids, plasmids, mobile elements and viruses among others) are the only ones with distinct genetic identities but which are not included in any traditional tree of life. We suggest to introduce or, rather, revive the distinct category of acellular organisms, Acytota, as an additional, undeservedly ignored full-fledged kingdom of life. Acytota are indispensable players in cellular life and its evolution. The six traditional kingdoms (Cytota) and Acytota together complete the classification of the biological world (Biota), leaving nothing beyond. But philosopher of biology Read More ›

This pdf letter to Nature journal Cell Research is free: Paternally contributed centrioles exhibit exceptional persistence in *C. elegans *embryos If you want background re centrioles. This door is for Darwin trolls. So far as we know, noise limits are not currently in force. See also: Talk to the fossils: Let’s see what they say back

From Mental Floss: 10. YOUR FIRST MICROBIOME CONTACT WAS IN UTERO. For years, science considered the uterus of a pregnant woman a sterile environment, but new research published in Science Translational Medicine revealed that placentas have a unique microbiome that is different from any other part of the body (though most similar to the microbiome of the mouth). Contact with their mothers’ placentas, and the umbilical cord that attaches them, offers babies their first exposure to the bacteria that will soon colonize and support their own small bodies. Understanding this particular microbiome may also help researchers learn more to treat in utero infections and preterm births. More. By contrast, the space alien certainly exists, according to tax-funded sources, but has Read More ›

Well, we thought so. But it wasn’t something we could really say in a world where Bimbette, looking as concerned as her current hairstyle makes possible, interviews a Darwin-in-the-schools lobbyist, knowing that no one will question the intelligence of either party as long as the bimbette appears to take her interview subjects seriously. Okay, seriously: Further to Questions re recent Naledi human evolution find (some relate to the quality and sponsorship of the work), here’s Jeffrey H. Schwartz’s view (he’s the skeptic re homo habilis): What to do? As I recently advocated in the journal Science, it’s about time paleoanthropologists acknowledged what a taxonomic and undefinable mess the genus Homo has become, and restudy the human fossil record without preconceived Read More ›

Further to the recent Homo naledi find in South Africa, just some stuff to think about: Some people wrote to ask, why Berger and his colleagues published their Homo neledi findings in an open access journal (eLIFE) rather than a staider one like Nature or Science. Well, we are not mind readers, so … one problem noted might be undated fossils. Anyway, their story is getting air via National Geographic (“Artist Gurche spent some 700 hours reconstructing the head from bone scans, using bear fur for hair”). And the concern is no surprise as Lee Berger is an NG explorer in residence. And he is no stranger to controversy with colleagues: Paleoanthropologists often take years, sometimes decades, to publish their Read More ›