Millennia ago,epicycles were introduced to astronomy to account for differences between theory and observation, thus saving the theory. Rob Sheldon writes to comment on a recent finding: New theory of secondary inflation expands options for avoiding an excess of dark matter. First, here’s the finding: Physicists suggest a smaller secondary inflationary period in the moments after the Big Bang could account for the abundance of the mysterious matter Standard cosmology — that is, the Big Bang Theory with its early period of exponential growth known as inflation — is the prevailing scientific model for our universe, in which the entirety of space and time ballooned out from a very hot, very dense point into a homogeneous and ever-expanding vastness. This Read More ›

O’Leary for News’ blog on new media Tweet!: Canadian cleared of harassment charges Many people today have a self-image of victimhood that is both impervious to and unrelated to shared facts. Print media are now officially a coffee table item Old media rarely die out altogether. They survive as period pieces and collectors’ items. Could Google sway an election? If so, how? American psychologist Robert Epstein explains how search engine rankings can be manipulated. Killed in Mexico’s drug wars: Honest reporting When media are afraid to report the news, there’s another casualty: Informed decision-making and voting. New media may help in the long run for a structural reason: They feature no “gatekeeper” role such as held by the veteran journalist Read More ›

BA77 often posts clips of citations and links here at UD. After a recent noticeable break (we missed you), he has just [–> correction: he posted in a thread some time ago which just got a comment from TJG . . . ]  posted a link to a video on objections to prof Dawkins’ claims that FOXP 2 (let me be exact) etc trees give the same structure: [youtube IfFZ8lCn5uU] Key clips include a transcript: Plus, several family trees, such as FOXP1, showing: With FOXP2: FOXP3: The three trees seem to be quite divergent, one putting chimps with squirrels and the like, another putting gorillas on a different branch, and only one putting the three on neighbouring twigs. This seems Read More ›

From Pub Med: Evolution by epigenesis: farewell to Darwinism, neo- and otherwise. Follow UD News at Twitter! In the last 25 years, criticism of most theories advanced by Darwin and the neo-Darwinians has increased considerably, and so did their defense. Darwinism has become an ideology, while the most significant theories of Darwin were proven unsupportable. The critics advanced other theories instead of ‘natural selection’ and the survival of the fittest’. ‘Saltatory ontogeny’ and ‘epigenesis’ are such new theories proposed to explain how variations in ontogeny and novelties in evolution are created. They are reviewed again in the present essay that also tries to explain how Darwinians, artificially kept dominant in academia and in granting agencies, are preventing their acceptance. Epigenesis, Read More ›

  Denis Noble is one of the figures behind the upcoming “rethink evolution” meet in November. Here’s one of his lectures: Physiologist Noble doubts Darwinism, and does a good job of identifying problems with the Central Dogma and other stuff* that just hangs around forever. Darwinists say they are phasing it out. But they don’t need to if they can phase out the careers of people who know it is bunk instead. So lots of people want a meeting. *Note: For that matter, there’s Dollo’s Law: That said, patterns we assume to exist may not hold up. A classic evolutionary doctrine, “Dollo’s law,” claims that traits once lost can never be regained. But bone worms, for one example, seem to break this Read More ›

This row has been going on for twelve years. From Nature: The saga began when the paper described a method for using RNA sequences to grow tiny hexagonal crystals of palladium metal. The work hinted that RNA might have a role in producing inorganic materials in the environment. It has been cited more than 135 times. But Stefan Franzen, another chemist at NCSU, soon raised questions about the work. In a series of publications, he challenged whether the team had really seen RNA-driven action or stable palladium crystals. Franzen filed a formal complaint to NCSU, which kicked off a series of investigations. In the 2013 report, the NSF inspector-general found that the researchers had omitted experimental details and overstated the Read More ›

A friend draws attention to this paywalled paper, noting that—however it tries to wallpaper issues—at least confronts a problem: The conventional claims about how natural selection can simply “gather” information are inadequate. It’s nice wallpaper; there’s probably no wall under it. But there doesn’t need to be. One can say anything one wants about evolution these days and attribute anything at all to it. From Trends and Ecology and Evolution: The theory of evolution links random variation and selection to incremental adaptation. In a different intellectual domain, learning theory links incremental adaptation (e.g., from positive and/or negative reinforcement) to intelligent behaviour. Specifically, learning theory explains how incremental adaptation can acquire knowledge from past experience and use it to direct future Read More ›

From Salk Institute: “This is a real bombshell in the field of neuroscience,” says Terry Sejnowski, Salk professor and co-senior author of the paper, which was published in eLife. “We discovered the key to unlocking the design principle for how hippocampal neurons function with low energy but high computation power. Our new measurements of the brain’s memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web.” … The Salk team, while building a 3D reconstruction of rat hippocampus tissue (the memory center of the brain), noticed something unusual. In some cases, a single axon from one neuron formed two synapses reaching out to a single dendrite Read More ›

From BBC: The theory goes that although we sleep for fewer hours than other primates, the sleep that we have is of high quality so we do not need as much. To understand whether human sleep is unique, Samson and Nunn compared the sleep patterns of 21 primates, whose slumber patterns had already been analysed. Humans therefore have the deepest sleep of any primate As well as noting how long the animals slept for, they looked at how much time they spent in rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep. This is when we dream, and when our brain consolidates our memories into long-term storage. Humans slept the least. The sleepiest primates were grey mouse lemurs and night monkeys, which slept for 15 Read More ›

From Nature: Opaekaa Falls, like much of Kauai, is teeming with feral chickens — free-ranging fowl related both to the domestic breeds that lay eggs or produce meat for supermarket shelves and to a more ancestral lineage imported to Hawaii hundreds of years ago. … The process of domestication has moulded animals and their genomes to thrive in human environments. Traits that ensure survival in the wild often give way to qualities that benefit humans, such as docility and fast growth. Feralization looks, on its surface, like domestication in reverse. But closer inspection suggests that the chickens of Kauai are evolving into something quite different from their wild predecessors, gaining some traits that reflect that past, but maintaining others that Read More ›

From Salk Institute: Grafted plants’ genomes can communicate with each other Agricultural grafting dates back nearly 3,000 years. By trial and error, people from ancient China to ancient Greece realized that joining a cut branch from one plant onto the stalk of another could improve the quality of crops. Now, researchers at the Salk Institute and Cambridge University have used this ancient practice, combined with modern genetic research, to show that grafted plants can share epigenetic traits, according to a new paper published the week of January 18, 2016 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. … “Grafting is something done often in the commercial world, and yet, we really don’t completely understand the consequences for the two Read More ›

In a few short paragraphs here.  For some reason the phrase “epic smackdown” keeps coming to mind.  

Further to Biology of the Baroque, in an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio’s Steve Paulson at Nautilus, Nobelist (2004) Frank Wilczek argues that Beauty Is Physics’ Secret Weapon We recognize beauty when we see it, right? Michelangelo’s David, Machu Picchu, an ocean sunrise. Could we say the same about the cosmos itself? Frank Wilczek, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks we can. And should. In his new book A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design, Wilczek lays out his case for the elegance of mathematics and the coherence of nature’s underlying laws. … Was beauty important to Einstein and the other founders of modern physics? Absolutely, although they didn’t always think about it explicitly. Einstein Read More ›

The documentary explores the mystery of non-adaptive order in biology and the unique challenge it presents to Darwinian evolution. More re documentary: here.

From ScienceDaily: The nest of black garden ants, Lasius niger, consists of an underground part made up of a network of galleries, and a mound of earth composed of a large number of bubble-shaped chambers closely interconnected with each other. Using 3D imaging techniques such as X-ray tomography[2] and a 3D scanner, the researchers characterized the 3D structures made by the ants as well as the construction dynamics. In addition, they analyzed the individual building behavior of the ants. In the part located above ground, the insects pile up their building materials forming pillars that encircle the chambers. The ants preferentially deposit their soil pellets in areas where other clusters of pellets have already been created. They add a pheromone Read More ›