According to yet another experimental manipulation. From ScienceDaily: “Challenging a person’s belief in free will did not seem to provide them with a conscious justification for uncooperative behavior,” Protzko said. “If it did, we should have observed fewer contributions when people were given adequate time to think about their decision on the amount to contribute. “It’s very damaging to hear that we don’t have free will,” said Protzko. “Discounting free will changes the way we see things. Yet given time, we recover and go about our lives as though nothing were different.” More. Paper. (paywall) At least in their game simulation. See also: How can we believe in naturalism if we have no choice? and “I will ” means something Read More ›

Call it Mycoplasma mycoides lite—researchers have established what is approximately a minimal organism by removing about have of the genes from theMycoplasma mycoidesgenome. The result is a set of 473 genes which, collectively, appear to be required for any kind of reasonable performance. That is an enormous level of complexity. Furthermore, about one third of that minimal gene set is of unknown function. As J. Craig Venter put it, “We’re showing how complex life is, even in the simplest of organisms. These findings are very humbling.”  Read more

From (lawyers) David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew M. Grossman here: We help scientists, writers, businesses and others targeted for speaking out on scientific issues and policy to defend themselves. Yes, but who needs free speech when we’ve got Science? 😉 Most recently, their target is the Climate change bureaucracy (March 23, 2016): Assuming the mantle of Grand Inquisitor is Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.). Last spring he called on the Justice Department to bring charges against those behind a “coordinated strategy” to spread heterodox views on global warming, including the energy industry, trade associations, “conservative policy institutes” and scientists. Mr. Whitehouse, a former prosecutor, identified as a legal basis for charges that the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Archaic Denisovan and Neanderthal DNA that persists in modern Pacific islanders of Melanesia, far from the Siberian cave where Denisovan fossils have been found, is a source of information about early human history. Equally informative are genome regions where DNA from extinct, human-like species has vanished and been replaced with sequences unique to people. These large regions have genes for brain development, language and brain cell signalling. Retained archaic DNA in human genomes may confer infection-fighting advantages. … Denisovans are related to, but distinct from, Neanderthals. This prehistoric species was discovered less than a decade ago through genetic analysis of a finger bone unearthed in northern Siberia. Named for the mountain cave where that fossil, and later, two Read More ›

From Winston Ewert of the Evolutionary Information Lab, writing at Evolution News & Views: Ev Ever Again — Eying an Evolutionary Simulation A writer at The Skeptical Zone, Patrick, recently contributed a post on the computer simulation ev. He takes aim at William Dembski, Robert Marks, and the Evolutionary Informatics Lab’s analysis of that simulation. However, the events he discusses actually show a history of Darwinists repeatedly misunderstanding or misrepresenting arguments for intelligent design. Patrick fundamentally mistakes the claim we are making about ev (and evolutionary simulations in general). Regarding a response to Schneider from the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, he says: He admits again that evolution does work in certain environments. Patrick treats this as an admission that undermines our Read More ›

From Matthew Davidson at The Conversation: Integrated Information Theory (IIT), and was proposed in 2008 by Guilio Tononi, a US-based neuroscientist. It also has one rather surprising implication: consciousness can, in principle, be found anywhere where there is the right kind of information processing going on, whether that’s in a brain or a computer. … The theory says that a physical system can give rise to consciousness if two physical postulates are met. The first is that the physical system must be very rich in information. … This brings us to the second postulate, which is that for consciousness to emerge, the physical system must also be highly integrated. … The authors report some success in testing a related idea, Read More ›

Well, almost. Maybe should be. From Digg: According to King, Echo was owned by a New Orleans crime boss and he’d been at the wrong place at the wrong time, seen something he wasn’t supposed to, and wouldn’t stop talking about it. All this chatter, King told Heck, meant he was making himself into a potential target. Because Echo isn’t a person, he couldn’t enter an actual witness protection program. At least not officially. At least not yet. … Occasionally parrots learn to mimic darker things. In South Carolina in 2010 a woman went to jail for abusing and neglecting her elderly mother. When local police entered the house they found a parrot that repeated “Help me, help me” — Read More ›

A new reason? ET is HAL, but not psychotic. From Aeon: From the evolution side, a number of futurists are predicting the singularity: a time when computers will soon become powerful enough to simulate human consciousness, or absorb it entirely. In parallel, some visionaries propose that any intelligent life we encounter in the rest of the Universe is more likely to be machine-based, rather than humanoid meat-bags such as ourselves. These ruminations offer a potential solution to the long-debated Fermi Paradox: the seeming absence of intelligent alien life swarming around us, despite the fact that such life seems possible. If machine intelligence is the inevitable end-point of both technology and biology, then perhaps the aliens are hyper-evolved machines so off-the-charts Read More ›

After explaining the limitations of natural selection it is good to see the feature article in this week’s NewScientist admit that “current ways of thinking about evolution give a less-than-complete picture of how that [the spontaneous evolution of ‘all living things’] works.” Less-than-complete? That is evolution-speak for a theoretical meltdown. It’s no secret that the idea that the biosphere arose spontaneously is contradicted by the science. For evolutionists, that means their theory is “less-than-complete.” Well I suppose, technically, that is true. A theory that makes no sense is “less-than-complete.” Evolutionists are masters of the euphemism. They are also masters of the epicycle.  Read more

But Simon Oxenham did, at Prime Mind: Let’s begin by looking at the most widely-read news website—Mail Online, which provides a perfect demonstration of what we’ll call the seesaw effect. Almost every week, the Mail publishes news stories illustrating scientific findings that—apparently—turn our understanding of the world upside down. If you believed everything you read in the Mail about cancer, for example, you’d have to believe that everything from taking aspirin to drinking beer both causes and prevents cancer. That’s according to The Daily Mail Ontological Oncology project, a tongue-in-cheek attempt to track “the Daily Mail’s ongoing effort to classify every inanimate object into those that cause cancer and those that prevent it.” But it’s not just the Mail that’s Read More ›

For those interested in attending, the AM-Nat Conference Schedule has been posted. If you want to find more detail about any of the talks, you can find them on the summary page.
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Waynesburg University (Pennsylvania) biology prof Wayne Rossiter, author of In the Shadow of Oz, offers thoughts on Saturday’s debate in Toronto: Lamoureux’s role in the debate was largely to offer a robotic rolodex of tired cliché’s (e.g., “I find the evidence for evolution overwhelming, there is no debate on that,” and “biology only makes sense in light of evolution”). Among them was the classic, “show me one tooth in the Cambrian, and we’ll turn all the science upside-down.” Of course, we have good reason to doubt that he would be true to his ultimatum. After all, we didn’t think evolution could account for the massive diversification of animal life seen in a 5-8 million year sliver of the Cambrian period, Read More ›

From New Scientist: … That brings to the fore areas that are not part of the canon of evolutionary theory: epigenetics, for example, which studies how organisms are affected by changes in the ways in which genes are expressed, rather than in the genes themselves. Attempts to incorporate such elements into evolutionary theory have not always been welcomed, however. That is understandable, given how successful the theory has been without them. Occam’s razor applies: do not add complications unless they are absolutely necessary. But another motivating factor is undoubtedly the fear that if scientists themselves are seen to suggest that even small details of the theory of evolution could be improved upon, its detractors will seize upon them with avidity. Read More ›

A reader writes, to share this brief remembrance of Dr. Hughes  in Infection, Genetics and Evolution. Here’s a reminiscence from a friend as well: No one was exempt from his devastating critiques—friends, scientists, religious leaders. Jerry Coyne twice had the splendid misfortune of addressing topics better understood by Hughes, and from a conflicting point of view, resulting in chains of blogs, columns, and book reviews (for example, see “Faith, Fact, and False Dichotomies“). However, erroneous claims only seemed to bother him when tied to some metaphysical agenda, such as Coyne’s atheism. Conflict on other matters, such as hostile reviews of his work overturning well-accepted bird phylogenies, prompted easy resignation: “Oh well, I tried.” When it came to outlandish claims about evolution, Hughes Read More ›

But then we would need to replace a lot of science journalists. From Michael Schulson at Pacific Standard: Last May, when This American Life acknowledged that it had run a 23-minute-long segment premised on a fraudulent scientific study, America’s most respected radio journalists did something strange: They declined to apologize for the error. “Our original story was based on what was known at the time,” host Ira Glass explained in a blog post. “Obviously the facts have changed.” It was a funny admission. Journalists typically don’t say that “facts change”; it is a journalist’s job to define and publicize facts. When a reporter gets hoodwinked by a source, she does not imply that something in the fabric of reality has Read More ›