From ScienceDaily: “This study shows that the unique bill contributes to the birds’ ability to use and probably make tools,” he said. “We argue that the beak became specialized for tool manipulation once the birds began using tools, and that this enhanced tool manipulation ability may have allowed the crows to make more complex tools.” Probably. It works that way with appendages too. In fact, some differences in apparent animal intelligence may come down to whether the animal can carry out an action for its own benefit. Shellfish are closer anatomically to octopuses than birds are but both octopuses and birds can use body parts to do something. Shellfish can’t. Can we quantify intelligence apart from the ability to demonstrate Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: By looking at distantly related bacteria from different branches of the evolutionary tree, the team speculate that the ability to alter torque in this way may have evolved up to two billion years ago. “Entire branches of the bacterial family tree have evolved motors with different torques, leading to a diversity of species each geared to their own environment,” said Dr Beeby. The team is now investigating how and when the evolutionary steps that altered motor torque happened. More. Evolved two billion years ago? That’s not a lot of time for Darwinian evolution, even if a wheel could be achieved that way, given enough monkeys, enough typewriters. See also: You’ll never guess why biological wheels are not irreducibly Read More ›

Neanderthals diet: 80% meat, 20% vegetables, according to ScienceDaily: The paleo-diet is one of the new trends among nutrition-conscious people — but what exactly did the meal plan of our extinct ancestors include? “We have taken a detailed look at the Neanderthals’ diet,” explains Professor Dr. Hervé Bocherens of the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen, and he continues, “In the process, we were able to determine that the extinct relatives of today’s humans primarily fed on large herbivorous mammals such as mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses.” The two excavation sites in Belgium that were examined offered the international team of scientists led by the biogeologist from Tübingen a vast array of 45,000 to 40,000 Read More ›

[cannot locate drive] From BBC News: So Itskov is putting a slice of his fortune in to a bold plan he has devised to bypass ageing. He wants to use cutting-edge science to unlock the secrets of the human brain and then upload an individual’s mind to a computer, freeing them from the biological constraints of the body. “The ultimate goal of my plan is to transfer someone’s personality into a completely new body,” he says. … But Itskov is far from home and dry. At Duke University, one leading neuroscientist argues that the brain’s dynamic complexity – from which the human condition emerges – cannot be replicated. “You cannot code intuition; you cannot code aesthetic beauty; you cannot code Read More ›

The cottage industry attempting to show that great apes are just fuzzy people has a new one for us: From ScienceDaily: In one of the twelve tasks, children needed to use a stick as a lever to retrieve pom poms from a small box. Similarly, great apes use twigs to remove kernels from nuts or seeds from stingy fruits. The tasks could only be solved by using a tool, but children were not told that. Dr Claudio Tennie, Birmingham Fellow, explained, “The idea was to provide children with the raw material necessary to solve the task. We told children the goal of the task, for example to get the pom poms out of the box, but we never mentioned using Read More ›

From Nature News: The pupfish has evolved distinct differences from related species that live nearby, including reduced aggression, larger eyes and missing pelvic fins. But Many researchers thought that the fish species had been isolated in its cavern from around 13,000 years ago — the last time major flooding occurred in the region. But Christopher Martin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and his colleagues say that genetic sequencing suggests that the pupfish became trapped in Devils Hole somewhere between 105 and 830 years ago — and since then has continued to exchange genes with neighbouring populations of pupfish species. “That was the big surprise,” says Martin. “Every few hundred years there’s a fish or Read More ›

From New Scientist: Behold – the only known example of a biological wheel. Loved by creationists, who falsely think they are examples of “intelligent design”, the bacterial flagellum is a long tail that is spun like a propeller by nano-sized protein motors. … Indeed, the diversity of the motors and the fact that they have evolved many times in different bacterial lineages, scuppers the creationist view that the machinery is “irreducibly complex”. More. Have a look. The New Scientist writer seems anxious to so mangle the idea of irreducible complexity that “irreducible complexity” means lack of diversity and “evolved only once.” People indulge in this kind of thing when their claims are so intimately a part of their readers’ lives Read More ›

I was asked today for a comment about a paper regarding irreducible complexity – Eliminating the Requirement of an Essential Gene Product in an Already Very Small Virus: Scaffolding Protein B-free øX174, B-free by Min Chen, Asako Uchiyama, and Bentley A. Fane, 2007.

I noted that despite this having been written in 2007, no one at all seemed to comment on it one way or the other. So, here is my short commentary on their criticism of Behe’s Irreducible Complexity. It is late, so I didn’t spend a lot of time reading in-depth, so please correct me where I am wrong.
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At Quillette, Brian Boutwell defends the concept of “race”: Evolution, as it applies to the social sciences, would have also made the list some decades back. But pioneers like E.O. Wilson, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, David Buss, Margot Wilson, and Martin Daly (as well as a number of others) have absorbed many punches and blows for us younger generation of scholars. Their efforts produced a sizeable evidentiary base regarding the role that evolutionary processes have played (and continue to play) in sculpting human psychology. Debates still rage, and controversies still exist, but nowadays arguing that natural selection played some role in molding human psychology will no longer jeopardize your career. Huh? Far from thinking evolutionary psychology would jeopardize a career, Read More ›

From Quartz: The idea that papers are publishing false results might sound alarming but the recent crisis doesn’t mean that the entire scientific method is totally wrong. In fact, science’s focus on its own errors is a sign that researchers are on exactly the right path. Ivan Oransky, producer of the blog Retraction Watch, which tracks retractions printed in journals, tells Quartz that ultimately, the alarm will lead to increased rigor. There’s going to be some short-term and maybe mid-term pain as all of this shakes out, but that’s how you move forward,” he says. “It’s like therapy—if you never get angry in therapy, you’re probably not pushing hard enough. If you never find mistakes, or failures to reproduce in Read More ›

Again? From NOVA:Today, there is wide scientific consensus that black holes are real. Even though they can’t be observed directly—by definition, they give off no light—astronomers can infer their hidden presence by watching how stars, gas, and dust swirl and glow around them. But what if they’re wrong? Could something else—massive, dense, all-but-invisible—be concealed in the darkness? A telescope as big as the Earth could tell a black hole from an exotic imposter. While black holes have gone mainstream, a handful of researchers are investigating exotic ultra-compact stars that, they argue, would look exactly like black holes from afar. Well, almost exactly. Though their ideas have been around for many years, researchers are now putting them to the most stringent Read More ›

Inspired by Michael Denton’s Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (2016)

It’s in the air. Talk of replacing Darwinism. See, for example: Don’t let zoologists hog the stage at the upcoming Royal Society rethink evolution meet. Long overdue for a serious discussion. That said, some cures really are worse than the disease. From Gatestone Institute, embedded in an article on the current bout of suppression of media in prospective EU member Turkey, Turkish law professor Ayse Isil Karakas, both a judge and elected Deputy Head of the ECHR, said that among all member states, Turkey has ranked number one in the field of violations of free speech. “619 lawsuits of freedom of expression were brought at the ECHR between 1959 and 2015,” she said. ” 258 of them — almost half Read More ›

For those who are unfamiliar with The Royal Society, it’s an academic organization whose membership includes many of the world’s most eminent scientists, and is “the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence”. In loose terms, they are a British forbearer to many of the various Academies of Science sprinkled throughout the nations of the world. From their mission statement: The Society’s fundamental purpose, reflected in its founding Charters of the 1660s, is to recognize, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity. This article isn’t necessarily about the Royal Society, except for the fact that it serves as the genesis of the story, and also a proper backdrop Read More ›

From Hank Campbell at Science20, a potpourri of people he wishes didn’t have funds: Meanwhile, Denier For Hire groups like SourceWatch (see their executive director libel me here) who spend their time and money vilifying pro-science groups in every other area (food, technology, chemistry, energy, medicine) turned a blind eye to the advocacy research being done by the dark money people and corporations on the political side of the aisle that fund them. Crappy job, Hank, but someone has to do it. The popular science media are often a field demonstration of monochromatic advocacy. … Academics were not going to be duped by such faux political allies forever, and as time has gone on academic scientists have caught on to Read More ›