For whom is that a problem? Escience News attempts to set some limits to our uniqueness Frank said that the third big question–how long civilizations might survive–is still completely unknown. “The fact that humans have had rudimentary technology for roughly ten thousand years doesn’t really tell us if other societies would last that long or […]
Month: April 2016
Major human extinction more likely to kill you than traffic accident
Yeh, the End of All Thing IS at hand. File yer tax return first, okay? The government needs the money. Robinson Meyer at the Atlantic channels the best of science: Nuclear war. Climate change. Pandemics that kill tens of millions. These are the most viable threats to globally organized civilization. They’re the stuff of nightmares and […]
Another naturalist slam at free will
From Scientific American via Business Insider: In a study just published in Psychological Science, Paul Bloom and I explore a radical—but non-magical—solution to this puzzle. Perhaps in the very moments that we experience a choice, our minds are rewriting history, fooling us into thinking that this choice—that was actually completed after its consequences were subconsciously […]
Earth shatters at new physics find?
From CERN researcher Pauline Gagnon at Aeon: Physics is on the verge of an Earth-shattering discovery The Higgs boson filled in the last missing piece of the Standard Model, but this model is itself clearly incomplete. None of its particles has the properties of dark matter, a mysterious entity that is five times as prevalent as […]
Evolution Arguments Are Not Holding Water
Being an evolutionist means never having to say you’re sorry. Just look at Richard Dawkins who will say pretty much anything at any time, no matter how much it contradicts science or just plain logic. If he ever gets into trouble he can always lapse back into a rant about those creationist rascals and the […]
Sell your stock in volcanic vents
From ScienceDaily: The crucibles that bore out building blocks of life may have been, in many cases, not fiery cataclysms, but modest puddles. Researchers working with that hypothesis have achieved a significant advancement toward understanding the evolutionary mystery of how components of RNA and DNA formed from chemicals present on early Earth before life existed. […]
Peer review: Troubled from the start
From Nature: Today, with the debate about the future of peer review more fraught than ever, it is crucial to understand the youth of this institution. What’s more, its workings and its imagined goals have evolved continually, and its current tensions bear the marks of this. The referee system has become a mishmash of practices, […]
“Here we report a new cell”
. Cells are the fundamental units of life. The genome sequence of a cell may be thought of as its operating system. It carries the code that specifies all of the genetic functions of the cell, which in turn determine the cellular chemistry, structure, replication, and other characteristics. Each genome contains instructions for universal functions […]
If math is not real, BS stats are okay. Right?
Why do people who think math is just something humans evolved to relate to our world (and has only an accidental relationship with correctness) think it is important if statistics are just made up? Clearly they do care (language warning), as is evident from an interview with stats critic Tim Harford More or Less at […]
Breaking: Carnivores ate humans 500k ago
From ScienceDaily: Early humans may have been food for carnivores 500,000 years ago Tooth-marks on a 500,000-year-old hominin femur bone found in a Moroccan cave indicate that it was consumed by large carnivores, likely hyenas, according to a study published April 27, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Camille Daujeard from the Muséum […]
Climate Hustle: Armageddon-free look at climate change
From Paul Driessen at Townhall: I saw Climate Hustle April 14, at its U.S. premiere on Capitol Hill in Washington. The film is informative and entertaining, pointed and humorous. As meteorologist Anthony Watts says, it is wickedly effective in its using slapstick humor and the words and deeds of climate alarmists to make you laugh […]
New Scientist tells us what human gene traits conquered world
Here: Dozens of genes found in humans today have been traced to Neanderthals and Denisovans. They made their way into the human species when some of our direct ancestors mated with ancient lineages that are now extinct. Interbreeding like this happened in Africa and in Eurasia, producing many human hybrids – you can read more […]
Denton: Vast majority of taxa defined without ancestral forms
From Michael Denton, in Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (2016): Incongruous thought it might seem (in the context of the evolutionary propaganda machine and especially to a reader outside of academia), it remains true, as I point out in Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985), that the vast majority of all taxa are indeed […]
Science: The Victim of Ideology ‘Uber Alles’
Here’s a link to an article from American Thinker that details how, in Ohio, the Univ. of Cincinnati did a three year study on the effects of oil-well “fracking,” the results of which demonstrate no contamination of ground water had occurred because of “fracking.” And then the study was quashed.
Poached Egg’s common sense cosmology
Take two of these: 4) We cannot appeal to the singularity as the cause of the universe. If the big bang singularity is precisely nothing, we are left with the question of how the universe then came into existence out of nothing. Others have argued that a big bang singularity would be a real physical […]