When intelligent design is nuts From Phys.org: Lead researcher, Kendy Teng, from the University of Sydney, Australia, said, “Australians are favouring brachycephalic breeds, dogs with shorter and wider heads, such as the Pug and the French bulldog, more than those with longer and thinner heads. Looking at data spanning 28 years, we found that the demand for smaller dogs has increased every year from 1986.” “Veterinarians are concerned about brachycephalic dogs’ welfare, as these breeds commonly suffer from breathing difficulties, skin and eye conditions, and digestive disorders. In New Zealand, brachycephalic breeds are number four of the top five dog breeds considered by veterinarians to be unsuitable for continued breeding due to compromised health and welfare. We expect to see Read More ›

From Daily Mail: Ecologists, historians and geneticists from the TaurOs Programme hope to recreate the auroch by crossbreeding, or ‘back breeding’ modern cattle. Unlike in the work to resurrect the woolly mammoth, there is no need to use ancient DNA from well-preserved remains. Instead, the scientists identified ‘primitive’ breeds of cattle that share characteristics with their auroch ancestors, such as a tall and athletic build, long legs and forward curling horns to recapture the animal’s original purpose- to graze large areas of wilderness. They began the back breeding programme using seven varieties of cattle in 2009 and progress is being made. More. Interestingly, writer Sarah Griffiths is not throwing the word “species” around wildly. Good thing, because the best interpretation Read More ›

From Thony Christie at Aeon: Galileo’s vast reputation, and the hyperbolic accolades that go with it, are not justified by the real history. With a corrected perspective on the man comes a rich and compelling pair of questions: what did Galileo actually achieve, and where does the science superhero image come from? Ah! At last! A question we can answer. The Galileo of pop science is the science teacher people wish they had, instead of the fourth-rate union dweeb they did have, and were ordered to be grateful to the public school system for. Having parlayed his discoveries into a new position as court philosopher and mathematician to the Medici in Florence, Galileo’s fame rested largely on those telescopic discoveries Read More ›

From New Scientist: The ballistics of galactic shrapnel show that the Milky Way has already crashed into its giant neighbour, Andromeda – but if that’s right, physics is wrong Well, if we don’t exist anymore, it doesn’t matter much if physics is wrong, but … A monstrous Milkomeda galaxy? It’s a well-established picture of our galaxy’s cataclysmic future. More controversially, it might also be a vision of its past. More. You have to pay to read the rest. And, aw, we dunno. Predicting the end of all things is by its nature a risky business. The nice thing about New Scientist is that it makes the religious fantasies of some of my neighbours seem normal. See also: The bill arrives Read More ›

From ScienceNordic: “We have found a mathematical rule that can objectively evaluate the evolution of different parts of the body,” says lead-author Professor Jukka Jernvall University of Helsinki, Finland. More. But wait! Don’t evolutionary biologists also say that evolution has no goal, and can’t be used to make predictions? Isn’t that “no goal” thing precisely what Brit psychs want to cram down kiddies’ throats? “In this context, the new study also explains why we are now losing our wisdom teeth–it’s simply a pattern that was already established at the beginning of our family tree,” says Jernvall. So long as you know the species, the model can precisely describe tooth development and predict the size of teeth in the dental arch Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: I keep circling back in my mind to the dramatic juxtaposition of atheist, theistic evolutionist (TE), and ID advocate in Saturday night’s debate at the University of Toronto. I won’t use names, since it was almost a clash of archetypes where the personal identities and personal circumstances hardly matter. That the TE persistently joined with the atheist in going after the ID’er speaks volumes. An email correspondent, thinking along the same lines, offers the phrase “science signaling,” a play on “virtue signaling.” The latter refers to the habit of some in political and other debates to care more about signaling their own virtue than about winning the election or other contest against Read More ›

From Daily Caller: The research concludes that when people purchase an electric car or install rooftop solar, that decision is often heavily motivated by a desire to appear trendy and fashionable to their peers, which researchers dub as “conspicuous conservation.” Economists previously calculated that car dealerships and manufacturers can charge an extra $7,000 for a Prius, a hybrid car, because of social status bonuses. That’s quite a bit considering the hybrid car starts at $24,200. “Every era produces hucksters trying to sell snake oil,” Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute who did not take part in the study, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “But the particular type of flimflam Read More ›

Checking out what good science really means is usually a serious and revealing business (sometimes a distressing one), but then there’s this from Retraction Watch: Microchimica Acta has retracted a paper about water-soluble quantum dots after the authors couldn’t provide back-up for a figure that contained signs of manipulation. The reason, the editor told us: The corresponding author said the raw data were lost in a flood in Sri Lanka. … The paper has been cited 19 times, according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science. As the goldfish said, Glub glub glub We’ve seen a similar explanation for lost data before — see Lost your data? Blame an earthquake. More. Come on now, people. These explanations have way more cachet Read More ›

  From Nautilus, #1: Our spines are a mess. It’s a wonder we can even walk, says Bruce Latimer, director of the Center for Human Origins at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland. When our ancestors walked on all fours, their spines arched, like a bow, to withstand the weight of the organs suspended below. But then we stood up. That threw the system out of whack by 90 degrees, and the spine was forced to become a column. Next, to allow for bipedalism, it curved forward at the lower back. And to keep the head in balance—so that we didn’t all walk around as if doing the limbo—the upper spine curved in the opposite direction. This change put tremendous Read More ›

Recently there has been a spate of newspaper reports extolling Denmark as the world’s happiest country. Secular liberals often point to the Scandinavian countries as an earthly paradise, when compared with what they see as a broken-down, inegalitarian, hyper-religious United States. Are they right? I decided to check out the facts, and here’s what I’ve come up with. My findings, in a nutshell 1. Latin Americans are actually the world’s happiest people; Danes are the world’s most contented people. 2. The success of Sweden and Denmark is due to its social homogeneity and its Protestant work ethic, rather than socialism. 3. Scandinavian societies are egalitarian, but they also tend to stifle individuality. 4. Denmark and Sweden have their own social Read More ›

From Eurekalert: Behind the apparent randomness of a basketball game, a process of self-organisation is actually taking place amid the teams. The interactions between team mates and opponents are constantly influencing each other while the game itself allows for creative behaviours to emerge. This phenomenon, detected by Spanish researchers after analysing over 6,000 NBA games, resembles the way in which living things must continually evolve in order to survive in nature. More. Hmmm. If the basketball players are evolving as a result of their strategies, they are keeping it a secret. In a predator-prey system, for instance, or in a natural changing environment with limited resources, species evolve in their arms race by adapting. They continuously fight and give it Read More ›

From Robert Lawrence Kuhn at Space: On the other hand, when asked his view of the anthropic principle, physicist David Gross at the University of California at Santa Barbara said, “I hate it.” “Anthropic considerations acquire real physical meaning only if one has many potential options,” Linde explained to me, “but only if some of them are compatible with the existence of observers. “The multiverse provides these options”, he asserted. “The most famous problem addressed by anthropic considerations is the size of the cosmological constant.” In other words, in studying the energy density of empty space, the vacuum, why is the cosmological constant so astonishingly small but still not zero? Linde said there are multiple problems in physics and cosmology, Read More ›

The Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism Online Conference is holding our second online free preview session this morning, April 4th at 7:30 AM Central Time. Login now to join us! This session is on methodological dualism and multi-explanation frameworks in Psychology by Dr. Sam Rakover, Professor Emeritus at the University of Haifa in Israel.
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From Phys.org: The teams’ study consisted of analyzing the remains of approximately 2,500 people that lived in Japan during the Jomon period [(from 13,000 – 800 BC)], looking for examples of violence, e.g. broken or damaged bones. The team reports that they found evidence of violence in just 1.8 percent of all the adult bones represented and in just 0.89 percent of the population as a whole. A very low number compared to the 12 to 14 percent seen in other hunter-gatherer populations of around the same time period (which strongly suggested a violent existence). This, the researchers claim, suggests that the people of that time lived peacefully among themselves and did not conduct war against others that might have Read More ›

From Neuroskeptic at Discover: In a long and interesting article over at Edge, social neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman discusses (amongst other things) the ‘replication crisis’ in his field. … Lieberman wants replictors to be chosen from among those who have done successful work in that area previously — because if they haven’t shown that they can successfully get other priming effects, or other embodied cognition effects, how do I know that they can do this? Neuroskeptic responds, … there’s something odd about the idea that ones qualifications should include a track record in finding positive results in the field in question. That seems to be putting the cart before the horse. I agree that replicators should have the necessary technical skills, Read More ›