By mathematician (and string theory skeptic) Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: It seems that Carroll was arguing that the multiverse shows that we need to change our thinking about what science is, adopting his favored “abduction” and “Bayesian reasoning” framework, getting rid of falsifiability. Using this method he arrives at a probability of the multiverse as “about 50%” (funny, but that’s the same number I’d use, as for any binary option where you know nothing). So, from the Bayesians we now have the following for multiverse probability estimates: 1. Carroll: “About 50%” 2. Polchinski: “94%” 3. Rees: “Kill my dog if it’s not true” 4. Linde: “Kill me if it’s not true” 5. Weinberg: “Kill Linde and Rees’s dog if Read More ›

  Over on this thread we’ve had a lively discussion, primarily about common descent.  However, one of the key side discussions has focused on the information required to build an organism. Remarkably, some have argued that essentially nothing is required except a parts list on a digital storage medium.  Yes, you heard right.  Given the right sequence of digital characters (represented by nucleotides in the DNA molecule), each part will correctly self-assemble, the various parts will make their way automatically to the correct place within the cell, they will then automatically assemble into larger protein complexes and molecular machines to perform work, the various cells will automatically assemble themselves into larger structures, such as limbs and organs, and eventually everything will Read More ›

From Yahoo: WASHINGTON, June 15, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — “Allowing the FCC to rule the Internet like a public utility under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act will do nothing but produce a broadband shortage,” said George Gilder, bestselling technology author and Discovery Institute senior fellow. “This just creates new incentives for broadband providers to divert investment into advertising and content platforms or other countries,” Gilder added. By a 2-1 vote the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has upheld the net neutrality rules adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in 2015. More. This much I know is true: Bureaucrats can administer a shortage of goods and services just as easily as a surplus but businesses in free Read More ›

From Globe and Mail: While fertilization is the crucial first step to all human life, it has not been easy for scientists to determine precisely what happens when egg and sperm meet. In addition to the technical challenges, experiments that require human fertilization immediately raise ethical issues. To sidestep these dilemmas, researchers in both groups found ways to separately generate two proteins that are known to be crucial for fertilization and studied their interaction. The teams were then able to deduce the three-dimensional structures of the proteins and show precisely how they fit together, atom to atom. Their complementary findings were published Wednesday in the journal Nature. … One intriguing detail is that the Izumo1 protein, which is long and Read More ›

From Emily Singer at Quanta: According to the new findings, published in Genetics this month, Neanderthal genomes were rife with harmful DNA that significantly reduced the species’ fitness. The researchers conclude that Neanderthals were roughly 40 percent less fit than modern humans, meaning they were less likely to produce offspring. More. Okay, so it turns out we didn’t murder them, like everyone said we had. That’s the trouble when you’re supposed to be extinct. People can insist that Neanderthals are the Bad Seed and they can’t launch a grievance. Fortunately, even if it’s nonsense, no one gets hurt. Far cry from eugenics. See also: There’s a gene for that… or is there? and Neanderthal Man: The long-lost relative turns up Read More ›

From New Scientist: “NASA has been shameful in not searching for extraterrestrial life and at the same time claiming that’s one of the motivations for their programmes,” says Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. “The Mars programme counts life as the reason for the programme, and then the missions NASA implements don’t even approach the question at all.” McKay cites the example of the upcoming Mars 2020 rover, which will primarily search for signs that life once existed on the Red Planet. Rather than hunting for alien microbes today, the rover will set aside samples that NASA hopes some future mission will bring back to Earth, where we can probe them for signs Read More ›

From Douglas Axe, author of Undeniable, in response to Atul Gawande (“Scientific explanation stands in contrast to the wisdom of divinity and experience and common sense”), who was complaining about lack of public confidence in science. At Evolution News & Views: Maybe the better way to restore public confidence is to abandon the condescending mindset and embrace a much more radically inclusive view of science. Maybe the moms Gawande referred to — the ones who jumped to the conclusion that vaccines were dangerous — aren’t all that different from professional scientists who jump to the conclusion that public dissent is dangerous. Gawande gave five handy tips for writing people off as pseudoscientists, but instead of alienating people by dismissing them Read More ›

From BBC: The microbes, called Geobacter metallireducens, were getting their electrons from organic compounds, and passing them onto iron oxides. In other words they were eating waste – including ethanol – and effectively “breathing” iron instead of oxygen. f course, this is not breathing as we would recognise it. For one thing, bacteria do not have lungs. Instead, the bacteria pass their electrons to metal oxides that lie outside the cell. They do this through special hair-like wires that protrude from the cell’s surface. These tiny wires act in much in the same way that copper wire does when it conducts electricity. They have been dubbed “microbial nanowires”. More. We’ve noted this before, here and here. If a life form Read More ›

Comments on a new study on the phylogeny of Homo naledi published today in the August issue of Journal of Human Evolution. For this analysis, Dembo et al. used Bayesian methods to infer the phylogeny. I’ve always been a bit suspicious of Bayesian methods, mostly because of the need for a model for which the probability is known. That’s technically not knowable, but Bayesian methods get around this by drawing model probabilities from a set of “random” models. So it ends up sort of like a bootstrap in traditional parsimony studies. What Bayesian methods get you is the ability to test many more models and model parameters than you could with other phylogenetic methods, and that’s really a big deal. In Read More ›

From Daily Caller: Twitter lost one of its leading lights earlier this month when user @Real_PeerReview, who chronicled ridiculous, useless, and unintelligible academic papers, shut down their account in an apparent effort to avoid having their real-life academic career ruined. While @Real_PeerReview’s tweets have been deleted from Twitter, they fortunately are not gone entirely, and can still be read here. More. For example, This article investigates the origins of the bucket and spade as a foundational element in the relational materialism of the beach as a space of vacationing. Using the intensification of Romantic beach painting through the early nineteenth century alongside prose descriptions and the development of photography at the beach, the article locates more precisely than ever before Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The Australian National University (ANU) study found that by living in the same habitat, pythons and boas evolved independently to look similar. This happened at least five times in different habitats. Aquatic pythons look like aquatic boas, burrowing pythons look like borrowing boas and tree-dwelling pythons look like tree-dwelling boas. … Other famous examples of convergent evolution are sharks and dolphins, which are not related but have evolved similar body plans. Similarly, the extinct Tasmanian Tiger, a marsupial mammal, and the wolf, a placental mammal, evolved similar body plans. Esquerre attempts to pin all this on natural selection (Darwinism) and adaptation, then admits: not all evolution was driven by natural selection, but examples such as pythons and boas Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: “We believe sea snakes use these organs to sense objects at a distance by ‘feeling’ movements in the water. This hydrodynamic sense is not an option for land animals. In water, a new way of sensing the environment becomes possible.” Sea snakes evolved from land-living snakes, taking to life in the sea between 9 and 20 million years ago. They spend the majority of their lives at sea: hunting fish, swimming and diving using a paddle-shaped tail, and coming up to the water’s surface to breathe air. Although they can also see, little is known about the underwater sensory perception of the snakes. Paper. (public access) – Jenna M. Crowe-Riddell, Edward P. Snelling, Amy P. Watson, Anton Kyuseop Read More ›

From Washington Post: “We think they are using quantum mechanics to navigate,” said Daniel Kattnig, a researcher in the chemistry department at Oxford University. Kattnig works in a lab that studies radical pairs — a phenomenon in which atoms acquire extra electrons that are “entangled” with one another, each affecting the other’s motion even though they’re separated by space. It’s a field of science that’s difficult to understand under the best of circumstances; imagine trying to figure out it out with a bird brain. But according to an increasingly popular theory, birds and other animals use a radical pair-based compass to “see” the Earth’s magnetic field, allowing them to undertake great migrations and daring rescues without getting lost. It’s still Read More ›

From Henry Bodkin at the UK Telegraph: holesterol does not cause heart disease in the elderly and trying to reduce it with drugs like statins is a waste of time, an international group of experts has claimed. A review of research involving nearly 70,000 people found there was no link between what has traditionally been considered “bad” cholesterol and the premature deaths of over 60-year-olds from cardiovascular disease. Published in the BMJ Open journal, the new study found that 92 percent of people with a high cholesterol level lived longer.More. Hope no one’s career went south for being a “denialist.” See also: The skinny on salt, veggie oil,, skim milk, whole foods. Nutrition science is nearly baseless but it rules. Read More ›

In the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism conference, Paul Nelson gave a great talk on Design Triangulation – the inference from system-level functional necessity.
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