From Neuroskeptic at Discover: In a new paper that could prove explosive, Australian neuropathologists C. V. Dennis and colleagues report that they found very little evidence for adult neurogenesis in humans. … … Dennis et al. don’t quite rule out all neurogenesis in adults. However, the authors say that if human adult neurogenesis takes place, it does so at an extremely low rate: relatively speaking, it’s about 10 times lower than the rate seen in adult rodents.More. In that case, old neurons must be learning new functions because rehabilitation happens all the time. See also: Birds have more neurons than primates do. It’s unclear how neurons relate to intelligence, exactly. Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Science News: By carefully crushing rock salt, researchers have measured the chemical makeup of air pockets embedded inside the rock. This new technique reveals that oxygen made up 10.9 percent of Earth’s atmosphere around 815 million years ago. Scientists have thought that oxygen levels would not be that high until 100 million to 200 million years later. The measurements place elevated oxygen levels well before the appearance of animals in the fossil record around 650 million years ago, the researchers report in the August issue of Geology. “I think our results will take people by surprise,” says study coauthor Nigel Blamey, a geochemist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada. “We came out of left field, and I think Read More ›

At “Animals and abstraction: Reflections on Vincent Torley’s thoughts,” commenter Charles Do cats explore for the sake of exploring (curioisity)? Or are they just reconnoitering for food, danger, shelter, sex, and if so, is that a form of learning? asks. Good questions. My impression is that cats are not generally lifelong learners. They are very curious when young, and learn almost everything they need to know in the first year or two. Once they have learned a way of life, they stick to it. There can be a comical aspect to that. A vet once told me that it is wise to neuter a tomcat as young as he can safely sustain the operation. If one waits a few years Read More ›

The “hard problem” of life From Arxiv: Chalmer’s famously identified pinpointing an explanation for our subjective experience as the “hard problem of consciousness”. He argued that subjective experience constitutes a “hard problem” in the sense that its explanation will ultimately require new physical laws or principles. Here, we propose a corresponding “hard problem of life” as the problem of how `information’ can affect the world. In this essay we motivate both why the problem of information as a causal agent is central to explaining life, and why it is hard – that is, why we suspect that a full resolution of the hard problem of life will, similar to as has been proposed for the hard problem of consciousness, ultimately Read More ›

Yes, this is getting a bit bistro, isn’t it? From Animals, abstraction, arithmetic and language: During the past two weeks, over at Evolution News and Views, Professor Michael Egnor has been arguing that it is the capacity for abstract thought which distinguishes humans from other animals, and that human language arises from this capacity. While I share Dr. Egnor’s belief in human uniqueness, I have to take issue with his claim that abstraction is what separates man from the beasts. More. We ask questions about how we think, and about how animals think. No animal asks such questions. Terms like “abstraction” are human ideas; whether an animal can abstract hardly matters. He is none the worse for not caring. All Read More ›

It is often claimed that methodological naturalism is a principle which defines the scope of the scientific enterprise. Today’s post is about thirty-one famous scientists throughout history who openly flouted this principle, in their scientific writings, by putting forward arguments for a supernatural Deity. The term “methodological naturalism” is defined variously in the literature. All authorities agree, however, that if you put forward scientific arguments for the existence of a supernatural Deity, then you are violating the principle of methodological naturalism. The 31 scientists whom I’ve listed below all did just that. I’ve supplied copious documentation, to satisfy the inquiries of skeptical readers. My own researches have led me to the conclusion that the principle of methodological naturalism is not Read More ›

  Readers will remember that Tom Wolfe’s book, the Kingdom of Speech, is coming out amid summer fanfare. From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News and Views: Great minds, as you know. As I’ve said before, it’s the Thomas Nagel/Stephen King/Tom Stoppard Principle: When you reach a certain rare level of achievement and acclaim, you earn the right to speak your mind plainly in defiance of the bullies and censors. We look forward to reading Wolfe. More. In the past, it has been agreed that there are only 20 chairs. 19 chairs must be occupied by Darwin followers. The 20th chair is permitted to someone they can ricochet off. Suppose we added more chairs? Does it matter if some of the Read More ›

Dan Falk here: Last month, about 60 physicists, along with a handful of philosophers and researchers from other branches of science, gathered at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, to debate this question at the Time in Cosmology conference. The conference was co-organized by the physicist Lee Smolin, an outspoken critic of the block-universe idea (among other topics). His position is spelled out for a lay audience in Time Reborn and in a more technical work, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time, co-authored with the philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger, who was also a co-organizer of the conference. In the latter work, mirroring Elitzur’s sentiments about the future’s lack of concreteness, Smolin wrote: “The future is Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur’s Paradigm Shifters: Suzan Mazur: Do you have a definition for life? Mae-Wan Ho: I would define it as a quantum coherent system. It is a circular thermodynamic system that can reproduce. Suzan Mazur: How do you think about origin of life? Mae-Wan Ho: I think there was an origin of lifel If you look at water, which has been the subject of my research for a number of years – the physic o life depends on wter in a very fundamental way. Water has all the characteristics of consciousness. It’s very sensitive, it’s flexible. It responds to light. Electromagnetic fields, etc. Suzan Mazur: Have you commented about electrons and consciousness? Mae-Wan Ho: It was Alfred North Whitehead’s Read More ›

In an article on the question of bias in policing, from Slate: In practice, though, “peer review” refers to a bewildering array of methods and procedures. At least 1 million peer-reviewed articles are published every year, in at least 25,000 journals. At the narrow, top tier of this ecosystem, where prestigious journals filter out all but the best and most important papers, peer review screens for breakthrough work with airtight methodology and well-founded conclusions. At the bulbous bottom, peer review is less discerning. It’s also amenable to all sorts of chicanery—like rings of scientists who rubber-stamp each other’s work or researchers who invent reviews. The use of peer review varies from one publication to another and between different fields of Read More ›

From Emily Conover at Science: A puzzling mismatch is plaguing two methods for measuring how fast the universe is expanding. When the discrepancy arose a few years ago, scientists suspected it would fade away, a symptom of measurement errors. But the latest, more precise measurements of the expansion rate — a number known as the Hubble constant — have only deepened the mystery.“There’s nothing obvious in the measurements or analyses that have been done that can easily explain this away, which is why I think we are paying attention,” says theoretical physicist Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University. If the mismatch persists, it could reveal the existence of stealthy new subatomic particles or illuminate details of the mysterious dark energy Read More ›

Possibly struggling to survive, New Scientist claims there is a 2500 year struggle between God and the multiverse: Modern physics has also wrestled with this “fine-tuning problem”, and supplies its own answer. If only one universe exists, then it is strange to find it so hospitable to life, when nearly any other value for the gravitational or cosmological constants would have produced nothing at all. But if there is a “multiverse” of many universes, all with different constants, the problem vanishes: we’re here because we happen to be in one of the universes that works.More. The rest is an avoidable paywall. Put simply, the multiverse idea only ever got started because New Scientist types needed a universe that originated randomly. Read More ›

The creationist biology conference See also: Todd Wood: New findings on homo Naledi Follow UD News at Twitter!

From ScienceDaily: The maneuvers of flying insects are unmatched by even the best pilots, and this might be due to the fact that these critters don’t obey the same aerodynamic laws as airplanes, a team of New York University researchers has found. “We’ve known for quite a while that the aerodynamic theory for airplanes doesn’t work so well in predicting the force of lift for flapping wings,” says Leif Ristroph, an assistant professor at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences who directed the study. “We found that the drag or wind resistance also behaves very differently, and we put together a new law that could help explain how insects move through the air.” “To double its flight speed, an airplane Read More ›

Someone found out that lichens involve more than one fungus with the algae?: “The findings overthrow the two-organism paradigm,” says Sarah Watkinson from the University of Oxford. “Textbook definitions of lichens may have to be revised.” “It makes lichens all the more remarkable,” adds Nick Talbot from the University of Exeter. “We now see that they require two different kinds of fungi and an algal species. If the right combination meet together on a rock or twig, then a lichen will form, and this will result in the large and complex plant-like organisms that we see on trees and rocks very commonly. The mechanism by which this symbiotic association occurs is completely unknown and remains a real mystery.” More. If that’s Read More ›