Long time UD contributor Gil Dodgen has died. From here: A small episode from Gil Dodgen’s life might help you understand the sort of person he was: Picture a homeless kitten, lost and confused in Southern California traffic. A man sees her, stops his car in the middle of the street and rescues her, starting a lifelong companionship. Gil’s life was characterized by excellence in everything he did, combined with a deep sympathy for those around him. Gil was born Dec. 29, 1950, in Moscow, was raised in Pullman and received bachelor’s degrees in music and French and a master’s in French from Washington State University. He met and married his college sweetheart, Janie Gay of Prosser, Wash., who was Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: “For the first time ever, we looked at the evolution of venom across all fishes,” said lead author William Leo Smith, assistant curator at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute. “Nobody had attempted to look across all fishes. Nobody had done sharks or included eels. Nobody had looked at them all and included all fishes in an evolutionary tree at the same time.” … According to Smith, the 18 independent evolutions of venom each pose an opportunity for drug makers to derive therapies for a host of human ailments. “Fish venoms are often super complicated, big molecules that have big impact,” he said. “Venom can have impacts on blood pressure, cause local necrosis, breakdown of tissue and blood, Read More ›

From James Coyne’s Mind the Brain blog at PLOSOne: Despite thousands of studies, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and related meditation approaches have not yet been shown to be more efficacious than other active treatments for reducing stress. Nonetheless many cancer patients seek MBSR or mindfulness-based cancer recovery (MBCR) believing that they are improving their immune system and are on their way to a better outcome in “fighting” their cancer. … Responsible scientists and health care providers should dispel myths that patients may have about the effectiveness of psychosocial treatments in extending life. But in the absence of responsible professionals speaking out, patients can be intimidated by how these studies are headlined in the popular media, particularly when they believe that Read More ›

Over on a recent thread there has been much interesting discussion about a recent debate between theist philosopher Rabbi Daniel Rowe and atheist philosopher A.C. Grayling.  HeKS provided a review of the matter, focusing largely on his analysis of Jerry Coyne’s responses.

I agree with HeKS’s general observation that Coyne failed to adequately address the issues.  Indeed, it seems Coyne failed to adequately understand some of the issues, a situation that is all too common.

However, I want to focus in this post on a specific aspect of the discussion, namely, some of the points raised by sean samis, starting @37 on that thread.  In his comments, samis urges caution in drawing any conclusion from the Big Bang about deity’s existence or involvement.  I do not necessarily share all of his conclusions, but I think a number of his points are worthy of additional discussion.

First of all, let me apologize to HeKS for starting a new thread.  I initially began this as a comment to the prior thread, but it became long enough that it required a separate post.  Additionally, I want to focus on a specific issue that tacks in a slightly different direction than the prior thread.

If the Universe Had a Beginning, then What? Read More ›

From Elizabeth Gibney at Nature: No astronomer had ever seen anything like it. No theorist had predicted it. Yet there it was — a 5-millisecond radio burst that had arrived on 24 August 2001 from an unknown source seemingly billions of light years away. “It was so bright, we couldn’t just dismiss it,” says Duncan Lorimer, who co-discovered the signal1 in 2007 while working on archived data from the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia. “But we didn’t really know what to do with it.” Such fleeting radio bursts usually came from pulsars — furiously rotating neutron stars whose radiation sweeps by Earth with the regularity of a lighthouse beam. But Lorimer, an astrophysicist at West Virginia University in Read More ›

Video: [youtube MTezZFZH098] (This is supplementary to the discussion thread here started by HeKS, as he only linked the debate. Onward discussion is invited there in the thread.) END

Not according to theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder on the diphoton bump, at Forbes: Despite the fact that it would be the nightmare of most of my colleagues, I’m hoping the diphoton bump turns out to be nothing more than noise. … During my professional career, all I have seen is failure. A failure, that is, of particle physicists to uncover a more powerful mathematical framework that improves upon the theories we already have. Yes, failure is part of science – it’s frustrating, but not worrisome. What worries me much more is our failure to learn from those failures. Rather than trying something new, we’ve been trying the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. … If the bump Read More ›

Readers may remember Lehrer from a 2012 uproar around his making up Dylan quotes, The truth losing its facts From a review of Jonah Lehrer’s new Book about Love by Jennifer Senior at New York Times: In retrospect — and I am hardly the first person to point this out — the vote to excommunicate Mr. Lehrer was as much about the product he was peddling as the professional transgressions he was committing. It was a referendum on a certain genre of canned, cocktail-party social science, one that traffics in bespoke platitudes for the middlebrow and rehearses the same studies without saying something new. Apparently, he’s learned nothing. This book is a series of duckpin arguments, just waiting to be Read More ›

Here: More. He advises hi audience to depart if they are looking for simple solutions to the orgin of life problem. Here at YouTube: See also: Professor James Tour points the way forward for intelligent design (Vincent Torley) and What we know and don’t know about the origin of life Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Eric Worrall at Watt’s Up with That?: The alleged weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation appears to be triggering a growing amount of speculation about abrupt cooling, like the plot of the movie “The Day After Tomorrow”. More. We’ll see. Good thing I didn’t put away my parka. Please. No more persecution of dissenters. See also: Scientific dissent can never be securities fraud Follow UD News at Twitter!

From ScienceDaily: The fossilised remnants of tube-like ‘dwellings’ which housed a primitive type of prehistoric sea worm on the ocean floor have been identified in a new study. According to researchers, the long, perforated tubes may have looked like narrow chimneys reaching up from the sea bed, and were made by a creature called Oesia, which lived a solitary existence inside them about 500 million years ago. … The study suggests that in some cases these structures exceeded 50cm in height and that they were typically at least twice the width of the worm, giving it plenty of room. The ends were sealed off, making life inside a rather lonely experience. “Only single worms are found within tubes, suggesting a Read More ›

No, really. From Emma Young at New Scientist: HUMILITY. Empathy. Selflessness. These are qualities most of us associate with being a “nice person”. But being nice doesn’t often help you in the fierce competition to get that job, win a project or secure a promotion. No one likes an egocentric big-head but if, as they say, “you are your own brand”, perhaps in this modern world it pays to be a bit narcissistic. More. You’d have to pay to read much more. From O’Leary for News: I am beginning to like New Scientist. I used to trash them, but that was before serious people started wondering about things like rethinking evolution and the impact of the war on falsifiability. And Read More ›

From National Geographic: New research published in Behavioral Ecology suggests that the small reef fish, no more than three inches long, may switch sex roles with their partner up to 20 times each day. Chalk bass use a reproductive strategy known as “egg trading,” wherein they subdivide their daily egg clutch into “parcels” and alternate sex roles with their mating partner throughout a sequence of spawning bouts. More. This suggests that what sex even is in the fish is different from what we find in mammals or birds. See also: Can sex explain evolution?

At Nature: PhDs are assessed in very different ways around the world. Almost all involve a written thesis, but those come in many forms. In the United Kingdom, they are usually monographs, long explanations of a student’s work; in Scandinavia, science students typically top-and-tail a series of their publications. The accompanying oral examination — also called a viva voce or defence — can be a public lecture, a private discussion or not happen at all. There is wide variation across disciplines and from one institution to the next. “It is a complicated world in doctoral education. One format does not fit all,” says Maresi Nerad, founding director of the Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education at the University Read More ›

From Nature: Peer review is touted as a demonstration of the self-critical nature of science. But it is a human system. Everybody involved brings prejudices, misunderstandings and gaps in knowledge, so no one should be surprised that peer review is often biased and inefficient. It is occasionally corrupt, sometimes a charade, an open temptation to plagiarists. Even with the best of intentions, how and whether peer review identifies high-quality science is unknown. It is, in short, unscientific.More. Couple things: Peer review got started, some tell us, as a means of helping U librarians decided what journals to subscribe to. Einstein didn’t have peer reviewers because, back then, his peer were fellow Nobelists. After WWII, science became Big Business so millions Read More ›