Every so often, we devote space to a really dumb idea about how human beings came to be the way we are. Today’s is: A team led by computer scientists at Cardiff University suggest that the challenge of judging a person’s relative standing and deciding whether or not to cooperate with them has promoted the rapid expansion of human brain size over the last 2 million years. In a study published in Scientific Reports, the team, which also includes leading evolutionary psychologist Professor Robin Dunbar from the University of Oxford, specifically found that evolution favors those who prefer to help out others who are at least as successful as themselves.More. Reality check: And this did not work out so well Read More ›

Rabbi Moshe Averick, author of Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused World of Modern Atheism:at Algemeiner: If a rational, truth-seeking individual is asked: “How did life begin; naturalistic, unguided forces or Divine Creation?” There are only two possible answers: (a) Divine Creation or (b) I don’t know, the jury is still out; but atheism – a denial of the existence of a Creator of life — is not possible anymore….unless, of course, as I stated in the title of this article, you are prepared to ignore science and scientists. And if so, you might just as well go and play children’s games and with children’s toys, like…..LEGO blocks.More. Can anyone explain why atheists are so angry? They’ve no one Read More ›

Alongside the proton? From ScienceDaily: The deuteron — one of the simplest atomic nuclei, consisting of just one proton and one neutron — is considerably smaller than previously thought, say researchers who measured the proton and found a significantly smaller value than previous research did, using new experimental methods. … The new measurement of the deuteron’s size has now given rise to an analogous mystery. It is possible that this will lead to an adjustment of the Rydberg constant, a fundamental quantity in physics. Another possible explanation is that a physical force as yet unknown is at work. More. See also: What no new particles means for physics? Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Science Daily: Without having tasted a new juice mix before, an orangutan in a Swedish zoo has enough sense to know whether it will taste nice or not based on how he recombined relevant memories from the past. Only humans were thought to have this ability of affective forecasting, in which prior experiences are used to conjure up mental pictures about totally new situations. – Paper. (public access) Gabriela-Alina Sauciuc, Tomas Persson, Rasmus Bååth, Katarzyna Bobrowicz, Mathias Osvath. Affective forecasting in an orangutan: predicting the hedonic outcome of novel juice mixes. Animal Cognition, 2016; DOI: 10.1007/s10071-016-1015-0 More. But the average domestic cat can do that. To prop up a failing thesis that human and animal minds are essentially the Read More ›

Don’t bet the farm but, from a href=”http://phys.org/news/2016-08-scientists-unveil-earth-like-planet.html” target=”another”>Phys.org: The exoplanet orbits a well-investigated star called Proxima Centauri, part of the Alpha Centauri star system, the magazine said, quoting anonymous sources. “The still nameless planet is believed to be Earth-like and orbits at a distance to Proxima Centauri that could allow it to have liquid water on its surface—an important requirement for the emergence of life,” said the magazine. “Never before have scientists discovered a second Earth that is so close by,” it said, adding that the European Southern Observatory (ESO) will announce the finding at the end of August. More. See also: “Behold, countless Earths sail the galaxies … that is, if you would only believe …” Follow UD Read More ›

Here. From Genetics and Epigenetics: The evolution process includes genetic alterations which started with prokaryotes and now continues in humans. A distinct difference between prokaryotic chromosomes and eukaryotic chromosomes involves histones. As evolution progressed, genetic alterations accumulated and a mechanism for gene selection developed. It was as if nature was experimenting to optimally utilize the gene pool without changing individual gene sequences. This mechanism is called epigenetics, as it is above the genome. Curiously, the mechanism of epigenetic regulation in prokaryotes is strikingly different from that in eukaryotes, mainly higher eukaryotes, like mammals. In fact, epigenetics plays a huge role in the conserved process of embryogenesis and human development. Malfunction of epigenetic regulation results in many types of undesirable effects, Read More ›

From Will Knight at Technology Review: Machines that truly understand language would be incredibly useful. But we don’t know how to build them. … SHRDLU was held up as a sign that the field of AI was making profound progress. But it was just an illusion. When Winograd tried to make the program’s block world larger, the rules required to account for the necessary words and grammatical complexity became unmanageable. Just a few years later, he had given up, and eventually he abandoned AI altogether to focus on other areas of research. “The limitations were a lot closer than it seemed at the time,” he says. More. Could part of the problem be that language is not just a signal Read More ›

Here. Said to be based on the “Oregon Trail” video game graphics.

For more than 50 years, psychologists have worried about the robustness of research in their field. … Last year, psychologist Brian Nosek led a consortium of nearly 300 scientists who published the first attempt to estimate the reproducibility rate in psychology by redoing 98 recent studies. The scientists couldn’t reproduce the initial results about 60 percent … ” More So forget about it.

Yes, according to Rob Sheldon: Woit & Hossenfelder & Wolchover are saying something more profound than they realize. It is not simply, as Wolchover put it, “a diphoton hangover”, or as Hossenfelder put it, “we are completely lost”, nor even as Woit said in his 2013 essay, a “nightmare scenario” in which, “After centuries of great progress, moving towards ever deeper understanding of the universe we live in, we may be entering a new kind of era. Will intellectual progress become just a memory, with an important aspect of human civilization increasingly characterized by an unfamiliar and disturbing stasis?” For Peter, as well as Sabine and Natalie, “progress” is the birthright of humanity, and “stasis” the curse. But imagine for Read More ›

Every so often something exquisitely stupid turns up, something worth celebrating on that account: From ScienceDaily: A new scientific study puts the final nail in the coffin of a long-standing theory to explain human’s remarkable cognitive abilities: that human evolution involved the selective expansion of the brain’s prefrontal cortex. It does so by determining that the prefrontal region of the brain which orchestrates abstract thinking, complex planning and ecision making contains the same proportion of neurons and fills the same relative volume in non-human primates as it does in humans. “People need to drop the idea that the human brain is exceptional,” said Vanderbilt University neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel, who directed the study. “Our brain is basically a primate brain. Because Read More ›

Peter M. Burfeind writes: According to the various social theories—all claiming to be scientific—it is an ironclad law that to be human is to have all your thought and thinking inescapably determined by whatever structures you’re born in. A Cretan can’t stop being a Cretan any more than an apple can stop being pulled to the earth by gravity. At least that’s the pretense of the sociologist (who fantasizes he’s doing science, but that’s another story.) The only escape exists in something transcending the physical nature of the subject, something outside its earthy, physical nature. Thus, if you wished to escape your human-ness, you’d have to be supra- or trans-human. This was the exact position of the Gnostics. A Gnostic Read More ›

From Quanta: In the past two years, some theoretical physicists have started to devise totally new natural explanations for the Higgs mass that avoid the fatalism of anthropic reasoning and do not rely on new particles showing up at the LHC. Last week at CERN, while their experimental colleagues elsewhere in the building busily crunched data in search of such particles, theorists held a workshop to discuss nascent ideas such as the relaxion hypothesis — which supposes that the Higgs mass, rather than being shaped by symmetry, was sculpted dynamically by the birth of the cosmos — and possible ways to test these ideas. Nathaniel Craig of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who works on an idea called “neutral Read More ›

From Columbia mathematician Peter Woit at Nott Even Wrong: The Nightmare Scenario Now back from a short vacation, and there seems to have been a lot happening on the debate over fundamental physics front. From the experimentalists, news that the Standard Model continues to resist falsification: More. See also: Physics to crack wide open? Of course, in this post-modern world, there’s an alternative to admitting we are completely lost—make up the missing data. Follow UD News at Twitter!

Probably one of the most daunting aspects of carrying on debates either about proper critical thinking, theism vs atheism, or intelligent design and its implications is the seeming implacable nature of those we debate here and elsewhere. It most often seems that no amount of logic, evidence or even reasonable discourse makes one iota of difference to our interlocutors; however, I think this is probably because most of those who will take the time to seek our position out and criticize it on its home turf are already fully committed against such positions, and are often emotionally entrenched. Not only has my time here at UD aided in my personal transition from atheist to theist, I’d like to let the Read More ›