From Stuart Clark at New Scientist: Although the scope of our definition determines the complexity of the puzzle, physics should still supply the solution, says philosopher Tim Maudlin of New York University. Physics is about just two questions, he says: “what exists?” and “what does it do?”. “If you answer both of those questions, then I think you have answered the question ‘what is reality?’.” More. (paywall) Reality isn’t “made of” anything. What is the number 2 “made of”? What is the political idea of proportional representation “made of”? What is the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam “made of”? Almost certainly, they will get nowhere, but at least they will be able to reaffirm their basic vision of life. Not bad Read More ›

From Ekin Karasin at Daily Mail: David Buss, Cari Goetz and their team told the Sunday Times: ‘Lifelong monogamy does not characterise the primary mating pattern of humans. ‘Breaking up with one partner and re-mating with another – mate switching – may more accurately characterise the common, perhaps the primary, mating strategy of humans.’ For our ancestors, disease, poor diet and poor medical care meant few lived past 30 – meaning experimenting to find the most suitable partner may have been key to survival. More. Reality check: These people aren’t “scientists”; they are evolutionary psychologists. Their discipline is without a live subject (a human who lived 100kya) so they are forever emptying Darwin’s wastebasket and trying to combine it with Read More ›

From NASA: As Juno approached Jupiter on August 27, 2016, it’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument captured the planet’s glow in infrared light. The full story and more images from Juno’s first pass of Jupiter with all instruments on is here.

Science writer Amanda Gefter concludes at Nautilus: Could it be that something is just what nothing looks like from the inside? If so, our discomfort with nothingness may have been hinting at something profound: It is our human nature that recoils at the notion of nothing, and yet it may also be our limited, human perspective that ultimately solves the paradox. More. Wishful thinking is a good way to get nothing from something. See also: The bill arrives for cosmology’s free lunch Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Ben Andrew Henry at Science: “Earth’s surface 3.7 billion years ago was a tumultuous place, bombarded by asteroids and still in its formative stages,” Allwood writes. “If life could find a foothold here, and leave such an imprint that vestiges exist even though only a minuscule sliver of metamorphic rock is all that remains from that time, then life is not a fussy, reluctant and unlikely thing. Give life half an opportunity and it’ll run with it.”More. Really? Just half a chance? But then why isn’t spontaneous generation happening now, when conditions are more favorable? See also: Oldest fossils found in Greenland shrink time for origin of life: If it is true that life existed by ~3.7 billion years Read More ›

Dr. Joshua Swamidass, a computational biologist from Wash U, recently posted some questions to critics of methodological naturalism like myself, and also explicitly named the AM-Nat (Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism) conferences as an example of those searching for an alternative to methodological naturalism.  After some discussions with Dr. Swamidass, I thought I would take some time to write a response to his questions.  I apologize for the length, but these issues take some time to suss out.  Therefore, this response will be broken into two parts.

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In comments to my last post HeKS absolutely lays waste to two materialists who are trying to punch way above their weight.  First, Pindi spews out the million-times-rebutted claim that there is “no evidence” for the existence of God. Pindi: And its not that I don’t want to believe in something that is god-like and personal. I just don’t see any evidence for it. HeKS responds (not placed in quote box; all that follows is his unless noted otherwise): Oh God, it’s the “there just isn’t any evidence” canard again. I don’t know how atheists can even make this claim with a straight face anymore. Here is a sampling of a few lines of evidence strongly pointing to God’s existence: – Read More ›

From physicist Sabine Hossenfelder at Aeon: Might nature’s bottomless pits actually be ultra-efficient quantum computers? That could explain why data never dies … Hawking’s discovery of black-hole evaporation has presented theoretical physicists with a huge conundrum: general relativity says that black holes must destroy information; quantum mechanics says it cannot happen because information must live on eternally. Both general relativity and quantum mechanics are extremely well-tested theories, and yet they refuse to combine. The clash reveals something much more fundamental than a seemingly exotic quirk about black holes: the information paradox makes it aptly clear that physicists still do not understand the fundamental laws of nature. But Gia Dvali, professor of physics at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, believes he’s Read More ›

Re Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech. From Jerry Coyne at Washington Post: Here Wolfe’s victims are two renowned scholars, Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky, whom he considers the most vocal exponents of the “hardwired” school of language. But Wolfe’s argument ultimately backfires, for the book grossly distorts the theory of evolution, the claims of linguistics and the controversies about their connection. Finally, after misleading the reader for nearly 200 pages, Wolfe proposes his own theory of how language began — a theory far less plausible than the ones he mocks. Using the surgical kit of New Journalism, Wolfe flays Darwin and Chomsky as imperious, self-aggrandizing snobs, each humiliated by a lower-class “clueless outsider who crashes the party of the big thinkers.” Read More ›

From Donald S. Kornfeld & Sandra L. Titus at Nature: Only 10–12 individuals are found guilty by the US Office of Research Integrity (ORI) each year. That number, which the NIH used to dismiss the role of research misconduct1, is misleadingly low, as numerous studies show. For instance, a review2 of 2,047 life-science papers retracted from 1973 to 2012 found that around 43% were attributed to fraud or suspected fraud. A compilation of anonymous surveys3 suggests that 2% of scientists and trainees admit that they have fabricated, falsified or modified data. And a 1996 study4 of more than 1,000 postdocs found that more than one-quarter would select or omit data to improve their chances of receiving grant funding. … Nonetheless, Read More ›

From Douglas Axe, author of Undeniable, at Evolution News & Views : Much of my book is devoted to developing an argument around everyday experience and common sense, a combination I refer to as common science. It seems to me that Darwin’s thinking is quite vulnerable to refutation by common science. After all, selection doesn’t really make anything. It merely chooses among things that have already been made. That’s what the word means. The only kind of selection that gives you clams or snails is the kind you do while ordering dinner at a French restaurant. [Critic] Sharma dismisses such thoughts as childish “pre-theoretical” thinking. One of my book’s themes is that we adults shy away from common-science deductions like Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers used fMRI to analyze the dogs’ brain activity as the animals listened to each combination. Their results reveal that, regardless of intonation, dogs process vocabulary, recognizing each word as distinct, and further, that they do so in a way similar to humans, using the left hemisphere of the brain. Of course. Otherwise, how would they distinguish between Bad dog, bad! And Good dog, good! Also like humans, the researchers found that dogs process intonation separately from vocabulary, in auditory regions in the right hemisphere of the brain. Lastly, and also like humans, the team found that the dogs relied on both word meaning and intonation when processing the reward value of utterances. Thought experiment: If we whispered Read More ›

This exchange between Phinehas and HeKS brings it out as succinctly as anything I’ve ever seen: Phinehas says: The thing that fascinates me is how atheists are shown to have prodigious faith in something eternal with god-like creative powers [i.e., the multiverse]. It’s almost like they have no issues whatsoever believing in a god, just so long as it doesn’t bear that particular label. HeKS replies: I tend to think that it’s because they don’t want that eternal thing with god-like creative powers to also be personal and have the ability to ground and impose moral values and duties on humans. As the multiverse has demonstrated, atheists have no problem at all with faith in something that is unseen, intangible, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Although variants are scattered throughout the genome, scientists have largely ignored the stretches of repetitive genetic code once dismissively known as “junk” DNA in their search for differences that influence human health and disease. A new study shows that variation in these overlooked repetitive regions may also affect human health. These regions can affect the stability of the genome and the proper function of the chromosomes that package genetic material, leading to an increased risk of cancer, birth defects and infertility. The results appear online in the journal Genome Research. … “What we found in this study is probably the tip of the iceberg,” Sullivan said. “There could be all sorts of functional consequences to having variation within Read More ›

The Kingdom of Speech Noel Rude (native American specialist) kindly writes to say, re Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech: — But maybe we should pause a moment and ask just what the beef is between Daniel Everett and Noam Chomsky [addressed by Wolfe in detail. – ed.] –as seen by actual linguists. I can tell you what it isn’t. Hardly any linguist would now challenge the fact that language is creative and that there is at present no materialist theory whatsoever to explain this–though of course this fact is seldom mentioned. Language, you see, divides between the physical medium (sound, symbols, words, grammar) and the nonphysical message. The big beef is not about the latter but the former. Chomsky Read More ›