From Emily Conover at ScienceNews: A beautiful but unproved theory of particle physics is withering in the harsh light of data. For decades, many particle physicists have devoted themselves to the beloved theory, known as supersymmetry. But it’s beginning to seem that the zoo of new particles that the theory predicts —the heavier cousins of known particles — may live only in physicists’ imaginations. Or if such particles, known as superpartners, do exist, they’re not what physicists expected. New data from the world’s most powerful particle accelerator — the Large Hadron Collider, now operating at higher energies than ever before — show no traces of superpartners. More. Will we accept that or move toward throwing out falsifiability? See also: Supersymmetry Read More ›

From Science Daily: ESA’s Planck satellite has revealed that the first stars in the Universe started forming later than previous observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background indicated. This new analysis also shows that these stars were the only sources needed to account for reionising atoms in the cosmos, having completed half of this process when the Universe had reached an age of 700 million years. More. Paper. (public access) – Matthieu Tristram and Collaboration. Planck intermediate results. XLVII. Planck constraints on reionization history. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2016; DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201628897 Doesn’t that reduce the time for origin of life? See also: Galaxy started forming stars only 200 million years after the Big Bang? Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Anil Ananthaswamy at New Scientist: How does something as physical as the brain create something as immaterial as your sense of self? It could all just be one big trick of the mind … Broadly speaking, those trying to solve the hard problem fall into two camps, according to psychologist and philosopher Nicholas Humphrey. There are those who think that consciousness is something real and those who say it’s a mirage, and so dismiss the problem entirely. More. (paywall) Generally speaking, a trick is more complex than straightforward information, so it only adds to the difficulty if consciousness is regarded as a trick. By whom on whom? These people are not going to get anywhere any time soon. See Read More ›

From O’Leary for News at MercatorNet: … if anyone tells you that there is no broad consensus that social science is in deep trouble because of progressive bias, you can assume that they haven’t been keeping up with the stats. Unfortunately, when asked to reform by adding diverse voices, social scientists opt for any strategy other than inclusiveness, almost as if they were old-fashioned segregationists. That is, they want to “subtract out bias” all on their own, without adding new voices. Of course, if that had worked, they could have done it decades ago. Part of the problem, as the Regnerus controversy demonstrated, is that so many of their beliefs conflict not so much with tradition as with reality. Commentator Read More ›

Who knew? From Jan. 25, 1989: After examining climate data extending back nearly 100 years, a team of Government scientists has concluded that there has been no significant change in average temperatures or rainfall in the United States over that entire period. Of course, this is before those same scientists began cooking the books in the service of expanding government power.    

From Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience: Recently, Nir Lahav, a physicist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, went searching for this nucleus of conscious activity. He and his interdisciplinary team, which also included neuroscientists and mathematicians, used detailed scans of six brains to assemble an information map of the human cortex, the brain’s outer layer of neural tissue. With the map, they observed and recorded how certain parts of the cortex were connected to other parts. They charted regions of high connectivity and regions of low connectivity. The map approximated how information “flows” within the cortex, and showed where that flow is concentrated. The region with the highest traffic may very well be the seat of consciousness.More. But what about those people Read More ›

From archaeologist Joe Roe: Archaeology, like geology or astronomy, is an observational science, not an experimental one. … The stuff of archaeology―landscapes, sites, assemblages―are unique and finite records of the past. That doesn’t mean we can’t be scientific, just not in the neat, hypothetico-deductive mold so fervently extolled by bright-eyed physics students. It’s hard to come up with testable predictions for the field when you have no idea what you’re going to find there. Controlled experiments are a non-starter because, as excellently put by Roger Peng, the stuff we study is “generally reluctant to be controlled by human beings”. Archaeology, like geology or astronomy, is an observational science, not an experimental one. More. See also: Nature on the reproducibility crisis and Read More ›

From Martha Henriques at BBC Earth: Chemist Graham Cairns-Smith has spent his entire scientific career pushing a simple, radical idea: life did not begin with fiddly organic molecules like DNA, but with simple crystals It is now 50 years since Cairns-Smith [1931–2016] first put forward his ideas about the origin of life. Some scientists have ridiculed them; others have, cautiously or wholeheartedly, embraced them. They have never become mainstream orthodoxy, but they have never quite gone away either. Was there any truth to Cairns-Smith’s daring proposal? Did life really come from crystals? More. Life is information in motion. Looking for something uninformative that life “comes from” is a guarantee that we will still be in this rut in fifty years. Read More ›

From Jonathan Freedland, commenting at Britain’s Guardian: Socialism’s one-time interest in eugenics is dismissed as an accident of history. But the truth is far more unpalatable Hush. Someone is finally being honest about that. They believed in science and progress, and nothing was more cutting edge and modern than social Darwinism. Man now had the ability to intervene in his own evolution. Instead of natural selection and the law of the jungle, there would be planned selection. And what could be more socialist than planning, the Fabian faith that the gentlemen in Whitehall really did know best? If the state was going to plan the production of motor cars in the national interest, why should it not do the same Read More ›

This is an ongoing discussion we are having with Dr. Swamidass over the question of Methodological Naturalism in science. For those who haven’t been keeping up, I posted Dr. Swamidass’s questions to critics of MN to UD a few weeks ago, then posted some of my questions for proponents of MN. Then, my first response to Swamidass’s questions is here, covering the nature of scientific inquiry, and this present post continues to answer Dr. Swamidass’s specific questions. You can find Dr. Swamidass’s original blog post here.

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Painful. Closing our religion coverage for the week (a bit late, as it is the Labour Day weekend) from Rabbi Moshe Averick, in his Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused World of Modern Atheism: Atheists are prepared to deny our very grasp on reality Atheists are prepared to burrow very deep down the materialist rabbit hole in order to avoid any possible confrontation with the spiritual. How deep? Deep enough to cast doubt on our very connection with reality. The skeptic claims that a scientific investigation of the brain leads us to the conclusion that there resides within us a separate “executive self” is an illusion. Leaving totally aside the issue of whether or not that assessment of the Read More ›

Here: Perhaps the most striking trend in American religion in recent years has been the growing percentage of adults who do not identify with a religious group. And the vast majority of these religious “nones” (78%) say they were raised as a member of a particular religion before shedding their religious identity in adulthood. … About half of current religious “nones” who were raised in a religion (49%) indicate that a lack of belief led them to move away from religion. This includes many respondents who mention “science” as the reason they do not believe in religious teachings, including one who said “I’m a scientist now, and I don’t believe in miracles.” Others reference “common sense,” “logic” or a “lack Read More ›

From Matthew Mackinnon at Psychology Today: Illusion of Choice: The Myth of Free Will … It is at this point that you have the conscious experience of, “I chose to wink with my right eye.” The human brain is a logical machine and it seeks to establish linear causation regardless of the temporal reality. The fact that your prediction aligned with the actual action is interpreted by your brain to mean that your conscious thought caused the action. In reality, your thought, “I chose to wink my right eye,” is nothing more than a retroactive inference generated in an attempt to transmute a largely unconscious process into a conscious one. More. These claims come in many varieties but their outcome, Read More ›

A restaurant owner decided not to boil a rare golden lobster. From Kirschner’s Korner (“Let’s make the world a more humane place”): What do decisions like this tell us about the human race? Even though people will often teach children not to judge others based on their religion, appearance, sexual orientation, race, or other distinguishing factors, these rules don’t apply to animals. This thought process is known as speciesism. … Sending a yellow lobster to an aquarium while killing the rest isn’t praiseworthy except in a society that fails to grasp the concept that all animals matter equally. More. Here’s how to blow off most people who talk this way. Ask him what he thinks of this, Methods of abortion Read More ›

From Lee Billings at Scientific American: Whatever dark matter is, it is not accounted for in the Standard Model of particle physics, a thoroughly-tested “theory of almost everything” forged in the 1970s that explains all known particles and all known forces other than gravity. Find the identity of dark matter and you illuminate a new path forward to a deeper understanding of the universe—at least, that is what physicists hope … “The desire is for dark matter to not only exist but also to solve other outstanding problems of the Standard Model,” says Jesse Thaler, a physicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Not every new discovery can be a revelation like the Higgs, where afterward theories suddenly fit together much Read More ›