From sociologist Steve Fuller, who has studied ID, at Telegraph: Stephen Hawking summed up the thinking of many of the researchers and funders behind artificial intelligence this week when he launched the new Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge by claiming that AI is “either the best or worst thing to happen Read More…
Month: October 2016
Atheism as religion: Atheist cemetery opens in Sweden
From Caroline Mortimer at Independent: Founder insists believers are welcome as well as long as they don’t have religious symbols on their headstones Apparently, the Church of Sweden will maintain the graveyard. Josef Erdem, a teacher from Borlänge in central Sweden, first proposed the idea because he wanted people to “decide for themselves what their Read More…
Atheists blocked Not Ashamed trailer from YouTube
For eleven months. From Stoyan Zaimov at Christian Post: The atheist criticism against the movie reached such intensity that the film’s trailer was blocked on YouTube for 11 months because it was flagged by members of the community who were seemingly upset with its representation of what happened. The issue was allegedly the claim that Read More…
Denis Noble: Why talk about replacement of Darwinian evolution theory, not extension?
In new book on the Royal Society’s Public Evolution Summit, Oxford’s Denis Noble explains, The reasons I think we are talking about replacement rather than extension are several. The first is that the exclusion of any form of acquired characteristics being inherited was a central feature of the modern synthesis. In other words, to exclude Read More…
Smart lab rats enter Hooked Tool Age
(To get chocolate cereal) From Agata Blaszczak-Boxe at New Scientist: Rats have been filmed for the first time using hooked tools to get chocolate cereal – a manifestation of their critter intelligence. Akane Nagano and Kenjiro Aoyama, of Doshisha University in Kyotanabe, Japan, placed eight brown rats in a transparent box and trained them to Read More…
iOS autocomplete nearly addresses physics conference
But rivals feared the system would hog the stage? From Elle Hunt at Guardian: A nonsensical academic paper on nuclear physics written only by iOS autocomplete has been accepted for a scientific conference. Christoph Bartneck, an associate professor at the Human Interface Technology laboratory at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, received an email Read More…
Exoplanets: Robbing the term “Earth-like” of meaning
From Nathaniel Sharping at Discover blogs: Every time astronomers discover another exoplanet, the first question is,”Does it look like Earth?” Finding an Earth-like exoplanet would certainly increase our chances of finding life, as we know it, on that distant world. We could finally prove that we’re not all alone in this big, cold universe. But, Read More…
423 mya fish upends jaw evolution theory
From Anna Nowogrodzki at Nature: The 423-million-year-old specimen, dubbed Qilinyu rostrata, is part of an ancient group of armoured fish called placoderms. The fossil is the oldest ever found with a modern three-part jaw, which includes two bones in the upper jaw and one in the lower jaw. Researchers reported their find on 20 October Read More…
Torturing the data till it really scares people
From Ronald Bailey at Reason: When environmental activists could no longer maintain with a straight face that exposure to trace amounts of synthetic chemicals is a significant cause for cancer in people, the endocrine disruption hypothesis was ginned up. The idea is that chemicals that mimic estrogen are causing epidemics of deformed penises, lower sperm Read More…
Columbine film actually addresses Darwinism as the mass murderers’ motive
Wow. How that one got past “All suits on board for PC over fact” is anyone’s guess. From Alex Murashko at World News Daily: Although producers of “I’m Not Ashamed,” which releases Friday, use the 1999 Columbine High School massacre as a backdrop to the feature story of martyred Rachel Joy Scott, the film doesn’t Read More…
The universe from a black hole?
From astrophysicist Ethan Siegel at Forbes: So could our Universe not have originated from a true singularity, but rather as the three-dimensional wrapping of a collapsing, growing four-dimensional black hole? Perimeter Institute and University of Waterloo researchers Niayesh Afshordi, Razieh Pourhasan and Robert Mann proposed this idea back in 2014, and despite their best attempts, Read More…
Chimp enters Smoke Age
O’Leary for News: Yes, yes, I know I shouldn’t be putting this story up; I should pay attention to real news, but: From North Korea we learn about a chimp who smokes a pack a day. Okay, back to work soon. But is this cruelty to chimps? See also: Are apes entering the Stone Age? Follow Read More…
Andrew Ferguson reviews Wolfe’s Kingdom of Speech at Commentary
The Kingdom of Speech Here: When The Kingdom of Speech, Tom Wolfe’s new book-length essay, was published in late summer, it received generally respectful reviews in the popular press, fitting for the Grand Old Man of Letters that Wolfe, through no fault of his own, has become. … This time around the notable exception was Read More…
Possible water on largest solar system asteroid
From Astronomical Journal: In order to search for evidence of hydration on M-type asteroid (16) Psyche, we observed this object in the 3 micron spectral region using the long-wavelength cross-dispersed (LXD: 1.9-4.2 micron) mode of the SpeX spectrograph/imager at the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF). Our observations show that Psyche exhibits a 3 micron absorption Read More…
Polyploidy: Genetic fundamentalism is still looking for a job?
From ScienceDaily: Millions of years ago, one species of frog diverged into two species. Millions of years later, the two frogs became one again, but with a few extra chromosomes due to whole genome duplication. Such is the curious case of the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, a frog whose genome contains nearly double the Read More…