Further to: Bonobos can crack nuts with stones: Nothing science story of the year? we learn from Eurekalert: But male and female chimpanzees achieve social status in dramatically different ways, says a new study by primatologists at Duke University. While males actively challenge their superiors to win higher rank, females accept their position in the social pecking order, waiting until more senior group members die before moving up the ladder. The study, which appeared online Oct. 14 in the journal Scientific Reports, provides the first detailed look at how social status among wild chimpanzees changes throughout their lifetimes. “We found that, after entering the adult hierarchy, there was a complete absence of successful challenges for rank increases among females,” said Read More ›

“Greatly exaggerated,” as Mark Twain put it, when informed of media accounts of his own death. From Maria Gallucci at Mashable: The good news is, relatively speaking, that the rest of the 1,400-mile-long coral reef is alive — severely threatened, yes, but not yet dead. A widely shared “obituary” in Outside magazine last week inaccurately claimed that all of the Great Barrier Reef “passed away in 2016” after a brief battle with global warming and ocean acidification. … Huffington Post and other outlets soon set the record straight, clarifying that while most of the Australian reef is in serious trouble, we still have a fighting chance to rescue it from its deathbed. More. It reminds some of us here of Read More ›

From msmash at Slashdot: In the middle of a discussion about the pros and cons of statins, Sir Rory Collins, the head of clinical trials at Oxford University, noted that If you want a career in medicine these days you’re better off studying mathematics or computing than biology. More. From Tom Feilden at BBC, a key issue is information science and cancer: So why cancer? The answer can be summed up in two words: big data. What Dr Sottoriva brings to the fight against cancer is the expertise in mathematical modelling needed to mine the vast treasure trove of data the information revolution has brought to medicine. “The exciting thing is that we can apply all the new analytical techniques Read More ›

From software engineer Brendan Dixon at Evolution News & Views: AI theorists consider what they call Artificial Generalized Intelligence (or AGI) the ultimate goal: The intelligence of an AGI would match or beat — if you believe Musk, Kurzweil, and the other true believers — human intelligence. For these theorists, AI’s recent successes, including Google’s DeepMind, IBM’s Watson, and Tesla’s self-driving cars, are no more than steps toward that end. Like all goals, however, the pursuit of AGI rests not just on a desire to see what we can accomplish, but on beliefs about what is. … The misguided goals, the bad aim, of so much AI (though not all) arises from dismissing human uniqueness. Such AI becomes, not a Read More ›

Some of us worried that it would be a fizzle, but maybe not. Do Darwin faithful own evolution or does evidence matter even if thy did not sponsor it? Does it make any difference if they can’t plausibly explain it? We’ll see. From Suzan Mazur’s new book on the Royal Society’s Public Evolution Summit: It seems a long time in coming for those of us watching from the sidelines. But on November 7-9, 26 distinguished scientists will meet with a public audience of nearly 300 (including other distinguished scientists) at London’s Royal Society — the world’s oldest scientific organization—to present and discuss evidence for evolution paradigm shift and hopefully send the selfish gene, once and for all, into literary history. The expectation Read More ›

Readers will remember Larry Krauss, possible Dawkins’ replacement (much needed just now): From Wintery Knight: Lawrence Krauss is a Cosmologist at Arizona State University who describes himself as an “anti-theist”. His latest book “A Universe From Nothing” has received both acclaim and criticism for its attempt to answer the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Debating the issue with Krauss is Rodney Holder, Course director at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge. An astrophysicist and priest by background. In a lively exchange they debate whether Krauss’ “nothing” is “nothing”, fine tuning and multiverses, scientific knowledge, miracles and the usefulness of theology and philosophy. This debate is quite entertaining, and do not be intimidated if your don’t understand science. You can understand Read More ›

From Times Higher: College Rankings 2017: top 20 colleges for engagement Dordt College 18.3 Brigham Young University-Provo 18.0 Texas Christian University 18.0 Cedarville University 17.9 Baylor University 17.8 Note: Even if you are not a Christian, it is okay to send your kid to a serious Christian U, as long as you don’t mind hearing that the kid is engaged to a Christian who wants to do mission work. See also: Baylor prof Robert Marks on evolutionary informatics Follow UD News at Twitter!

. . . and of course, the long subversive march through the institutions that dominate culture. As in, we need to understand some of why a self-falsifying and inherently amoral ideology of evolutionary materialistic scientism has so much traction in our day, and why so many bizarre agendas are being pushed so hard by the narrative shapers, manipulators and spin doctors working in the information battle-space, to what effect. Let us never forget that if we are led to judge the true and straight by the false and crooked, we will unavoidably end up in conflict with reality; to our detriment. (And yes, this follows up on the current Wikileaks revelations about the long term manipulation of the public through Read More ›

From Jonathan Witt at Evolution News & Views: If you’re driving along and notice that a bright philosopher has just mangled beyond recognition the argument of another bright philosopher, a tap on the brakes and a bit of careful rubbernecking is in order. If you then notice that the one who has done the mangling is Darwinist Michael Ruse, and what he mangled is an argument by eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel against Darwinism, then it’s worth pulling over and taking an even closer look. More. I remember Ruse from the days when he taught in Canada, a cheery old Darwinist (I once interviewed him) who – to his credit – never disguised his genial contempt for the rubes, boobs, hicks, Read More ›

From Amy Ellis Nutt at Washington Post: For the first time, scientists have helped a paralyzed man experience the sense of touch in his mind-controlled robotic arm. For the cutting-edge experiment, a collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, electrodes smaller than a grain of sand were implanted in the sensory cortex of the man’s brain. The electrodes received signals from a robot arm. When a researcher pressed the fingers of the prosthesis, the man felt the pressure in the fingers of his paralyzed right hand, effectively bypassing his damaged spinal cord. The results of the experiment, which have been repeated over several months with 30-year-old Nathan Copeland, offer a breakthrough in the restoration Read More ›

Oh, and the mind is an illusion that the meat somehow produces? A new book noted at Springer seems poised to try: Many believe that the language and concepts of philosophy will eventually be superseded by those of neuroscience. This collection of essays questions this assumption and attempts to show how philosophy can contribute to real explanatory progress in neuroscience while remaining faithful to the full complexity of the phenomena of life and mind. The general orientation of the volume is Aristotelian, as it seeks to promote a non-reductive understanding of subjectivity that is firmly rooted in biology, paying close attention to the special formal and material properties of living systems. However, its contributors represent a diversity of perspectives and Read More ›

From Phys.org: Physicists have implemented the first experimental demonstration of everlasting quantum coherence—the phenomenon that occurs when a quantum system exists in a superposition of two or more states at once. Typically, quantum coherence lasts for only a fraction of a second before decoherence destroys the effect due to interactions between the quantum system and its surrounding environment. The collaboration of physicists, led by Gerardo Adesso at The University of Nottingham and with members from the UK, Brazil, Italy, and Germany, have published a paper on the demonstration of the extreme resilience of quantum coherence in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters. “Quantum properties can be exploited for disruptive technologies but are typically very fragile,” Adesso told Phys.org. “Here Read More ›

From string theory skeptic Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: The last talk of the [“C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics] event was a public talk by Ashoke Sen on What is String Theory? (slides here), one which made me think that maybe it wasn’t a bad thing that I hadn’t made it out to Stony Brook, since I might have been there for this. Sen’s talk was a depressing compilation of ancient hype and misleading claims about string theory, with the standard multiverse excuse for why it predicts nothing at all about particle physics. My time at the ITP coincided with the early years of this kind of string theory hype, which got started in late 1984, about Read More ›

Further to Rethinking the links between genes and disease, from Erica Check Hayden at Nature: Many disease-association studies, particularly in recent years, have identified mutations as pathogenic simply because scientists performing analyses on a group of people with a disorder found mutations that looked like the culprit, but didn’t see them in healthy people. But it’s possible that they weren’t looking hard enough, or in the right populations. Baseline ‘healthy’ genetic data has tended to come mainly from people of European descent, which can skew results. … In August this year, MacArthur’s group published its analysis of ExAC data in Nature, revealing that many mutations thought to be harmful are probably not. In one analysis, the group identified 192 variants Read More ›

From Gareth Cook at Scientific American, reviewing Alan Schwarz’s ADHD Nation: According to the American Psychiatric Association, about 5 percent of American children suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), yet the diagnosis is given to some 15 percent of American children, many of whom are placed on powerful drugs with lifelong consequences. This is the central fact of the journalist Alan Schwarz’s new book, ADHD Nation. Explaining this fact—how it is that perhaps two thirds of the children diagnosed with ADHD do not actually suffer from the disorder—is the book’s central mystery. The result is a damning indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, and an alarming portrait of what is being done to children in the name of mental health. Read More ›