From Joshua A. Krisch at The Scientist: Juric and colleagues developed a method for quantifying the average strength of natural selection against Neanderthal genes. They found that selection against individual Neanderthal alleles is very weak, suggesting that our ancient ancestors accumulated many slightly deleterious alleles, which—within their small enclaves—were hardly noticeable when inherited. But once Neanderthals integrated into larger human populations, the researchers proposed, these alleles entered the crucible of natural selection and were weeded out of modern human genomes. In the statement, Juric acknowledged that population size was but one factor. More. We actually have little idea why it happened and that is a key problem with Darwinism (natural selection acting on random mutation). In the absence of evidence, Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: And so now our own focus shifts north in England, up the M11 to Cambridge University where the “Beyond Materialism: Biology for the 21st Century” conference opens at Hughes Hall on Saturday at 9 am. This gathering will feature scientists and scholars from U.S., U.K., Israel, Germany, and Sweden, plus leading advocates of intelligent design well known to readers of Evolution News, including Stephen Meyer, Douglas Axe, Ann Gauger, and Paul Nelson. If you found the RS meeting less provocative than you might have expected, join us tomorrow morning for a full day of challenging and candid discussion. Find the full program here, along with registration information. More. Darwin demolition: Someone’s gotta do Read More ›

John Searle gives a nice talk at Google about real intelligence vs. machine intelligence. The conversation is interesting for a number of reasons, including some historical background of Searle’s famous “Chinese Room Argument.”
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From Michael Skinner at Aeon: Darwin’s theory that natural selection drives evolution is incomplete without input from evolution’s anti-hero: Lamarck If sneers had weight, the Darwinian sneers against Lamarck over the last century or so would have crushed the Royal Society building to rubble. Let’s remember that when we hear bafflegab PR about how nothing has changed. When we read stuff like this, a lot of things have changed. One problem with Darwin’s theory is that, while species do evolve more adaptive traits (called phenotypes by biologists), the rate of random DNA sequence mutation turns out to be too slow to explain many of the changes observed. Scientists, well-aware of the issue, have proposed a variety of genetic mechanisms to Read More ›

From Mindy Weisberger at LiveScience: The newest additions to the Dutch National Police (DNP) are North American “immigrants”: bald eagles that are specially trained to take down airborne drones. The initiative is a first for law enforcement, according to DNP officials. They announced in a statement, released Sept. 13, that the DNP is currently the only police force in the world to include raptors on its roster for drone defense. For the past year, the DNP has tested eagles’ prowess against flying drones, collaborating with a private company called Guard from Above that trains raptors to snatch drones out of the sky. The tests were so successful, the DNP reported, that the police force recently purchased juvenile bald eagles that Read More ›

From Andrew Tarantola at Engadget: The Harvard study examined 36 patients with similar brainstem lesions, 12 of which were comatose. The study sought to determine why that dozen of people lost consciousness while the other 24 retained theirs. The researchers quickly zeroed in on one region: the rostral dorsolateral pontine tegmentum. Ten of the twelve comatose patients suffered damage to this area, while only one of the conscious patients did.More. It will be interesting to see if this is replicated. One guesses that it is a bit more complex. See also: Evading the hard problem of human consciousness: Consciousness is in everything! and What great physicists have said about immateriality and consciousness Follow UD News at Twitter!

From anthropologist Todd Wood at his blog: First up, in a surprisingly speculative paper in the South African Journal of Science, Wits professor Francis Thackeray proposed that the bones of H. naledi had lichen stains on them from exposure to light. If correct, the resting of the bones on the surface would imply that the bodies of H. naledi were not intentionally deposited in the Dinaledi chamber but just fell in there. I say this was speculative, since Thackeray’s argument (as I understood it) was based on visual similarity of some stains on the bones to stains on some rocks that might have been made by lichens. More. Colleagues say no, the stains are not consistent with lichen growth in Read More ›

Here: Multicopy plasmids potentiate the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria As well as allowing horizontal gene transfer, the increased copy number of plasmids could accelerate evolution. Here, it is shown that… More. One can browse four articles for free, include the above. Perhaps they are hoping to accommodate non-Darwinian evolution more formally. Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Matthew R. Francis at Symmetry: One reason to think of dark matter as a thermal relic is an interesting coincidence known as the “WIMP miracle.”WIMP stands for “weakly-interacting massive particle,” and WIMPs are the most widely accepted candidates for dark matter. Theory says WIMPs are likely heavier than protons and interact via the weak force, or at least interactions related to the weak force. … Both the primordial light known as the cosmic microwave background and the behavior of galaxies tell us that most dark matter must be slow-moving (“cold” in the language of physics). That means interactions between dark matter particles must be low in strength. “Through what is perhaps a very deep fact about the universe,” Buckley Read More ›

From a Nature editorial: Do the academics of the Internet age still communicate as stiffly as their colleagues did at the time of the Apollo programme? Or, heaven forbid, has some scruffy informality crept into scholarly discourse? Yes, and no, according to an illuminating new analysis. Formal language is largely intact, the study finds, give or take a mildly more tolerant attitude to split infinitives and initial conjunctions. Yet there has been an explosion in the use of the first-person pronouns in academic papers by biologists. What, we wondered, is that all about? Ah, at last, a question UD News can answer with confidence: It’s “all about me.” The traditional scientist preferred an anonymous style out of a sense of Read More ›

Equally false. From Rik Smits at the Scientist, commenting on ethologist Frans de Waal’s recent book, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?: The essential burden of science is to replace dogma, sentiment, and superstition with an as-far-as-we-now-know theory based on verifiable facts, all the while striving for objectivity. Yet, in his work, de Waal replaces one dogma—the Cartesian/behaviorist stance that animals are mere oblivious response machines—with another. Following “Charles Darwin’s well-known observation that the mental difference between humans and other animals is one of degree rather than kind,” de Waal notes that there is no fundamental difference between man and beast—not even mentally. The problem is not the idea, it is that de Waal posits this Read More ›

From Alison George at New Scientist: A painstaking investigation of Europe’s cave art has revealed 32 shapes and lines that crop up again and again and could be the world’s oldest code Von Petzinger, a palaeoanthropologist from the University of Victoria in Canada, is spearheading an unusual study of cave art. Her interest lies not in the breathtaking paintings of bulls, horses and bison that usually spring to mind, but in the smaller, geometric symbols frequently found alongside them. Her work has convinced her that far from being random doodles, the simple shapes represent a fundamental shift in our ancestors’ mental skills. (paywall) More. See also: Australia: Sophisticated inland campsite 50 000 years ago The search for our earliest ancestors: Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Life took hold on land at least as early as 3.2 billion years ago, suggests a study. The team studied ancient rock formations from South Africa’s Barberton greenstone belt. These rocks are some of the oldest known on Earth, with their formation dating back to 3.5 billion years. … These rocks are some of the oldest known on Earth, with their formation dating back to 3.5 billion years. In a layer that has been dated at 3.22 billion years old, tiny grains of the iron sulfide mineral pyrite were discovered that show telltale signs of microbial activity. Paper. (paywall) – Sami Nabhan, Michael Wiedenbeck, Ralf Milke, Christoph Heubeck. Biogenic overgrowth on detrital pyrite in ca. 3.2 Ga Archean Read More ›

Sheldon, our physics and physics colour commentator, responds based on his personal experiences to the news from Nature that many scientists “stunned” by the Trump win: There’s been a lot of hyperventilating by the intelligentsia about the consequences of a Republican sweep of House, Senate and Presidency. Many fear that Republicans in general, and Trump in particular are “anti-science” and will put America back in the stone age. For those of you new to American politics, I’d like to dispel that myth and throw some cold water on the hysteria. First, universities and research scientists are by no means neutral politically. I’ve lost 3 jobs at universities both public and private, in part for being a Republican. Sociologists who measure Read More ›

Why? Doesn’t that speak poorly of the powers of the scientific method? From Jeff Tollefson, Lauren Morello& Sara Reardon at Nature: Republican businessman and reality-television star Donald Trump will be the United States’ next president. Although science played only a bit part in this year’s dramatic, hard-fought campaign, many researchers expressed fear and disbelief as Trump defeated former secretary of state Hillary Clinton on 8 November. “Trump will be the first anti-science president we have ever had,” says Michael Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society in Washington DC. “The consequences are going to be very, very severe.” Trump has questioned the science underlying climate change — at one point suggesting that it was a Chinese hoax Read More ›