An illusion like consciousness, right? Okay, never mind, let’s hear the solution. From Brian Koberlein at Forbes: What if the effects of gravity aren’t due to some fundamental force, but are rather an emergent effect due to other fundamental interactions? A new paper proposes just that, and if correct it could also explain the effects of dark matter. An anthropic force acts like gravity. Entropic gravity is an interesting idea, and it would explain why gravity is so difficult to bring into the fold of quantum physics, but it’s not without its problems. For one, since entropic gravity predicts exactly the same gravitational behavior as general relativity, there’s no experimental way to distinguish it as a better theory. There are Read More ›

From Marek Kohn at New Scientist, in a review of Chris Knight’s Decoding Chomsky: Researchers have devised different ways to create firebreaks between values and data. According to anthropologist Chris Knight, Chomsky’s strategy was as radical as his politics – and he developed it in order to enable himself to sustain his left-wing political commitments. In his new book Decoding Chomsky, Knight (who mounts his own critique from a position on the radical left) argues that Chomsky needed to deny any connection between his science and his politics in order to practise both while based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an institution that was heavily funded by the US military. … This required detaching language from society altogether. Chomsky Read More ›

From Berit Brogaard at Psychology Today: A new volume of papers on panpsychism edited by philosophers Godehard Bruntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla just appeared with Oxford University Press. It features paper by prominent philosophers David Chalmers, Galen Strawson and Brian McLaughlin, among many others. According to the traditional version of panpsychism, everything around you is conscious: the chair your are sitting on, the rock you use as a doorstopper at home and the thick hurricane-safe windows in your office. Panpsychism literally means that particular kinds of psychological states are embedded in everything. An alternative to the traditional view is the view that everything around you has a form of rudimentary consciousness. More. Brogaard suggests, “…we can imagine that there is qualitative Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: It’s the ultimate chicken-or-egg conundrum: What was the “mother” molecule that led to the formation of life? And how did it replicate itself? One prominent school of thought proposes that RNA is the answer to the first question. Now, in ACS Central Science, researchers in this camp demonstrate RNA has more flexibility in how it recognizes itself than previously believed. The finding might change how we picture the first chemical steps towards replication and life. Today, plants, animals and other organisms reproduce by making copies of their DNA with the help of enzymes and then passing the copies onto the next generation. This is possible because genetic material is made of building blocks — or bases A, T, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: It has been known for quite some time that genetically modified bacteria, which have lost their ability to produce certain amino acids and retrieve these nutrients from their environment grow better than bacteria, which produce all nutrients themselves. This led researchers to inquire whether natural selection would favor the loss of abilities, thus making bacteria more dependent on their environment. Of course it did or they wouldn’t be writing about it but this has nothing to do with “natural” selection. The researchers had produced the bacteria themselves. A similar loss of traits has been observed not only in bacteria, but also in other groups of organisms. Many animals, including humans, are not able to produce vitamins themselves — Read More ›

From physicist Rob Sheldon, our physics colour commentator, on what’s wrong with the latest new theory of consciousness. That’s the one by Anil Seth that walloped through here quite recently, namely, Researcher: Never mind the “hard problem of consciousness”: The real one is… “Our experiences of being and having a body are ‘controlled hallucinations’ of a very distinctive kind” Sheldon: The key point in this article is in this sentence: But there is an alternative, which I like to call the real problem: how to account for the various properties of consciousness in terms of biological mechanisms; without pretending it doesn’t exist (easy problem) and without worrying too much about explaining its existence in the first place (hard problem). Restating it, Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer, Britside, at Evolution News & Views: Our biologist friend writes of yesterday’s session: Some opposing views were aired in the morning sessions, with polite but pointed disagreement between Drs. Sonia Sultan and Russell Lande on the subject of phenotypic plasticity. It is clear that opinion is divided in the room. Some applause for bolder statements was quickly quashed, the audience having been warned at the beginning that boos and cheers were not acceptable. More. We all know that science is best represented by unquestioning deference to dogma, even in the face of growing contradictions with reality. Right? He describes the meeting as tense. How about “tense but timid”? We’ve all been through that at some time in Read More ›

Darwinian Christian racism? Election years bring dangerous creatures from the shadows From Denyse O’Leary (O’Leary for News) at MercatorNet: Just recently, one Russell Kirk (probably a pseudonym*) blind-copied me on a post to “oxfordchristia” to advise me that Many younger Bible-centered conservative Christians have declared war on Christian Cultural Marxism. At first I thought, well, if young Christians want to live, they had better learn the difference between friends and foes, between life and death. But then, What is human biodiversity? Many younger, high IQ Christians have become very interested in human biodiversity. Modern studies in population genetics are showing that there are many differences in human populations. For example, Europeans about 8,000 years ago developed genes lactose tolerance that Read More ›

Douglas Axe, author of Undeniable interviewed here: On this episode of ID the Future, Andrew McDiarmid interviews Douglas Axe on his recent book, Undeniable. Axe shares his reasons for writing the volume, defines common science, and describes what a new biology, with intelligent design, not Darwinism, might resemble. See also: Doug Axe: Every reason for optimism on deepest questions in biology Follow UD News at Twitter!

  From David Snoke here: — Advance Details for the April annual meeting next year The theme is “human exceptionalism” and confirmed speakers include Jack Collins, Ph.D., professor of Old Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, and author of several books, including Science and Faith, speaking on what the Bible means by the Image of God in humanity. Jeffrey Schwarz, M.D., research psychologist at UCLA, and author of several books including You Are Not Your Brain, speaking on the rising movement of Mindfulness. Michael Egnor, M.D., neurosurgeon and professor of pediatrics at Stony Brook University, speaking on unique aspects of the human brain. Kevin Birdwell, Ph.D., manager of the meteorology program and team leader of the Atmospheric Risk Read More ›

LiveScience publishes stale dated origin of life theories from 2007 in 2016 It’s not their fault. No serious new developments in the intervening years. From Ker Than at LiveScience, a rehash of competing origin of life theories, concluding with: Trying to recreate an event that happened billions of years ago is a daunting task, but many scientists believe that, like the emergence of life itself, it is still possible. “The solution of a mystery of this magnitude is totally unpredictable,” said Freeman Dyson, a professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University in New Jersey. “It might happen next week or it might take a thousand years.” More. But then we learn, Editor’s Note: This article was first published in 2007. Read More ›

We are “conscious beast-machines.” (Aw, sit down. We owe this guy a hearing out of politeness. ) From neuroscientist Anil K. Seth at Aeon: In my work at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex in Brighton, I collaborate with cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, brain imagers, virtual reality wizards and mathematicians – and philosophers too – trying to do just this. And together with other laboratories, we are gaining exciting new insights into consciousness – insights that are making real differences in medicine, and that in turn raise new intellectual and ethical challenges. In my own research, a new picture is taking shape in which conscious experience is seen as deeply grounded in how brains and Read More ›

From Annalee Newitz at Ars Technica: In a stunning discovery, a team of archaeologists in Australia has found extensive remains of a sophisticated human community living 50,000 years ago. The remains were found in a rock shelter in the continent’s arid southern interior. Packed with a range of tools, decorative pigments, and animal bones, the shelter is a wide, roomy space located in the Flinders Ranges, which are the ancestral lands of the Adnyamathanha. The find overturns previous hypotheses of how humans colonized Australia, and it also proves that they interacted with now-extinct megafauna that ranged across the continent. Dubbed the Warratyi site, the rock shelter sits above a landscape criss-crossed with deep gorges that would have flowed with water Read More ›

UD has a broad and deep pool of readers and occasional contributors from across the world that have a lot to say, things that are well worth pondering. In this case, I am more than happy to host a guest post in which physicist and computer scientist ES (who hails from Russia) argues the thesis: No linguistic processing occurs in the case of memory of a material that is exclusively explainable in terms of physical interactions between particles of that material, whereas the basic architecture of life is inherently linguistic. Let us now ponder: >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Biological memory vs. memory of materials [Eugen S, UD November 7, 2016] Contemporary technology allows us to make self-deploying structures that can revert to their Read More ›

At Forbes: While experiments are telling us that low-energy supersymmetry and extra dimensions probably don’t exist (or are so constrained that they’re irrelevant), there are plenty of pieces of evidence that there’s more to existence than the Standard Model alone. What else is out there? There are five strong, independent lines of inquiry that reveal there’s got to be something. Including: During the last decade, when neutrino masses were constrained for the first time (via neutrino oscillations), it surprised many that they were found to be very low in mass, but to have definitively non-zero masses. Why is that? The general way of explaining this — the see-saw mechanism — typically involves additional, very heavy particles (like, maybe a billion Read More ›