From Sal Perkins, describing indigenous Panamanian customs at MEL: I first heard about the fights at Mi Lucha from my fellow expats in Volcan. The legend they perpetuate is that these impromptu street-boxing matches between Ngäbe men are for each other’s wives. Specifically, the wife of the loser can go with the winner of the fight if she so chooses. It’s not obligatory, they swear, but she often does. It’s Darwinism in action, they argue: She chooses the winner because he’s proven to be a stronger mate who can likely provide for her better. “The great thing about living in Volcan is if you get tired of your wife, you can just go down to the bar and pick a Read More ›

From Sarah Lewin at LiveScience: Space.com talked with Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester in New York who consulted on “Doctor Strange,” about how the movie’s magic of the mind fits in with the more science-grounded (comparatively!) worlds introduced previously, the concept of the multiverse and what science philosophy has to do with superheroes. … In general, the multiverse idea is very much built into the Marvel comics; Marvel has Earth 226A, Earth 213B … You can expect it to show up in different places. What’s interesting about the Marvel universe is, they would have these characters which would be the embodiment of impersonal forces. There’s a character who’s like, “I’m Eternity,” and he’s represented as this Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur’s Public Evolution Summit: At a meeting last May in New York with Andrew Pohorille, NASA’s senior-most scientist on origins of life, Pohorille told me that there is a certain factor to life that far cannot be captured in the lab, i.e., life is not purely a technical matter, and that he does not expect “we” will find life anywhere else in the solar system, including Mars – he added that there is as yet o consensus on what life is. But what Andrew Pohorille did not tell me at the time was that just a few days prior to our meeting, NASA’s Astrobiology Program—headed by Mary Voytek—awarded $1.108 million (5% of its annual budget) to the Center Read More ›

From Sean Martin at Daily Express: While scientists are still unsure about what exactly consciousness is, the University of Arizona’s Stuart Hameroff believes that it is merely information stored at a quantum level. British physicist Sir Roger Penrose agrees and believes he and his team have found evidence that protein-based microtubules – a structural component of human cells – carry quantum information – information stored at a sub-atomic level. More. Couple thoughts: 1. To say that there is no good or even reasonable theory of consciousness would be to shower the discipline with unearned praise. The ”perceptronium” thesis gives some sense of that, but there are other gems out there. 2. No one knows how to relate information to matter Read More ›

From David Sloan Wilson at Evolution Institute: Toward A New Social Darwinism … We should be suspicious of all narratives that attempt to incorporate Darwin’s theory for one purpose or another, past and present. Nevertheless, this does not mean that we are permanently trapped in a hall of mirrors. The articles by Paul Crook and Adriana Novoa show that it is possible to understand how a scientific theory is refracted through the lens of a particular person or culture. Admittedly, this is easier to do for the past than for the present. In any case, avoiding cultural bias is a problem for all theories, not just evolutionary theory. … What does that mean? Either Darwinian theory is any use in Read More ›

From Helen Thomson at New Scientist: In recent years it has become clear that hallucinations are much more than a rare symptom of mental illness or the result of mind-altering drugs. Their appearance in those of sound mind has led to a better understanding of how the brain can create a world that doesn’t really exist. More surprising, perhaps, is the role they may play in our perceptions of the real world. As researchers explore what is happening in the brain, they are beginning to wonder: do hallucinations make up the very fabric of our reality? (paywall) More. Of course in a world where the war on falsifiability is the new cosmology, objectivity is just evidence that a guy is Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The stretches of DNA between genes, littered with repeating sequences, were once considered the “junk of the genome,” but scientists are learning that some of this junk is far from harmless clutter. Researchers at the University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center report in the journal Cell Reports that certain short, repetitive sequences of DNA, or “junk,” play an important role in the development of Ewing sarcoma, a rare bone and soft tissue cancer that occurs most commonly in children and adolescents. “Some people may still think of these non-coding sequences as junk; that they don’t really do anything but act as hangers-on to the more famous parts of the genome,” said the study’s senior author Ian Read More ›

From Manjit Kumar at Physics World, reviewing Peter Watson’s Convergence: the Deepest Idea in the Universe, expresses some caution about that: Wherever experimental evidence can be coaxed out of nature, it suffices to corroborate or refute a theory and serves as the sole arbiter of validity. But where evidence is sparse or absent, other criteria, including aesthetic ones, have been allowed to come into play – both in formulating a theory and evaluating it. Watson believes that because of this, in some ways “physics has become mathematics”, arguing that we are currently “living in an in-between time, and have no way of knowing whether many of the ideas current in physics will endure and be supported by experiment”. This, Watson Read More ›

From Mike Wall at LiveScience: Humanity should be wary of seeking out contact with alien civilizations, Stephen Hawking has warned once again. … For what it’s worth, some other astronomers believe Hawking’s caution is unwarranted. Any alien civilization advanced enough to come to Earth would surely already know of humans’ existence via the radio and TV signals that humanity has been sending out into space since 1900 or so, this line of thinking goes. More. Hawking airs his concerns in his new documentary, Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places (paywall) See also: But surely we can’t conjure an entire advanced civilization? and How do we grapple with the idea that ET might not be out there? Follow UD News at Twitter! Trailer:

From Laurel Hamer at Science News: Textbook drawings of the cell’s largest organelle might need to be updated based on new images. Super-resolution shots of the endoplasmic reticulum reveal tightly packed tubes where previous pictures showed plain flat sheets, scientists report in the Oct. 28 Science. The finding helps explain how the endoplasmic reticulum, or ER, reshapes itself in response to changing conditions, says study coauthor Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, a cell biologist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Va. More. And it all just happens, see, via natural selection acting on random mutations, like textbooks have been preaching for fifty years. Yuh. See also: Royal Society meeting on new trend in evolutionary biology is definitely going Read More ›

A: One of the old sayings of WW II era bomber pilots was that flak gets heaviest over a sensitive target. So, when something as intuitively obvious and easily demonstrated as configuration-based, functionally specific complex organisation and/or associated (explicit or implicit) information — FSCO/I — becomes a focus for objections, that is an implicit sign of its central importance and potential impact on the prevailing a priori materialism school of thought. So, it is appropriate to pause, headline and note for record its source in the works of Orgel, Wicken and Thaxton et al (where Dembski’s link to CSI is also important, cf here from a few days ago; as is the metric approach by Trevors, Abel, Durston Chiu et Read More ›

If Darwin’s boys don’t get to town in time, it will be historic. A chance to talk about what really happens in evolution without Darwin clogging the works. New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives Scientific meeting Register for this event Register now Starts: November 072016 09:00 Add to calendar Ends: November 092016 17:00 Add to calendar Location The Royal Society, London, 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AG View map Venue information Overview Scientific discussion meeting organised in partnership with the British Academy by Professor Denis Noble CBE FMedSci FRS, Professor Nancy Cartwright FBA, Professor Sir Patrick Bateson FRS, Professor John Dupré and Professor Kevin Laland. The Royal Society, London Developments in evolutionary biology and adjacent Read More ›

Who thought twenty years ago we’d be reading science releases like this ? From Jeffrey M. Perkel at The Scientist: The idea of establishing an ant colony as a model system for epigenetics dates back nearly 12 years to a conversation Reinberg had with Shelley Berger, an epigeneticist at the University of Pennsylvania. Berger had recently returned from a family vacation in Costa Rica, where she spent time watching leaf-cutter ants in action. Ant colonies are highly homogeneous, genetically speaking. Yet their members vary dramatically in shape, size, and behavior. “In some cases the worker and queen are absolutely identical genetically, and yet they have completely different functions,” Berger explains. “The workers give up their reproduction to the queen.” Such Read More ›

From Hanneke Weitering at Space.com: In the film, six astronauts aboard the space station study a sample collected from Mars that could provide evidence for extraterrestrial life on the Red Planet. The crew determines that the sample contains a large, single-celled organism — the first example of life beyond Earth. … At first, the tiny alien seems cute and harmless as it sits inside a gloved containment box. When one of the astronauts puts his hands into the gloves and reaches in to touch the alien, its small, stringy, mushroom-like figure wiggles as if it’s being tickled. But the cuteness doesn’t last long. More. No, It wouldn’t. Otherwise, there’d be no story. Happily… See also: What we know and don’t Read More ›

Does anyone remember this from our textbook cell biology? From Michael Le Page at New Scientist: Giants, self-sacrifice, biological warfare: this story has them all. A voracious marine predator plagued by a giant virus has a defence system we’ve never seen before – it fights back by making its very own virus. The individuals that make these bioweapons sacrifice themselves for the greater good, saving their fellow predators in the process. The single-celled predator, Cafeteria roenbergensis, is common in coastal waters around the world, where it snacks on bacteria More. Giant viruses have yet to be factored into a serious discussion of living things. Curiously, the Royal Society suppressed discussion of the role of viruses at its upcoming rethinking evolution Read More ›