2016

From Motherboard: Why Are So Many Scientists Harassing Their Students? In the past few months, there have been four separate cases of high-profile scientists accused of harassment, a first-person account of harassment published in the science journal Nature, and multiple cries for greater awareness and reform. There have also been a handful of alarming studies and surveys published in the last few months and years, outlining the extent of the problem. Late last year, preliminary results from a survey by the Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy found 82 percent of respondents (men and women) had heard sexist comments on the job, while 57 percent said they had been personally harassed—9 percent physically so. A survey published in Read More ›

O’Leary’s new media blog Social media can strengthen families They can help people stay in touch better than any other device invented by human ingenuity. For better or worse. The internet: Privacy fights back It’s worse than we thought. But is Privategrity the answer? Do you know who your teens meet on social media? Maybe they don’t either. Maybe you should both find out. From Forbes: Is the internet losing freedom of speech? It’s as if your telephone company were your judge and jury, not the court system. Ethics for the citizen journalist If you write for online publications today, you are a citizen journalist Could the internet outlive humanity? That seems like a strange question, but there is a Read More ›

Suzan Mazur, author of The Origin of Life Circus, interviews British philosopher of biology (U Exeter) John Dupré, on the upcoming Royal Society meeting, New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives, at Huffington Post: Since the upcoming Royal Society meeting on evolution paradigm shift is a public one, one of its organizers — British philosopher John Dupré — recently agreed to answer some of my questions about the event. This in itself is progress in science, considering the silly secrecy that surrounded “the Altenberg 16” Extended Synthesis conference of 2008 that two years later would produce a book timidly announcing: However, that is not what is expected from the Royal Society gathering in November, since Denis Noble, Read More ›

Or something. Maybe there’s never much religion news on Superbowl Sunday, so… From Slate, we learn: How an evangelical creationist came to accept evolution. The article focuses on Kramer, 27, who would seem to be a Christian Darwinist: “Kramer found a way to have his faith and Darwin too.” Interesting. Darwin didn’t find the way, but then what did he know? Anyway, Kramer got a job at Templeton-funded BioLogos, which is currently trying to distance itself from the views of its living (b 1950) founder, Francis Collins, after barely a decade. As Slate puts it, Of course, Kramer’s view is not everyone’s. Most people who study evolution see no evidence of or need for God in the history of life Read More ›

Physicist Rob Sheldon writes to respond to the claim that Jupiter does not shield Earth: Kevin Grazier, PhD, at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, describes the study in which he simulated the evolution of tens of thousands of particles in the gaps between the jovian planets for up to 100 million years. Based on the results, Dr. Grazier concludes that the widely reported shield role attributed to Jupiter is incorrect. More. Sheldon notes, While I have the greatest respect for people who run tens of Newtonian mechanics simulations of 10,000 bodies for 100 million years, the models only give results that were programmed into the simulation. If, for example, tomorrow someone were to find that the magnetized solar Read More ›

A friend draws our attention to Anthony O’Hear: Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, editor of the journal Philosophy, author of many books on the subject, and was formerly Government Advisor on Education and Teacher Training. He is a philosopher with a special interest in education. Friend offers some notes to the vid lecture (Fall, 2015) below: O’Hear discusses five internal problems to Darwin’s theory of evolution: 1. Darwin’s notion of progress 2. His stance on the creator 3. Knowledge of reality — i.e., Darwinism undermines its own claims to truth for if everything is “explained” by natural selection, how do we get to truth? 4. Darwin on human development (primitive/savage peoples) 5. Darwinism and social policy O’Hear’s conclusions: Read More ›

Rob Sheldon writes, in response to a reader who asked that question that it function as a way of getting rid of the idea of design in nature: 1. Dark Energy. Antithetical to ID, dark energy is a proposed, but completely speculative solution to the question of how the universe can appear to be so finely tuned. By invoking a free parameter that can substitute for a designer, the hope is that the fanciful name, the concept (anti-gravity), the impersonality of it all will discourage anyone from attributing intelligence or design to this fine tuning knob. 2. Dark Matter — the yet-unobserved proposed source of correctly observed gravitational attraction, this could be something as innocuous as comets, black-eyed peas, and Read More ›

From Michael Graziano at Atlantic: This is called the attention schema theory, a theory that my lab has been developing and testing experimentally for the past five years. It’s a theory of why we insist with such certainty that we have subjective experience. Attention is fundamental. It’s present in almost all animals. To help control it, the brain evolved an attention schema. Because of the quirky information contained in the attention schema, the brain-machine claims to have a conscious experience of things. Consciousness is phantom attention. Without resorting to magic, mysticism, hard problems, or spooky soul energy, the theory explains the behavior of us humans who claim—who swear up and down and get testy when challenged—that we have a ghost Read More ›

By biotech giant AmGen. From Nature News: A biotechnology firm is releasing data on three failed efforts to confirm findings in high-profile scientific journals — details that the industry usually keeps secret. … The idea emerged from discussions at a meeting focused on improving scientific integrity, hosted by the US National Academy of Sciences in 2015. Sasha Kamb, who leads research discovery at Amgen, said that his company’s scientists have in many instances tried and failed to reproduce academic studies, but that it takes too much time and effort to publish these accounts through conventional peer-review procedures. This problem has been around forever, but recently, its seriousness has begun to attract attention. For example, In 2012, Amgen researchers made headlines Read More ›

From BBC: The intentional selection of the qualities we like (such as flavour and size) in domesticated livestock and cultivated crops has led to descendent animals and plants that differ genetically from their ancestors. This change in gene frequency is evolution, and in this case has come about by a process called artificial selection. Natural selection is basically the same process. The difference is that instead of humans selecting individuals to breed, natural selection pressures such as predation, or the reluctance of females to mate with lower quality males, cause some individuals in a population to prosper and produce offspring while others fare poorly, leaving fewer offspring. If the trait that caused the parents to prosper has a genetic basis, Read More ›

At Aeon, we are asked to consider the “superfluid universe.” Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder offers: Quantum effects are not just subatomic: they can be expressed across galaxies, and solve the puzzle of dark matter Most of the matter in the Universe is invisible, composed of some substance that leaves no mark as it breezes through us – and through all of the detectors the scientists have created to catch it. But this dark matter might not consist of unseen particle clouds, as most theorists have assumed. Instead, it might be something even stranger: a superfluid that condensed to puddles billions of years ago, seeding the galaxies we observe today. This new proposal has vast implications for cosmology and physics. Superfluid dark matter Read More ›

The Atlantic says no one knows why. Apparently, it’s not for chewing, finding mates, speaking, or taking punches. [Anthropologist James] Pampush doubts that chins are adaptations at all. He thinks it’s more likely that they are spandrels—incidental features that have no benefits in themselves, but are byproducts of evolution acting upon something else. … A different explanation portrays the chin as a bit of the jaw that got left behind while the rest shrunk back. As early humans started cooking and processing our food, we made fewer demands upon our teeth, which started shrinking as a result. They gradually retracted into the face, while the part of the lower jaw that held them did not (or, at least, did so Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: While previous experimental and theoretical studies give clues to spatial variations in the primordial universe, they lack the key element of time. Without a ticking clock to measure the passage of time, the evolutionary history of the primordial universe can’t be determined unambiguously. “Imagine you took the frames of a movie and stacked them all randomly on top of each other. If those frames aren’t labeled with a time, you can’t put them in order. Did the primordial universe crunch or bang? If you don’t know whether the movie is running forward or in reverse, you can’t tell the difference,” explains Chen. This new research suggests that such “clocks” exist, and can be used to measure the passage Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Not only is the ‘Jupiter as shield’ concept, implying that the planet shields Earth from comet impacts, not true, but perhaps Jupiter’s most important role in fostering the development of life on Earth was just the opposite — delivering the volatile materials from the outer Solar System needed for life to form. This new simulation study, and the previously underestimated role that Saturn may have also played in the evolution of life on Earth. … In “Jupiter: Cosmic Jekyll and Hyde”), Kevin Grazier, PhD, at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, describes the study in which he simulated the evolution of tens of thousands of particles in the gaps between the jovian planets for up to 100 Read More ›