2016

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 ›

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 ›