2016

From Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech, By now, 2014 [when Chomsky’s critic Everett appeared], Evolution was more than a theory. It had become embedded in the very anatomy, the very central nervous system of all modern people. Every part, every tendency, of every living creature had evolved from some earlier life form—even if you had to go all the way back to Darwin’s “four or five cells floating in a warm pool somewhere” to find it. A title like “The Mystery of Language Evolution” was instinctive. It went without saying that any “trait” as important as speech had evolved… from something. Everett’s notion that speech had not evolved from anything—it was a “cultural tool” man had made for himself—was Read More ›

From Paul Ibbotson and Michael Tomasello at Scientific American: The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar—famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—has dominated linguistics for almost half a century. Recently, though, cognitive scientists and linguists have abandoned Chomsky’s “universal grammar” theory in droves because of new research examining many different languages—and the way young children learn to understand and speak the tongues of their communities. That work fails to support Chomsky’s assertions. The research suggests a radically different view, in which learning of a child’s first language does not rely on an innate grammar module. Instead the new research shows that young children use various types of thinking that Read More ›

Here: Science has made great strides in modeling space, time, mass and energy. Yet little attention has been paid to the precise representation of the information ubiquitous in nature. Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics fuses results from complexity modeling and information theory that allow both meaning and design difficulty in nature to be measured in bits. Built on the foundation of a series of peer-reviewed papers published by the authors, the book is written at a level easily understandable to readers with knowledge of rudimentary high school math. Those seeking a quick first read or those not interested in mathematical detail can skip marked sections in the monograph and still experience the impact of this new and exciting model of nature’s Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at Salvo: In 2008, Robert Perlman, who taught courses in evolutionary medicine at the University of Chicago, complained in the Review, “This spring, under the chairmanship of Edmund Pellegrino, the Council [President’s Council on Bioethics] published a reader, ‘Human Dignity and Bioethics’, to expand and clarify the concept of human dignity. The neglect or dismissal of evolution in this volume is striking.”5 Striking? Why? No non-human ancestor is on the examining table. Of course, writers and editors for publications like the Review might not think that matters. When one is sufficiently steeped in Darwinian evolution, bodies of scientific fact gain value principally by their association with it. More. See also:  Neurosurgeon explains why Darwinian medicine is a Read More ›

Here. Fire-Maker Book: How Humans Were Designed to Harness Fire and Transform Our Planet (The Privileged Species Series) Paperback – July 18, 2016 From computers to airplanes to life-giving medicines, the technological marvels of our world were made possible by the human use of fire. But the use of fire itself was made possible by an array of features built into the human body and the planet. In Fire-Maker, biologist Michael Denton explores the special features of nature that equipped humans to to harness the powers of fire and remake their world. This book is a companion to the documentary of the same name, available at www.privilegedspecies.com. See also: The whole vid online: Follow UD News at Twitter!

I briefly discuss here. Notice the 100-year global subjugation map I first found online on an IslamIST site on the following day: And also, this sketch of history from the 630’s on (i.e. the last IslamIST 100-year expansion): Sky News coverage on that fateful following day: Note, too, this outline of global geostrategic challenges c 2016: (Relevance to our time, fifteen years later, should not be under-estimated. We need to ask ourselves some sobering questions and look at questions on straight and sound thinking and response to a media ever more blatantly driven by spin in service to various agendas.) END PS: Nor, should we overlook the relevance of the Benghazi attacks on Sept 11, 2012 [cf article here and Read More ›

From Chris Woolston at Nature: Researchers previously split giraffes into several subspecies on the basis of their coat patterns and where they lived. Closer inspection of their genes, however, reveals that giraffes should actually be divided into four distinct lineages that don’t interbreed in the wild, researchers report on 8 September in Current Biology1. Previous genetic studies2 have suggested that there were discrete giraffe populations that rarely intermingled, but this is the first to detect species-level differences, says Axel Janke, a geneticist at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and the study’s senior author. “It was an amazing finding,” he says. He notes that giraffes are highly mobile, wide-ranging animals that would have many chances to interbreed in the wild if Read More ›

Hello, base, do we have a connection? The human brain is said by many to be the most sophisticated known item in the universe. Never mind, from ScienceDaily: Inhibitory connections between neurons act as the brain’s brakes, preventing it from becoming overexcited. Researchers thought inhibitory connections were less sophisticated than their excitatory counterparts because relatively few proteins were known to exist at these structures. But a new study overturns that assumption, uncovering 140 proteins that have never been mapped to inhibitory synapses. Some of the proteins have already been implicated in autism, intellectual disability and epilepsy, suggesting new treatment avenues. – Akiyoshi Uezu, Daniel J. Kanak, Tyler W.A. Bradshaw, Erik J. Soderblom, Christina M. Catavero, Alain C. Burette, Richard J. Read More ›

Okay, dead leaves: See also: A moth’s wings feature two flies picking at a pile of bird dropping. It should be harder to be a Darwinist than our culture makes it. Follow UD News at Twitter!

So reports Andrea Taroni at New Scientist: Chances are, too, you’re nowhere near the vision of particles painted by our best picture of how they work, quantum theory. This says that despite making up stuff that definitely has a size – ourselves, the paper or screen you’re reading this on – particles occupy a point in space precisely zero metres across. While you’re chewing that one over, you might consider how quantum theory also allows these size-zero particles to occupy multiple places at once, or be “entangled” so the state of one becomes inextricably bound up with the state of another. But even that doesn’t prepare you for the latest assault on any common-sense conception of a particle that physicists Read More ›

Para nuestros lectores bilingues (se que tenemos algunos), un video que demuestra que el debate no es nada complicado: Here is the English version, highlighted earlier at UD: Y en el caso poco probable que alguien se interesa en saber en que he trabajado los ultimos 40 anos, puede verlo aqui. Hey, I’m from El Paso, we all switch languages en medio de una frase aqui. And as long as I’m pushing my Youtube videos, here is my most entertaining and recent one, the only one with any chance to go viral, “Isaac has to wait” (essential to turn on closed captions, CC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tycSRzBy5zc

From ScienceDaily: This week in the journal Nature, a team of researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in France and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom shows that fossils of the 360 million-year-old tetrapod Acanthostega, one of the iconic transitional forms between fishes and land animals, are not adults but all juveniles. This conclusion, which is based on high-resolution synchrotron X-ray scans of fossil limb bones performed at the ESRF sheds new light on the life cycle of Acanthostega and the so-called conquest of land by tetrapods. The tetrapods are four-limbed vertebrates, which are today represented by amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Early tetrapods of the Devonian period (419-359 million years ago) Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A team of Japanese researchers led by Homma’s laboratory of Nagoya University have now purified the stator protein MotA from a bacterium found in hot springs (Aquifex aeolicus) and analyzed its three-dimensional structure using electron microscopy mainly in cooperation with Namba’s laboratory of Osaka University. They found that it can form a structure of four MotA molecules (called a tetramer), which differs in shape from the previously predicted complex. The study was recently published in Scientific Reports. The MotA protein spans the bacterial membrane, and has previously been shown to form a tetramer complex with another transmembrane protein, MotB, creating the stator. In this latest work, MotA was expressed and purified from A. aeolicus, and found to be Read More ›

Here. MCDOWELL: What do you consider some of the greatest successes, and also challenges, in the ID movement? DEMBSKI Unlike creationism, with which it is often conflated, intelligent design shifts the discussion of biological origins from a religion vs. science controversy to a science vs. science controversy. This is a success, even if ID’s critics continue to try to claim that it is religion in scientific garb. There are really two strands to ID’s scientific program. There’s the pure information-theoretic side, as represented by the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, and then there’s the molecular biology research side, as represented by the Biologic Institute and its journal Bio-Complexity.[ii] We continue to push the research frontiers forward on both sides. The biggest challenge Read More ›

From Dan Falk at Quanta, Many physicists have made peace with the idea of a block universe, arguing that the task of the physicist is to describe how the universe appears from the point of view of individual observers. To understand the distinction between past, present and future, you have to “plunge into this block universe and ask: ‘How is an observer perceiving time?’” said Andreas Albrecht, a physicist at the University of California, Davis, and one of the founders of the theory ofcosmic inflation. Others vehemently disagree, arguing that the task of physics is to explain not just how time appears to pass, but why. For them, the universe is not static. The passage of time is physical. “I’m Read More ›