2016

From Josh Rosenau at New Scientist: School field trips to creationist Ark? Sink that idea right now Just as pernicious as the scientific errors and the religious proselytising is a subtler form of indoctrination. The relentless message to visitors is that our world is as fallen and wicked as Noah’s, and that the destruction of the flood – including the obliteration of all humans other than a virtuous few – was not just acceptable but praiseworthy. Under the pretence of illustrating a beloved tale shared by Jews, Christians, Muslims and others, Ark Encounter presents a message as socially divisive as it is scientifically inaccurate, instilling fear, hatred and hopelessness. Those are lessons no school or parent should want their students Read More ›

From American Council on Science and Health: As Kramer from Seinfeld demonstrated, sponging off of other people can be a successful life strategy. The same is true for many members of the Animal Kingdom. In a new study published in Biology Letters, researchers Sara Weinstein and Armand Kuris from the University of California-Santa Barbara show that parasitism independently evolved many more times than originally thought. To conduct their analysis, Weinstein and Kuris examined how often parasitism evolved from non-parasitic ancestors. They concluded that it evolved at least 223 times, far more than the previous estimate of 60.More. Actually, DEvolved. See also: Why devolution works and Evolution appears to converge on goals—but in Darwinian terms, is that possible? Follow UD News Read More ›

Smarter than yer average animal. From ScienceDaily: The event, known as the end-Ediacaran extinction, took place 540 million years ago. The earliest life on Earth consisted of microbes — various types of single-celled organisms. These held sway for more than 3 billion years, when the first multicellular organisms evolved. The most successful of these were the Ediacarans, which spread around the globe about 600 million years ago. They were a largely immobile form of marine life shaped like discs and tubes, fronds and quilted mattresses. After 60 million years, evolution gave birth to another major innovation: metazoans, the first animals. Metazoans could move spontaneously and independently at least during some point in their life cycle and sustain themselves by eating other Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Evolution may have been waiting for a decent breath of oxygen, said researcher Chris Reinhard. And that was hard to come by. His research team is tracking down O2 concentrations in oceans, where earliest animals evolved. By doing so, they have jumped into the middle of a heated scientific debate on what rising oxygen did, if anything, to charge up evolutionary eras. Reinhard, a geochemist from the Georgia Institute of Technology, is shaking up conventional thinking with the help of computer modeling.Paper. (paywall) – More. The oxygen on early Earth debate has reached way higher decibels than information levels. See, for example, Rise of animals and oxygen on early Earth. and All the contradictory early Earth oxygen theories Read More ›

A new study could explain why DNA and not RNA, its older chemical cousin, is the main repository of genetic information. The DNA double helix is a more forgiving molecule that can contort itself into different shapes to absorb chemical damage to the basic building blocks — A, G, C and T — of genetic code. In contrast, when RNA is in the form of a double helix it is so rigid and unyielding that rather than accommodating damaged bases, it falls apart completely. … “For something as fundamental as the double helix, it is amazing that we are discovering these basic properties so late in the game,” said Al-Hashimi. “We need to continue to zoom in to obtain a Read More ›

From The Scientist: If there is one common theme in all this recent selection, it is that much of the human diversity we see around us today arose very recently. More than 90 percent of the heritage of every living human comes from sub-Saharan Africa sometime around 100,000 years ago. Fifteen years ago, many geneticists saw this recent common ancestry as evidence that human evolution had mostly drawn to a close. After diverging from our common chimpanzee and bonobo ancestors some 7 million years ago, hominins underwent massive changes in body size, diet, behavior, and brain size. Huge evolutionary innovations marked the beginning of upright walking, tool use, culture, and language. And those changes all happened before 100,000 years ago. Read More ›

But he has gotten used to it. From Chau Tu at ScienceFriday: More than 50 years later, the renowned astronomer is surprised by the cultural impact of his Drake Equation. No one else is. What might be the next best ‘candidate’ on Earth for gaining intelligence? There’s an obvious one, the chimpanzees. Or the bonobo—that’s the closest thing in physiology and social life to humans, so the bonobos are the prime candidate for our successor, if we ever wipe ourselves out or allow ourselves to be wiped out. If the planet gave them a million years to evolve, they would become us. Another creature I always cite, which is half-joke and half-serious, is squirrels. If you look at the fossil Read More ›

From Smithsonian: A Neuroscientist Tells You What’s Wrong With Your Brain Dean Burnett’s new book, Idiot Brain, explains why your mind evolved to thwart you People should be free to write what they want, including idiocy, but these neurosciencey claims about how our brains are constantly fooled and our minds do not really grasp anything undermine the idea that adults, citizens, voters, can make valid decisions. And that has been going on for decades. Good news for long-running corrupt rackets of every kind. Less good news for responsible government. That said, Burnett notes, in response to a question, Research seems to show that more intelligent people use less brain power. Why? [Researchers were] putting people into fMRI machines and giving Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: New research led by the University of Leicester has overturned a long-standing theory on how vertebrates evolved their eyes by identifying remarkable details of the retina in the eyes of 300 million year-old lamprey and hagfish fossils. The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, led by Professor Sarah Gabbott from the University of Leicester Department of Geology, shows that fossil hagfish eyes were well-developed, indicating that the ancient animal could see, whereas their living counterparts are completely blind after millions of years of eye degeneration — a kind of reverse evolution. No problem. It is called devolution. But now the fun starts: The eye is a complex structure and must have evolved through Read More ›

From Melissa Hogenboom at BBC: Unlike hairy chimpanzees and bonobos – and all other primates – most of our skin is on display. We have evolved this way, even though fur is beneficial: it insulates and protects the skin, and in some cases acts as a useful camouflage. So if it is so advantageous, why did we lose so much of it? Many speculations follow. “It would be [an] enormous advantage to be able to spend the entire midday foraging, finding mates or fighting enemies,” he says. “Sweating allows that, and for sweat to be efficient you need to be mostly hairless. That is the reason why sweating is a useful thing and hence why hair loss is a useful Read More ›

Another health sciences correctitude goes down in flames. From Big Story: Last year, the Associated Press asked the departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture for their evidence, and followed up with written requests under the Freedom of Information Act. When the federal government issued its latest dietary guidelines this year, the flossing recommendation had been removed, without notice. In a letter to the AP, the government acknowledged the effectiveness of flossing had never been researched, as required. The AP looked at the most rigorous research conducted over the past decade, focusing on 25 studies that generally compared the use of a toothbrush with the combination of toothbrushes and floss. The findings? The evidence for flossing is “weak, very Read More ›

In my last post, I cited 31 great scientists who made scientific arguments for the supernatural, and in so doing, flouted the tenets of methodological naturalism. One of these was the Scottish physicist, James Clerk Maxwell, who propounded the theory of electromagnetism. I was surprised that Maxwell’s violation of methodological naturalism generated so little comment among commenters on my last post, so I have decided to re-post it. The interesting thing is that Maxwell himself had a firm conception of the kinds of questions that science should and shouldn’t concern itself with – only his conception was quite different from ours. And the bright line he drew between science and non-science didn’t rule out talk of a Creator; it merely Read More ›

From Colin Barras at New Scientist: Where there’s fire there’s often smoke – which might have been bad news for Neanderthals and other ancient hominins. Modern humans carry a genetic mutation that reduces our sensitivity to cancer-causing chemicals found in wood smoke. But Neanderthals and Denisovans apparently lacked the mutation. … The team inserted human and Neanderthal versions of the AHR gene into animal cells in the lab and examined how the cells responded when exposed to these carcinogens. The Neanderthal version proved to be far more likely to cause the production of enzymes that induce a toxic effect. “We were surprised that the differences between the two were so large,” says Perdew. For some compounds there was a 1000-fold Read More ›

In “Why Social Science Risks Irrelevance,” danah boyd at Chronicle Review: My path of inquiry, like that of most scientists, was shaped by the context in which I was operating. As a queer woman trying to sort out sexuality and identity, questions about gender felt natural. I was also a computer scientist at the time, but I knew that computer-science methods could not help me answer my question. So I embarked on a path that forced me to learn psychology, cognitive science, and gender studies. And, as a result, I began a lifelong battle to define my disciplinary identity. Am I a sociologist? An anthropologist? An internet-studies scholar? In the process, I quickly realized that I queered my disciplinary identity Read More ›

Jerry Coyne believes in “science-based determinism” and denies the existence of libertarian free will.  Over at his blog he assures us that he is nevertheless in favor of altering the behavior of other beings (whether dogs or people) through “environmental factors” such as kicks or arguments. He starts off in his OP: you can alter the behavior of a dog by kicking it when it does something you don’t like. (I am NOT recommending this!). After a while the dog, whose onboard computer gets reprogrammed to anticipate pain, will no longer engage in the unwanted behavior. Later in a comment he writes: Reason is no different from a kick: it’s words that people can take on board to see if doing what Read More ›