2016

In an attempt to frustrate rethinking evolution. From Suzan Mazur at Huffington Post: Six months after announcing the November 2016 Royal Society evolution meeting on this page and a half dozen or so stories later, over one-third of the seats for the event still remain vacant — and the tickets are free! But that’s easily explained, because the zoologists ultimately decided to “hog” the show. It didn’t have to be so. A lineup of speakers who truly represent the paradigm shift underway in evolution science would have quickly filled up the house. Instead, organizers went with essentially an evo-devo reunion on plasticity and niche construction — rehashed themes of Altenberg! from eight years ago minus most of the stars of Read More ›

From Phil Plait at Slate: I was wrong. I underestimated just how thoroughly the GOP had salted the Earth. Philosophical party planks of climate change denial, anti-evolution, anti-intellectualism, intolerance, and more have made it such that Trump can literally say almost anything, and it hardly affects his popularity.More. Izzatso? Trump was the first candidate in modern history to exploit the fact that no one now cares what legacy media, including Slate, think. When I travel the Toronto-Ottawa rail corridor in Canada, almost everyone is using a handheld to reach whoever or whatever they want anywhere on the planet. That can’t be stuffed back into a bottle. Trump spent almost nothing on publicity, trusting that the full pack cry against him Read More ›

Dr. Ann Gauger argues that the hypothesis of common descent fails to account for the origin of the mammalian placenta, in an ENV article titled, The Placenta Problem (June 17, 2016). As we’ll see, the evidence she puts forward proves precisely the opposite: common descent is the only hypothesis which explains the facts, without resorting to ad hoc suppositions. I’d like to begin with a confession. When I read Dr. Gauger’s article on the origin of the placenta, my first reaction was: “Whoa.” It appeared that Dr. Gauger had made a very strong case against the hypothesis of common descent. But then I did some more reading, and after looking at the evidence which Professor Joshua Swamidass kindly forwarded to Read More ›

Yeah. They were short. So? From The Scientist: New research suggests that Homo floresiensis—ancient hominins often called “hobbits”—lived closer in time to modern humans than previously thought. Researchers from the University of Wollongong in Australia have found evidence that modern humans were using fire on the Indonesian island of Flores as far back as 41,000 years ago, whereas the hobbits lived until roughly 50,000 years ago, the team reported today (June 30) in the Journal of Archaeological Science.More. Enough. Can we call off the Darwinian search for a lesser type (species) of human? Isn’t this getting, um, weird? See also: The Little Lady of Flores spoke from the grave. But said what, exactly? Follow UD News at Twitter!

Neither will salt But for now, ScienceDaily: Butter consumption was only weakly associated with total mortality, not associated with cardiovascular disease, and slightly inversely associated (protective) with diabetes, according to a new epidemiological study which analyzed the association of butter consumption with chronic disease and all-cause mortality. This systematic review and meta-analysis, published in PLOS ONE, was led by Tufts scientists including Laura Pimpin, Ph.D., former postdoctoral fellow at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts in Boston, and senior author Dariush Mozaffarian, M.D., Dr.P.H., dean of the School. Paper. (public access) – Pimpin L, Wu JHY, Haskelberg H, Del Gobbo L, Mozaffarian D. Is Butter Back? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Butter Consumption and Risk Read More ›

From academic librarian Jeffrey Beall here: Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers This is a list of questionable, scholarly open-access publishers. We recommend that scholars read the available reviews, assessments and descriptions provided here, and then decide for themselves whether they want to submit articles, serve as editors or on editorial boards. The criteria for determining predatory publishers are here. We hope that tenure and promotion committees can also decide for themselves how importantly or not to rate articles published in these journals in the context of their own institutional standards and/or geocultural locus. We emphasize that journal publishers and journals change in their business and editorial practices over time. This list is kept up-to-date to the best Read More ›

From Twitter: Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence — Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) June 29, 2016 But the whole point of the theory he espouses (the universe is a computer sim) is to escape the weight of the demand for evidence. See also the war on falsifiability and non-evidence-based science. People who need publicity to stay afloat can say what they like. We might have predicted Rationalia – but we were busy. It’s just more progressivism infesting science. See also: Neil deGrasse Tyson on why he thinks ID must be wrong Follow UD News at Twitter!

In this next installment from the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism (AM-Nat) conference, Salvador Cordova gives us his perspective on epistemology, which he calls “Gambler’s Epistemology,” which intends to be a metaphysically neutral way of analyzing claims based on their costs and payoff possibilities. Cordova shows that naturalism does not have a history of high payoffs, and that the ENCODE and similar projects by the NIH are good gambling bets but have caused consternation for those metaphysically committed to naturalism, which has historically been shown to be impractical.

From Nathaniel Comfort at Nautilus: Hydrothermal vent models transform the origins of life from unlikely to near-inevitable.What most goes against our intuition is that complex structures can be better dissipaters of energy than simpler ones.11 Catalysts help you up an energy hill so that you can drop even further down on the other side. Casting our gaze across the entirety of biological evolution, each organism is such an energy hill. It forms only if it is thermodynamically favored—if by pumping energy uphill to create it, even more energy is released. A lizard, for example, requires more energy to make than a lizard’s-worth of E. coli, but it consumes more energy at a greater rate. A world that contains both lizards Read More ›

From Symmetry (Fermilab/SLAC): According to the Standard Model, the most common decay of the Higgs boson should be a transformation into a pair of bottom quarks. This should happen about 60 percent of the time. The strange thing is, scientists have yet to discover it happening (though they have seen evidence). According to Harvard researcher John Huth, a member of the ATLAS experiment, seeing the Higgs turning into bottom quarks is priority No. 1 for Higgs boson research. “It would behoove us to find the Higgs decaying to bottom quarks because this is the largest interaction,” Huth says, “and it darn well better be there.”More. Good thing no one is trying to stop anyone from doing or publishing research on Read More ›

From rhampton7: I’m willing to bet that all of the talks/papers will refer to processes that are material in origin. Not sure why ID proponents would be excited by this. See Royal Society announces guest list for Extended Synthesis meet. It must be difficult to miss the point to the extent that rhampton7 does. Darwinism has been a stupidifier of evolutionary biology for so long that almost everyone just wants to call 1 800 GOTJUNK, the way one would for a flea-bitten sofa. People may differ widely as to what type of sofa should replace it but almost everyone agrees on its fate. See also: What the fossils told us in their own words Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Third Way: Below, you will find a list of researchers and authors who have, in one way or another, expressed their concerns regarding natural selection’s scope and who believe that other mechanisms are essential for a comprehensive understanding of evolutionary processes. More. A lot of scientists are listed. In the context, the putdowns by Darwinists in previous years are, um, interesting: The Third Way of Evolution announced, but fails to cohere (2015), written by someone at Panda’s Thumb. Arrogance always sounds far more pronounced in retrospect. Will they try getting some US court to rule against the Royal Society or the Third Way? Note: The Third Way site was created by Raju Pookottil, profiled in The Paradigm Shifters, a Read More ›

In plain English, a meeting November 7 – 9 that explores dumping Darwinism in favour of a more-evidence-based approach to evolution From Royal Society: Overview Scientific discussion meeting organised in partnership with the British Academy by Professor Denis Noble CBE FMedSci FRS, Professor Nancy Cartwright, Professor Sir Patrick Bateson FRS, Professor John Dupré and Professor Kevin Laland. Developments in evolutionary biology and adjacent fields have produced calls for revision of the standard theory of evolution, although the issues involved remain hotly contested. This meeting will present these developments and arguments in a form that will encourage cross-disciplinary discussion and, in particular, involve the humanities and social sciences in order to provide further analytical perspectives and explore the social and philosophical Read More ›

In connection with a sale on The Design of Life (Dembski and Wells), an excerpt from Evolution News and Views: The giraffe is an integrated adaptational package whose parts are carefully coordinated with one another. To fit successfully into its environmental niche, the giraffe presumably needed long legs. But in possessing long legs, it also needed a long neck. And to use its long neck, further adaptations were necessary. When a giraffe stands in its normal upright posture, the blood pressure in the neck arteries will be highest at the base of the neck and lowest in the head. The blood pressure generated by the heart must be extremely high to pump blood to the head. This, in turn, requires Read More ›

The Democrats’ platform committee says they have a “Final Draft To Advance Progressive Democratic Values.” Among those progressive values, criminalizing scientific dissent.  A plank calling for criminal prosecution of anyone who dissent’s from “the scientific reality of climate change” was adopted with unanimous consent.  Progressives do not tolerate dissent even from calling for the persecution of dissenters. UPDATE: Predictably, progressives ( wd400 @ comment 3 and rhampton7  @ comment 12) come in and apologize for the brown shirts. No, WD, it is not like the tobacco company cases at all. Those cases were civil cases in which the goal was a civil money judgment against companies that sold products that killed people.  In this case the plank calls for criminal Read More ›