2016

From Eurekalert: A research team under Dr. Bo Wang of the State Key Laboratory of Paleobiology and Stratigraphy in Nanjing (China) worked together with paleontologists from the University of Bonn and other scientists from China, USA, France, and England to examine a total of 35 insects preserved in amber. With the aid of grains of sand, plant residue, wood fibers, dust, or even the lifeless shells of their victims, the larvae achieved camouflage to perfection. Some larvae fashioned a kind of “knight’s armor” from grains of sand, perhaps to protect against spider bites. In order to custom-tailor their “camo”, they have even adapted their limbs for the purpose. The larvae were able to turn their legs about 180 degrees, in Read More ›

Here is a press release via phys.org. They applied “biological evolution” to the history of cars and car makers in order to predict the future of electric car technology. It sort of makes you chuckle. “Cars are exceptionally diverse but also have a detailed history of changes, making them a model system for investigating the evolution of technology,” Gjesfjeld said. The team drew data from 3,575 car models made by 172 different manufacturers, noting the first and last year each was manufactured. “This is similar to when a paleontologist first dates a particular fossil and last sees a particular fossil,” Gjesfjeld said. And a little bit more: Alfaro said applying an evolutionary biology approach worked so well because the automotive Read More ›

From Mary Bates at National Geographic: Scientists have recently described the world’s first known amphibious centipede. It belongs to a group of giant centipedes called Scolopendra and grows up to 20 centimeters (7.9 inches) long. Like all centipedes, it is venomous and carnivorous. … With some difficulty, Beccaloni captured the centipede and later put it in a large container of water. He says it immediately dove to the bottom and swam powerfully like an eel, with horizontal undulations of its body. When he took the centipede out of the container, the water rolled off its body, leaving it totally dry. More. All centipedes, even tiny land-based ones, are horrific. But they eat millipedes (plant pests), so it’s best not to Read More ›

String theory is hotter than tabasco in the pop science media. It interests us because it is probably unfalsifiable—and therefore generates worrying demands for an exemption from falsifiability and for non-evidence-based science. From mathematician Peter Woit, a string theory skeptic at Not Even Wrong: If you’re interested in the various sorts of internal divisions these days among people doing what gets called “string theory”, you might want to take a look at this blog entry and the discussion there with string phenomenologist Joseph Conlon. Back in 2002 or so when I started writing my popular book, it was a lot clearer what the term “string theory” meant and who counted as a “string theorist”. If I were writing about this Read More ›

This video is from the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism 2016 conference held earlier this year. It deals with using non-naturalism in order to improve the quality of machine learning programs using a technique called “imagination sampling.” The results of a limited test run are given.

An anti-ID commenter who goes by MatSpirit has been active in these pages for well over a year, during which time he has posted scores of comments in the comboxes of dozens of OPs.  This particular statement in one of his comments caught my eye: If I understand correctly, the ID story is that some unidentified, undetectable supernatural agent acting at a time and place unknown arranged matter into patterns that are living creatures. *palm forehead* It is just staggering to me that someone can spend so much time and effort debating ID and still not have the first idea about the fundamentals of the theory. I understand what is going on here, of course.  Like many of our opponents Read More ›

June 23 is the Feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist, whose father Zacharias, a priest, may have been the first theistic evolutionist, somewhere around 4 BC.. As Luke tells the story, 10And the whole multitude of the people were in prayer outside at the hour of the incense offering. 11And an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing to the right of the altar of incense. 12Zacharias was troubled when he saw the angel, and fear gripped him. 13But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zacharias, for your petition has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will give him the name John. 14“You will have joy and Read More ›

From Waynesburg University (Pennsylvania) biology prof Wayne Rossiter, author of In the Shadow of Oz, From If Apes Could Fly: Review of Darwinism and Natural Theology, Chapter 2 (R.J. Berry): R.J. Berry (former professor of Genetics at the University of London) offers the second chapter in the volume. It begins with a short, but informative biography of Darwin’s life and the events leading up to the Origin. Like Monty Python’s knight on the bridge, Berry continues to hack away at the body of Christian theology while maintaining that we’re all the better for it. The next limb to go is a classic one. Nearly all theistic evolutionists abandon the concept of the Fall of man, in favor of a “falling Read More ›

From Nanette Byrnes at Technology Review: We seem to be idolizing algorithms, imagining they are more objective than their creators. The dustup over Facebook’s “trending topics” list and its possible liberal bias hit such a nerve that the U.S. Senate called on the company to come up with an official explanation, and this week COO Sheryl Sandberg said the company will begin training employees to identify and control their political leanings. This is just one result, however, of a broader trend that Fred Benenson, Kickstarter’s former data chief, calls “mathwashing”: our tendency to idolize programs like Facebook’s as entirely objective because they have mathematics at their core.More. Grasshopper, who is the “we” who thought they weren’t biased? See also: Darwin’s Read More ›

Better than great apes, some say. From Marianne Freiberger at PlusMaths: It’s a question that has recently received a partial answer in a (refreshingly simple) experiment conducted by scientists in Japan. The study showed that cats know what it means when a container rattles when shaken, and that they expect something to fall out when the container is turned over. This may not appear hugely impressive, but our relatives, the great apes, have failed similar tests. Cats themselves haven’t fared well in other tasks testing their causal understanding (for example tests involving the pulling of strings) and were therefore thought a little unsophisticated in that respect. The new study appears to vindicate them.More. The cat is not in fact abstracting Read More ›

From Paul Greenberg at Jewish World Review: It was back in 1928, just after another five-year plan had proven a five-year bust, that Trofim Lysenko first came to the grateful attention of the Party by borrowing an old trick of the simplest Russian peasants: Make winter wheat sprout in the spring by exposing its seeds to the cold. They’d been doing it for centuries, but Comrade Lysenko gave that traditional technique a new and scientific-sounding name, vernalization, and made it sound like a scientific breakthrough. He backed it all up with charts, graphs and illustrations as neat as those double hockey sticks the climate-changers used to impress the gullible in our own time. But like them, Lysenko was just practicing Read More ›

john_a_designer writes: After his famous 1948 BBC debate with skeptic Bertrand Russell, Jesuit priest Fr. Frederick Copleston expressed some frustration. He said that he felt that Russell had come unwilling to really engage him in any of his arguments. However, during the debate the two men had this brief exchange: “You say,” Copleston said to Russell, “I think that the universe — or my existence if you prefer, or any other existence — is unintelligible?” “I shouldn’t say unintelligible,” Russell replied, “I think it is without explanation.” I would say that was a major concession on Russell’s part. It’s true. Non-theists don’t really have a good explanation for the existence of the universe, theists do. For example, scientists believe that Read More ›

From Michael Denton, author of Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis As with other taxa-defining novelities, three is no evidence that any fundamental changes have occurred in the basic design of the cell system since its origination. The cell membrane, the basic metabolic paths, the ribosome, the genetic code, etc., are essentially invariant in all life forms on earth. And absolutely no plausible well-developed hypothetical evolutionary sequence has ever been presented showing how the cell night have evolved via a series of simpler cell-like systems. (p. 121) Follow UD News at Twitter!

From ScienceDaily: The elephantnose fish explores objects in its surroundings by using its eyes or its electrical sense — sometimes both together. Zoologists have now found out how complex the processing of these sensory impressions is. With its tiny brain, the fish achieves performance comparable to that of humans or mammals. More. Paper. (paywall) – Sarah Schumacher, Theresa Burt de Perera, Johanna Thenert, Gerhard von der Emde. Cross-modal object recognition and dynamic weighting of sensory inputs in a fish. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2016; 201603120 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1603120113 See also: What can we hope to learn about animal minds? Are apes entering the Stone Age? Furry, feathery, and finny animals speak their minds Does intelligence depend on a specific Read More ›

From Atlantic: But even if quantum nonlocality is the best we can hope for, PR boxes may offer clues about why that is. The question becomes not so much why nature isn’t completely classical, but why it’s not “more” quantum. We should then seek answers not by wondering why, say, objects are described by wave functions (or what a wave function is anyway), but by looking at a more fundamental matter of how information can be shunted about—of how efficient communication in nature can possibly be. What is it that apparently limits quantum nonlocality’s ability to make information exchange more efficient? All this fits with a growing conviction among many physicists that quantum mechanics is at root a theory not Read More ›