From ScienceDaily: An international group that includes a University of Kansas researcher has discovered a brownish piece of split limestone in a site in Croatia that suggests Neanderthals 130,000 years ago collected the rock that stands out among all other items in the cave. “If we were walking and picked up this rock, we would have taken it home,” said David Frayer, a professor emeritus of anthropology who was part of the study. “It is an interesting rock.” The finding is important, he said, because it adds to other recent evidence that Neanderthals were capable — on their own — of incorporating symbolic objects into their culture. The rock was collected more than 100 years ago from the Krapina Neanderthal Read More ›

Robert Tracinski reports on how recent reports that 2016 was the hottest year on record was, unsurprisingly, extremely misleading: They should have been in the first paragraph, but at least they’re in the third paragraph: “This puts 2016 only nominally ahead of 2015 by just 0.01C—within the 0.1C margin of error—but….” There’s stuff after the “but,” but it’s just somebody’s evaluation. Even this report can’t give us a straight fact and leave it alone. For the benefit of science reporters and other people who are unfamiliar with the scientific method, let me point out that the margin of error for these measurements is plus or minus one tenth of a degree Celsius. The temperature difference that is supposedly being measured Read More ›

From BBC radio: One of Britain’s finest comedians, Rob Newman returns to Radio 4 with a witty, fact-packed series mixing stand-up and sketches, challenging notions of Survival of the Fittest and The Selfish Gene with a new theory that’s equal parts enlightening and hilarious. Rob is our guide on a journey through a unique audio A-Z of nature that takes in everything from altruistic amoebae and dancing squid to Richard Dawkins wrestling naked with a postal worker. Piecing these fragments together allows Rob to correct some major distortions of Darwinism, as well as rejig the theory of natural selection in the light of what we now know about epigenetics, mirror neurons and the Flintstones. Written by Rob Newman Starring Claire Read More ›

Recently, we picked up on the story that life on Earth may be datable to 4.1 billion years ago: UCLA geochemists have found evidence that life likely existed on Earth at least 4.1 billion years ago — 300 million years earlier than previous research suggested. The discovery indicates that life may have begun shortly after the planet formed 4.54 billion years ago. The estimate is based on studies of zircons. Zircons? Champagne gemstones on a beer budget? Our favourite physicist and physics colour commentator Rob Sheldon kindly writes to explain why zircons matter to origin of life studies: —- To answer your question, carbon comes in various isotopes or flavors. Giving the longest lasting of these isotopes: Isotope Half-life ——– Read More ›

Recently I read my first steampunk novel, Jim Butcher’s The Aeronaut’s Windlass.  For those of you who have never heard of steampunk, it is a sub-genera of science fiction that anachronistically fuses Victorian steam powered technology into the digital age. It occurred to me that Darwinism is “steampunk science.”  It is an analog-based Victorian relic trying to make its way in the digital information age.  Darwin had no conception of the information problem facing any account of naturalistic evolution.  Darwin’s 21st century successors certainly know about the problem, but in 2017 they are no closer to solving it than Darwin was in 1859.  Naturalistic evolutionary science has not come remotely close to solving the problem of how the meaningful information on Read More ›

In a “ so-called Lomagundi Event” when deep sea organic carbon might have suddenly increased between 2.3 and 2.1 billion years ago, ue to “biologically complex, oxygen-breathing animals.” From Colin Barras at New Scientist: “The take-home message is that the oxygen level was high enough to support eukaryotic life and, by some arguments, maybe even animal life,” says Timothy Lyons at the University of California Riverside, who collaborates with Kipp and his colleagues, but was not involved in the new study. … So far, however, it appears there was little response: although there are hints that life became more complex during the Lomagundi Event, there is no really convincing evidence. “But that doesn’t mean that those organisms didn’t exist,” says Read More ›

Why did liberal democracy arise in the West and nowhere else?  Because of the influence of Christianity on Western politics.  Consider the most famous expression of classical liberalism the world has ever known, the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . .” Compare that passage to Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Paul’s message in Galatians was not political.  He was making a theological statement about the equality of Christians in the body of Christ.  Read More ›

From U Buenos Aires molecular biologist Alberto Kornblihtt at Nature: To complete the landscape of nonsense, the chief of the cabinet of ministers, Marcos Peña, attacked one of the fundamentals of science by saying that “critical thinking has done too much damage to our country”. He continued: “Some people in Argentina think that being critical is being smart. Our government believes that being smart is being enthusiastic and optimistic.” This is gobbledygook, yet it neatly fits the New Age concept of the “revolution of happiness” proclaimed by Macri as a lubricant for social conflicts. Colleagues around the world should know that, in this new Argentina, science and technology could become dispensable. More demonstrations are sure to follow. We will not Read More ›

FromDaily Galaxy, a revisit of cosmologist Sean Carroll’s From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time (2010): The relativity of time depended upon a new theory, and if we stand back, we discover that all views of time are human constructs. If time seems linear, that’s because we humans have modeled it that way in accord with our nervous system. It is just as viable to construct other models of time. For example, your body obeys natural rhythms in accord with the planetary, lunar, and solar cycles. The very notion of “time passing” fits with the firing of neurons in the brain, which have a beginning, middle, and end. If you drop every model, something surprising Read More ›

From Josh Gabbatiss at BBC: In their experiments, Appel and Cocroft found that recordings of the munching noises produced by caterpillars caused plants to flood their leaves with chemical defences designed to ward off attackers. “We showed that plants responded to an ecologically-relevant ‘sound’ with an ecologically-relevant response,” says Cocroft. … For example, despite lacking eyes, plants such as Arabidopsis possess at least 11 types of photoreceptor, compared to our measly four. This means that, in a way, their vision is more complex than ours. Plants have different priorities, and their sensory systems reflect this. As Chamovitz points out in his book: “light for a plant is much more than a signal; light is food.” More. The article cautions, refreshingly, Read More ›

From Keith Cooper at Space.com: Venus has long been a focus of Russian planetary science, which has the proud legacy of the record-breaking Venera space probes that landed on the Venusian surface in the late 1970s and early 1980s. [Mysterious Venus: 10 Weird Facts] Time to bone up on Venus; probes are under developent. With many questions remaining unanswered, the joint mission of Roscosmos and NASA, if approved, would see an orbiter launch toward Venus in 2025 with the aim to make remote-sensing observations of the planet and its atmosphere; deploy a lander on the surface; and search for future landing sites. Now, the “life” hope is dark streaks in Venus’s clouds. Finding life at high altitude in the atmosphere Read More ›

New Republic intern Eric Armstrong thinks that no U.S. party deserves the crown, at any rate: The time has come for Democrats to remove the beam from their own eyes, so to speak. Taking up the mantle of scientific liberalism—that is, adopting an evidence-based view of reality in pursuit of progressive policy—would serve both the strategic purposes of the Democratic Party in the menacing face of Trumpism, as well as the existential interests of humanity.* More. Oh, wait. No political party is likely to survive just taking an evidence-based view of matters. That’s supposed to be the role of science as such. You know what they say about party policy and strategy: It’s like sausage; if you are going to Read More ›

Friends note, from Biology & Philosophy (Springer): Biological regulation is what allows an organism to handle the effects of a perturbation, modulating its own constitutive dynamics in response to particular changes in internal and external conditions. With the central focus of analysis on the case of minimal living systems, we argue that regulation consists in a specific form of second-order control, exerted over the core (constitutive) regime of production and maintenance of the components that actually put together the organism. The main argument is that regulation requires a distinctive architecture of functional relationships, and specifically the action of a dedicated subsystem whose activity is dynamically decoupled from that of the constitutive regime. We distinguish between two major ways in which Read More ›

From Hanneke Weitering at LiveScience: Earth’s moon may be the product of many small moonlets that merged after multiple objects as big as Mars collided with Earth, leaving disks of planetary debris orbiting the planet, a new study suggests. This idea that multiple impacts led to the moon’s birth challenges the most prevalent theory of lunar formation, which suggests that one giant impact led to the formation of the moon. More. See also: Space.com: Scientists finally know how old Moon is What’s surprising, really, is how little we know about the moon in general. And various current theories: Another moon origin theory: Epic crash How the Moon Formed: 5 Wild Lunar Theories (Mike Wall at Space.com, 2014) Our moon formed in Read More ›

From Joshua Howgego at New Scientist: On 11 November last year, a small birthday party was held in an apparently unremarkable hangar onthe outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland. Nothing too fancy, just a few people gathered around a cake. The honourees were there. Well, sort of – they were still locked in the cage where they had spent their first year. But then again, there is no other way to treat a brood of antimatter particles. The antimatter realm is so bizarre as to be almost unbelievable: a mirror world of particles that destroy themselves and normal matter whenever the two come into contact. But it’s real enough. Cosmic rays containing antiparticles constantly bombard Earth. A banana blurts out an anti-electron Read More ›