From Nobelist and multiverse proponent* Steven Weinberg at New York Review of Books: Many physicists came to think that the reaction of Einstein and Feynman and others to the unfamiliar aspects of quantum mechanics had been overblown. This used to be my view. His view has changed to: The introduction of probability into the principles of physics was disturbing to past physicists, but the trouble with quantum mechanics is not that it involves probabilities. We can live with that. The trouble is that in quantum mechanics the way that wave functions change with time is governed by an equation, the Schrödinger equation, that does not involve probabilities. It is just as deterministic as Newton’s equations of motion and gravitation. That Read More ›

Epigenetics (changes in the course of life that alter the state in which genes are inherited) seems to offer explicitly science-based explanations for observations, rather than the decades-long usual: We can fit even this into Darwinism! For example,  “Evolutionary psychology: The grandmother thesis, yet again” And also, of course, this: “‘Grandmother’ thesis in human evolution takes a hit.” (Shrug.) That’s what’s killing Darwinism. For everything to fit in, the theory must be everything and thus nothing. For example, Evolutionary psychology does not, for the most part, explain puzzling human behavior. It offers Darwinian explanations for conventional behavior that are intended to supplant traditional ones. For example, why we are sexually jealous (not fear of abandonment, but “sperm competition”); why we don’t stick to our goals Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Reporting research in the scientific journal Cell, Vienna-based scientists from the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) have discovered that not only do fertilized egg cells trigger epigenetic reprogramming of sperm DNA but this process is closely monitored to safeguard genomic integrity. “When the sperm enters the egg cell, the densely compacted male chromatin has to be entirely ‘unpacked’ and restructured around protein scaffolds called histones,” explained Sabrina Ladstätter, first author of the study. “Using fertilized mouse eggs, we showed that the egg cell actively triggers demethylation of the paternal DNA — in other words, it initiates epigenetic reprogramming by stripping any previous epigenetic memory passed on from the father. This allows the zygote to start afresh and create Read More ›

In the when it comes thread, an exchange has developed with GD, and I think it helpful to headline an argument at comment 49: __________ >>I [KF] found an elementary introduction to statistical entropy very helpful, from the Russian authors Yavorsky and Pinski, in their Physics, vol I [1974]: as we consider a simple model of diffusion, let us think of ten white and ten black balls in two rows in a container. [Inserted image, red used for convenience, rather than white:] There is of course but one way in which there are ten whites in the top row; the balls of any one colour being for our purposes identical. But on shuffling, there are 63,504 ways to arrange five Read More ›

His answer is “Yes!”* _________ *so long as by “intelligence” you mean something other than “intelligence,” and by “evolution” you mean something other than “evolution.” In this article, atheist Kevin N. Laland, Professor of Behavioral and Evolutionary Biology at the University of St Andrews, argues that human culture affects evolution of the human genome.  Here are a couple of his examples: Individuals from populations with high-starch diets have, on average, more copies of the salivary and pancreatic amylase genes (AMY1 and AMY2) that improve the ability to digest starchy foods. . . . There is a strong correlation across cultures between the frequency of lactose tolerance in the population and a history of dairy farming: populations with a long history Read More ›

Instead of the other way around? If you can’t sleep and have already overdosed on cute cat vids, try this one, from Futurism and SFGate: The brain isn’t the seat of consciousness but acts more like a radio receiver, and perhaps emitter, translating conscious activity into physical correlates. (The radio receiver metaphor describes the feedback loop between mind and brain, which are actually not separate but part of the same complementary activity in consciousness.) To understand our true participation in the universe, we must learn much more about awareness and how it turns mind into matter and vice versa. These are difficult truths for mainstream scientists to accept, and some would react to them with skepticism, disbelief, or anger. But Read More ›

From Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience: We know this thanks to a lengthy chain reaction of scientific discoveries. And according to Cobb, if there was a single man who catalyzed this reaction, it was Oswald Avery. In 1944, Avery, a medical researcher at Rockefeller University, published a paper with his colleagues Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty. The experiment they described showed that DNA carries genetic information. While that seems obvious today, back then it was a controversial conclusion, countering decades of entrenched thought. DNA had originally been discovered back in 1869, but the majority of scientists considered it to be too simple to carry meaningful biological information. That duty, they assumed, belonged to proteins. But a decade before Avery dented that Read More ›

Probably. The belief that birds must be less intelligent than mammals was based on Darwinism, not observation. From ScienceDaily: Chickens are not as clueless or “bird-brained” as people believe them to be. They have distinct personalities and can outmaneuver one another. They know their place in the pecking order, and can reason by deduction, which is an ability that humans develop by the age of seven. Chicken intelligence is therefore unnecessarily underestimated and overshadowed by other avian groups. So says Lori Marino, senior scientist for The Someone Project, a joint venture of Farm Sanctuary and the Kimmela Center in the USA, who reviewed the latest research about the psychology, behavior and emotions of the world’s most abundant domestic animal. Her Read More ›

From Bob Henderson, a finance writer with a physics background, at Nautilus: Einstein and Feynman ushered me into grad school, reality ushered me out. All of my classmates had taken up with advisors who were, like most physicists, experimentalists, the researchers who do the hands-on work of, say, smashing particles together at accelerators to see what comes out. Theorists like Rajeev, or for that matter Einstein and Feynman, who instead do the noodling necessary to explain the results of experiments with math are fewer and further between. A couple of Rochester’s experimentalists had pressured me to drop my dream of doing theory because, they explained, theory was so ridiculously difficult and had so few jobs. But I’d brushed them off. The Read More ›

So we hear, from Kate Lunau at Motherboard: 2017 might just be the year we finally catch one. And if we don’t, well, it may be that our best theories about dark matter are wrong—that we’re looking in the wrong places, with the wrong instruments. Maybe dark matter, whatever it is, will turn out to be even weirder and more surprising than anyone has so far predicted. Maybe it’s not a WIMP, but some other bizarre kind of particle. Then there’s the outside possibility that dark matter doesn’t exist, that it’s an illusion. If that’s the case, we’ll have to consider whether we’ve been fundamentally misreading the universe’s clues. … Buried deep in a mine near Sudbury in northern Ontario Read More ›

From Lydia Pyne at Ars Technica: Forty years after she was discovered, Lucy, the world’s most famous fossil australopithecine, just might have a cause of death. In August of this year, a team of paleoanthropologists led by John Kappelman argued in Nature that Lucy died 3.2 million years ago by falling out of a tree. Their conclusion has been met with skepticism among fellow researchers, and Lucy’s death-by-tree-fall hypothesis has generated no shortage of debate within the scientific community of paleoanthropology. Doubts about whether ancient hominin Lucy fell to her death 3.18 million years ago But there’s a takeaway here that’s more significant than the study’s conclusion—this study’s approach to sharing data with the scientific community and the public at Read More ›

In the wake of the bogus petition against teaching evolution, we might as well throw in “A Peek Inside the Strange World of Fake Academia” by Kevin Carey at New York Times: OMICS International is a leader in the growing business of academic publication fraud. It has created scores of “journals” that mimic the look and feel of traditional scholarly publications, but without the integrity. This year the Federal Trade Commission formally charged OMICS with “deceiving academics and researchers about the nature of its publications and hiding publication fees ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars.” OMICS is also in the less well-known business of what might be called conference fraud, which is what led to the call from John. Read More ›

It would have looked great as a three-dollar bill. A number of high-profile Darwinians ended up passing it around. David Klinghoffer updates the story at Evolution News & Views: I called out the Darwin activists who were promoting this “news,” including Michael Zimmerman of the Clergy Letter Project. Well, they’re back and defending themselves and each other. P.Z. Myers now agrees with me that “Joe Hannon” is a fake name — used, he informs us, by an often-banned Internet troll from Manchester, England, who haunts blog comments sections under a variety of pseudonyms. Myers cites University of Toronto’s Larry Moran, saying that “Hannon” is “a holocaust denier. He used to run a business ‘selling components — just nuts and bolts Read More ›

Yes, 20 years old: The hoax journal paper genre was started, as Dreier explains, by New York University physicist Alan Sokal in 1996. Sokal aimed to skewer the postmodern dogma that facts, even in mathematics and physics, are merely a social construct. He submitted an article to Social Text, a postmodern cultural studies journal, that, “shorn of its intentionally outrageous jargon, essentially made the claim that gravity was in the mind of the beholder.” From Jennifer Ruark at Chronicle of Higher Education: How the physicist Alan Sokal hoodwinked a group of humanists and why, 20 years later, it still matters. (paywall) But do Sokal hoaxes still matter? Are we not now in the age of post-fact science? (“I’m a factual Read More ›

I read the headline of Denyse O’Leary’s post about the LiveScience article headlined “Gigantic Cambrian Shrimplike Creature Unearthed in Greenland,” and I did what I always do – suspended judgment while I waited for the real facts. Fortunately in this case, the real facts were not long in coming.  The story itself states that “Gigantic” refers to a beastie that was about two and half feet long.  And the phrase “massive frontal appendage” in the story refers to an appendage that appears to be about one-fourth of that length – i.e., about eight inches long. It is not hard to understand why I suspend judgment whenever I read the latest hyperventilating story about evolution.  Countless times I have seen articles Read More ›