From Dennis Overbye at New York Times: There is a crisis brewing in the cosmos, or perhaps in the community of cosmologists. The universe seems to be expanding too fast, some astronomers say. Recent measurements of the distances and velocities of faraway galaxies don’t agree with a hard-won “standard model” of the cosmos that has prevailed for the past two decades. The latest result shows a 9 percent discrepancy in the value of a long-sought number called the Hubble constant, which describes how fast the universe is expanding. But in a measure of how precise cosmologists think their science has become, this small mismatch has fostered a debate about just how well we know the cosmos. “If it is real, Read More ›

“Prebiotic” chemistry means the development and demonstration of theories about how chemicals washed together and somehow formed the immensely complex structures of life. There is no shortage of single-event scenarios. A hairpin loop is “an unpaired loop of messenger RNA (mRNA) that is created when an mRNA strand folds and forms base pairs with another section of the same strand. The resulting structure looks like a loop or a U-shape. (Suitable)” In DNA too. From ScienceDaily: The evolution of cells and organisms is thought to have been preceded by a phase in which informational molecules like DNA could be replicated selectively. New work shows that hairpin structures make particularly effective DNA replicator. In the metabolism of all living organisms there Read More ›

Says Eric Scerri at Los Angeles Times: Detailed case studies on the history of chemistry and physics show that the role of genius in advancing those fields — and even the role of rationality — is overstated. Rather than a hyper-intellectual, alien activity practiced by a remote priesthood, science is hit and miss, the ever-changing product of less-than-brilliant people, just like every other human activity. … In the 1910s, the English mathematical physicist John Nicholson published a number of articles in which he proposed that several proto-elements (his term) existed in outer space and were the basis of our familiar terrestrial elements. Their presence in a number of celestial bodies, he claimed, enabled him for the first time to do Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur at Huffington Post, a chat with molecular biologist Jeffrey Errington about L-form bacteria, which lack a strong cell wall: Jeffery Errington: I became interested in the problem because I was aware of L-forms from the scientific literature of the 1950s and 60s. Curiously, however, right around the end of the 1970s or so, publishing on L-forms just sort of petered out. I haven’t really been able to get to the bottom of exactly why that happened. … Suzan Mazur: How pervasive are L-forms in nature now and earlier in evolution? Jeffery Errington: There are a few bacteria that are naturally cell wall-deficient, like Mycoplasma, which is a pathogen, and Phytoplasma, which inhabits plants. They’re both cell-wall deficient, Read More ›

From Tom Feilden at at BBC: From his lab at the University of Virginia’s Centre for Open Science, immunologist Dr Tim Errington runs The Reproducibility Project, which attempted to repeat the findings reported in five landmark cancer studies. … After meticulous research involving painstaking attention to detail over several years (the project was launched in 2011), the team was able to confirm only two of the original studies’ findings. … Writing in the latest edition of Nature, [Edinburgh neuroscientist Prof Malcolm Macleod] outlines a new approach to animal studies that calls for independent, statistically rigorous confirmation of a paper’s central hypothesis before publication. “Without efforts to reproduce the findings of others, we don’t know if the facts out there actually Read More ›

Yesterday, NASA reported a record-breaking discovery of seven new Earth-size planets around a single star, three in the habitable zone: The discovery sets a new record for greatest number of habitable-zone planets found around a single star outside our solar system [TRAPPIST-1]. All of these seven planets could have liquid water – key to life as we know it – under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the habitable zone. “This discovery could be a significant piece in the puzzle of finding habitable environments, places that are conducive to life,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “Answering the question ‘are we alone’ is a top science Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News and Views: We’re looking forward to the March for Science this coming April 22, planned for Washington, DC, and with satellite marches across the country. If you’ve read about it, it promises to be a screechy and politicized protest against questioning orthodox scientific views or criticizing scientists. Scientists, as you know, are now held by many to enjoy a status granting them permanent immunity from criticism (much like the media, judges, and intelligence officials). In this way, scientific authority transmutes into scientific authoritarianism. Meanwhile we’re told it’s the skeptics on Darwinism and other scientific ideas, perpetually dodging threats to their careers and reputations, that we are supposed to fear and revile. More. It’s increasingly Read More ›

Of course. What other motive could there be? Re the South Dakota academic freedom bill, David Klinghoffer offers at Evolution News & Views : In a surreal move, a group called the National Coalition Against Censorship has plunged into the South Dakota situation to demand continued restraints on teachers and their academic freedom — in other words, censorship. They complain that SB 55 would “remov[e] accountability in science education.” “Accountability” there would seem to mean instructors being vulnerable to career retaliation for teaching critical thinking skills to science students. These “anti-censorship” proponents advocate retaining the option of punishing biology teachers for going off message on Darwinism. They go on: “Essentially, [the bill] removes the restraints on teachers that prevents them Read More ›

While preparing a talk for May I created a video which I would like to share. The first 12 minutes are based more or less on an ENV post Why Should Evolutionary Biology be so Different? and the second part is based on Why Similarities Do Not Prove the Absence of Design. This video was updated 5/14/2017: [youtube VpEXXNxjWYE]

The March for Science is billing itself as “nonpartisan.”  Here’s the first sentence of the second paragraph of their website: We are scientists and science enthusiasts. We come from all races, all religions, all gender identities, all sexual orientations, all abilities, all socioeconomic backgrounds, all political perspectives, and all nationalities. Yeah, that could have been written by someone at the RNC. Inigo Montoya might say: The whole purpose of the March for Science is to squelch opposition to certain dogmas that are currently fashionable among scientific elites.  And I bet many of those same scientists would say that science is a self-correcting, ideology-free enterprise that prizes skepticism as one of its most important ideals.  Well, if the attitude on display Read More ›

Non-naturalist atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, author of Mind and Cosmos, reviewing naturalist atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Bacteria to Bach and Back at New York Review of Books: For fifty years the philosopher Daniel Dennett has been engaged in a grand project of disenchantment of the human world, using science to free us from what he deems illusions—illusions that are difficult to dislodge because they are so natural. In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, his eighteenth book (thirteenth as sole author), Dennett presents a valuable and typically lucid synthesis of his worldview. Though it is supported by reams of scientific data, he acknowledges that much of what he says is conjectural rather than proven, either empirically or philosophically. A question Read More ›

Just wanted to let everyone know that we have posted the abstracts for this weekend’s Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism in Biology conference online.
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The original Nature article is here. From Sarah Lewin at LiveScience: Winston Churchill was known for his leadership during World War II, but a newfound essay on alien life reveals another side of him, one that was deeply curious about the universe. “I, for one, am not so immensely impressed by the success we are making of our civilization here that I am prepared to think we are the only spot in this immense universe which contains living, thinking creatures,” he wrote in the newly uncovered essay, “or that we are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time.” More. Churchill’s opinions sound cogent, though not a history-making Read More ›

UPDATE:  Dear readers, the movie version of The Shack will be out soon, so I thought it might be a good time to dust off my December 2009 review of the book. The Shack by William P. Young is an unlikely publishing phenomenon.  The book was first conceived as a private gift to the author’s children and a few friends.  Young’s friends were so thrilled with the manuscript they encouraged him to find a publisher, but after several publishers rejected the book, Young and his friends self-published.  Propelled almost exclusively by word-of-mouth in the evangelical Christian community, sales skyrocketed, and the book has been firmly ensconced in the best seller lists for many months now, with sales topping one million Read More ›

Peter Woit comments at Not Even Wrong on his review (paywall; no paywall) at Wall Street Journal of A Big Bang in a Little Room: The Quest to Create New Universes by Zeeya Merali: My concern about the topic of the book is that it’s Fake Physics, not that religion is motivating the author (and likely motivating the Templeton Foundation to fund this project). A book about the religious views of physicists would be an interesting one that I’d certainly read, and the material in this book on that topic is quite interesting. One of the odder twists here is that the two blurbs from physicists promoting the book are from Sean Carroll and Martin Rees, with Carroll writing So you Read More ›