From Michael Byrne at Motherboard: It’s not that computer scientists haven’t argued against AI hype, but an academic you’ve never heard of (all of them?) pitching the headline “AI is hard” is at a disadvantage to the famous person whose job description largely centers around making big public pronouncements. This month that academic is Alan Bundy, a professor of automated reasoning at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, who argues in the Communications of the ACM that there is a real AI threat, but it’s not human-like machine intelligence gone amok. Quite the opposite: the danger is instead shitty AI. Incompetent, bumbling machines. Bundy notes that most all of our big-deal AI successes in recent years are extremely narrow in Read More ›

From researcher Timothy D. Clark, re a U.S. physicist doing time for research fraud, at Nature: Scientists like to think that such blatant dishonesty is rare, but I myself have witnessed several serious cases of scientific misconduct, from major data manipulation to outright fabrication. Most have gone unpunished — in fact, it has been disheartening to see the culprits lauded. It makes little sense for fraudsters to fabricate mediocre data. Their falsehoods generate outstanding stories, which result in high-profile publications and a disproportionately large chunk of the funding pie. I have noticed a lesser-known motive for bad science in my field, experimental biology. As environmental change proceeds, there is great demand from the public and policy-makers for simple stories that Read More ›

From Science Daily: Lacey Knowles and Jeet Sukumaran investigated the accuracy of inferences made by a mathematical model widely used to quickly determine the boundaries between species without the time-consuming, painstaking process of comparing specimens in museum collections. They found that the genetic approach, formally known as the multispecies coalescent model, can lead to species estimates that are five to 13 times higher than the true numbers. Because the species is the fundamental unit for all evolutionary and ecological studies, their findings are expected to have wide-ranging implications, from biodiversity studies to conservation planning. Their results are scheduled for online publication Jan. 30 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “This is an area that has really taken off Read More ›

From Suzan Mazur at Huffington Post: Suzan Mazur: If you were organizing a public evolution summit, what discoveries in biology would you showcase? Eugene Koonin: I would try to focus on two aspects. One is genomics, and in particular, comparative genomics and metagenomics discoveries — all this comes under the wide umbrella of genomics. That’s one. The other is the existence of solid theory in evolutionary biology. I’ll elaborate on both aspects. The first aspect, genomics, has in roughly the last 25 years completely transformed the ability to investigate, assess and measure evolutionary processes. All our conclusions on the course of evolution until the advent of genomics had been indirect. It’s remarkable how many of these conclusions and findings remain Read More ›

See Here The Mail on Sunday today reveals astonishing evidence that the organisation that is the world’s leading source of climate data rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate change. Which leads me to wonder yet again, if the evidence is really so overwhelming, why do they feel compelled to exaggerate, mislead and outright lie about it?

And considered “remarkable” for exploring a specialized niche so early in their evolution. From ScienceDaily: Loriciferans are a group of miniscule animals, always less than a millimetre long, which live among grains of sediment on the seabed. They are easy to overlook: the first examples were described from modern environments as recently as the 1980s. Dr Harvey added: “As well as being very small, loriciferans lack hard parts (they have no shell), so no-one expected them ever to be found as fossils — but here they are! The fossils represent a new genus and species, which we name Eolorica deadwoodensis, loosely meaning the “ancient corset-animal from rocks of the Deadwood Formation.” “It’s remarkable that so early in their evolution, animals Read More ›

From Alex Berezow at American Council on Science and Health, including, 5) The article is sensationalized; i.e., it draws huge, sweeping conclusions from a single study. (This is particularly common in stories on scary chemicals and miracle vegetables.) … 9) The article is about evolutionary psychology. More. The “huge, sweeping conclusions” problem is especially scandalous in fields like nutrition, which is already a mess. And, as noted elsewhere, evolutionary psychology does not explain puzzling human behavior. It offers Darwinian explanations for conventional behavior, with no insight that exceeds the results of applying common sense. Evo psych is big in pop science media precisely because it’s so easy. Just call your town Bedrock, build a story about it on some recent evo Read More ›

On “Compensating” Entropy Decreases, Physics Essays, 2017, is my latest, and probably last, article on this topic. It is actually quite easy to understand, but for an even more user-friendly treatment, see Why Should Evolutionary Biology be so Different?

From ScienceDaily: In their paper, published in Nature Communications, Atmospheric oxygen regulation at low Proterozoic levels by incomplete oxidative weathering of sedimentary organic carbon, the University of Exeter scientists explain how organic material — the dead bodies of simple lifeforms — accumulated in the earth’s sedimentary rocks. After the Great Oxidation, and once plate tectonics pushed these sediments to the surface, they reacted with oxygen in the atmosphere for the first time. The more oxygen in the atmosphere, the faster it reacted with this organic material, creating a regulatory mechanism whereby the oxygen was consumed by the sediments at the same rate at which it was produced. This mechanism broke down with the rise of land plants and a resultant Read More ›

From Neuroskeptic at Discover blogs: Retraction Watch reports on three scientific papers (1,2,3) that have been retracted or deleted after I reported that they were plagiarized. … The papers, in different fields, did not pass a plagiarism softwear scan. Every case I reported was a serious one. The percentage of unoriginal text ranged from 44-90%, with an average of about 65%. What’s more, I didn’t count overlap with the authors’ own work (i.e. self-plagiarism) as this is sometimes seen as less serious. Likewise, I only looked at review papers, because plagiarism is arguably less serious in experimental papers when the data is new. Yet despite the severity of the problems I reported, most journals never replied to my emails. A Read More ›

Materialists often argue that the size of the universe is evidence that God does not exist.  As we shall see, this is a very weak argument. The argument from the size of the universe usually goes something like this:  The superstitious ancients who dreamt up the idea of God thought we lived in a cozy little universe.  We now know the universe is unimaginably vast and mostly empty.  God, if he exists, would not have created a vast, mostly empty, universe.  Therefore, God does not exist. Let’s examine these premises.  First, the materialist’s assertion that the ancients did not understand that we live in a vast universe is wrong is nothing more than a modern conceit.  Over 3,000 years ago Read More ›

Philosopher Laszlo Bencze writes to tell us his reaction to Tom Bethell’s new book, Darwin’s House of Cards: A Journalist’s Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates: Way back in February of 1985 I read an article, “Agnostic Evolutionists,” by Tom Bethell in Harper’s magazine which turned me from passively accepting evolution to being actively angry at the lies I had been fed by the evolution lobby. Until I read that article, I had assumed that many thousands of studies documenting the step by step evolution of various species filled the shelves of university libraries. I assumed that the bulk of these were doctoral theses bound in red and dull as federal regulations but filled with line drawings of the host of Read More ›

Concluding our religion News coverage for the week, From Wayne Rossiter, author of Shadow of Oz: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God: at his book blog: Over the weekend, I had a friend ask me about this story, in which Pope Francis has seemingly cast in with Darwinian evolution. Now, I have learned from previous experience, that pressing some Catholics on this will often result in some long response about the Pope being mis-interpreted. So, I’ll let others decide if this is really what the Pope said. But, let’s at least roll with what the story declares. “The theories of evolution and the Big Bang are real and God is not ‘a magician with a magic wand’, Pope Francis has Read More ›

Having rehearsed it all, he asks: 3.) If we don’t find life in the places and under the conditions where we expect it, can that prove the existence of God? Certainly, there are people that will argue that it does. But to me, that’s a terrible way to place your faith. Consider this: Do you want or need your belief in a divine or supernatural origin to the Universe to be based in something that could be scientifically disproven? I am very open about not being a man of faith myself, but of having tremendous respect for those who are believers. The wonderful thing about science is that it is for everybody who’s willing to look to the Universe itself Read More ›

This is a short post explaining a little feature I’ll be doing on my blog called ‘Critic’s Corner’. Hopefully it will turn out to be a useful resource. It goes without saying that ID isn’t the most popular idea in the world. Since its development and increased prominence in western culture, it has been widely derided and criticised. It has many, many critics. Among those critics are people from a wide range of disciplines including biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, philosophy, theology, and journalism. ID also has the misfortune of being disliked not only by atheists and naturalists (as one might expect), but also many theistic evolutionists, and even more surprisingly, many young-earth Creationists. There are of course many within those Read More ›