Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Why is the recent dating of Homo Naledi to 250 kya a problem?

From Colin Barras at New Scientist: Our earliest hominin ancestors lived at least seven million years ago. The first species to look a little like modern humans appeared between about two and three million years ago. But our own species – Homo sapiens – evolved about 200,000 years ago. So, if H. naledi lived 300,000 to 200,000 years ago that’s a remarkable discovery. It means that a species of human with some surprisingly primitive features – including a tiny skull and brain – survived into the relatively recent past. Conceivably, H. naledi might even have met early members of our species, H. sapiens. One could even speculate we had something to do with it going extinct. More. It also means Read More ›

Stasis: Early jawbones present 507 mya seem like can openers

From ScienceDaily Paleontologists have uncovered a new fossil species that sheds light on the origin of mandibulates, the most abundant and diverse group of organisms on Earth, to which belong familiar animals such as flies, ants, crayfish and centipedes. Named Tokummia katalepsis by the researchers, the creature documents for the first time the anatomy of early mandibulates, a sub-group of arthropods with specialized appendages known as mandibles, used to grasp, crush and cut their food. … “The pincers of Tokummia are large, yet also delicate and complex, reminding us of the shape of a can opener, with their couple of terminal teeth on one claw, and the other claw being curved towards them,” said Aria. “But we think they might Read More ›

Have researchers imaged dark matter, as per a recent claim? Rob Sheldon comments

From Nancy Atkinson at LiveScience: Now, researchers have produced what they say is the first composite image of a dark matter filament that connects galaxies together. … In their paper, they explained that in order to study the weak lensing signal of the dark matter filaments, they required two sets of data: a catalog of galaxy cluster pairs that were lensed, and a catalog of background source galaxies with accurate distance measurements. They combined lensing data from a multi-year sky survey at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope with information from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey that mapped luminous red galaxies (LRGs), which are massive, distant, and very old galaxies. … Hudson and Epps combined or “stacked” more than 23,000 galaxy pairs, all Read More ›

Bill Nye now wants to shrink science classrooms further

At least, that would be the outcome of his crackdown on kids: You’ve maybe already heard this one: In his Netflix series, Bill Nye asks, bluntly, ‘Should we have policies that penalize people for having extra kids in the developed world?’ The Internet is rightly mocking the complete disaster that is the Rachel Bloom “My Sex Junk” video that is part of the new Netflix series, “Bill Nye Saves the World.” As bad as that is (it is BAD), another portion of the series is even worse. The 13th and final installment is titled “Earth’s People Problem,” and with a name like that, you know we could be in for some ideas that border on eugenics. … Nye (who, again, Read More ›

The March for Science drinking game

Toiling too long in a clean lab, micromanaging the lives of mice, can really put stress on a person. Something like that might have happened to the poor sot who wrote us the following, outlining a Drinking Game, to help get through March for Science coverage on the lunchroom TV: The “March for Science” Drinking Game Drinking Games can help you get through watching things that are excruciatingly tedious. It might be the best way – perhaps the only way – to get through the entire “March for Science” festivities. There are a few locations where you can watch the Washington Mall event online: four hours and five and a half hours, depending on how the beer holds out, or Read More ›

Reflecting on the March for Science after the death of reason

  From Denyse O’Leary (O’Leary for News) at MercatorNet: Croatian philosopher of science and politics Neven Sesardic (b. 1949) retired from Lingnan University, Hong Kong, in 2015. He wrote a book shortly thereafter, When Reason Goes on Holiday: Philosophers in Politics (Encounter Books, 2016). He was wise to wait till he had his pension… He chronicles the way in which 20th Century luminaries in science, philosophy, and their mutual colleagues excused and aided totalitarian rule. As a survivor of totalitarian rule himself, Sesardic does not focus on acknowledged racists or Nazi Party members in science, the ones that we are all taught to reject by popular science journalism. He spotlights brilliant thinkers we are encouraged to look up to as Read More ›

That didn’t take long: Darwin’s man Jerry Coyne defends zombie science

Of course, he allows us to know, he did not read Jonathan Wells’ book, Zombie Science: I will be accused of having “reviewed” Wells’s book here without having read it, but this isn’t a review: it’s a notice that a scientifically rejected charlatan has published another book, and has even issued a “teaser trailer” for it. Here it is below. There’s no intellectual content there, but of course the buyers of the book aren’t looking for truth and reason; they’re looking to confirm their own religiously-based biases. Reading a book signals that one intends to address the information therein. When people are sufficiently well established, they do not need to know information in order to dismiss it. Indeed, that may Read More ›

Wikipedia founder wades into the fake war on fake news

From Alex Hern at the Guardian: Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is launching a new online publication which will aim to fight fake news by pairing professional journalists with an army of volunteer community contributors. Wikitribune plans to pay for the reporters by raising money from a crowdfunding campaign. Wales intends to cover general issues, such as US and UK politics, through to specialist science and technology. Those who donate will become supporters, who in turn will have a say in which subjects and story threads the site focuses on. And Wales intends that the community of readers will fact-check and subedit published articles.More. The process described is elsewhere called propaganda. Translation: Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is Read More ›

Futurism: Science should be wary of exploring links between minds and quantum phenomena

From Karla Lant at Futurism: The revelation that observing and measuring quantum effects changes their behavior is troubling, but it also suggests to many people that consciousness itself is part of quantum theory. Moreover, as humans creating AI that, for all its achievements still can’t master some of the things that come so easily to our own minds (at least not yet), we are bound to see a blurry reflection of ourselves in quantum computers, which promise to achieve so much more than ordinary computers ever could. However, it was the British physicist Roger Penrose who pointed out that, observer effect aside, quantum mechanics may be involved in consciousness. More specifically, he thought it might be possible that quantum events Read More ›

These vids certainly show a different side to Bill Nye…

And won’t likely help his reputation: My Sex Junk is a message to the world about sexuality. We can probably miss the one where ice cream cones discover sex. Pop science is no match for identity politics, as we might have guessed. Someone asks, does Nye has a future as the ”Pee Wee Herman of popular science”? Maybe that’s what’s left now. See also: March for Science, Bill Nye, and constitutional government Follow UD News at Twitter!

Where did language come from?

Novelist Cormac McCarthy at Nautilus: There are influential persons among us—of whom a bit more a bit later—who claim to believe that language is a totally evolutionary process. That it has somehow appeared in the brain in a primitive form and then grown to usefulness. Somewhat like vision, perhaps. But vision we now know is traceable to perhaps as many as a dozen quite independent evolutionary histories. Tempting material for the teleologists. These stories apparently begin with a crude organ capable of perceiving light where any occlusion could well suggest a predator. Which actually makes it an excellent scenario for Darwinian selection. It may be that the influential persons imagine all mammals waiting for language to appear. I dont know. Read More ›

March for Science: Sagan fan on how the “Carl Sagan” culture ruined science

From Robert Tracinski at the Federalist: I am a Carl Sagan fan from way back. His 1980 TV miniseries “Cosmos” hit me at just the right age and inflamed a lifelong love of science. But we’ve had nearly 40 years to assess the long-term effects and see how Sagan unwittingly contributed to a trend that muddled public understanding of science. This weekend’s so-called “March for Science” is a perfect example of what went wrong. Fact morphed into narrative: If you don’t really need science so much as the narrative, then what you get is our own era’s official replacement for Sagan: Neil deGrasse Tyson. As the decades pass, Sagan’s imitators become less thoughtful and more propagandistic, less interested in conveying Read More ›

Suck it up Buttercup: On Leftist History of Science Denialism

Refusing To Believe Early Progressives Loved Eugenics Will Not Erase The Horrible Truth After seeing the end result [of pushing eugenics in the early 20th century] in the Holocaust, progressives naturally sought to bury their connection to this genocidal concept, and succeeded in doing so, at least when they can discredit conservatives who persist in mentioning it. That problem bubbled to the surface last week when Bloomberg’s economist and writer Noah Smith tweeted, “Apparently some people believe that eugenics was the scientific consensus 100 years ago. Sounds like a total myth to me.”

Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga wins Templeton Prize

“an American scholar whose rigorous writings over a half century have made theism – the belief in a divine reality or god – a serious option within academic philosophy” Here: — Tuesday, 25-April-2017 WEST CONSHOHOCKEN, Pa. – Alvin Plantinga, an American scholar whose rigorous writings over a half century have made theism – the belief in a divine reality or god – a serious option within academic philosophy, was announced today as the 2017 Templeton Prize Laureate. Plantinga’s pioneering work began in the late 1950s, a time when academic philosophers generally rejected religiously informed philosophy. In his early books, however, Plantinga considered a variety of arguments for the existence of God in ways that put theistic belief back on the Read More ›

Could dingo help unravel mystery of how dogs become tame?

From Kacey Deamer at LiveScience: The wild-born, pure Australian desert dingo recently took first place in the World’s Most Interesting Genome competition, and will have her DNA decoded thanks to the Pacific Biosciences SMRT Grant Program. The grant provides genome sequencing for “a particularly fascinating plant or animal.” … “Sandy is truly a gift to science. As a rare, wild-born pure dingo, she provides a unique case study,” Ballard, who submitted the bid to sequence Sandy’s DNA, said in a statement. “Pure dingoes are intermediate between wild wolves and domestic dogs, with a range of non-domesticated traits. So sequencing Sandy’s genome will help pinpoint some of the genes for temperament and behavior that underlie the transition from wild animals to Read More ›