Our physics colour commentator wrote recently to advise us of the deprofessionalization of academy From Rob Sheldon, noting an article at Quillette: Over twelve years, I have watched with increasing dismay and incredulity as academic integrity, fairness, and intellectual rigor have been eroded, with the implicit endorsement of administration and faculty alike. I have witnessed the de-professionalization of the professoriate—hiring policies based on tokenized identity politics and cronyism, the increasing intellectual and ideological conformity expected from faculty and students, and the subsequent curtailment of academic freedom. Just to be clear, most of my faculty colleagues are well-educated, bright, and dedicated teachers. Some are also worthy scholars or creative authors. Yet, in addition to cronyism, the program’s hiring practices have been Read More ›

HAL: Here. Inspired by Galileo’s principle of inertia, the “default state” of inert matter, we propose a “default state” for biological dynamics following Darwin’s first principle, “descent with modification” that we transform into “proliferation with variation and motility” as a property that spans life, including cells in an organism. These dissimilarities between theories of the inert and of biology also apply to causality: biological causality is to be understood in relation to the distinctive role that constraints assume in this discipline. Consequently, the notion of cause will be reframed in a context where constraints to activity are seen as the core component of biological analyses. Finally, we assert that the radical materiality of life rules out distinctions such as “software Read More ›

From Adrian Barnett at New Scientist: Not all of Prum’s analogies or counterexamples worked for me, and the attacks on the prevailing view often seemed strident. However, the book deserves to be read, just as the idea of pure beauty evolving unallied to selection and unalloyed by function deserves to be examined and considered. You may not end up agreeing with the reason for its existence, but the dance Prum performs to convince you to take him on as an intellectual partner is beautiful and deserves to be appreciated on its own terms. More. Okay, a noble flop. See also: Can sexual selection cause a decline inevolutionary fitness? Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Suzan Mazur, author of Paradigm Shifters, at Huffington Post: Suzan Mazur: Philipp Khaitovich et al. think neoteny affects the grey matter of the human brain but not the white matter. I gather you agree, but you see the issue as one of bioenergetics, involving mitochondria. You say neoteny is inherent in development of human brain regions where high energy demands are required for cognitive and memory-related functions. Is that right? Vladimir Skulachev: Yes. This is absolutely necessary for technical progress. By the way, I am now writing the next paper concerning the numerous common traits of humans and NMRs. It’s very strange but NMRs are much closer to humans with regard to several components of brain construction than to Read More ›

Yes, if you want credibility. From William G. Kaelin Jr at Nature: worry about sloppiness in biomedical research: too many published results are true only under narrow conditions, or cannot be reproduced at all. The causes are diverse, but what I see as the biggest culprit is hardly discussed. Like the proverbial boiled frog that failed to leap from a slowly warming pot of water, biomedical researchers are stuck in a system in which the amount of data and number of claims in individual papers has gradually risen over decades. Moreover, the goal of a paper seems to have shifted from validating specific conclusions to making the broadest possible assertions. The danger is that papers are increasingly like grand mansions Read More ›

From Carl Zimmer at New York Times: In ‘Enormous Success,’ Scientists Tie 52 Genes to Human Intelligence In a significant advance in the study of mental ability, a team of European and American scientists announced on Monday that they had identified 52 genes linked to intelligence in nearly 80,000 people. These genes do not determine intelligence, however. Their combined influence is minuscule, the researchers said, suggesting that thousands more are likely to be involved and still await discovery. Just as important, intelligence is profoundly shaped by the environment. More. So? Is this ambivalence an “enormous success” in science today? If you still subscribe to the New York Times, please quit and save trees. See also: Science fictions series 4: Naturalism Read More ›

From Martin Seligman and JohnTierney at the dying New York Times: We are misnamed. We call ourselves Homo sapiens, the “wise man,” but that’s more of a boast than a description. What makes us wise? What sets us apart from other animals? Various answers have been proposed — language, tools, cooperation, culture, tasting bad to predators — but none is unique to humans. What best distinguishes our species is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future. Our singular foresight created civilization and sustains society. It usually lifts our spirits, but it’s also the source of most depression and anxiety, whether we’re evaluating our own lives or worrying about the nation. Other animals have springtime Read More ›

From M Anthony Mills at Big Questions Online: Unity, in other words, may be a goal of scientific explanation, even if it is not attainable. Instead, we might think of unity as a kind of regulative ideal — something that guides and orients research. String theory’s vice, on this account, would not be seeking unity — it would be pursuing unity as a goal to be reached rather than an ideal to be approximated. In so doing, other theoretical virtues — parsimony, predictive power, empirical robustness — fall by the wayside. Perhaps relativity and quantum theory will never be unified. But the quest to unify them — if properly tempered by the type of humility Gleiser highlights — might nevertheless Read More ›

In the latest post at Design Disquisitions I focus on the excellent work on ID by British philosopher Peter S. Williams. He has published several papers, and has many high quality articles and media presentations on the subject. His work was instrumental in initiating my change of mind from theistic neo-Darwinism to design. Highly recommended stuff! Peter S. Williams on Intelligent Design  

From John L. Allen, Jr., at Crux Now: Most basically, Consolmagno said, it’s important to maintain the proper distinction between what science can prove, and what faith can add. “God is not something we arrive at the end of our science, it’s what we assume at the beginning,” he said, adding emphatically: “I am afraid of a God who can be proved by science, because I know my science well enough to not trust it!” More. Excuse us. Faith can add nothing to what cannot be demonstrated. Many popular theories such as the multiverse, Darwinism, alt right eugenics, cannot be demonstrated at all. So, translation from Consolmagno: Not to worry, we really are theistic naturalists: Nature is all there is. Read More ›

From Skeptic Reading Room: The Hoax The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial. That’s how we began. We used this preposterous sentence to open a “paper” consisting of 3,000 words of utter nonsense posing as academic scholarship. Then a peer-reviewed academic journal in the social sciences accepted and published it. This paper should never have been published. Titled, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” our paper “argues” that “The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.” As if to prove philosopher David Hume’s claim Read More ›

From Denise Chow, the list includes Hillary Clinton Hillary Clinton has a long political history advocating for children and families, gender equality and health care reform, but in 2016, during her bid to secure the Democratic nomination for president, Clinton turned her attention to the paranormal. In a radio interview and then later on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” Clinton said she wants to review files about UFOs and the mysterious Area 51 site in Nevada and make them public. “I would like us to go into those files and hopefully make as much of that public as possible,” she told Kimmel. “If there’s nothing there, let’s tell people there’s nothing there.” Area 51, located about 80 miles (130 kilometers) northwest of Read More ›

From Griffiths University (Queensland, Australia): Fit and healthy Tasmanian devils are being taken down by deadly facial tumours that are attacking the “best” animals in the population, according to novel research led by Griffith University. The research, published in the scientific journal Ecology Letters, shows that devils that catch devil facial tumour disease (DFTD) have higher survival and reproductive rates prior to disease-induced death than individuals that do not become infected. Typically infectious diseases affect mostly older, younger, or less healthy individuals. However, the team of scientists from Australia and the US, led by Dr Konstans Wells of Griffith’s Environmental Futures Research Institute (EFRI), found that devils with higher fitness are at highest risk of infection and death from facial Read More ›

Science historian Michael Flannery offers a vid link below. He notes, Two things are important to bear in mind: first, nothing in Hoyle’s rejection bears upon a teleological universe (Hoyle’s steady state can–and did–coexist with a purposeful and intelligently guided universe); and second, Hoyle’s rejection of the big bang still allows him to have very skeptical view of “safe” science and government power. The frequently repeated claim that Fred Hoyle was an atheist has been greatly exaggerated. While Hoyle had been an atheist early in his career, he didn’t end that way. This is made clear in his book, The Intelligent Universe (1983) where he argued that “the information-rich” universe was guided and controlled by an “overriding intelligence,” and in Read More ›