From Denyse O’Leary at MercatorNet: Here are four reasons why the war against freedom will not just somehow lose itself, without our taking any action: 2. Progressive academics are training “child soldiers” to carry out their revolution against intellectual freedom. Put simply, they are teaching their rioting students attitudes, values, and beliefs that guarantee failure in work and healthy relationships. Reader, would you want, as a colleague, someone who put a middle-aged woman professor at Middlebury College in the hospital ? No? Then think what your answer means. In an age when most graduates face job shortages, students who have been encouraged in transgressive behaviour must simply continue their “revolution” off campus. That may be all they know how to Read More ›

From Jesse Emspak at LiveScience: What Is Intelligence? 20 Years After Deep Blue, AI Still Can’t Think Like Humans “Good as they are, [computers] are quite poor at other kinds of decision making,” said Murray Campbell, a research scientist at IBM Research. “Some doubted that a computer would ever play as well as a top human. “The more interesting thing we showed was that there’s more than one way to look at a complex problem,” Campbell told Live Science. “You can look at it the human way, using experience and intuition, or in a more computer-like way.” Those methods complement each other, he said. Although Deep Blue’s win proved that humans could build a machine that’s a great chess player, Read More ›

From Center or Science and Culture at Evolution News & Views: A recent article in Nature Ecology & Evolution, “Public literacy in evolution,” discusses a newly launched project to push evolution on the European public. Called EvoKE, or “EVOlutionary Knowledge for Everyone,” the project’s main concern is to find ways to increase “European citizens’ acceptance and understanding of evolution.” In multiple places, the article quotes EvoKE leaders who are worried about the level of “acceptance” of evolution. Translation: Right now, in Europe, it is still safe to follow the maxim: If it sounds unbelieveable, don’t believe it. And when in doubt, doubt. But EvoKE aims to fix that: To summarize, the resolution claims that intelligent design is a form of Read More ›

Yet again a materialist comes into these pages (this time rvb8) and asserts that ID necessarily entails a supernatural designer.  The conversation usually goes something like this: Materialist:  ID is not science, because it studies the supernatural. ID Proponent:  No, that’s wrong.  ID is the study of design in nature.  While the designer may be supernatural, he is not necessarily so. Mat:  No, you are dissembling. ID:  Why do you say that? Mat:  Because the design of living things would require a miracle, and miracles are, by definition, supernatural. ID:  Let me get this straight.  You believe that blind, unguided natural forces are sufficient to account for the staggering complexity and diversity of life. Mat:  That’s right.  That is why Read More ›

From Anurag A. Agrawal and Editor: Judith L. Bronstein at The American Naturalist: Abstract: A charm of biology as a scientific discipline is the diversity of life. Although this diversity can make laws of biology challenging to discover, several repeated patterns and general principles govern evolutionary diversification. Convergent evolution, the independent evolution of similar phenotypes, has been at the heart of one approach to understand generality in the evolutionary process. Yet understanding when and why organismal traits and strategies repeatedly evolve has been a central challenge. These issues were the focus of the American Society of Naturalists Vice Presidential Symposium in 2016 and are the subject of this collection of articles. Although naturalists have long made inferences about convergent evolution Read More ›

From Ray Cavanaugh at Salvo: After his ordination [to the priesthood], Lemaître won a scholarship to study abroad and headed to Cambridge University, where he worked with the astronomer Arthur Eddington. He then migrated from Cambridge in the U.K. to Cambridge, Massachusetts, so he could study at Harvard and M.I.T., where he earned a doctoral degree. Returning to Belgium (at least for a while), he was appointed professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven. Right around this time, he published the formidably titled paper, “A Homogenous Universe of Constant Mass and Increasing Radiation, Taking Account of the Radial Velocity of Extragalactic Nebulae,” which questioned Einstein’s idea of a static universe. … By the latter half of the 1920s, Read More ›

From Robert H. Nelson at the Conversation: The question of whether a god exists is heating up in the 21st century. According to a Pew survey, the percent of Americans having no religious affiliation reached 23 percent in 2014. Among such “nones,” 33 percent said that they do not believe in God – an 11 percent increase since only 2007. Such trends have ironically been taking place even as, I would argue, the probability for the existence of a supernatural god have been rising. He offers five reasons God probably exists, but that’s not new. This is: As I say in my book, I should emphasize that I am not questioning the reality of natural biological evolution. What is interesting Read More ›

From Ethan Siegel at Forbes: This might seem like out-and-out science fiction, but not all of it belongs to the “fiction” category: traveling through time is the one thing in science that you can’t help yourself from doing no matter what you do! The question is how much you can manipulate it for your own ends, and control your motion through time. Physicist Siegel offers theories that enable forward or backward motion through tme but says But that’s a mathematical solution; does that mathematics describe our physical Universe, though? It appears not to be the case. The curvatures and/or discontinuities we’d need our Universe to have are wildly incompatible with what we observe, even near neutron stars and black holes: Read More ›

From Nguyen A, Yosinski J, and Clune J (2015) at Evolving Artificial Intelligence Laboratory: Deep neural networks (DNNs) have recently been achieving state-of-the-art performance on a variety of pattern-recognition tasks, most notably visual classification problems. Given that DNNs are now able to classify objects in images with near-human-level performance, questions naturally arise as to what differences remain between computer and human vision. A recent study revealed that changing an image (e.g. of a lion) in a way imperceptible to humans can cause a DNN to label the image as something else entirely (e.g. mislabeling a lion a library). Here we show a related result: it is easy to produce images that are completely unrecognizable to humans, but that state-of-the-art DNNs believe Read More ›

From Natalie Wolchover at Quanta: In recent years, a revolutionary understanding of thermodynamics has emerged that explains this subjectivity using quantum information theory — “a toddler among physical theories,” as del Rio and co-authors put it, that describes the spread of information through quantum systems. Just as thermodynamics initially grew out of trying to improve steam engines, today’s thermodynamicists are mulling over the workings of quantum machines. Shrinking technology — a single-ion engine and three-atom fridge were both experimentally realized for the first time within the past year — is forcing them to extend thermodynamics to the quantum realm, where notions like temperature and work lose their usual meanings, and the classical laws don’t necessarily apply. … “Many exciting things Read More ›

Animals we thought were extinct sometimes aren’t. From Julia Brown at New Scientist: Will Bill Laurance and his team find Tasmanian tigers lurking in Australia’s remote Cape York peninsula? Numerous animals that were thought to be extinct have recently been rediscovered. Here are our top five species that came back from the dead – and two more that might also have been written off too soon. More. This subject has heated up recently on account of possible sightings of the Tasmanian wolf (tiger), a marsupial that was believed to have gone extinct in the last century. Possibly, current technology would help us determine the chances that an actual species has actually gone extinct. The fact that one hasn’t seen any Read More ›

Well, in the age of just shout louder against the marchin’, marchin’ hordes, aw, maybe academic freedom is just a frill anyway. From Erin Ross at Nature: Revamped ‘anti-science’ education bills in United States find success: Legislation urges educators to ‘teach the controversy’ and allows citizens to challenge curricula. State and local legislatures in the United States are experimenting with new ways to target the topics taught in science classes, and it seems to be paying dividends. Florida’s legislature approved a bill on 5 May that would enable residents to challenge what educators teach students. And two other states have already approved non-binding legislation this year urging teachers to embrace ‘academic freedom’ and present the full spectrum of views on Read More ›

Most complete remains: Also in the series of papers released Tuesday in the journal eLife is the announcement of a new chamber within the Rising Star cave where the hominin species was first found. It too contains a collection of H. naledi bones, including at least three individuals and one “remarkably complete” specimen with a nearly intact skull. … While the dating is robust, the presence of such a primitive-looking hominin species so late in our history is perplexing. In addition to an upper body more suited for tree-dwelling, H. naledi had tiny brains, smaller even than a chimpanzee, which would have left them at a disadvantage when competing with the more intelligent hominin species in the same area around Read More ›

The firestorm ignited by Ijjas, Loeb & Steinhardt’s blog post in Scientific American,  is very much worth your time reading. It engages Peter Woit’s string-theory criticism on his blog. But the scientists do not divide into sides very rationally, as Woit notices, “This is getting very weird. It’s not normal to respond to a scientific argument by enlisting letter writers on your behalf, even less normal to put your university press office to work on a response..” Abraham Loeb is a cosmologist age 55 at Harvard who came from a Jewish farming community in Israel. He is known for creativity and writing on many sides of an issue. Paul Steinhardt is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist age 65 at Princeton, Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary  (News) at ENV: “Post-truth” was the Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year for 2016. The term “post-fact” is also heard more often now. Oxford tells us that “post-fact” relates to or denotes “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Post-fact has certainly hit science. Pundits blame everyone but themselves for its growing presence. But a post-fact and post-truth world are implicit and inevitable in the metaphysical naturalist view (nature is all there is) that is now equated with science and often stands in for it. Let’s start at the top, with cosmology. Some say there is a crisis in cosmology; others say there are merely Read More ›