From University of Utah at EurekAlert: The shores of Lake Turkana, in Kenya, are dry and inhospitable, with grasses as the dominant plant type. It hasn’t always been that way. Over the last four million years, the Omo-Turkana basin has seen a range of climates and ecosystems, and has also seen significant steps in human evolution. Scientists previously thought that long-term drying of the climate contributed to the growth of grasslands in the area and the rise of large herbivores, which in turn may have shaped how humans developed. It’s tough to prove that hypothesis, however, because of the difficulty of reconstructing four million years of climate data. Researchers from the University of Utah have found a better way. By Read More ›

From Philip Ball at Aeon: It’s a strange idea that measurement needs explaining at all. Usually what we mean by a measurement seems so trivial that we don’t even ask the question. A ball has a position, or a speed, or a mass. I can measure those things, and the things I measure are the properties of the ball. What more is there to say? But in the quantum world things aren’t so obvious. There, the position of a particle is nothing more than a whole set of possible positions until the moment when it is observed. The same holds true for any other aspect of the particle. How does the multitude of potential properties in a quantum object turn Read More ›

Recently I had a lengthy discussion with an acquaintance about evolution and the various concepts and claims that we find under the heading of the word “evolution.”  At one point I brought up the origin of life and he promptly insisted: “that’s not part of evolution.” “Perhaps,” I offered, “but consider that the origin of life is generally included under the heading of ‘evolution’ in biology textbooks, complete with optimistic discussions about the famous experiment by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey.” “Furthermore,” I continued, “researchers have long talked about ‘chemical evolution’ in relation to the origin of life.  What do they mean by ‘evolution’ in that context, if the origin of life is not part of evolution?”  Indeed, although Darwin Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: UA anthropologist David Raichlen and UA psychologist Gene Alexander, who together run a research program on exercise and the brain, propose an “adaptive capacity model” for understanding, from an evolutionary neuroscience perspective, how physical activity impacts brain structure and function. Their argument: As humans transitioned from a relatively sedentary apelike existence to a more physically demanding hunter-gatherer lifestyle, starting around 2 million years ago, we began to engage in complex foraging tasks that were simultaneously physically and mentally demanding, and that may explain how physical activity and the brain came to be so connected. “We think our physiology evolved to respond to those increases in physical activity levels, and those physiological adaptations go from your bones and your Read More ›

So genes don’t rule?  From ScienceDaily: Mice have a reputation for timidity. Yet when confronted with an unfamiliar peer, a mouse may respond by rearing, chasing, grappling, and biting — and come away with altered sensitivity toward future potential threats. What changes in the brain of an animal when its behavior is altered by experience? Research at the University of Illinois led by Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology Lisa Stubbs is working toward an answer to this question by focusing on the collective actions of genes. In a recent Genome Research publication (DOI: 10.1101/gr.214221.116), Stubbs and her colleagues identified and documented the activity of networks of genes involved in the response to social stress. “The goal of this study Read More ›

From Mike Wall at Space.com: NASA is not preparing to drop an alien-life bombshell, despite what you may have heard. Last week, the hacking group Anonymous posted a video on YouTube suggesting that the space agency is about to announce the discovery of life beyond Earth. The video has made a big splash online — so big that NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen addressed the rumor today (June 26). “Contrary to some reports, there’s no pending announcement from NASA regarding extraterrestrial life,” Zurbuchen said via Twitter, where he posts as @Dr_ThomasZ. More. Aw, it’s nice day. Go back to the pool. See also: How do we grapple with the idea that ET might not be out there?

From Philip Perry at BigThink: What consciousness is and where it emanates from has stymied great minds in societies across the globe since the dawn of speculation. In today’s world, it’s a realm tackled more and more by physicists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists. There are a few prevailing theories. The first is materialism. This is the notion that consciousness emanates from matter, in our case, by the firing of neurons inside the brain. So why don’t my socks talk to me? The view proposed is panpsychism: In quantum mechanics, particles don’t have a definite shape or specific location, until they are observed or measured. Is this a form of proto-consciousness at play? According to the late scientist and philosopher, John Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: Color us just a bit skeptical about news reports that Turkey will eliminate evolution from its official 9th grade curriculum. If true, though, it is of course a terrible idea. … News like this filtered through the Western media can’t necessarily be taken at face value. That having been said, the fact that evolution is both important and “controversial” is one reason we strongly favor teaching it thoroughly in high school biology classes, with due attention to objective scientific evidence and arguments for and against the theory. Critically evaluating scientific theories is what responsible scientists do, and with care and thoughtfulness, instructors can help students do the same.More. All that the opponents Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Their findings have just been published in the research journal Nature. “It forces a radical rethink of what evolution was capable of among the first tetrapods,” said project lead Jason Anderson, a paleontologist and Professor at the University of Calgary Faculty of Veterinary Medicine (UCVM). Before this study, ancient tetrapods — the ancestors of humans and other modern-day vertebrates — were thought to have evolved very slowly from fish to animals with limbs. “We used to think that the fin-to-limb transition was a slow evolution to becoming gradually less fish like,” he said. “But Lethiscus shows immediate, and dramatic, evolutionary experimentation. The lineage shrunk in size, and lost limbs almost immediately after they first evolved. It’s like a Read More ›

Bad news for Separation of Church and State lawyers. From Laura Geggel at LiveScience: Despite his criticism of intelligent design and creationism, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins told people at a science festival this past the weekend that he believes religious education is a key subject for schoolchildren. Dawkins, who is open about his atheism, said that understanding religion can help students get a better grasp of the world’s history and culture. He made the statement during a public conversation at the Cheltenham Science Festival in Gloucestershire, England, on Sunday (June 11), according to The Telegraph. It’s basically impossible to study English literature without some knowledge of Christianity, Dawkins noted. More. Religious education gets people used to the idea that other Read More ›

Asks BioLogos’s Jim Stump at at Christian Today, sneering: But after this initial good news, what strikes many people in the UK and elsewhere in the world is that there are still almost 40 per cent of Americans who are young earth creationists, holding beliefs that are contradicted by the overwhelming majority of scientists (in a separate poll from 2015, 99 per cent of those with a PhD in biology or medicine affirmed that humans evolved). And when restricted to Americans who attend church weekly, 65 per cent select the young earth creationist option. What accounts for this stunning disconnect between Americans’ religious convictions and what science has discovered about our origins? The reasons are surely multifarious and complex. There is Read More ›

ID is not absurd, unless, of course, thinking is absurd From Raymond Bergner at Academia: Let me say from the outset that this is not an essay arguing for intelligent design. Rather, it is a protest against a certain attitude. Everywhere I turn today, I hear voices, with varying degrees of smugness and contempt, telling me that intelligent design — the position that there is some ordering intelligence behind the whole cosmic shooting match — is straightforwardly ridiculous. “No intelligent person believes such a thing.” ” How unscientific!c ” “It’s always a cover for a religiously based, evolution-denying creationism, trying to sneak in the back door in the guise of science.” Highly visible, scientifically informed public intellectuals such as Richard Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: as their name suggests, giant viruses are larger than many bacterial and eukaryotic cells. They were first discovered in 2003, and the true breadth of their diversity remains unknown. In a study led by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI), a DOE Office of Science user facility, a new group of giant viruses has been uncovered after sifting through complex genetic datasets. Dubbed Klosneuviruses, the giant virus contains a more complete set of translation machinery genes than any other virus known to date. Paper. – Frederik Schulz, Natalya Yutin, Natalia N. Ivanova, Davi R. Ortega, Tae Kwon Lee, Julia Vierheilig, Holger Daims, Matthias Horn, Michael Wagner, Grant J. Jensen, Nikos C. Kyrpides, Eugene Read More ›

At at Watt’s Up with That: Traditional science required a skeptical view of one’s own findings until they could be replicated, especially by others. Unfortunately, skepticism has been deleted from the latest edition of “On Being a Scientist,” a widely-read booklet published by the National Academies of Science. When I asked the NAS about this unfortunate deletion, they explained there was insufficient space to include this fundamental aspect of doing science. Yet I counted nearly 10 pages of white space in the new edition. Despite the NAS change, I’ll continue to view science, including mine, through a veil of skepticism. That’s why I am concerned about what has become of the global warming/climate change movement, which is rapidly assuming the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers have determined that the fossils of an extinct species from the Triassic Period are the long-missing link that connects Kermit the Frog’s amphibian brethren to wormlike creatures with a backbone and two rows of sharp teeth. Named Chinlestegophis jenkinsi, the newfound fossil is the oldest relative of the most mysterious group of amphibians: caecilians. Today, these limbless, colorful serpentine carnivores live underground and range in size from 6 inches to 5 feet. “Our textbook-changing discovery will require paleontologists to re-evaluate the timing of the origin of modern amphibian groups and how they evolved,” said Adam Huttenlocker, senior author of the study and an assistant professor in the Department of Integrative Anatomical Sciences at the Keck School of Read More ›