From Amber Dance at Sapiens: Her question is a basic one about a crucial early technology: When did humankind first put fire to work for them, using it regularly for heat and cooking? Hlubik and other archaeologists who sift through the long-cold ashes of fires past cannot say for sure. It probably wasn’t as early as 2 million years ago—but it almost certainly occurred by 300,000 years ago. That leaves a big gap, with plenty to investigate. It’s a deceptively hard question to answer. “In order to find early fire, we have to work really, really hard,” says Michael Chazan, director of The Archaeology Centre at the University of Toronto. Evidence of fire is ephemeral: Its traces, in the form Read More ›

From Sydney Perkowitz at JStor: We can find guidance in two classic works about the dangers of modifying people and labeling them as “superior” or “inferior”—the novel Brave New World (1932) and the film Gattaca (1997). Their publication anniversaries in 2017 are sharp reminders of the costs of embracing any kind of twenty-first-century eugenics. … In the final analysis, Brave New World portrays a “hard eugenics” created by a government to suppress human rights, diversity, and opportunities for its citizens. But like the world in Gattaca, our own society could instead display a eugenic element not imposed from above, but arising from our society’s dynamics. Unless our society balances the undoubted benefits of gene editing against its equally undoubted risks, Read More ›

There was no simpler way of doing it? From Mark Maslin at RealClearScience: Our social groups are large and complex, but this creates high stress levels for individuals because the rewards in terms of food, safety and reproduction are so great. Hence, Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar argues our huge brain is primarily developed to keep track of rapidly changing relationships. It takes a huge amount of cognitive ability to exist in large social groups, and if you fall out of the group you lose access to food and mates and are unlikely to reproduce and pass on your genes.More. But, re relationships, don’t wolves and cattle have the same rotten luck, more or less? Isn’t it more likely that the Read More ›

Asked by Mindy Weisberger: While scientists have yet to find any evidence that multiverses exist, there are a number of hypotheses that use the laws of physics to explore the possibility of multiple universes, sometimes challenging our understanding of reality itself in the process, Erin Macdonald, astrophysicist and self-proclaimed “massive sci-fi nerd,” explained during a panel on Saturday (June 17) at Future Con, a festival that highlighted the intersection between science, technology and science fiction in Washington, D.C. More. Not only have we yet to find any evidence that multiverses exist, it is unclear that we could find any such evidence in principle. The article provides useful information on various multiverse theories, about which we learn, “”None of these can be Read More ›

In the video “Why Evolution is Different,” highlighted in a June 7 Evolution News post and embedded below, I try again to make the usual simple point that to not believe in intelligent design, you have to believe that the four fundamental, unintelligent forces of physics alone (the gravitational, electromagnetic and strong and weak nuclear forces) could have rearranged the fundamental particles of physics into encyclopedias and science texts and computers and airplanes and Apple iPhones. As usual, I try to show that this belief runs contrary to the more general statements of the second law of thermodynamics, even if the Earth is an open system. [youtube VpEXXNxjWYE] Whether or not it has anything to do with the second law, Read More ›

From Sabine Hossenfelder at at Forbes: After an effort of more than 100 years and a collaboration involving over 1,000 scientists, we all celebrated. It was February 11, 2016, and LIGO had just announced their first direct detection of gravitational waves. Analysis of the data attributed the signal to a black hole merger that happened several billion light years away. But what if there wasn’t a signal at all, but rather patterns and correlations in the noise that fooled us into believing we were seeing something that wasn’t real? A group of Danish researchers just submitted a paper arguing that the celebration might have been premature. Hossenfelder is not convinced. Making sense of somebody else’s data is tricky, as I Read More ›

From Ed Yong at the Atlantic: What If (Almost) Every Gene Affects (Almost) Everything? Three Stanford scientists have proposed a provocative new way of thinking about genetic variants, and how they affect people’s bodies and health. In 1999, a group of scientists scoured the genomes of around 150 pairs of siblings in an attempt to find genes that are involved in autism. They came up empty. They reasoned that this was because the risk of autism is not governed by a small number of powerful genes, which their study would have uncovered. Instead, it’s likely affected by a large number of genes that each have a small effect. Perhaps, they wrote, there might be 15 such genes or more. Two Read More ›

Summer vacation pricing for a leading book: US$7.56 From Amazon: Many volumes have addressed the question of whether or not naturalism is a required part of scientific methodology. However, few, if any, go any further into the many concerns that arise from a rejection of naturalism. If methodological naturalism is rejected, what replaces it? If science is not naturalistic, what defines science? If naturalism is rejected, what is gained and what is lost? How does the practice of science change? What new avenues would be available, and how would they be investigated? This volume is divided into three parts. The first part considers the question of methodological naturalism and its role in the demarcation problem – deciding what is science Read More ›

From Hannah Osborne at Newsweek: Scientists studying the brain have discovered that the organ operates on up to 11 different dimensions, creating multiverse-like structures that are “a world we had never imagined.” … Henry Markram, director of Blue Brain Project, said the findings could help explain why the brain is so hard to understand. “The mathematics usually applied to study networks cannot detect the high-dimensional structures and spaces that we now see clearly,” he said. “We found a world that we had never imagined. There are tens of millions of these objects even in a small speck of the brain, up through seven dimensions. In some networks, we even found structures with up to eleven dimensions.” More. The structures are Read More ›

Crossway is publishing a mammoth (over 600-page) anthology critiquing theistic evolution , with a wide range of contributors from science to theology. From the publisher: The debate about biological origins continues to be hotly contested within the Christian church. Prominent organizations such as Biologos (USA) and Faraday Institute (UK) insist that Christians must yield to an unassailable scientific consensus in favor of contemporary evolutionary theory and modify traditional biblical ideas about the creation of life accordingly. They promote a view known as “theistic evolution” or “evolutionary creation.” They argue that God used—albeit in an undetectable way—evolutionary mechanisms to produce all forms of life. This book contests this proposal. Featuring two dozen highly credentialed scientists, philosophers, and theologians from Europe and Read More ›

But will it really lead to a hack-free internet? From Lee Billings at Scientific American: In a landmark study, a team of Chinese scientists using an experimental satellite has tested quantum entanglement over unprecedented distances, beaming entangled pairs of photons to three ground stations across China—each separated by more than 1,200 kilometers. The test verifies a mysterious and long-held tenet of quantum theory, and firmly establishes China as the front-runner in a burgeoning “quantum space race” to create a secure, quantum-based global communications network—that is, a potentially unhackable “quantum internet” that would be of immense geopolitical importance. The findings were published Thursday in Science. More. We do not live in the world we think we do. That said, probably, any Read More ›

From the Daily Galaxy: According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, the curvature of spacetime was infinite at the big bang. In fact, at this point all mathematical tools fail, and the theory breaks down. However, there remained the notion that perhaps the beginning of the universe could be treated in a simpler manner, and that the infinities of the big bang might be avoided. This has indeed been the hope expressed since the 1980s by the well-known cosmologists James Hartle and Stephen Hawking with their “no-boundary proposal”, and by Alexander Vilenkin with his “tunnelling proposal”. Now scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute/AEI) in Potsdam and at the Perimeter Institute in Canada have been able Read More ›

Again. In his new book Zombie Science, biologist Jonathan Wells asks a simple question: If the icons of evolution were just innocent textbook errors, why do so many of them still persist? Wells gave a presentation about Zombie Science at the book’s national launch party recently in Seattle. Watch as Wells explores a new wave of icons walking the halls of science while putting some familiar corpses back in the grave. New topics include DNA, the human eye, vestigial organs, antibiotic resistance, and cancer. Looking past the current zombie outbreak, Wells offers a hopeful vision of science free from the clutches of materialist dogma. Wells himself is something of an iconoclast, railing against the tyranny of science’s Darwin-only advocates. His Read More ›

From neurologist Robert J. Burton at Nautilus: As a fledgling neurologist, I’d already seen a wide variety of strange mental states arising out of physical diseases. But on this particular day, I couldn’t wrap my mind around a gene mutation generating an isolated feeling of being spied on by the FBI. How could a localized excess of amino acids in a segment of DNA be transformed into paranoia? Though I didn’t know it at the time, I had run headlong into the “hard problem of consciousness,” the enigma of how physical brain mechanisms create purely subjective mental states. In the subsequent 50 years, what was once fodder for neurologists’ late night speculations has mushroomed into the pre-eminent question in the Read More ›

Many critics of intelligent design argue that not only is ID false (or at least unscientific), but that it is basically meaningless. Such lines of criticism come from philosophers such as Sahotra Sarkar and Elliott Sober. They argue that the general concepts that are assumed in ID discussions like ‘design’ and ‘intelligence’ are too primitive and vague to be of any use in a coherent scientific theory. Sarkar in particular claims that ID’s concepts can only be propped up by using analogies inherited by the natural theological tradition, and so cannot be formulated in a non-theological/scientific manner. In this article I have attempted to take a good stab at this objection. Though this article is quite in-depth, it is actually a Read More ›