Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

But does it matter anymore whether science makes sense?

Isn’t “making sense” a human construct? From Kenneth Francis at New English Review: About seven years ago, during a talk on Hawking at a university, I raised my hand and criticised comments he made in his then latest book, The Grand Design, which he co-wrote with Star Trek screenwriter Leonard Mlodinow. My question was, “why did Hawking write such a nonsensical idea that the universe created itself because of gravity?” (In order for the universe to create itself it would have to have existed before it exists, and gravity is part of the universe). I also asked why did Hawking write “philosophy is dead” at the beginning of his book (a self-refuting statement, as it’s philosophical), while constantly philosophising throughout Read More ›

Netherlands sponsors major origin of life research project

From Suzan Mazur at HuffPost: The Dutch Origins Center, a virtual project, has been led by Nobel laureate Ben Feringa (2016, Chemistry)—-keynote speaker of this week’s two-day conference. The project is a Dutch national initiative involving 17 of the country’s universities and institutes. … Curiously, Steve Benner’s $5.4M Templeton-funded Origins project isn’t represented, but inorganic chemist Lee Cronin—-who’s developing a “Universal Life Detector” with big bucks from Templeton—- will address this week’s gathering. Cronin, based at the University of Glasgow, has been attempting to make matter come alive. One of most notable presenters at the event is astrobiologist Bob Hazen, who told me he is “very sympathetic to people who see echoes of biology in mineralogy”. Hazen explained his perspective Read More ›

Claude Shannon: the man who failed to transform our understanding of information

Well, Columbia’s Rob Goodman thinks he did, at Aeon: Shannon’s ‘mathematical theory’ sets out two big ideas. The first is that information is probabilistic. We should begin by grasping that information is a measure of the uncertainty we overcome, Shannon said – which we might also call surprise. What determines this uncertainty is not just the size of the symbol vocabulary, as Nyquist and Hartley thought. It’s also about the odds that any given symbol will be chosen. Take the example of a coin-toss, the simplest thing Shannon could come up with as a ‘source’ of information. A fair coin carries two choices with equal odds; we could say that such a coin, or any ‘device with two stable positions’, Read More ›

Researchers: Hands-on tests contradict black hole model

From ScienceDaily: A long-standing but unproven assumption about the X-ray spectra of black holes in space has been contradicted by hands-on experiments performed at Sandia National Laboratories’ Z machine. Z, the most energetic laboratory X-ray source on Earth, can duplicate the X-rays surrounding black holes that otherwise can be watched only from a great distance and then theorized about. “Of course, emission directly from black holes cannot be observed,” said Sandia researcher and lead author Guillaume Loisel, lead author for a paper on the experimental results, published in August in Physical Review Letters. “We see emission from surrounding matter just before it is consumed by the black hole. This surrounding matter is forced into the shape of a disk, called Read More ›

Bird navigation designed around smell?

Sense of smell is key factor in bird navigation

researchers from the universities of Oxford, Barcelona and Pisa have shown in a new experiment that olfaction – or sense of smell – is almost certainly a key factor in long-distance oceanic navigation, eliminating previous misgivings about this hypothesis. . . .although the anosmic birds made successful trips to the Catalan coast and other distant foraging grounds, they showed significantly different orientation behaviour from the controls during the at-sea stage of their return journeys. Instead of being well-oriented towards home when they were out of sight of land, they embarked on curiously straight but poorly oriented flights across the ocean, as if following a compass bearing away from the foraging grounds without being able to update their position.

Their orientation then improved when approaching land, suggesting that birds must consult an olfactory map when out of sight of land but are subsequently able to find home using familiar landscape features.

Read More ›

Researchers: “Junk DNA” lowers risk of heart disease

From ScienceDaily: Gene therapy using ‘junk DNA’ could lower risk for heart disease Scientists from UCLA and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute successfully used a gene that suppresses cholesterol levels as part of a treatment to reduce plaque in mice with a disorder called familial hypercholesterolemia. In a preclinical study, researchers found that the gene, LeXis, lowered cholesterol and blockages in the arteries, and the treatment appeared to reduce the build-up of fat in liver cells. Familial hypercholesterolemia is an inherited condition characterized by extremely high levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (commonly referred to as “bad cholesterol”) and an increased risk of early heart disease. The LeXis gene belongs to a unique group of genes that until recently were considered Read More ›

The Size of the Stars Issue in 17th Century Astronomy

OK, raise your hand if you knew that the in the 1600’s advocates of the heliocentric view appealed to God’s greatness to answer geocentric arguments.  Yep.  In fact, the “size of the star” issue was not fully resolved until the 1800s.  The point is that the debate was not purely religion (geo) vs. science (helio).  The geo advocates had scientific arguments that were not fully answered until the 1800s, and the helio advocates sometimes resorted to religious arguments.  Anyone who has followed the standard history of the so-called war of religion against science would be surprised to learn there was nuance.  John Hartnett writes: The size of stars argument went as follows. Sizes of stars were first measured by eye, Read More ›

Study: Global patterns in human epigenetics show strong methylation-mRNA-genotype links

From Ashley Yeager at the Scientist: A study of five far-flung human populations gives clues to adaptations to environmental pressures. The results revealed a strong link between population-specific DNA methylation, mRNA levels, and genotypes. However, the CpG sites where methylation occurred that had the highest degree of population specificity were more strongly associated with a local variation in a single nucleotide (SNP) compared with the association of mRNA levels with local SNPs. Population-specific DNA methylation patterns are therefore explained better by local genetic variants than population-specific expression levels, the team says. Because the DNA methylation variation appears to be under genetic control, it could greatly affect human adaptability. Fraser notes, however, that the consequences of methylation still aren’t clear. “It Read More ›

Breaking! Breaking! U profs discover existence of human mind

From Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic: As the fall semester begins, 15 professors from Yale, Princeton, and Harvard have published a letter of advice for the class of 2021. Think for yourself. The “vice of conformism” is a temptation for all faculty and students, they argue, due to a climate rife with group think, where it is “all-too-easy to allow your views and outlook to be shaped by dominant opinion” on a campus or in academia generally. Mmmm, yes. Especially if one who opposes the group think could get expelled, fired, burned out, or end up in the hospital, … They warn that on many campuses, what John Stuart Mill called “the tyranny of public opinion” doesn’t merely discourage students Read More ›

Postmodern language studies weighs in on design in nature

From Politics in science—High modulation of engagement in intelligent design discourse at Journal of Language and Politics: Intelligent design is a pseudoscientific concept conceived in an attempt to bring religion-based teaching into the classroom. As such, it is involved in a constant struggle for dialogic space with the dominant scientific discourse of the theory of evolution. Here, we use a corpus linguistic approach to study how intelligent design discourse uses engagement to forward its creationistic propositions and at the same time limit the propositions of the theory of evolution. The results suggest that intelligent design discourse employs engagement far more frequently than evolutionary biology discourse, mainly to counter opposing propositions and to entertain its own proposition in their stead. The Read More ›

Can we test for information, as the basis of the universe, as opposed to matter or energy?

From science writer Philip Perry at BigThink: If the nature of reality is in fact reducible to information itself, that implies a conscious mind on the receiving end, to interpret and comprehend it. Wheeler himself believed in a participatory universe, where consciousness holds a central role. Some scientists argue that the cosmos seems to have specific properties which allow it to create and sustain life. Perhaps what it desires most is an audience captivated in awe as it whirls in prodigious splendor. Modern physics has hit a wall in a number of areas. Some proponents of information theory believe embracing it may help us to say, sew up the rift between general relativity and quantum mechanics. Or perhaps it’ll aid Read More ›

Is origin of life a fluke, physics… or just not a science question at present?

From Ian O’Neill at LiveScience: Understanding the origin of life is arguably one of the most compelling quests for humanity. This quest has inevitably moved beyond the puzzle of life on Earth to whether there’s life elsewhere in the universe. Is life on Earth a fluke? Or is life as natural as the universal laws of physics? Jeremy England, a biophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is trying to answer these profound questions. In 2013, he formulated a hypothesis that physics may spontaneously trigger chemicals to organize themselves in ways that seed “life-like” qualities. Now, new research by England and a colleague suggests that physics may naturally produce self-replicating chemical reactions, one of the first steps toward creating life Read More ›

Noncoding (“junk”) RNA predominates in genome

From Jun-An Chen and Simon Conn at Genome Biology: Abstract: A report on the Second Aegean International Conference on the Long and the Short of Non-Coding RNAs, held in Heraklion, Greece, 9–14 June 2017. Investigations into gene regulation and disease pathogenesis have been protein-centric for decades. However, in recent years there has been a profound expansion in our knowledge of the variety and complexity of eukaryotic RNA species, particularly the non-coding RNA families. Vast amounts of RNA sequencing data generated from various library preparation methods have revealed these non-coding RNA species to be unequivocally more abundant than canonical mRNA species. Furthermore, insight into the diverse mechanisms and functional roles of these RNA transcripts is emerging, pointing to their roles in Read More ›

Self-organization: New James Shapiro paper on the Read-Write genome

From U Chicago’s James Shapiro at Pub Med: Biological action in Read-Write genome evolution. Many of the most important evolutionary variations that generated phenotypic adaptations and originated novel taxa resulted from complex cellular activities affecting genome content and expression. These activities included (i) the symbiogenetic cell merger that produced the mitochondrion-bearing ancestor of all extant eukaryotes, (ii) symbiogenetic cell mergers that produced chloroplast-bearing ancestors of photosynthetic eukaryotes, and (iii) interspecific hybridizations and genome doublings that generated new species and adaptive radiations of higher plants and animals. Adaptive variations also involved horizontal DNA transfers and natural genetic engineering by mobile DNA elements to rewire regulatory networks, such as those essential to viviparous reproduction in mammals. In the most highly evolved multicellular Read More ›