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Scientific American Capitulates to the Cultural Left

Julie Kelly reports If you need proof that the line between science and politics has been irrevocably erased, look no further than the September edition of Scientific American. In a special issue entitled “Sex and Gender,” the magazine purloins the progressive political agenda and attempts to give it a scientific mooring even when none exists. It represents a wholesale retreat from the principle that science should be apolitical, further jeopardizing the integrity of the scientific establishment and potentially inflicting real harm as it chooses to promote identity politics over solid science. more

Philosopher of biology: Darwinian natural selection is a poor predictor of evolutionary success

From Bengt Autzen at the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science: Musing on Means: Fitness, Expectation and the Principles of Natural Selection How to measure fitness in the theory of natural selection? A fitness measure that has been proposed in both the biological and the philosophical literature is the expected relative reproductive success. The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between expected relative reproductive success and future actual evolutionary success. Doing so will not only clarify the use of expected relative reproductive success as a fitness measure but also shed light on the role of fitness in the theory of natural selection. 1 Introduction 2 The Role of Fitness 3 Geometric Mean versus Expected Relative Reproductive Read More ›

Epigenetics may explain how Darwin’s finches respond to environment

From ScienceDaily: Epigenetics may explain how Darwin’s finches respond to rapid environmental changes, according to new research published in the open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology. By studying rural and urban populations of two species of Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos Islands, researchers were able to show that while there was very little genetic variation, there were substantial epigenetic differences that could be related to environmental differences resulting from urbanization. Sabrina McNew, PhD student at the University of Utah and lead author of the study said: “Urbanization of the Galapagos has happened relatively recently, so this is a good opportunity to study how animals respond to rapid environmental change.” … Genetic analysis of the birds revealed very little differences in Read More ›

New Scientist: Evolution “more baffling than we thought”

Every assumption has been called into question over the last fifteen years, Colin Barras tells us: Do you believe that human brains have been getting steadily bigger for millions of years, culminating in the extraordinary machine between your ears? Think again, because over the past 15 years, almost every part of our story, every assumption about who our ancestors were and where we came from, has been called into question. The new insights have some unsettling implications for how long we have walked the earth, and even who we really are. Once upon a time, the human story seemed relatively straightforward … It began roughly 5.5 to 6.5 million years ago, somewhere in an east African forest, with a chimpanzee-like ape. Read More ›

The changing strategies of the dinosaurs’ PR agents

We’ll probably never know what dinos were really like inthe sense that we can know what horses are like but we learn from Will Tattersdill at H-Sci-Med-Tech about the different ways we have understood them. Reviewing Dinosaurs Ever Evolving: The Changing Face of Prehistoric Animals in Popular Culture by Allen A. Debus, (1926–2009), he writes If you are interested in the history of dinosaurs in popular culture, Debus is an author you simply cannot ignore. He has written copiously on the “imaginative impact” of dinosaurs, and he is clearly on to something when he proposes to offer “an alternate history” of their evolution (pp. 265, 3)—a history written not across the geological ages of the Mesozoic (Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous) but Read More ›

Is violence really “embedded in our DNA”?

Like flaky therapists claim? If it is, then the embedded genes are not very evenly distributed among humans. From Josh Gabbatiss at Sapiens: The 2015 paper that resulted from Carrier’s research showed that a buttressed fist, one with the thumb closed against the index and middle fingers, provides a safer way to hit someone with force. Given that none of our primate cousins have the ability to make such a fist, Carrier and his co-authors propose that our hand proportions may have evolved specifically to turn our hands into more effective weapons. The research is just the latest in a string of studies Carrier has conducted to define “a suite of distinguishing characteristics that are consistent with the idea that Read More ›

A. N. Wilson on Darwin in the London Times

Here: In Darwin’s scheme of things, the Victorian rich were the perfect expression of evolution. In perfecting itself, nature started with amoebas, and moved on through dinosaurs and flying lizards, fish, fowl and mammals until it came to the apes, so obviously like the poor savages of Tierra del Fuego or Papua New Guinea. Above the savages were the southern Europeans, above them the British and, at the top of the evolutionary pecking order, sat the great families of England, the Darwins, the Arnolds, the Huxleys and the Wedgwoods, who all intermarried and were obviously cleverer than anyone else. If these types of remarks had been made about any Victorian other than Darwin, the combox would not be Days of Read More ›

Could “dark DNA” change the way we think about evolution?

From Adam Hargreaves at The Conversation: DNA sequencing technology is helping scientists unravel questions that humans have been asking about animals for centuries. By mapping out animal genomes, we now have a better idea of how the giraffe got its huge neck and why snakes are so long. Genome sequencing allows us to compare and contrast the DNA of different animals and work out how they evolved in their own unique ways. But in some cases we’re faced with a mystery. Some animal genomes seem to be missing certain genes, ones that appear in other similar species and must be present to keep the animals alive. These apparently missing genes have been dubbed “dark DNA”. And its existence could change Read More ›

Fun (no, not really) science news from Retraction Watch

One way to boost your uni’s ranking: Ask faculty to cite each other This is elsewhere called a citation ring. Also from the same post: Of course, this isn’t the only technique universities use to boost their metrics. Recently, we ran a story in Science about institutions (including many in Western countries) who pay faculty for publications; a 2011 report in Science showed that universities in Saudi Arabia were giving tens of thousands of dollars to highly cited researchers to take a secondary position there, ensuring the institution gets listed on prominent papers. SAGE journal retracts three more papers after discovering faked reviews: This trio of retractions is the second batch of papers withdrawn by Technology in Cancer Research & Read More ›

Consciousness in radically different non-human minds?

From cognitive roboticist Murray Shanahan at Aeon: n 1984, the philosopher Aaron Sloman invited scholars to describe ‘the space of possible minds’. Sloman’s phrase alludes to the fact that human minds, in all their variety, are not the only sorts of minds. There are, for example, the minds of other animals, such as chimpanzees, crows and octopuses. But the space of possibilities must also include the minds of life-forms that have evolved elsewhere in the Universe, minds that could be very different from any product of terrestrial biology. The map of possibilities includes such theoretical creatures even if we are alone in the Cosmos, just as it also includes life-forms that could have evolved on Earth under different conditions. We Read More ›

Bill Nye suing Disney over proceeds from Science Guy shows

From Mic, via AP: Bill Nye, the Science Guy, has been in the news a lot. From Bruce Haring and Erik Pedersen at Deadline: Bill Nye Hits Disney With $37 Million Fraud Suit Over ‘Science Guy’ Profits Bill Nye the Science Guy ran on PBS from 1994 to 1999 and also was syndicated to local stations. The show aired for 100 half-hour episodes spanning five seasons and was nominated for 23 Emmy Awards, winning 19 The suit that Nye and his lawyers put before the court contends that “the disturbing size of the supposed ‘accounting error,’ coupled with the seeming indifference of both BVT and WDC, left Nye suspicious of the veracity of the accounting.” More. See also: Bill Nye Read More ›

Royal Society: What has the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis missed?

From John S. Torday at Royal Society on the special issue edition on the (failures of) current Darwinism (aka the Modern Synthesis): The Modern Synthesis, merging population genetics and Darwinian evolutionary gradualism, was formulated in 1942. That was long before biologists learned about the Double Helix, the role of epigenetics in embryonic development, or the molecular bases for cell and developmental biology. All these developments are missing from neo-Darwinism. Even those who practice EvoDevo do not utilize cell biology to understand evolutionary mechanisms, defaulting to random mutation and natural selection. Much in evolutionary history can be understood by introducing knowledge of cell-cell signaling for pattern formation in the combined short-term ontogeny of the individual organism and the long-term phylogenetic history of Read More ›

Neuroscientist: Philosophers have made the problem of consciousness unnecessarily difficult

Says neuroscientist Anil K. Seth at Aeon: Let’s begin with David Chalmers’s influential distinction, inherited from Descartes, between the ‘easy problem’ and the ‘hard problem’. The ‘easy problem’ is to understand how the brain (and body) gives rise to perception, cognition, learning and behaviour. The ‘hard’ problem is to understand why and how any of this should be associated with consciousness at all: why aren’t we just robots, or philosophical zombies, without any inner universe? It’s tempting to think that solving the easy problem (whatever this might mean) would get us nowhere in solving the hard problem, leaving the brain basis of consciousness a total mystery. But there is an alternative, which I like to call the real problem: how Read More ›