Trigger warning!: Donald Trump mentioned. 😉 From Nicholas Staropoli at Epigenetics Literacy Project: This week’s features: A professor’s troubling politicization of epigenetics in Gizmodo, Men’s Health quotes me on male fertility but mistakes correlation for causation. Plus see what’s trending on the Epigenetics Literacy Project. On a larger scale, the amount of stress that Americans are going through now, because of Trump—there is going to be an evolutionary consequence. Peter Ward Professor, Department of Biology, University of Washington More. Although Ward’s appointment is in biology at U Washington, as Staropoli notes, his main publications have been in astronomy and paleontology. One of Ward’s better-known works is Rare Earth (2000), on why Earth is especially habitable (now free at the link as Read More ›

From Michael Greshko at National Geographic: “We’ve been looking for ape fossils for years—this is the first time we’re getting a skull that’s complete,” says Isaiah Nengo, the De Anza College anthropologist who led the discovery, supported by a National Geographic Society grant and the Stony Brook University-affiliated Turkana Basin Institute. Roughly the size of a lemon, the skull belongs to a newly identified species of early ape named Nyanzapithecus alesi. Some of its features resemble those of today’s living Old World monkeys and apes, and the face bears a striking resemblance to today’s infant gibbons. What’s more, N. alesi offers insight into early apes’ brains, the team reports in their study, published today in Nature. With a volume of Read More ›

From Heather Heying, weighing in on the Google foray into post-modern truth, which smacked an unwary engineer upside head, at Quillette: Should We “Stop Equating ‘Science’ With Truth”? Damore’s heresy turns on innate differences between men and women that have never been noticed by anyone in the history of human life on the planet except him. So, of course, the entire obsolescent traditional media melted down in shock. Heying: Evolutionary biology has been through this, over and over and over again. There are straw men. No, the co-option of science by those with a political agenda does not put the lie to the science that was co-opted. Social Darwinism is not Darwinism. You can put that one to rest. There Read More ›

The Third Way of Evolution is a group of non-Darwinian or minimally Darwinian evolutionary biologists. From Tom Heneghan at Religion News: Since scientists succeeded in sequencing the genome in the late 1990s, they have found that epigenetic markers that regulate patterns of gene expression can reflect outside influences on a body. Even simpler living objects such as plants contain a complex internal genetic system that governs their growth according to information they receive from outside. To theologians who see a “new biology” emerging, this knowledge points to a more holistic system than scientists have traditionally seen, one more open to some divine inspiration for life. In this view, the fact that epigenetic markers can bring outside pressures to bear on Read More ›

From Evan Allgood at New York Mag: A few years ago, psychological scientist Kurt Gray came across the final statements of 500 Texas inmates executed between 1982 and 2013. (The state’s Department of Criminal Justice posts them online.) As he read these inmates’ surprisingly sanguine last words, Gray wondered if their positivity was a fluke or part of a broader psychological trend. So he conducted a study at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, which compared the words of death row inmates and terminally ill patients to those simply imagining they were close to death. This research —published this summer in Psychological Science — suggests that while it’s natural to fear death in the abstract, the closer one actually Read More ›

In an interview with John Horgan at Scientific American: Horgan: Is consciousness a scientifically tractable problem? Do you favor any current approaches and theories? Dawkins: It certainly isn’t tractable by me. At times I find myself inspired by the confidence of my friend Daniel Dennett. At other times I lean towards his fellow philosopher Colin McGinn’s pessimism: the view that the human mind is flatly incapable of understanding its own consciousness. Our brains evolved to understand how to survive in a hunter–gatherer way of life on the African savanna—understand the behavior of an extremely narrow range of medium-sized objects travelling at medium velocities. It is therefore a wonder, as [cognitive scientist] Steven Pinker has pointed out, that our brains have Read More ›

Responding to philosopher Joseph Carter on how we can pretend that the universe has purpose even though it doesn’t, at Evolution News & Views: As I noted yesterday, materialist philosopher Joseph Carter wrote a fatuous essay for the New York Times philosophy forum The Stone in which he denies purpose in the universe and does an amusing dance around the implications that follow. Carter claims (erroneously) that modern science has disproven teleology in nature: The laws of physics are inherently mechanistic. Except for quantum mechanics and relativity, which reveal space-time curving in gravitation, time slowing with velocity, light that travels with the same velocity irrespective of the velocity of its emitter or absorber, sinks of gravity so intense that neither Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Daniel Whitmire, a retired astrophysicist who teaches mathematics at the University of Arkansas, once thought the cosmic silence indicated we as a species lagged far behind. “I taught astronomy for 37 years,” said Whitmire. “I used to tell my students that by statistics, we have to be the dumbest guys in the galaxy. After all we have only been technological for about 100 years while other civilizations could be more technologically advanced than us by millions or billions of years.” Recently, however, he’s changed his mind. By applying a statistical concept called the principle of mediocrity — the idea that in the absence of any evidence to the contrary we should consider ourselves typical, rather than atypical — Read More ›

Or don’t they? From Phys.org: A unusual social study has revealed that atheists are more easily suspected of vile deeds than Christians, Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists—strikingly, even by fellow atheists, researchers said Monday. This suggests that in an increasingly secular world, many—including some atheists—still hold the view that people will do bad things unless they fear punishment from all-seeing gods. The results of the study “show that across the world, religious belief is intuitively viewed as a necessary safeguard against the temptations of grossly immoral conduct,” an international team wrote in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. And it revealed that “atheists are broadly perceived as potentially morally depraved and dangerous.” The study measured the attitudes of more than 3,000 people Read More ›

Why? Could that be because the teachers are really teaching a religion rather than a discipline and many people are not convinced by that religion? From Amanda Glaze at Evolution Institute: There has long been a discussion in the scientific and science education communities about the dismal state of evolution acceptance in the United States2. For those not aware, the United States presently ranks second to last in terms of acceptance of evolution among all other first tier nations worldwide3. In fact, the only nation that has lower acceptance rates is Turkey, a country where the national education governing body has, just this year, presented new national standards for education that are noticeably missing their previous coverage of evolution4. In Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Two 160 million-year-old mammal fossils discovered in China show that the forerunners of mammals in the Jurassic Period evolved to glide and live in trees. With long limbs, long hand and foot fingers, and wing-like membranes for tree-to-tree gliding, Maiopatagium furculiferum and Vilevolodon diplomylos are the oldest known gliders in the long history of early mammals. The new discoveries suggest that the volant, or flying, way of life evolved among mammalian ancestors 100 million years earlier than the first modern mammal fliers. The fossils are described in two papers published this week in Nature by an international team of scientists from the University of Chicago and Beijing Museum of Natural History. “These Jurassic mammals are truly ‘the first Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: “We have a pretty good understanding of the overall population of stars in the universe and their mass distribution as they’re born, so we can tell how many black holes should have formed with 100 solar masses versus 10 solar masses,” Bullock said. “We were able to work out how many big black holes should exist, and it ended up being in the millions — way more than I anticipated.” In addition, to shed light on subsequent phenomena, the UCI researchers sought to determine how often black holes occur in pairs, how often they merge, and how long it takes. They wondered whether the 30-solar-mass black holes detected by LIGO were born billions of years ago and took Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The stability of dark matter is usually explained by a symmetry principle. However, in their paper, Dr. Michael Baker and Prof. Joachim Kopp demonstrate that the universe may have gone through a phase during which this symmetry was broken. This would mean that it is possible for the hypothetical dark matter particle to decay. During the electroweak phase transition, the symmetry that stabilizes dark matter would have been re-established, enabling it to continue to exist in the universe to the present day. With their new theory, Baker and Kopp have introduced a new principle into the debate about the nature of dark matter that offers an alternative to the widely accepted WIMP theory. Up to now, WIMPs, or Read More ›

From Andy Greenberg at Wired: In new research they plan to present at the USENIX Security conference on Thursday, a group of researchers from the University of Washington has shown for the first time that it’s possible to encode malicious software into physical strands of DNA, so that when a gene sequencer analyzes it the resulting data becomes a program that corrupts gene-sequencing software and takes control of the underlying computer. While that attack is far from practical for any real spy or criminal, it’s one the researchers argue could become more likely over time, as DNA sequencing becomes more commonplace, powerful, and performed by third-party services on sensitive computer systems. And, perhaps more to the point for the cybersecurity Read More ›

From Allum Bohkari at Breitbart Tech, interviewing an anonymous Google serf, “Emmett”: “Emmett”: I remember Peter Goett entirely unironically posting a reply to a list with over 10,000 Googlers: “congratulations on your white penis.” To my understanding, had someone posted “black vagina”, that person would have been summarily fired. Also to my understanding, Goett appears to have received no punishment. … 1. Every day, rank-and-file (nominally low-status, but informally very high-status) SJWs post SJW / Marxist propaganda that irritates non-SJW folks who just want to do their job. 2. Everyone who dares question any of these propaganda posts, no matter how politely, is chastised publicly by the SJWs, and then (I hope it’s clear) written up on some secret lists. Read More ›