No, we did not make this total confusion up. From Olivia Goldhill, discussing Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, andthe Deep Origins of Consciousness at Quartz: Octopus research shows that consciousness isn’t what makes humans special There’s some uncertainty about which precise ancestor was most recently shared by octopuses and humans, but, Godfrey-Smith says, “It was probably an animal about the size of a leech or flatworm with neurons numbering perhaps in the thousands, but not more than that.” This means that octopuses have very little in common with humans, evolution-wise. They have developed eyes, limbs, and brains via a completely separate route, with very different ancestors, from humans. And they seem to have come by their impressive Read More ›

From Columbia mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong on some recent developments in theoretical physics: …it seems that the field is moving ever forward in a post-modern direction I can’t follow. Tonight the arXiv has something new from Susskind about this, where he argues that one should go beyond “ER=EPR”, to “GR=QM”. While the 2013 paper had very few equations, this one has none at all, and is actually written in the form not of a scientific paper, but of a letter to fellow “Qubitzers”. On some sort of spectrum of precision of statements, with Bourbaki near one end, this paper is way at the other end. More. Post-moderns are indeed marchin’, marchin’ and they are deadly serious about Read More ›

From Catherine Offord at the Scientist: Circular RNAs (circRNAs) have attracted growing attention in recent years, but their function in living organisms has long remained a mystery. Now, researchers report that one circRNA, Cdr1as, regulates microRNA levels in the mammalian brain, and that its removal results in abnormal neuronal activity and behavioral impairments in mice. The findings were published today (August 10) in Science. “There are few papers where you can really say it’s a breakthrough,” says Sebastian Kadener, a neuroscientist and circRNA researcher at Brandeis University who was not involved in the work. “But this paper is really exciting. It’s the first real demonstration of a function of these molecules in vivo in an animal.”More. A breakthrough now but Read More ›

Archaea are thought to be about 3.8 billion years old. From ScienceDaily: By studying the 3-D structure of proteins bound to DNA in microbes called archaea, researchers have turned up surprising similarities to DNA packing in more complicated organisms. “If you look at the nitty gritty, it’s identical,” says Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Karolin Luger, a structural biologist and biochemist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “It just blows my mind.” The archaeal DNA folding, reported August 10 in Science, hints at the evolutionary origins of genome folding, a process that involves bending DNA and one that is remarkably conserved across all eukaryotes (organisms that have a defined nucleus surrounded by a membrane). Like Eukarya and Bacteria, Archaea represents Read More ›

In an interview with John Horgan at Scientific American: Horgan: The “reproducibility crisis” in research has raised questions about science’s reliability. Do scientists deserve some blame for widespread debate over climate change, evolution and vaccines? Dawkins: It is a real worry, perhaps especially acute in medical research. Part of the problem is the tendency for results to be simplified in order to make a neat, easily summed-up story. And this is exacerbated when recent research results hit the newspapers or other media. Another problem is the “file drawer effect” whereby papers that fail to disprove the null hypothesis are never published, because authors or editors think they’re too boring. This could theoretically lead to falsehoods being propagated: If enough studies Read More ›

A friend asked about this common intelligent design concept. Specified complexity, also called complex specified information (CSI): Life shows evidence of complex, aperiodic, and specified information in its key functional macromolecules, and the only other example we know of such function-specifying complex information are artifacts designed by intelligent agents. A chance origin of life would exceed the universal probability bound (UPB) set by the scope of the universe; hence design is a factor in the origin and development of life. Contrary to a commonly encountered (and usually dismissive) opinion, this concept is neither original to Dr Dembski nor to the design theory movement. Its first recognized use was by noted Origin of Life researcher, Leslie Orgel, in 1973: Living organisms are Read More ›

Lots of people are now saying that the king is a fink*. A friend kindly offers some useful update links on the subject: Neuroscientist Debra Soh defends Damore. No surprise, she is also not a fan of the marchin’, marchin’ pussyhats for science and has warned about the danger of fad post-modern concepts like intersectionality invading science and just plain stompin’ down hard on fact. Updated: Breitbart News’ interview series, Rebels of Google, has revealed an atmosphere of profound fear at the company, in which employees who challenge Google’s hyper-progressive narratives face bullying and ostracization from co-workers, and frequently find themselves added to blacklists aimed at destroying peoples’ careers both inside and outside Google. Our last interviewee even described an Read More ›

From cosmologist George Ellis at Inference Review: THEORETICAL PHYSICS AND cosmology find themselves in a strange place. Scientific theories have since the seventeenth century been held tight by an experimental leash. In the last twenty years or so, both string theory and theories of the multiverse have slipped the leash. Their owners argue that this is no time to bring these subjects to heel. It is this that is strange. … If the multiverse is scientifically problematic, it is always open to philosophers to rescue the multiverse by expanding the margins of science. A theory, so the argument runs, need not be confirmed by empirical evidence. Richard Dawid has argued as much in a paper entitled “The Significance of Non-Empirical Read More ›

Concerning the now infamous diversity memo that led to the ouster of a heretical engineer at Google, Kelly Ellis reports that “some women who still work at the company stayed home Monday because the memo made them “uncomfortable going back to work.” Oh the irony.  Daniel Payne informs us that the heretic, James Damore, explained, in part, why he believed there is a “gender gap” in tech fields—namely because, on average, women are, in a variety of ways, predisposed to avoid the high-stress world of technology.” And women at the company react by — wait for it, wait for it — avoiding a high-stress situation at the company. All of which makes me wonder whether Google should install in its Read More ›

Our all-time most-read post here at Uncommon Descent was about renowned chemist James Tour: A world-famous chemist tells the truth: there’s no scientist alive today who understands macroevolution (visited 363,901 times, 66 visits today, 484 responses). At Inference Review, he writes, Cellular and organelle bilayers, which were once thought of as simple vesicles, are anything but. They are highly functional gatekeepers. By virtue of their glycans, lipid bilayers become enormous banks of stored, readable, and re-writable information. The sonication of a few random lipids, polysaccharides, and proteins in a lab will not yield cellular lipid bilayer membranes. Mes frères, mes semblables, with these complexities in mind, how can we build the microsystem of a simple cell? Would we be able Read More ›

The one who got drowned in diversicrat social media politics. The story provides good illustration of the way in which traditional media today are not up to the job of newsgathering in a non-gatekeeper digital age and should not be trusted. From Bre Davis at the Federalist: Here Are All The Media Outlets Blatantly Lying About The Google Memo E.g.: 3.Time Magazine: The magazine that’s been slowly dying for nearly a decade published a writeup of the ordeal, calling the memo a “tirade” in their headline: “Google Has Fired the Employee Who Wrote an Anti-Diversity Tirade, Report Says”. To anyone who’s actually read the memo, it’s clear a “tirade” is the least accurate way to describe it. It’s calm, it’s rational, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the ancestors of modern humans diverged from an archaic lineage that gave rise to Neanderthals and Denisovans. Yet the evolutionary relationships between these groups remain unclear. A University of Utah-led team developed a new method for analyzing DNA sequence data to reconstruct the early history of the archaic human populations. They revealed an evolutionary story that contradicts conventional wisdom about modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans. The study found that the Neanderthal-Denisovan lineage nearly went extinct after separating from modern humans. Just 300 generations later, Neanderthals and Denisovans diverged from each other around 744,000 years ago. Then, the global Neanderthal population grew to tens of thousands of individuals living in fragmented, isolated populations Read More ›

From Paul Braterman at The Conversation, we learn stuff like: Evolution, Pence argues, is a theory, theories are uncertain, therefore evolution is uncertain. But evolution is a theory only in the scientific sense of the word. And in the words of the National Academy of Sciences, “The formal scientific definition of theory is quite different from the everyday meaning of the word. It refers to a comprehensive explanation of some aspect of nature that is supported by a vast body of evidence.” Attaching this label to evolution is an indicator of strength, not weakness. Actually, string theory and multiverse theories are elaborate theories too; there is just no evidence for them. It simply isn’t the case, as Braterman claims, that Read More ›

In a coherent system, that would be a dilemma. As progressives turn and rend each other with increasing ferocity—as a break from attacking others— we learn that the engineer who was fired from Google for authoring the anti-diversity memo was relying on the principles of evolutionary psychology. From Nitasha Tiku at Wired: The 10-page missive was posted on an internal discussion board and went viral inside, and outside, the company Friday and Saturday. The document cited purported principles of evolutionary psychology to argue that women make up only 20 percent of Google’s technical staff because they are more interested in people rather than ideas, which the author considers an obstacle to being a good engineer. The author, James Damore, said Read More ›

Here: [The New Atheists’ assertion that they do not believe in God, defined as the infinite actuality that grounds all being] is the embrace of an infinite paradox: the universe understood as an “absolute contingency.” It may not amount to a metaphysics in the fullest sense, since strictly speaking it possesses no rational content—it is, after all, a belief that all things rest upon something like an original moment of magic—but it is certainly far more than the mere absence of faith.