Monthly Archives: September 2017
Quotes to ponder: Steve Fuller and the cult of the expert
| September 30, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Naturalism, Science |
From Steve Fuller, who has studied the intelligent design controversy, “Brexit as the unlikely leading edge of the anti-expert revolution,” European Management Journal: At this point, we confront one of the big canards perpetrated by defenders of expertise, namely that anti-experts are anti-intellectuals who privilege ignorance over knowledge and would treat all opinions as equally […]
Quotes to ponder: Education does not determine acceptance of science consensus
| September 30, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Education, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, science education |
From Caitlin Drummond and Baruch Fischhoff, Individuals with greater science literacy and education have more polarized beliefs on controversial science topics at PNAS: Prior research has found that political and religious polarization over science and technology issues in the United States can be greater among individuals with more education and science knowledge. We examine that […]
Are split-brain people really two half-persons? No, and that deepens the “mystery of consciousness”
| September 30, 2017 | Posted by News under Mind, Naturalism |
From cognitive psychologist and physicist Yaïr Pinto at Aeon: We’ve got to admit that split-brain patients feel and behave normally. If a split-brain patient walks into the room, you would not notice anything unusual. And they themselves claim to be completely unchanged, other than being rid of terrible epileptic seizures. If the person was really […]
Smithsonian: Childhood experiences can permanently change DNA
| September 30, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Epigenetics |
From Lorena Infante Lara at The Smithsonian: But we’re finding out that our DNA isn’t always set in stone. Now, a team of researchers from Northwestern University led by anthropology professor Thom McDade have shown that DNA can also be modified by your environment during childhood. What’s more, the authors conclude in the journal Proceedings […]
Model: Quantum wave collapse creates gravitational fields, may be testable
| September 30, 2017 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Physics |
Uniting quantum mechanics and gravity at last. From Anil Ananthaswamy at New Scientist One approach towards reconciling gravity with quantum mechanics has been to show that gravity at its most fundamental comes in indivisible parcels called quanta, much like the electromagnetic force comes in quanta called photons. But this road to a theory of quantum […]
Physicist at Forbes: The inflationary universe is not science any more
| September 29, 2017 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design, Philosophy, Science |
From theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder at Forbes: The problem with inflation isn’t the idea per se, but the overproduction of useless inflationary models. There are literally hundreds of these models, and they are – as the philosophers say – severely underdetermined. This means if one extrapolates the models that fit current data to regimes which […]
Chimps can learn to uses tools on their own, without being taught
| September 29, 2017 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: New observations have led researchers to believe that chimpanzees can use tools spontaneously to solve a task, without needing to watch others first. The evidence of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) spontaneously using sticks to scoop food from water surfaces is published in the open-access journal PeerJ. … The results challenge the accepted belief that chimpanzees […]
At Nautilus: Biggest mysteries of our universe might be outside traditional paradigms
| September 29, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design |
From Claudia Grieb at Nautilus, In the sciences, new ideas are often judged for how far they lie outside of the systems that scaffold our understanding of the world— systems that are not only scientific, but also social. But when it comes to solving our most persistent mysteries in physics, like the composition of dark […]
Humans 250k years older than thought? Arose in multiple places?
| September 29, 2017 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, stasis |
From Will Dunham at Reuters, Genetic data from the skeletal remains of seven people who lived centuries ago in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal Province is offering intriguing new evidence that our species, Homo sapiens, is older than previously believed. Scientists said on Thursday they sequenced the genomes of the seven individuals including a boy who lived […]
What? Only an “extremely occasional” mutation is beneficial? But Darwinism… ?
| September 29, 2017 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
From Jessica Hamzelou at New Scientist on a study in Iceland that shows that old fathers pass on more mutations than old mothers: “If a sequence is not present in the parents but is present in the child, then it’s new,” says Stefánsson. They discovered that 80 per cent of new mutations come from the […]
Post-modern science: The illusion of consciousness sees through itself
| September 28, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Mind, Naturalism |
From Denyse O’Leary at Evolution News & Views: We know almost nothing about the human consciousness but naturalism must treat it as evolved from unconscious elements. Much confusion is avoided by recognizing that that is a core assumption, not a discovery. Naturalist theories of consciousness currently proliferate with abandon because there is no basis for […]
Do gut feelings hurt science decisions?
| September 28, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Education, Intelligent Design, Science |
From R. Kelly Garrett at Phys.org: Where people differ is in how often they do so. A 2016 survey that my colleague Brian Weeks and I conducted found that 50.3 percent of all Americans agreed with the statement “I trust my gut to tell me what’s true and what’s not.” Some of those polled felt […]
If evolution were repeated, would jellyfish be intelligent?
| September 28, 2017 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind |
From Douglas Fox at Aeon: The ctenophore was already known for having a relatively advanced nervous system; but these first experiments by Moroz showed that its nerves were constructed from a different set of molecular building blocks – different from any other animal – using ‘a different chemical language’, says Moroz: these animals are ‘aliens […]
Researchers: First Ediacaran animal identified
| September 28, 2017 | Posted by News under Ediacaran, Evolution, Intelligent Design |
Mysterious Ediacaran Dickinsonia, from 550 mya was definitely an animal, they say. [pic] From ScienceDaily: ‘Dickinsonia belongs to the Ediacaran biota — a collection of mostly soft-bodied organisms that lived in the global oceans between roughly 580 and 540 million years ago. They are mysterious because despite there being around 200 different species, very few […]
Researchers: Evidence of life 3.95 billion years ago
| September 27, 2017 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
From Phys.org: Rudimentary life may have existed on Earth 3.95 billion years ago, a time when our infant planet was being bombarded by comets and had hardly any oxygen, researchers said Wednesday. … A team presented what they say is the oldest-known fossil evidence for life on the Blue Planet—grains of graphite, a form of […]
And now, the internet of cells
| September 27, 2017 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Intelligent Design |
From Monya Baker at Nature: Yukiko Yamashita thought she knew the fruit-fly testis inside out. But when she carried out a set of experiments on the organ five years ago, it ended up leaving her flummoxed. Her group had been studying how fruit flies maintain their sperm supply and had engineered certain cells involved in […]
An information theory approach to homeostasis
| September 27, 2017 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Information, Intelligent Design |
From Cell: A prevailing view among physiologists is that homeostasis evolves to protect organisms from damaging variation in physiological factors. Here, we propose that homeostasis also evolves to minimize noise in physiological channels. Fluctuations in physiological factors constitute inescapable noise that corrupts the transfer of information through physiological systems. We apply information theory to homeostasis […]
New findings overturn the widely held model of human visual attention
| September 27, 2017 | Posted by News under Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind |
From ScienceDaily: Our visual attention is drawn to parts of a scene that have meaning, rather than to those that are salient or “stick out,” according to new research from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. The findings, published Sept. 25 in the journal Nature Human Behavior, overturn the […]
Supernova analysis questions dark energy, cosmic acceleration
| September 27, 2017 | Posted by News under Cosmology, Intelligent Design |
From Michael Byrne at Motherboard: According to a paper published this week in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, we might just be wrong about all of this. The accelerating expansion may just be a sort of illusion driven by an incorrect assumption about the nature of the distribution of mass across the […]
P-values: Scientists slam proposal to raise threshold for statistically significant findings
| September 27, 2017 | Posted by News under Peer review |
From Dalmeet Singh Chawla at Nature: Researchers are at odds over when to dub a discovery ‘significant’. In July, 72 researchers took aim at the P value, calling for a lower threshold for the popular but much-maligned statistic. In a response published on 18 September1, a group of 88 researchers have responded, saying that a […]
