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 valid. All that this exercise in misdirection does is to cover up the reverse tendency, namely that our trust in experts in modern democracies has led to a moral dumbing down of the population, as people are encouraged to let authorised others – starting perhaps with the general medical practitioner – decide for them what to believe, even when the consequences of those decisions directly Read More ›

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 potential pattern in responses to two waves of the nationally representative GSS (31), with respect to six issues: stem cell research, the Big Bang, human evolution, climate change, nanotechnology, and genetically modified foods. Overall, we found that where religious or political polarization existed, it was greater among individuals with more general education and among individuals with greater scientific knowledge, as measured by both whether they Read More ›

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 split, this wouldn’t be true. To try to get to the bottom of things, my team at the University of Amsterdam re-visited this fundamental issue by testing two split-brain patients, evaluating whether they could respond accurately to objects in the left visual field (perceived by the right brain) while also responding verbally or with the right hand (controlled by the left brain). Astonishingly, in these Read More ›

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 of the National Academy of Sciences, those modifications can affect how or when you develop certain illnesses during adulthood. Their investigation followed more than 500 children in the Philippines and found that certain childhood situations can create modifications in genes associated with inflammation, which affects how prone we are to suffer from certain illnesses. Specifically, these factors included socioeconomic status, the prolonged absence of a Read More ›

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 gravity has so far proved impassable. Now Antoine Tilloy at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, has attempted to get at gravity by tweaking standard quantum mechanics. Odd that no one has thought of this before, given all the strenuous mental effort that has gone into the topic… But now, Nonetheless, his model makes predictions that can be tested. For example, Read More ›

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 are still untested, the result is ambiguous. Different models lead to very different predictions for not-yet made observations. Presently, it is therefore utterly pointless to twiddle with the details of inflation because there are literally infinitely many models that one can think up, giving rise to infinitely many different “predictions.” Rather than taking on this overproduction problem, however, Steinhardt et al. in their SciAm piece Read More ›

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 need to learn from each other how to use tools, and instead suggest that some (if not all) forms of tool-use are instead within their pre-existing behavioural repertoire (what the authors call “latent solutions”). Elisa Bandini explained, “The commonly held belief is that chimpanzee behaviour is cultural, much like how human culture has been passed between groups. But if that was the case, the same Read More ›

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 matter—which has so far resisted all attempt at elucidation by traditional physics—claims from outside this paradigm may be vital. … “The way in which a community behaves is constructed over a long social progress, made by power structures, years of training, reward systems, rules of competition and collaboration between and within different groups,” says Roberto Lalli, research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the Read More ›

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 as a hunter-gatherer at Ballito Bay roughly 2,000 years ago. In doing so, they were able to estimate that the evolutionary split between Homo sapiens and ancestral human groups occurred 260,000 to 350,000 years ago. Until recently, the prevailing belief was that Homo sapiens arose a bit before 200,000 years ago. The new study and fossil discoveries from Morocco announced in June indicate a much Read More ›

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 father, and that the number of mutations increases in line with the age of the parents. … These mutations won’t all be harmful. We’re all born with at least 70 new mutations, and most of these don’t affect the way our bodies and brains work. “The vast majority of mutations don’t matter, says Leo Schalkyk at the University of Essex. “There might be the occasional Read More ›

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 deciding among them. They are tossed, like hats, into a ring. … The third proposal, that everything is conscious, is the subtlest: If everything is conscious, nothing is. If rocks have minds, humans, for all practical purposes, do not. We are back to the first proposal, that consciousness is an evolved illusion, having learned nothing. There is an irony here: Naturalists have learned nothing for Read More ›

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 quite strongly about it: About one in seven (14.6 percent) strongly agreed, while one in 10 (10.2 percent) strongly disagreed. Gut feelings tell many of us not to trust anything in social sciences except the Sokal hoaxes played on its practitioners. But now and then, we learn something that reminds us vaguely of the world we live in: Another study found that people with the Read More ›

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 of the sea’. If Moroz is right, then the ctenophore represents an evolutionary experiment of stunning proportions, one that has been running for more than half a billion years. This separate pathway of evolution – a sort of Evolution 2.0 – has invented neurons, muscles and other specialised tissues, independently from the rest of the animal kingdom, using different starting materials. This animal, the ctenophore, Read More ›

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 of them resemble any living or extinct organism, and therefore what they were, and how they relate to modern organisms, has been a long-standing palaeontological mystery.’ In 1947, Dickinsonia became one of the first described Ediacaran fossils and was initially thought to be an organism similar to a jellyfish. Since then, its strange body plan has been compared to that of a worm, a placozoan, Read More ›

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 carbon, wedged into ancient sedimentary rocks in Labrador, Canada. … For the new study, Komiya and a team studied graphite, a form of carbon used in pencil lead, in rocks at Saglek Block in Labrador, Canada. They measured its isotope composition, the signature of chemical elements, and concluded the graphite was “biogenic”—meaning it was produced by living organisms. The identity of the organisms, or what Read More ›