We didn’t predict this one and it’s not the story you think. Recently, geneticist Richard Buggs defended the possibility in principle that a human population bottleneck could consist of one fertile couple. At the Zone (founded by former UD commenters among others), Vincent Torley writes: Geneticist Richard Buggs, Reader in Evolutionary Genomics at Queen Mary University of London, has just written an intriguing article in Nature: Ecology and Evolution (28 October 2017), titled, Adam and Eve: a tested hypothesis? Comments on a recent book chapter. It appears that Buggs is unpersuaded that science has ruled out Adam and Eve. He thinks it’s still theoretically possible that the human race once passed through a short, sharp population bottleneck of just two Read More ›

From Gregory Chaitin at UFRJ: In Chapter 8 of his 1996 Oxford University Press masterpiece The Conscious Mind, David Chalmers speculates on using information theory as the basis for a fundamental theory of consciousness. Building on his work, we attempt to flesh out an updated version of the Chalmers proposal by taking into account more recent developments including algorithmic information theory, quantum information theory, the holographic principle and the Bekenstein bound, and digital philosophy as sketched in two little-known monographs in Italian: Introduzione alla filosofia digitale and Bit Bang: La nascita della filosofia digitale … In the two decades since Chalmers published his panpsychism thesis that any physical system that processes information is conscious, it has become possible to put Read More ›

Where science means: Anything goes (with some targeted exceptions). From Denyse O’Leary at Evolution News & Views: Modern science, beginning in Europe in the 18th century, has been dominated by educated European men. But their dominance was not a principle of science. The principles were the laws and theorems that apply an internationally recognized thought pattern to nature. “Hidden figures” who sought and gained equality applied the same principles to the same effect. But for post-modernists, philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994) provided liberation: “Anything goes.” One outcome is that social justice activists have shifted away from helping marginalized people qualify in science toward questioning its principles, supposedly on behalf of the oppressed. We hear that objectivity is “cultural discrimination” (or sexist), Read More ›