A friend unearthed this: From evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller of NYU at the Edge (a response to their 2013 question): 2013 : What *Should* We Be Worried About? China has been running the world’s largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years, driving China’s ever-faster rise as the global superpower. I worry that this poses some existential threat to Western civilization. Yet the most likely result is that America and Europe linger around a few hundred more years as also-rans on the world-historical stage, nursing our anti-hereditarian political correctness to the bitter end. … For generations, Chinese intellectuals have emphasized close ties between the state (guojia), the nation (minzu), the population (renkou), the Han race (zhongzu), and, Read More ›

Abstract: (public access)One thing that discriminates living things from inanimate matter is their ability to generate similarly complex or non-random structures in a large abundance. From DNA sequences to folded protein structures, living cells, microbial communities and multicellular structures, the material configurations in biology can easily be distinguished from nonliving material assemblies. Many complex artefacts, from ordinary bioproducts to human tools, though they are not living things, are ultimately produced by biological processes—whether those processes occur at the scale of cells or societies, they are the consequences of living systems. While these objects are not living, they cannot randomly form, as they are the product of a biological organism and hence are either technological or cultural biosignatures. A generalized approach that Read More ›

From Subhash Kak at LiveScience: As a professor of electrical engineering and computer science who works in machine learning and quantum theory, I can say that researchers are divided on whether these sorts of hyperaware machines will ever exist. There’s also debate about whether machines could or should be called “conscious” in the way we think of humans, and even some animals, as conscious. Some of the questions have to do with technology; others have to do with what consciousness actually is. More. Indeed. First, we don’t know what consciousness is, yet it is an inextricable part of human life. Naturalists think it an illusion, which means everything else is too. That is not good news for science, which depends Read More ›

Ken Francis, journalist and author of The Little Book of God, Mind, Cosmos and Truth, reviews C. R. Hallpike’s Do We Need God To Be Good at New English Review: … Dr. Hallpike continues in his book: We can therefore agree with Hitchens that there is no reason to expect any special differences here between the conduct of believers and unbelievers, and the same would be true as well of many immoral actions that are also generally agreed to threaten the social order, such as theft, rape, and murder. To this extent it is clear that one does not need God to be good, and we also have to consider the influence of the traditional culture. So it is not particularly surprising Read More ›

From Evan Minton at Cerebral Faith: In defense of the Kalam Cosmological Argument, apologists such as William Lane Craig, Frank Turek, and myself will argue for the second premise (i.e that the universe had a beginning to its existence) by arguing that an actually infinite number of things are impossible. If an actually infinite number of things are impossible, then a beginningless universe cannot exist since it would involve an actually infinite number of things existing, namely, past events. If you’ve read my book Inference To The One True God, you’ll know that the reason to believe an actually infinite number of things cannot exist is that if they could, various absurdities would result. For example, if I had an Read More ›

CR is a frequent objector here at UD, and it seems again necessary to headline a corrective response given some of his remarks in the thread on UB’s discussion of information systems in cells: ____________________ KF, 62: >>CR: constructor theory formalizes the view that, in science, justification isn’t possible or even desirable and brings emergent phenomena, such as information, into fundamental physics First, no-one has discussed justification as a component for knowledge, as post Gettier, to be justified in holding a belief that turns out to be true is understood for cause as not equal to knowledge. The matter of warrant has long since been brought to your attention repeatedly but insistently ignored. Thus, you have shamelessly played the strawman Read More ›

From CBS: NEW PALTZ, N.Y. (CBSNewYork) — At a time when participation in traditional religions is declining among Americans, the practice of witchcraft is said to be on the rise. CBS2’s Ali Bauman went inside the secret world of modern-day witches to explore why so many say they’re falling under its spell. “I am the high priestess,” Lisa Stewart said. “To be a witch is incredibly relevant in today’s society,” Anton Stewart explained. More. It sure is. As noted elsewhere, witchcraft is, in principle, compatible with naturalism: Although they were not materialists, our ancestors do appear to have been naturalists. They believed in gods, but gods were merely beings with considerable powers over nature. They were usually placated. But they Read More ›

Recently, we posted a link to  Ken Francis’s item at New English Review, which addresses, in part, the question of whether angels exist: The atheist philosopher, David Hume, said if rational people have a choice to believe more than one explanation of an event, they should choose to believe that explanation which is most probable. Hume would argue that such a supernatural event of an angelic encounter, by definition, is unbelievable. For Hume, an encounter with an angel would be a violation of the laws of nature. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, he writes: “There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation. And as a uniform experience amounts Read More ›

From Ruth Williams at The Scientist: Two studies in Science today (December 7)—one that focuses on prenatal development in humans, the other on infancy to old age—provide insights into the extent of DNA sequence errors that the average human brain cell accumulates over a lifetime. Together, they reveal that mutations become more common as fetuses develop, and over a lifetime a person may rack up more than 2,000 mutations per cell. … Within the now burgeoning field of somatic mutation analyses, the brain is a particular area of interest. That’s because unlike organs such as the skin and gut where cells are replaced daily, the brain’s neurons, once established in the fetus, for the most part stick around for life. Read More ›

From at Christie Anschwanden FiveThirtyEight: These are the arguments underlying an “open science” reform movement that was created, in part, as a response to a “reproducibility crisis” that has struck some fields of science.1 But they’re also used as talking points by politicians who are working to make it more difficult for the EPA and other federal agencies to use science in their regulatory decision-making, under the guise of basing policy on “sound science.” Science’s virtues are being wielded against it. What distinguishes the two calls for transparency is intent: Whereas the “open science” movement aims to make science more reliable, reproducible and robust, proponents of “sound science” have historically worked to amplify uncertainty, create doubt and undermine scientific discoveries Read More ›

Horizontal gene transfer on skates. Wow, re evolution. From ScienceDaily: A new study finds that viruses share some genes exclusively with cells that are not their hosts. The study, reported in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology, adds to the evidence that viruses swap genes with a variety of cellular organisms and are agents of diversity, researchers say. The study looked at protein structures in viruses and across all superkingdoms, or domains, of life: from the single-celled microbes known as bacteria and archaea, to eukaryotes, a group that includes animals, plants, fungi and all other living things. “It is typical to define viruses in relation to their hosts, but this practice restricts our understanding of virus-cell interactions,” said University of Illinois Read More ›

 Notes: How Do Organisms Achieve Their Basic Form? That is to ask, how does a single fertilized egg become a elephant, a tiger, a human, or any of the numerous other kinds of animals or plants we see around us? “The earliest events leading from the first division of the egg cell to the blastula stage in amphibians, reptiles and mammals are illustrated in figure 5.4. Even to the untrained zoologist it is obvious that neither the blastula itself, nor the sequence of events that lead to its formation, is identical in any of the vertebrate classes shown. The differences become even more striking in the next major phase of in embryo formation – gastrulation. This involves a complex Read More ›

From Alice Klein at NewScientist: An Australian boy missing the visual processing centre of his brain has baffled doctors by seeming to have near-normal sight. … However, BI has remarkably well-preserved vision, says Iñaki-Carril Mundiñano at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. “You wouldn’t think he is blind,” he says. “He navigates his way around without any problems and plays soccer and video games,” (paywall) More. But then, as per David Robson at BBC, there’s also blindsight, Clearly, despite his blindness, Daniel’s healthy eyes were still watching the world and passing the information to his unconscious, which was guiding his behaviour. Publishing a report in 1974, Weiskrantz coined the term “blindsight” to describe this fractured conscious state. “Some were sceptical, of Read More ›

From David N.Schwartz,  author of The Last Man Who Knew Everything: The Life and Times of Enrico Fermi, Father of the Nuclear Age, at NPR: Fermi’s contributions to physics were so broad ranging, his interests so wide, that he made a mark in virtually every area of the field. I find it irresistible to speculate what he would make of physics today or how he would view some of our broader debates on the role of science and society. … What he would make of string theory we will never know, but he was always more comfortable with theories backed by experimental agendas. He would have been amazed at the size of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, but in fact, Read More ›

Suzan Mazur, author of Public Evolution Summit, writes at HuffPost that the principals of the Dutch Origins Center have pledged that with respect to involvement in theology, “We will not make the mistake NASA made.” … Several days later in Amsterdam, Origins Center coordinator Jan-Willem Mantel confirmed that theology is not part of the Dutch initiative. Over a million US dollars were squandered by the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) for a two-year program (2015-2017) to find out, among other things, how the religious community would respond to the discovery of extraterrestrial life—-a story I reported here, which Jerry Coyne picked up a few days later followed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) filing a Freedom of Information Act request. The Read More ›