From Andy Coghlan at New Scientist: We may owe some of our unique intelligence to a generous supply of a signalling chemical called dopamine in brain regions that help us think and plan. Our brains produce far more dopamine in these regions than the brains of other primates like apes.More. Naturalist ideology requires something like extra dopamine production to be seen as a cause, not an effect.  Of course, what we are really talking about is human consciousness, whose origin no one understands. And whatta feast of just-so science! See also: Human/primate evolution: Eating fruit led to bigger brains? Climate change made us smart Retroviruses play a role in development of human brain? Tooth size not linked to brain size in early humans Read More ›

Here: Artificial Intelligence has leapt to the forefront of global discourse, garnering increased attention from practitioners, industry leaders, policymakers, and the general public. The diversity of opinions and debates gathered from news articles this year illustrates just how broadly AI is being investigated, studied, and applied. However, the field of AI is still evolving rapidly and even experts have a hard time understanding and tracking progress across the field. More. But they are keeping track and it is free. See also: How are those AI spiritual machines coming?

From Denyse O’Leary at Evolution News & Views: The scientific discoveries that might have supported the naturalist view of the universe, life, and the human mind have never actually occurred. Stubborn problems, old and new, make such discoveries less likely than ever. New technology in neuroscience, for example, has enabled unexpected new findings that point unambiguously in a non-naturalist direction, raising the suspicion of more such findings to come. Naturalists are not taking it well; fighting superstition is easier than fighting magnetic resonance imaging. For some decades, we have simply been informed that “science would find the answer” to stubborn problems. But what happens if “stubborn problems” are signals that our ideas are incomplete and new insights are needed? … Read More ›

This is a complex and long-running dispute. From ScienceDaily: Commenting on the breakthrough research, Professor Pisani said: “The fact is, hypotheses about whether sponges or comb jellies came first suggest entirely different evolutionary histories for key animal organ systems like the nervous and the digestive systems. Therefore, knowing the correct branching order at the root of the animal tree is fundamental to understanding our own evolution, and the origin of key features of the animal anatomy.” In the new study, Professor Pisani and colleagues used cutting edge statistical techniques (Posterior Predictive Analyses) to test whether the evolutionary models routinely used in phylogenetics can adequately describe the genomic datasets used to study early animal evolution. They found that, for the same Read More ›

Suzan Mazur author of Origin of Life Circus, talks to Jan-Willem Mantel of the new Dutch Origins Center sponsored by the University of Groningen on the Dutch group effort: Suzan Mazur: The Dutch Origins Center is a virtual center, but would you say the University of Groningen serves as sort of the hub? Jan-Willem Mantel: In a way. We try to create a flat network. We have groups in 17 or 18 universities and/or independent research organizations and we try to avoid one university leading or dominating. But, of course, the practical work has to be done somewhere and that is being done by Groningen. In an intellectual sense, however, you can’t say Groningen or any one of the others Read More ›

From theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder at her blog Back(reaction): On the one hand, I understand the concerns about breaking with centuries of tradition. We used to followed up each hypothesis with experimental test, and the longer the delay between hypothesis and test, the easier for pseudoscience to take foothold. On the other hand, I agree that speculation is a necessary part of science and new problems sometimes require new methods. Insisting on ideals of the past might mean getting stuck, maybe forever. Even more important, I think it’s a grave mistake to let anyone define what we mean by doing science. Because who gets to decide what’s the right thing to do? Should we listen to Helge Kragh? Peter Woit? Read More ›

The question is knottier than it might at first appear. Ken Francis, journalist and author of The Little Book of God, Mind, Cosmos and Truth, writes at New English Review: The beginning of the universe was a supernatural event, as only something that transcends time, space and matter could cause it to happen. Secondly, if the supernatural is real, then the existence of disembodied spirits is possible. If we are not our physical bodies, then a spiritual realm is more probable than improbable. And it’s more likely this realm filled with spiritual entities would be created by an Intelligent Designer sans/universe and before the creation of earthly creatures. As human beings, despite our many follies, we are also extremely intelligent creatures. Our Read More ›

“Only the deepest of the corrupt pretend that the nature of a thing killed changes based on the sound of the syllables a mouth utters to name it.”   Edward H. Sisson, commenting on the use of the word “fetus” to describe a pre-born human.

UD participant Upright Biped (of Complexity Cafe U/D: Biosemiosis) has commented recently in the what is knowledge thread, replying to frequent objector CR by summarising key aspects of the role of information systems in observed cell based life. His remarks are well worth headlining: __________________ UB, 195: >>We can start by summarizing the core physical requirements of the system we are trying to explain: an autonomous self-replicator with open-ended potential (i.e. it can describe itself or any variation of itself). The system requires: 1) a sequence of representations in a medium of information. 2) a set of physical constraints to establish what is being represented. 3) a system of discontinuous association between representations and referents, based on spatial orientation (i.e. Read More ›

A reader sends this: From EditorFrancis at Slashdot: 14 terabytes of “highly confidential” data about 5,120 financial aid applications over seven years were exposed in a breach at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business — proving that the school “misled thousands of applicants and donors about the way it distributes fellowship aid and financial assistance to its MBA students,” reports Poets&Quants. … Half the school’s students are awarded financial aid, and though Stanford always insisted it was awarded based only on need, the report concluded the school had been “lying to their faces” for more than a decade, also identifying evidece of “systemic biases against international students.” More. So the people who insist that there are systemic biases, like these, are Read More ›

From Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Education: California State University at Northridge has settled a lawsuit brought by a former employee who said he was fired for sharing news of an archaeological discovery that supported his young-Earth creationist beliefs. The university says it settled for $399,500 to avoid a protracted legal battle, but some scientists say the outcome has implications for how scientists critique creationist colleagues going forward. … Armitage published his findings in 2013 in Acta Histochemica, a peer-reviewed journal, leaving out his interpretation of the tissue’s age. If Armitage really found soft dinosaur tissue, his interpretation of their age would be irrelevant to others’ subsequent work. It would be irrelevant if he believed that dinosaurs were specially created Read More ›

From Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media: Last month, Wikipedia removed the entry on German insect paleontologist Günter Bechly, seemingly due to his position on intelligent design (ID), the scientific movement considering evidence for design behind nature — a movement opposed to Darwinian evolution. While editors claimed Bechly was not “notable” enough to warrant an entry, others with fewer career accomplishments have long pages on Wikipedia, and Bechly has a distinguished career. … When Wikipedia editors discussed deleting Bechly’s page, the scientist posted his own credentials. He provided links to press, TV, and radio segments mentioning his work, exhibitions he designed, and a few articles from the BBC and Scientific American. “Add to that three described new insect orders, more than Read More ›

Reader Edward Sisson writes to tell us of his encounter with the Who–Whom of science, in connection with the recent Armitage soft dinosaur tissue case:  It reminds me of an idea I had in about 2003, when I was at Arnold & Porter representing (pro bono, with firm authorization) ID organizations and people, for a study and book based on the study, working title “Who Controls Whom in Science.” The basic idea was to research and chart the individuals in power-relationships within academic science — editors of journals, persons on tenure committees, persons who have mentored PhD candidates, persons who sit on PhD thesis defense committees, etc. The research would be updated and published annually. This identifies the individuals in Read More ›

So do they think that we humans will evolve into separate species as a result of migration and founder effects? If not, what does “evolution” mean? From David Warmflash at the Genetic Literacy Project: The goblin shark, duck-billed platypus, lungfish, tadpole shrimp, cockroach, coelacanths and the horseshoe crab — these creatures are famous in the world of biology, because they look as though they stopped evolving long ago. To use a term introduced by Charles Darwin in 1859, they are “living fossils”. And to their ranks, some have added humans, based on the idea that technology and modern medicine has, for all intents and purposes, eliminated natural selection by allowing most infants to live to reproductive age and pass on their Read More ›

In the What is knowledge thread, this has come up now, and I think it should be headlined: ____________________ KF, 201: >> Can we regard scientific theories as factual knowledge? This is a deep challenge, especially on the so-called pessimistic induction that historically theories in effect have hidden sell-by dates. That is, theories show more of a track record of replacement (sometimes presented as refinement) than we are comfortable with. A first answer is that a theory, from the abductive angle, is a “best current explanatory framework,” often involving dynamics which may be deterministic or stochastic (or tempered by stochastic factors), and may be empirically reliable in a known or unknown range of circumstances. The turn of C20 surprises faced Read More ›